Bill to bar TikTok reflects diminishing U.S. confidence
Social media platforms have been influence and intelligence tools for Washington
Nina Xiang is managing director at TH Capital, an investment advisory and asset management firm. She is the author of "US-China Tech War: What Chinese Tech History Reveals About Future Tech Rivalry."
Three and a half years after then-U.S. President Donald Trump tried to ban the viral short video app TikTok from his country via executive order, the U.S. Congress is now striving to bring about the same result through legislation.
The twists and turns of TikTok's American saga, including Trump's recent conversion to the cause of keeping the app available in the U.S., reflects Washington's dilemma as it grapples with the erosion of its previously overweening global influence and surveillance capabilities.
The passage by the U.S. House of Representatives two weeks ago of a bill requiring Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok or face the app's banishment from American app stores shows the lack of a cohesive strategy to address challenges to the dominant position of the U.S. as the central hub of global digital platforms.
To become law, the bill, which has President Joe Biden's support, also must be passed by the U.S. Senate. Yet passage is unlikely to provide a viable remedy to either the explicit complaints of American politicians or to their underlying anxieties. At the same time, it would undermine U.S. credibility as a stalwart proponent of free-market principles.
It is not often openly discussed, but American apps have been a key part of U.S. global influence operations for many years.
In a 2022 report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jon Bateman, who previously served as special assistant to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and in intelligence roles, wrote, "U.S. dominance of digital platforms has provided unparalleled intelligence collection opportunities and helped to project certain American political and cultural values into foreign societies."
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2016 showed that American tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, were cooperating with U.S. National Security Agency intelligence gathering. Another leak the following year detailed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's ability to manipulate popular Western web browsers and operating systems.
Aside from domestically focused Chinese apps like Tencent's WeChat, TikTok is the only non-American app to have 1 billion or more global users. Its presence alongside apps like Facebook, Google, and YouTube is thus perceived as a threat to American dominance.
The House TikTok bill appears to be a natural knee-jerk reaction, driven in large part by lawmakers' awareness of how digital platforms can be misused.
The bill follows a similar implicit logic to that of the U.S. campaign to cripple Huawei Technologies after its telecommunications equipment and smartphones won widespread global acceptance, similarly putting U.S. influence and intelligence-gathering objectives in jeopardy by displacing Western hardware.
Yet Biden's pivot to supporting a TikTok ban is almost as surprising as Trump's reversing his backing for a ban.
When he became president in 2021, Biden undid Trump's executive order against TikTok and initially supported the company's plan to store U.S. user data with Oracle. Just last month, Biden created a TikTok account to post videos to try to revive youth interest in his flagging reelection campaign.
Yet with members of Congress concerned the Oracle plan will not resolve their concerns, Biden is suddenly distancing himself from TikTok. This kind of volatile policy shift, driven by political calculus, cannot but undermine U.S. credibility.
Furthermore, a TikTok ban undermines the U.S. position as a champion of free and open markets. Banning an app due to its ownership by a country considered a foreign adversary marks a fresh pinnacle of American paranoia and xenophobia.
Notwithstanding the absence of some major U.S. apps like Google and Facebook from the Chinese market, Beijing offers a regulatory framework to govern how foreign internet companies can operate within the mainland and has accommodated other U.S. companies like Microsoft. By contrast, the only option available to ByteDance under the House bill is to exit the U.S. market.
With the Senate showing no sign of rushing to take up the House bill, it seems it may not pass during the current legislative session. Yet the proposal serves as an unmistakable sign that a new era of economic warfare has begun and that markets previously wide open to free competition could snap shut overnight.
If this trend continues, we can expect more Chinese apps to run into trouble in the U.S. -- and vice versa.
Shein and PDD Holdings' Temu, which have both become wildly successful with American shoppers, are already beginning to face scrutiny in Congress, as TikTok has. Conversely, American tech giants like Apple, IBM and Intel could be targets of Chinese retaliation.
The road ahead thus appears increasingly challenging for the free market and for prosperity, not only for America but for the world at large.
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