Is The Clock Running Out On TikTok?
The average American TikTok user spends upwards of an hour and a half on the app per day and views around 165 videos during that time, according to recent studies. If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, though, you know that we all just might be getting that hour and half of our days back. TikTok has been banned from government devices in fourteen countries including the US as of March of this year, and many universities nationwide have begun moving to make the app inaccessible from campus WiFi networks. Prior to the Congressional testimony by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in March, a bill entitled the “Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Communications and Technology”—abbreviated, fortunately, as the RESTRICT Act—was the most broadly circulated of the many bills introduced that are related to TikTok, and it has raised concerns nationwide.
The RESTRICT Act, or Bill S.686, never uses the term “TikTok,” nor does it mention ByteDance, the Chinese company by which the app is owned. Its purview is much broader. The proposed bill grants the Secretary of Commerce Breakdown the power to ban any app or other facet of technology from US based devices on grounds of national security concerns. Furthermore, it entails the criminalization of US users who seek to use such installations regardless if the ban is implemented. The bill paints pictures of penalties such as governmental seizure of the device used to access the app, a fine of up $1,000,000, up to twenty years in prison, and in severe cases, all of the aforementioned. This seems extreme, yes? And so our next question should be: why does our government seem to be so concerned about this particular issue, of all the pressing issues about which they might be concerned?
Why, “national security,” of course. This claim has been met with skepticism from social media users, but it does have some reasonable roots. In 2021, several ByteDance employees were found to have accessed the data of and possibly surveilled several American journalists. These incidents are still matters of investigation by the US Department of Justice, but ByteDance claims that any such actions were not company sanctioned and that those employees have since been dismissed. Nonetheless, the data breach has justifiably raised concerns of data privacy for US users. The nationality of the company in question has been central to these concerns as well. The Chinese government is known for the censorship of social media used by its citizens—should we expect similar issues of content moderation when engaging with ByteDance? According to Shou Zi Chew, we should not. ByteDance, and by extension TikTok, is a private company with no formal ties to the Chinese government in the same way that, say, Facebook, a US based conglomerate, has no formal ties to the US government. For reference, Facebook has been the subject of multiple governmental investigations in recent years for issues including massive data leaks of user information.
So, our government is concerned about all of this, clearly. Should we be?
I believe that we should always be paying attention to the issues that play across our national stage. While we keep an eye on this issue in particular, there are several things I think we should keep central in our concerns.
First, in today’s climate, we should note when any issue rallies bipartisan support as this one has. We are an increasingly polarized nation. When Democrats and Republicans and the shades of either side of the aisle back a bill as they have S.686, we should look into it and ask ourselves why this is. Does bipartisan support automatically make it a good bill or a righteous issue? No, of course not. It does, however, make it an exception to the divisive rule of today.
Second, we should always be mindful of our own rights to privacy and security, of our access to information, and of the freedoms guaranteed to us in the First Amendment. We should not blindly trust any government or company to uphold these things for us. We should not become apathetic to our liberties nor our democracy.
Third, we should always be mindful of what we are consuming.
Sources:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/text
https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/restrict-act-bill-tiktok-rcna73682
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-strongly-opposes-house-bill-that-would-ban-tiktok-and-threaten-first-amendment-rights
Strike Out,
Written by: Sarah Singleton
Edited by: Hanna Bradford
Graphic by: CJ Barney
