TikTok - Another “Casualty” of the US - China Trade War?

Analysis by Maria Mouzannar, Staff Writer

April 14th, 2020

“Rarely does a country go to war with a private company, but America has done just that.”, states a journalist from The Economist in a 2019 video reportage discussing the case of the Huawei ban and the Trump administration. But is it really just about war with a specific private company? How “private” is any Chinese company, really?

The ban on Huawei and its potential threat to national security through its 5G antennas was not the first one directed from the U.S. towards a Chinese company, as a previous ban was put in 2017 on ZTE, a Chinese multinational telecommunications corporation (as it was engaging in illegal transportation of U.S. technology to Iran and North Korea). 

The most recent and closest example to the Huawei ban would be the set of restrictions that the United States has announced regarding TikTok, as it seems like it represents a “security threat to the nation”. 

But what is that TikTok worldwide phenomenon, where do these restrictions come from, and do they relate to a broader global issue?

What is TikTok, and how is it so successful?

The highly culture-based content of any Chinese media (be it movies, series, books, or any form of art) has had quite a hard time navigating the world and making itself popular, as Chinese media products seem to be highly rejected by most liberal societies. Indeed, as these societies are the ones dictating what becomes a trend, and what does not, their importance in the acceptance of the Chinese media has become of great importance– specifically looking at how important America is when it comes to ensuring the global success of a product. 

But it seems that TikTok, a video-sharing social networking service app (once called musical.ly, but was then bought by ByteDance in 2017, a Chinese internet technology company) that Chinese developers targeted specifically towards American teens, has been drawing its way into the global scenery more and more ever since the beginning of 2017.

TikTok is now available in over 150 countries, with about 1 billion users worldwide, quite a portion of them being in the US as it has been downloaded over 123 million times in the United States alone. It can now undoubtedly be qualified as one of the most successful apps in history. Even though the notion that a video-sharing app, or a technology company could threaten national security might seem highly farcical, in the eyes of the US government, it is not as ludicrous as it seems, rather, it falls with crucial matters that stand at the top priority of governmental decisions and actions.

What are the claims around TikTok causing it to be considered a threat for citizens and national security?

TikTok has been thought to be used by extremist groups for recruitment purposes, thus creating a discourse of fear around it, as most of its audience is made of kids and young teenagers - the threat became of considerable importance.

India banned the app for a while, judging the risks of young children being exposed to pornographic content, cyberbullying, and even sexual predators, but the Indian ban on the app how now been alleviated. 

Although ByteDance has hired many content moderators, it seems that this moderation is quite hard with the extremely high amount of content. But is the amount of content the only reason why it is not being filtered as per the request of many countries? It seems like this filtering of information has been quite subjective to what suits the preservation of the image of the Chinese government: any content that seems to display a dissatisfaction of the communist regime, be it from a user inside or outside the Chinese borders, is quickly banned from the app, while other content often slips from the moderators.

Through binding its people and companies to strict surveillance laws, China pronounces itself as one of the major economies in the world. Indeed, there quite hardly is a thing such as Chinese free markets, as the central government of China has a hand in almost any “private” Chinese company, such as TikTok.

Why is TikTok a threat to the American national security, and what measure have been taken?

It seems like China makes a tool out of its markets to ensure successful foreign policies and negotiations widening China’s global interest, and that, through setting very strict laws on companies and demanding quite important insights on what happens between the company and the clients.

Thus, it is clear that in the eyes of the United-States specifically, the threat barely resides in the circulating of potentially harmful or dangerous content, but rather on the collection of data on the American people, bringing us back to the similarity with the case of Huawei. 

 Starting the end of the year 2019, many requests have been made by the government to investigate TikTok as having potential security risks associated with its use, or not. The Department of Defense conducted counter-intelligence reviews on the Chinese actions in regard to the TikTok app. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is adopting a more expansive view of national security in terms of the use of TikTok, as it is believed to pose a threat on many officers, including U.S. officials and government contractors who could be blackmailed or compromised.

 Legislation to ban TikTok on specific U.S government devices went through. 

The Pentagon, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and all federal employees now follow the obligatory ban on the use of TikTok on their government devices. The pentagon even advised its personnel to have TikTok uninstalled from their phones for further security measure. 

TikTok has been trying to shift its personnel from a less Chinese-centered one, to one including more Americans, and it seems like this might make TikTok look less risky in the eyes of the CFIUS and considering how important it is for TikTok to touch on the American public. Indeed, Nevena Simidjiyska, a partner at law firm Fox Rothschild LLP, and advisor to companies on CFIUS reviews stated that “shifting a company’s operations away from China, geographically and technically, can give CFIUS more comfort that the company is really independent of its Chinese owner and the Chinese government”. 

How does the TikTok ban on governmental officers and the military reflect on the US-China dynamics on a broader scale?

Clearly, the fight between the US and China goes far beyond bans put forward by the US for matters of national security and brings us back the major trade war between the two states that has fired up in 2018, and whose repercussion could be felt worldwide. 

What will happen to TikTok use in the United States? Were the reasons behind the ban valid, or the threat was not as imminent? What does this series of consecutive bans on Chinese companies say about the future of trade and involvement of the two nations with one another?