OpinionTikTok is just a bogeyman for America’s sorry lack of digital governance

Two US administrations have tried to ban TikTok over Chinese security concerns with little success. Why not address instead the real and urgent issues of social media harm and data protection?

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A TikTok supporter outside the US Capitol in Washington on March 12. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 8:30pm, 2 Apr 2024

The recent passage of controversial US legislation to force Chinese tech company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or face a ban is not the first time that TikTok has been a target in the complex narrative of US politics.

It is not even really about TikTok, popular though the short-video app is. The debate is merely a reflection of broader concerns about tech governance in the United States.

US policymakers have been in a dilemma over TikTok for years. In August 2020, president Donald Trump, labelling TikTok as a data security threat, issued an executive order banning Americans and American companies from having anything to do with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance after 45 days – effectively a ban on TikTok.

In doing so, he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The legal bedrock for this is a declaration of a national emergency. This Trump had done the year before. In May 2019, he issued an executive order on “securing the information and communications technology and services supply chain”. He said “foreign adversaries” were “increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities” in the US tech landscape and declared a national emergency over this perceived threat.

After Trump’s TikTok executive order, the US Secretary of Commerce specified the prohibited transactions, including maintaining TikTok on an app store and providing it with internet hosting services.

The move to ban TikTok was opposed by not just ByteDance but also many Americans who relied on TikTok to learn and earn. Lawsuits followed. At the heart of these were not so much whether TikTok posed a security threat as whether Trump had overstepped his authority.

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Two US administrations have tried to ban TikTok over Chinese security concerns with little success. Why not address instead the real and urgent issues of social media harm and data protection?

Two US administrations have tried to ban TikTok over Chinese security concerns with little success. Why not address instead the real and urgent issues of social media harm and data protection?