4 questions about a TikTok ban
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Yesterday, the US House of Representatives passed a measure that would force TikTok to spin off from its parent company, ByteDance, or else face a nationwide ban in the United States. The vote saw overwhelming bipartisan support, passing 352 votes in favor to 65 against, in the name of safeguarding US consumer data from Chinese government influence.
President Biden has indicated that he would sign the bill if it also passes in the Senate—but questions remain, many of which directly impact the future of fintech:
1. Will the Senate vote on this bill?
So far, key Senate leaders have not voiced enthusiastic support for the bill. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) hasn’t said whether he would bring the bill up for a vote. Meanwhile, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said she would coordinate with “Senate and House colleagues to try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties.”
Inaction in the Senate would render the house vote little more than a symbolic measure. However, senators’ concerns may expand the scope of the bill, rather than make it die on the vine.
2. How will this bill protect users from undue influence?
The bill focuses specifically on TikTok as a source of foreign influence—itself a debatable, if not xenophobic, concern—but glosses over the ways US-based social media platforms have demonstrably influenced political and civic processes, often with deadly consequences. Facebook, notably, found itself embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal following the 2016 presidential election, and was also found responsible for fueling the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
A singular focus on TikTok, if anything, delays comprehensive data protection measures in Congress by conflating a TikTok ban with meaningful privacy-focused progress. This enables groups to continue using data brokers and US-based social media platforms as means to influence voters and consumers. That also leaves fintech companies in the lurch, with an uncertain long-term vision for how they should handle consumer data with privacy in mind.
3. Could TikTok be sold to anyone?
The bill as it currently stands could potentially render TikTok more politicized than it already is. In the wake of the bill’s passing in the House of Representatives, Steven Mnuchin, former Treasury Secretary during the Trump Administration, said he was looking to “put together a group to buy TikTok.”
Without the security and privacy measures outlined above, such a purchase would hand over a prominent social media platform to an explicitly political ally of a presidential candidate—the kind of political outcome the bill purportedly serves to prevent.
4. Does Congress know what TikTok is and does?
To put it lightly, members of congress aren’t known for being superlatively tech savvy. Recently, they seem to be failing their geography tests, too. Putting those two deficiencies together has encouraged lawmakers to frame TikTok as a foreign threat, which effectively casts working Chinese corporations as an invariable vulnerability, glosses over TikTok’s Singaporean leadership and Caymanian registration, and ignores the security measures TikTok has put in place to safeguard US consumer data by storing it in United States on Oracle cloud infrastructure.
If a Singapore-based technology firm is under political crosshairs to this extent, what stops future legal interventions about Singapore-based fintechs, insurtechs, and superapps moving forward?
