The Patriot Post® · The Clock Is Ticking for TikTok

For Big Tech giants, you are the product. We in our humble shop have been saying that for years.

Big Tech and social media companies vacuum up huge troves of data on every user and sell it to other companies directly or use it to target-advertise. The vast majority of Americans, however, collectively shrug and consider relinquishing privacy and data a small price to pay for the dopamine hit that comes with using social media apps all day, every day.

Partly for this reason, TikTok, the short-form video-sharing app that is hugely popular with young people, is in the crosshairs of Congress. A bill passed by both the House (360-58) and Senate (79-18) and headed to Joe Biden’s desk today for his signature will effectively ban TikTok inside the next year if it’s not sold by its parent company.

TikTok is perhaps a unique case given the company’s connections to the ChiComs, which greatly elevates the risk for user data. Like the Democrats’ deep state cutouts in DC, those connections aren’t direct or clear. TikTok is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, where China maintains a heavy presence. Its parent company is ByteDance, a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing but also incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

As for making users the product, according to The Wall Street Journal, “TikTok has repeatedly said that it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and that it would refuse any such requests.” However, that’s a deceptive semantics game.

Various Chinese laws require — not request — that companies collecting data allow the ChiComs to access that data if the ChiComs deem it necessary to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.” Additionally, most companies must allow the direct presence of Chinese Communist Party officials in the business structure.

Given that China runs a social credit score system to keep its 1.4 billion citizens under the government’s thumb, you can bet your incredibly expensive iPhone that the ChiComs within those companies deem it “necessary” to access and share that data. In fact, you don’t have to bet. A former ByteDance executive says this very thing happened in Hong Kong in 2018.

Also, as our since-retired Arnold Ahlert previously reported, “In 2019, TikTok agreed to pay a $5.7 million fine to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and collected personal data from children — under the age of 13.”

It’s not just privacy and data. Algorithms can be and are manipulated to indoctrinate unwitting users. Democrats at Facebook and elsewhere doing that here in America is bad enough. Allowing the ChiComs to do it to young Americans via TikTok could be a much bigger problem. TikTok likely overplayed its hand in this regard by mobilizing users to oppose this ban.

According to the legislation, ByteDance has nine months and a three-month extension from the president to find a buyer for TikTok, after which it will be “unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain or update.” Users can certainly keep it on their phones, but no one will be able to download it anew or update it if it’s already on their device. Eventually, the app will simply stop working.

Buyers must be able to afford the multibillion-dollar price tag for an app with 1.5 billion users worldwide and 170 million in America. According to USA Today, “The Chinese government would also likely block the sale of TikTok’s algorithm, which would force a buyer to rebuild a crucial component of the app.”

There is a free speech component here, of course. Does a ban violate the First Amendment? After Montana legislated a TikTok ban last year, a federal judge ruled that it does. Senator Rand Paul likewise said a congressional ban “would violate the First Amendment rights,” adding that he objects to giving “the government the power to force the sale of other companies.”

Senator Marco Rubio disagrees. “This is not a First Amendment issue,” he insisted last year. “It’s not about the content of the videos that are online. It is about the dangers to our national security that are presented by the way this company functions.”

TikTok says the law will “trample the free speech rights” of users — as if Big Tech companies would never do such a thing. The company will undoubtedly challenge the law, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see it reach the Supreme Court.

Except in the unlikely event that Congress follows Mark Alexander’s advice about requiring disclosures on data collection and use, users will remain the product. Facebook and others will continue making gobs of money by collecting user data and using it to influence and manipulate billions of people. Moreover, it’s unclear what workarounds the Chinese may already have developed for a long-awaited TikTok ban. Beyond that, what user data from Facebook or elsewhere ends up in ChiCom hands?

As for the content itself, mindless short videos will remain popular because, let’s face it, we all find them funny and entertaining. The bigger problem is that leftist-manipulated algorithms of social media will continue to influence the way millions of people think … and vote.