Time for TikTok to cut its ties to China
Editor’s note (March 13th 2024): This piece has been updated. TikTok’s videos keep its users up late into the evening. Now the app’s links to China are causing politicians to lose sleep, too. On March 13th America’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in America.
If the Senate follows suit, the world’s most downloaded app, by one measure, may start disappearing from screens. Some fears about TikTok are overblown. True, it hoovers up users’ data.
But there is no evidence that it takes more than it claims (or indeed more than rivals such as Facebook). If Chinese spies want to find out about Americans, the country’s lax data-protection laws allow them to buy such information from third parties. Banning Chinese apps that gather personal data would mean outlawing many more, cutting off Western consumers from some of the world’s most dynamic digital services.
TikTok has also injected welcome competition into the social-media market. Six of last year’s ten most-downloaded apps came from Meta, Facebook’s owner. TikTok, which beat them to the top spot, has brought in a wave of innovation.
Consumers everywhere are the winners. Yet there is one reason why America’s crackdown is justified. TikTok has evolved into a broad media platform with 170m users in America alone.
A third of American adults under 30 consider TikTok a source not just of entertainment but of news. It is therefore a real concern that it has links to China, whose government is in deep ideological conflict with the West and sees the media as a tool of propaganda. Most countries place some restrictions on foreign ownership of old media (ask
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