The U.S. Takes A Major Step Toward Banning TikTok

On December 22, 2022, the world’s understanding of TikTok changed. The social media giant admitted that a China-based team of employees at its parent company, ByteDance, had tracked the location of journalists, including this reporter, just three months after Forbes reported on its plans to surveil American citizens.

It was concrete evidence of something that American lawmakers have feared for years — that TikTok could be used to spy on Americans. The U.S. Government has long worried that the Chinese government could require ByteDance to either use TikTok to surveil Americans or try to influence our civic discourse. Today, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require ByteDance to divest from TikTok, or, if it refuses, ban the app in the United States, and President Biden has said he will sign the bill if he has the opportunity to do so. Whether that will happen is now in the hands of the Senate, where lawmakers are debating behind the scenes about whether they should introduce and pass an equivalent measure or not.

TikTok has characterized the bill as a straight ban, rather than a divestment requirement — perhaps because last time ByteDance tried to sell TikTok, the Chinese government asserted its power to block the sale. On Wednesday, Chinese government spokesperson Wang Wenbin voiced objection to the bill and accused the US Government of undermining competition.

Over the last two years, Forbes has revealed again and again how deep TikTok's ties are to its Chinese parent company ByteDance — which remains beholden to the Chinese government — and how that could pose a risk to national security.

In summer 2022, BuzzFeed News reported that TikTok users' private information was widely accessible to ByteDance employees in China, and that another ByteDance app had been used to push Chinese propaganda to people in the United States (ByteDance denied that this had occurred). Since then, Forbes has reported that the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into ByteDance for its surveillance of journalists. It revealed that ByteDance had monitored conversation about topics sensitive to the Chinese government, using over 200 “sensitive word” lists to do so.

Moreover, despite testimony from CEO Shou Zi Chew to the contrary, Forbes revealed that the company has continued to keep some data about its American users — including many of its most popular influencers — in China. This led some lawmakers to accuse Chew of perjury and request that the Justice Department open an investigation into his testimony.

Concerns about TikTok have been largely bipartisan; former President Trump first tried to ban TikTok in 2020. Since President Biden took office, his administration has remained skeptical of TikTok, despite his campaign’s decision to join the app last month. In March 2023, an interagency panel made up of Biden appointees told ByteDance that it would have to divest from TikTok, or face a ban on the app.

This marked an apparent stalemate in a years-long negotiation between TikTok and the government to reach a national security agreement that would impose restrictions on TikTok, but allow ByteDance to continue to own it, via a complex potential partnership with Oracle and a data sequestration initiative known as “Project Texas.” Forbes was the first newsroom to report on the contents of the draft agreement. But with this new bill, the Biden Administration has indicated that draft agreement — which would grant the U.S. government unprecedented power over online speech — was still not enough.

This week, TikTok prompted its 170 million American users to call their representatives and express opposition to the new House bill. Moreover, former President Trump reversed course and came out against a TikTok ban, scrambling the Biden Administration’s coalition. Still, with bipartisan momentum at an unusual high, it remains to be seen whether Trump’s reversal will be enough to save TikTok.

Read Forbes’ coverage of TikTok’s China problem below.

Source: Forbes‍