By Mayank Chhaya-
Nearly three years after India banned TikTok in June, 2020, the app hugely popular with teenagers and young adults, is staring at the prospects of a similar ban in the U.S.
If the line of questioning that TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was subjected during a congressional hearing was any indication, the app, which has 150 million users in America, could soon be banned here. The primary concern propelling a prospective ban on the video-sharing app is that the data it collects could be passed to Chinese intelligence.
It was a similar national security concern that prompted India, in the aftermath of a military clash with China, to ban the app.
In testifying before Congress, Chew tried hard to persuade lawmakers not to ban the app or force its Chinese parent company ByteDance to give up its ownership stake. This came in the face of concerns being expressed by the lawmakers along the line that national security and user privacy was at stake and the app may be used to flood young minds with Chinese propaganda and misinformation.
It was a measure of how much Chew and TikTok want to hold onto the U.S. market that he said they planned to store all user data on servers owned and maintained by the tech giant Oracle.
Independent tech observers argue that it is disingenuous for the lawmakers to target TikTok even as other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube could be potentially engaged in similar practices. The differentiator with TikTok is that it is a Chinese-owned company under a CEO from Singapore.
The five hours of Chew’s testimony did not seem to have changed many Congressional minds with many members across party lines convinced that it poses a serious threat to national security threat. After the hearing, a statement by Chew said he “came prepared to answer questions from Congress, but, unfortunately, the day was dominated by political grandstanding that failed to acknowledge the real solutions already underway.”
TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas used even stronger language by tweeting, “We’re committed to providing a safe, secure platform, that fosters an inclusive place for our amazing, diverse communities to call home. It’s a shame today’s conversation felt rooted in xenophobia.”
In India after the TikTok ban the vacuum was filled by Instagram which now has 400 million users. Ironically, Instagram is just as capable of collecting user data as TikTok and pass it on to the U.S. intelligence. Once again, it seems a distinction is being made between a Chinese entity potentially collecting sensitive data and a U.S. company doing the same.
If the original objective of India’s TikTok ban was to guard user data, a report by Forbes magazine suggested it was futile since “TikTok and ByteDance can still access sensitive user data, including where they live, their friends and acquaintances and their search history.”
The magazine quoted a current TikTok employee as saying, “I don’t think [Indians are] aware of how much of their data is exposed to China right now, even with the ban in place.”
