The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, better known as the act that extensively bans TikTok, was recently signed by President Joe Biden. The bill will officially ban TikTok in January 2025 if ByteDance doesn’t sell its app to a non-Chinese company.
The lawmakers who passed the law effectively banning TikTok banned it under the assumption that TikTok sells user data to the Chinese government and other Chinese companies, which is hypocritical in many ways.
TikTok selling its user’s data is no surprise. Most social media platforms sell user data to 3rd parties, as that’s how they profit.
Take the company Meta as an example. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and X(formally known as Twitter). Meta says they don’t sell user data unless the user permits it.
Users “permit” selling information by interacting with Metas-owned apps, such as posting or interacting with posts. With this logic, Meta can sell user data to the US government, without having to notify the user. So, Meta saying it doesn’t sell its user data is downright deceptive.
So why is TikTok being banned but not any Meta-owned apps?
I believe the political powers in charge of banning TikTok are too uninformed to understand how social media works and overly concerned about Chinese-owned companies.
Take the TikTok hearings earlier this year as an example, in which the CEO of TikTok, Shou Chew, was questioned about selling user data to the Chinese government.
In this hearing, Chew remains level-headed, informing governors about the 1.5 billion dollars TikTok has spent on Project Texas, ensuring that no American data is sold to the Chinese government.
Despite this, governors remain stuck on the fact that ByteDance is a Chinese company.
The best example is when Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton grills Chew on his nationality. Cotton goes on to drill Chew as to whether he is a Chinese citizen and if he has any links to the “Chinese communist party.” Chew repeatedly tells Cotton he is a Singaporean citizen, even having served in the Singaporean army, and that he is not a citizen of China.
Despite the measures TikTok has taken to ensure that no American data will be sold to the Chinese government, American officials remain hyper-fixated on TikTok being owned by a Chinese company, practically ensuring TikTok will be banned.
