President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed into law a legislative ultimatum to social media giant TikTok: sell or be banned in the United States.
In Virginia, one very prominent voice was glad to see it happen. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, is certain that TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, is beholden to its country of origin, China. That poses multiple problems, including reaping U.S. citizens’ data and influencing them with propaganda, Warner said in a recent interview.
Opinions aren’t uniform, though. Creators who are making money from the site don’t want to see it go away, and at least one academic in the region is not sure that China’s intentions are much different from the United States’ own.
The House of Representatives last week tacked on provisions about TikTok to the aid package it passed for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The Senate took up the legislation on Tuesday, after a bill Warner introduced last year had stalled. Both congressional houses passed the aid packages by significant bipartisan margins, sending the social media legislation to the president.
Warner noted in a Wednesday telephone conference with reporters that more than 80% of House members and almost 80% of the Senate voted in favor of pressuring ByteDance to sell.
“As I’ve said many times here, you know, the Chinese law dictates that Chinese companies, their top priority is not shareholders or their customers, it is the Communist Party of China,” Warner said. “And this entity, while enormously popular … the idea that they are collecting this kind of data, or potentially TikTok could be used as a propaganda tool is enormously troubling.”
In the far Southwest Virginia town of Cedar Bluff, an attorney and TikTok creator has a dissenting opinion. Brandi Hurley, who has more than 17,000 followers on the app, uses it to talk about coal country’s hidden history and to advocate for causes in her part of the world. TikTok happens to be much better than any other media application at getting her message out, Hurley said.
“To me, it just seems like it’s a fear tactic,” Hurley said. “You tell us there’s national security concerns about this app. But for me as an average TikTok user, all I’m seeing are videos like mine or videos of, like, cats doing silly things. So how can you tell me that this is a national security issue without any more information and expect me to support your ban?”
Gabriel Robins, a computer science professor at the University of Virginia, shares Hurley’s skepticism about national security. Yet Robins, who specializes in algorithms — the engines that make social media so effective — believes that whatever furor arises among 170 million TikTok users in the United States will subside relatively soon.
The new law says that ByteDance has nine months to find a buyer, and that if it’s moving toward a sale, Biden could extend its deadline to a year. If the company can’t find a buyer — The New York Times reported that ByteDance is worth $225 billion, with TikTok as its flagship — or if China refuses to let the company sell, then a ban will take effect, the first such social media prohibition in American history.
“That would mean there’ll be tens of millions of angry users for a few days and, and, you know, after the fever subsides after a few weeks, most of them will migrate to other websites that do similar functionality, like Instagram and Facebook and many others,” Robins said. “At some point they will calibrate and equalize and normalize, and maybe it would take half a year or a year.
“At some point, the status quo will be restored, and all these users will migrate elsewhere. You know, they’ll have to spend some time moving their content over and their videos and uploading their stuff again, and some businesses might lose customers, but other businesses will gain new customers.”
It’s all part of a complicated era that combines social media’s growing ubiquity with the decades-old tensions between two superpowers. And there may be no clear answer about the massive U.S. user base’s future, even with the ultimatum signed into law. It’s a First Amendment issue, according to such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, and lawsuits could add years to the newly enacted timetable. TikTok itself has vowed to fight, taking its case to its users on the site itself.
Warner said Wednesday that he would find it ironic for TikTok’s parent to take the U.S. to court over the law. He and other legislators, including Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington and chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, consulted with Department of Justice lawyers about its legality.
“The TikTok that we see [here] is prohibited in China,” he said. “American social media companies like Google and Facebook are prohibited in China. Yet this Chinese-controlled entity still has legal rights in America. They will have a right to bring this to the courts. But I believe this legislation has been drafted appropriately. … And I think at the end of the day, the law … will stand the test of judicial scrutiny.”
What’s in the bill
The bill, HR 7521, is titled “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” and is specifically tailored toward “the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications, such as TikTok and any successor application or service and any other application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Ltd. or an entity under the control of ByteDance Ltd.”
It prohibits distributing or hosting such apps on American soil or waters. Penalties for distributing or maintaining or updating would be $5,000 multiplied by the number of U.S. users. Hosting on the web would be subject to a $500 fine, multiplied by the number of users. The U.S. Attorney General’s office would enforce it.
The foreign adversary in this case is China. In an early April interview, Warner listed concerns about China’s control over TikTok’s parent company. He said he could not share the available intelligence, but publicly available information shows the app’s problematic approach to sharing news.
Warner cited news reports saying that in regard to Israel’s war in Gaza, TikTok skewed heavily toward a pro-Palestinian point of view, although ByteDance denies that accusation. Rival app Instagram posted 10 times more about protests in Chinese-controlled Hong Kong than did TikTok, Warner said. A similar ratio applied to postings about China’s ethnic Uyghurs, whom the U.S. and other countries believe are experiencing a genocide at China’s hands, he said.
“So, you know, is this coincidence or not?” he said. “I think there is a very … clear and present danger.”
He also was worried that ByteDance, at China’s orders, could use the site to influence the upcoming election season. He had told Wired magazine that he would like to see U.S. intelligence agencies reveal more, but there are sensitive matters that would be difficult to declassify.
“I try to make the case that … if this was just some group of politicians in America, you would say [they’re] anti-Chinese or anti-Communist Party, whatever,” Warner said. “But if you look at all of the other nations who prohibited TikTok, at least on their government phones, you know — Canada, U.K., the European Union, Australia, New Zealand. India has banned it not only from government phones but from consumers. This is … a global concern from democracies around the world.”
At any rate, the next election will have come and gone before TikTok’s deadline approaches. Warner said he has other concerns about election security, as well.
