Why the US is attempting to ban TikTok

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that will force a sale or ban on the hugely popular social media app.

On December 22, 2022, the world’s understanding of TikTok modified. The social media giant admitted that a China-based team of employees from its parent company ByteDance tracked the placement of journalists, including this reporter, just three months later Forbes reported on his plans to observe American residents.

It was concrete evidence of something American lawmakers have feared for years — that TikTok might be used to spy on Americans. The U.S. government has long feared that the Chinese government could require ByteDance to either use TikTok to observe Americans or try and influence our civil discourse. Today, the House of Representatives passed a bill that will require ByteDance to divest from TikTok or, if it refuses, ban the app within the United States, and President Biden has said he’ll sign the bill if he does has the chance to achieve this. Whether that may occur is now within the hands of the Senate, where lawmakers are debating behind the scenes whether or to not introduce and pass an equivalent measure.

TikTok has described the bill as a transparent ban relatively than a divestment requirement – perhaps since the last time ByteDance tried to sell TikTok was the Chinese government exercised its authority to dam the sale. On Wednesday, Chinese government spokesman Wang Wenbin expressed objections to the bill and accused the U.S. government of undermining competition.

In the last two years Forbes has repeatedly shown how close TikTok’s ties are to its Chinese parent company ByteDance – which stays beholden to the Chinese government – and the way this might pose a risk to national security.

In the summer of 2022, BuzzFeed News reported that TikTok users’ private information was deleted Widely accessible to ByteDance employees in Chinaand that one other ByteDance app was was used to advance Chinese propaganda to people within the United States (ByteDance denied this happened). Since then, Forbes has reported that the US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into ByteDance over its surveillance of journalists. It emerged that ByteDance had been monitoring conversations about topics sensitive to the Chinese government, using over 200 lists of “sensitive words.”

Furthermore, despite CEO Shou Zi Chew’s statement on the contrary, Forbes revealed that the corporate continues to store some data about its American users – including lots of its hottest influencers – in China. That prompted some lawmakers to accuse Chew of perjury and call on the Justice Department to open an investigation into his statement.

Concerns about TikTok were largely bipartisan; Former President Trump first tried to ban TikTok in 2020. Since President Biden took office, his administration has remained skeptical of TikTok, although his campaign decided to affix the app last month. In March 2023, an interagency panel of Biden appointees told ByteDance that it needed to divest from TikTok or face a ban on the app.

This marked an apparent stalemate in years of negotiations between TikTok and the federal government to succeed in a national security agreement that will impose restrictions on TikTok but allow ByteDance to proceed to own it through a posh potential partnership with Oracle and a Data storage initiative called “Project Texas.” Forbes was the primary newsroom to report on the contents of the draft treaty. But with this recent bill, the Biden administration has indicated that the draft treaty, which might give the U.S. government unprecedented power over online speech, continues to be not enough.

This week, TikTok urged its 170 million American users to call their representatives and voice their opposition to the House’s recent bill. Additionally, former President Trump reversed course and spoke out against a TikTok ban, upsetting the Biden administration’s coalition. But given the unusually high bipartisan momentum, it stays to be seen whether Trump’s about-face will probably be enough to save lots of TikTok.

To read Forbes‘ Coverage of TikTok’s China problem below.

The project, assigned to a Beijing-led team, would have involved accessing location data from some U.S. users’ devices without their knowledge or consent.

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ByteDance confirmed that it used TikTok to observe the physical location of journalists based on their IP addresses, as first reported by Forbes in October.

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A source said the Justice Department’s criminal division subpoenaed the app’s Chinese parent company months before the U.S. government asked ByteDance to sell TikTok.

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A moderation system run by ByteDance employees in China uses word lists to detect or suppress content about every thing from TikTok rival YouTube to 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump.

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TikTok has stored probably the most sensitive financial data of its biggest stars on servers in China. Earlier this 12 months, CEO Shou Chew told Congress, “American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore.”

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The Biden administration and TikTok have negotiated an agreement to deal with national security concerns raised by the Chinese app. Here’s an exclusive take a look at the draft agreement and what TikTok could have to provide as much as proceed operating within the US.

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