US TikTok Ban a Flashpoint in US-China Cyberwar
Maneuvers to escape ban serve to entrench US political animosity
By: Andy Wong Ming Jun
The passage by the US House of Representatives on March 13 of the popularly dubbed “Ban TikTok Bill” with rare bipartisan support represents the brightest line drawn to date by the US political establishment against China in the realm of cyberspace and information warfare competition.
Whatever the pleadings of TikTok’s Singaporean CEO Chew Shouzi during his January 31 US Congressional grilling regarding both his own and the company’s independence from Beijing and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, US politicians haven’t bought into the argument that the phenomenally popular social media app isn’t a threat to US national security or its innocent nature of entertainment instead of a propaganda and data accumulation outlet for the Chinese Communist Party.
A February 6 Asia Sentinel article described US Sen. Josh Hawley’s questioning TikTok’s ability to keep its US user data private and siloed from access by ByteDance, despite it being headquartered in Singapore and claiming cooperation with US regulators on such concerns with “Project Texas” back in June 2022. “Project Texas” is a US$1.5 billion plan which saw TikTok route all US user data to be stored in the cloud infrastructure of a US software company, Oracle. A January 30 Wall Street Journal article reported that internal reports from TikTok employees revealed that US user data was still accessible to ByteDance staff. Chew’s inability to adequately address this issue arguably contributed significantly towards the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s decision to support a full US ban.
(See related story: Singapore Begins To Pay The Price for ‘China Cuckooing’)
Public maneuvers by TikTok, its CEO, its parent company, and the Chinese government leading up to and following the passing of the ban have merely served to entrench US political animosity. Days before the bill’s passage through the House Of Representatives, TikTok, and Chew put out direct video messages to its US user base exhorting them to lobby their Congressional representatives to “stop a TikTok shutdown,” providing direct links to contact details for their specific congressional representatives. This led in some cases to American teenagers threatening self-harm or suicide in videos and phone calls, though in most cases US TikTok users simply stated that they were following instructions sent directly to their phones via the app. When this last-ditch effort to mobilize the American public backfired with the first-stage passage of the bill through Congress, TikTok doubled down in justifying its lobbying effort by asking “Why are members of Congress complaining about hearing from their constituents? Respectfully, isn't that their job?”
With a third of US adults under the age of 30 using TikTok not just for entertainment but as a news source, the behavior of Tiktok’s 170 million-strong US user base provided grist for the “national security risk” narrative being pushed by US politicians to justify banning the app. Any possibility of a ban is certain to result a plethora of lawsuits.
Nor is the US alone in its national security fears. TikTok shut down its India service in June 2020 after India became the first country to enact a nationwide block. Other governments enacting bans on the popular app include the EU, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, the UK, and Afghanistan. Estonia’s 2024 intelligence threat report described TikTok as an avenue for Bytedance and China by extension to hoover up massive amounts of visual and behavioral data from diverse non-Chinese human demographics around the world to develop “globally competent artificial intelligence” which could be potentially weaponized in conjunction with another Douyin-owned digital newsfeed named Toutiao that relies on AI-processed user behavior patterns to push personalized news feeds for individual users. The report concluded with the declaration that “using TikTok means assisting a company with ties to an authoritarian state, which aims to reshape Western security architecture, in developing artificial intelligence."
Worse was to come. Subsequent public responses from Bytedance and China in the following days blew away any notion of TikTok being an independent company free from Chinese control and direct influence. The Chinese foreign ministry put out a statement on March 14 decrying what it described as US lawmakers unjustly suppressing foreign companies out of a “bandit mentality.” The irony of China’s outcry was not lost on American ears, with the US ambassador to China retorting that China was in no position to criticize the US given its own heavy-handed censorship and exclusion of Western social media platforms and news websites behind its infamous “Great Firewall,” even applied to TikTok itself, an internationalized version of Bytedance’s Douyin social media app.
Beijing later doubled down in its backing of TikTok by signaling to Bytedance company executives in Beijing that they would not allow TikTok’s US operations or even the Singapore-based company itself to be forcibly sold out of Chinese ownership to avoid a US ban. This is despite the fact that China has had a history of gatekeeping foreign business access to its domestic market by requiring them to set up mainland operations as joint ventures with local Chinese companies. In some cases, these joint ventures would later be deliberately handicapped through various means to produce sandbagged financial performance. The intention was to induce foreign partners in said joint ventures to sell out to their Chinese counterparts and cut their losses. Once fully Chinese-owned, such businesses would suddenly be able to turn a profit.
Viewed from this historical perspective, it can be said that the current US bill targeting TikTok with the option of either divesting fully from Bytedance and Chinese ownership in a “shotgun divorce” or being banned from the US market is a clear offer that can’t be accepted in the first serious information warfare counterattack by the US against China amid rapidly chilling ties.
Even if China and Bytedance were to acquiesce to this US challenge over TikTok’s ultimate control and ownership, a shotgun divorce of TikTok from full Bytedance ownership and control would be something relatively easier to legislate for than to practically implement with multiple potential business pitfalls and loss in company value.