“I’ve said that I worry that we’re less prepared today than we were four years ago,” he said. “You know, our adversaries like China, Russia, etc., know that misinformation and disinformation is effective and cheap, too. Because of the nature of our politics in our country, now there’s a whole lot more Americans … that have a lot less trust in anything about our system, like a lot less trust in the electoral system.”
He was also concerned about artificial intelligence tools that could be used to spread disinformation and misinformation at an unprecedented speed and scale.
Social issues
Robins, the UVa scholar, said that governments harvesting Americans’ information and sharing it is not new, and the U.S. has engaged in it along with big tech companies. One need look no further back for proof than former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks to The Washington Post and The Guardian.
“Our worries about China are … not invalid,” Robins said. “But our own government in the U.S. is not beyond doing similar things, you know. I’m not saying two wrongs make a right, but it’s not at all shocking that the government wants to get free shots at the databases and cloud storage spaces of high-tech companies if they could somehow get it. And, hopefully, they get it legally.”
Social media user information doesn’t have to be collected surreptitiously, Robins added. Most of it is “open intelligence,” out there for anyone to find, because users have their friends and interests set for public viewing on multiple social sites, he said.
“You don’t even need some back door into some cloud storage space for a social media platform and nefariously get it through some back-end deal, bypassing subpoenas and so forth,” he said. “All you’ve got to do is data-mine the website and look for indicators of all kinds, look for matches and look for trends. And … you know a heck of a lot about almost everybody that’s on the website.”
Facebook became enmeshed in the 2016 election aftermath due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Twitter, now called X, has allowed back on the site users including Alex Jones, infamous for repeatedly claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.
Warner, in the April 1 interview, said that Congress has a poor track record in dealing with social media.
“We’ve not done anything to really slow in any meaningful way or put any kind of guardrails around the social media companies,” he said. “But there is something different in TikTok in that we may complain about Facebook and Google, but they’re American-controlled and they do answer to rule of law and shareholders and a management that can be held accountable.”
Clock ticks on business model
User content, the more engaging the better, is the coin of TikTok’s realm. It’s the same on YouTube. Hurley, the Cedar Bluff-based social media creator, said she has tried them all, but TikTok works best for her.
“TikTok, I think, makes things easier for people to follow, and in a 60-second to 3-minute video, you get immersed into a topic that you might not want to sit through an entire 30 minutes or an hour on YouTube for,” Hurley said. “And it’s easier to access this information because TikTok uses hashtags. … It’s easier to get a lot of content out fast versus on YouTube. … It’s very concise. Busy people use TikTok.”
Instagram, despite a somewhat similar interface, does not make it easy to do the kind of videos that Hurley makes. Facebook reels are more difficult to edit than on TikTok, she said.
“I can shoot a video really diving into the heart of an issue in 10 minutes,” she said. “And this video that took 10 minutes has this huge impact throughout my community, you know. One of the first things I started doing was … trying to get people to understand the real history of our area. … I really enjoy TikTok, and I feel like it has helped people in my community who are busy, blue-collar, working people to learn more about where they come from.”
Hurley has been able to monetize her content on the site, and losing it would negatively affect her ability to continue what for her is a supplemental business.
“It has been a beneficial part of my revenue stream right now, and especially in places like this, in the coalfields, we need more electronic means to make an income,” she said. “We just don’t have industry here, and to be honest with you, I don’t think we want industry here. We like our mountains not being stripped. We like having clean water. We like being able to go down the road without a two-hour-long traffic jam.”
She added: “I understand the algorithm allegedly is, you know, influencing people, but the algorithm has been good to my cause, and I can’t necessarily say that communist China is really into [learning about] whorehouses of the coal fields.”
Warner has said repeatedly that he understands those concerns, not to mention those of the children and teenagers who use it for dance and music. He and other government leaders simply don’t want it in China’s control.
“So if we can force this sale, there’ll be continuity of service, and people can still do the creative, fun things they like about TikTok, but I think they can do it in a much safer environment, as long as it has a different set of owners,” he said.
What would TikTok look like under new ownership? Multiple sources have reported that China considers the algorithm to be its intellectual property, and won’t let it go. Others wonder whether the country will allow a sale at all. On Wednesday, TikTok itself didn’t seem like a company that was primed to change hands.
Robins, to whom UVa recently granted emeritus status, has written algorithms and taught students about them. He said that making one in the TikTok style would be “pretty easy.” It’s a set of calculations that help sites determine users’ interests.
“Maybe a dozen competent programmers can do it in a few weeks of work,” Robins said. “So that’s really it. Now you can fine-tune it and tweak it and adapt it and make it learn more about users and so forth, but these are just a second order, third order of adornments on the main algorithm.
“The value in a social platform is not so much that algorithm, which is pretty generic, like I just described. The value is the number of eyeballs on the website at a given moment, number of users that subscribe daily or access daily that website. And for TikTok, it’s about a billion users a day [worldwide] that access it actively, and that’s a huge number. Whenever you have a billion pairs of eyeballs on a website, it’s worth tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars, just from the number of users.
“It’s in how many users already subscribe and live their daily lives depending on this website for their information, for their news, for their social contacts, for their dating, for their shopping and so forth and so on.”
A new algorithm is possible either for a TikTok that’s sold away from China or for a new app to take its place. But the United States is responsible only for 170 million of those billion sets of eyes. An American replacement would have to compete with an international juggernaut, if a sale can’t or won’t be closed.
“It is feasible to build out a comparable algorithm to replace it within a reasonably short period of time,” said Hwajung Lee, a professor and director of Radford University’s School of Computing and Information Sciences. “However, the real issue lies not in the algorithm but rather in the massive number of users and their followers in the app, whom we will not be able to migrate to the new one.”