What TikTok failed to understand about America: Democracy
TikTok has become one of the world’s biggest stories in business and geo- politics. US President Joe Biden recently signed a law that will ban the massively popular app in nine months if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell it to a non-Chinese entity. TikTok, for its part, has called the law “political theatre," and it is probably right: there is always some theatrics in politics, and bashing China is currently one of the most popular shows in town.
Almost no other issue can unite the two major parties. But, given the arrogance TikTok exhibited in the weeks and months leading up to the US bill’s passage, the company’s leadership clearly has a fundamental misunderstanding of America and Americans. Compared to policymakers in other countries, US lawmakers are usually reluctant to regulate business, and many had previously opposed a forced sale of TikTok for fear that it could create perceptions of corruption, reduce business and investor confidence in the US and undermine free speech.
Most agree that when regulation does happen, it should clear the relatively high bar of serving the public interest. Until a month ago, the main public-interest concern in America was data privacy. Questions such as who can access user data and whether that data can be put to malign uses are pertinent to all large social-media platforms.
Over the past decade, the US Congress has held many hearings on the issue, often targeting large US companies such as Meta and Google. But these concerns are amplified in TikTok’s case, because many US lawmakers assume that the Chinese government can force TikTok to hand over its American users’ data. Under laws China enacted in 2017 and 2021, all Chinese organizations are required to assist the
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