Yes, TikTok Has A Serious China Problem—Here’s Why You Should Be Concerned
Yes, TikTok Has A Serious China Problem—Here’s
Why You Should Be Concerned
Zak Doffman Contributor Cybersecurity Jul 9, 2020,02:38am
EDT
There was an irony to the news on
June 7 that TikTok was exiting Hong Kong. Its name joined those of Facebook,
Google and Twitter, and then Microsoft and Zoom, as major U.S. platforms
announced a rethink of their operations in the territory as its new national
security law came into force. It was as if they were all the same—but the truth
was very different. TikTok’s decision had nothing to do with the security
concerns cited by others and everything to do with its Chinese ownership. In
that moment, the carefully constructed shield around TikTok had fractured.
It doesn’t actually matter whether the Chinese
Communist Party influences TikTok owner ByteDance, as the U.S. alleges, or not.
China, in this instance, is China. The U.S. government has been waiting for an
opportunity to act. That opportunity has presented itself in the last week.
There’s a U.S. election coming up, set against the backdrop of a worsening
stand-off between Washington and Beijing. The U.S. cannot afford to let this
opportunity pass by unused—and it won’t.
Just like Huawei, TikTok managed to escape its
Chinese confinement to go head to head with western tech giants. Arguably,
TikTok presents a greater threat than Huawei. Arguably, it has given China the
means to pump content directly onto the phones of hundreds of millions of
citizens in America and Europe. TikTok has been under fire before—but not like
this. It has suddenly been hit by the perfect storm of four separate security
stories inside a week.
First came the news that a beta release of
Apple’s iOS 14 had caught TikTok
secretly accessing users’ clipboards. TikTok was not alone—a
raft of other apps were caught doing the same, and like those others,
TikTok issued an explanation and an update. But it was TikTok that generated
the headlines, partly because it had been caught before doing the same and had
promised to stop, but mostly because seeming to snoop on millions of phones in
the west is different if you’re Chinese.
Then came the announcement from the Indian
government that TikTok
would be banned on national security grounds. Again TikTok was not
alone—there were 58 other Chinese apps subject to the same sanctions. But,
again, TikTok made the headlines. India is the platforms’s largest market,
where hundreds of millions of users have installed the app and share its
videos. According to reports, sources at the company suggested the ban might
cost TikTok as
much as $6 billion.
The triggers for India’s ban on TikTok were
military and political tensions between itself and China. And, sure enough,
shortly after its ban was announced, reports from Australia suggested its
government was coming under pressure to do the same. Australia has its own
geopolitical tensions with China, and recent cyber attacks on the country’s
government have been informally attributed to Beijing.
The third whammy for TikTok, though, came when
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed in a Fox News interview that the U.S.
was “certainly
looking at” banning the platform. Suddenly the relatively contained action
in India looked as if it might spiral out of control and undo much of TikTok’s
success in recent years. The U.S. news was pure politics, with
TikTok joining Huawei as a totemic target of the technology standoff between
China and the U.S. Yes, there are security concerns behind the scenes,
but commercial, economic and political concerns trump those.
And so to Hong Kong, the final hit to the
platform in recent days. To understand why this is so critical, one has to look
at the way in which TikTok essentially wears two faces—one in China where it
operates as the highly restricted and censored Douyin, and one elsewhere where
it operates as the ostensibly liberal TikTok. By separating itself in this way,
the platform can assure non-Chinese users that the Chinese authorities cannot
access their data, that the data isn’t even stored in China, that there should
be no concerns about outside interference.
Until the end of June, Hong Kong with its
special status inside China operated as a non-Chinese TikTok market. But then
as the long reach of Beijing’s security apparatus stretched to cover the
territory for the first time, Hong Kong shifted from one side of that TikTok
line to the other. And while owner ByteDance says it has no plans to offer
Douyin to TikTok’s relatively small Hong Kong user base, it certainly can’t
offer TikTok while claiming the usual TikTok shield around those users.
There are several factors in play here. Under
Hong Kong’s new national security laws, China could compel TikTok to share
information and its users might be prosecuted for dissent for content shared on
the platform. That leads to the risk that information on the platform might be
subject to monitoring and restrictions and censorship to comply with new laws,
and that’s a PR nightmare. More critically, while Facebook and Google can
refuse to co-operate with the Hong Kong authorities citing security concerns,
ByteDance cannot. It is a Chinese-based entity.
And so while TikTok’s news coverage saw the
platform blend in with all its high-profile western competitors, it was very different.
The careful construct it had built and defended, that it was the same and
should be treated and trusted the same, was suddenly called into question. That
coincidental combination of Hong Kong’s security law coming into force at the
same time as India’s ban and even Apple’s iOS 14 beta release, with U.S.
political opportunism to follow, was simply too much.
As TikTok with its U.S. CEO looks to manage the
fallout from this hugely challenging set of toppling dominoes, two issues stand
out. First, the U.S. If you want to better understand the damage the
administration can do when it sets its sights on the success of a Chinese tech
giant, just ask Huawei. Pompeo has been the campaigner-in-chief against Huawei,
and it was no coincidence that it was he who broke the news that TikTok might
find itself in similar territory.
In the wake of Pompeo’s interview, a TikTok
spokesperson told me “TikTok is led by an American CEO, with hundreds of
employees and key leaders across safety, security, product, and public policy
here in the U.S. We have no higher priority than promoting a safe and secure
app experience for our users. We have never provided user data to the Chinese
government, nor would we do so if asked.”
The most immediate threat to TikTok is not
political, though, it’s commercial. We have seen various Indian platforms jump
up to fill the void left in the country, and arch-opportunist Facebook
is now pumping Reels, knowing that its chance to take back ground lost to
TikTok will never be greater than it is now. So, can Facebook change the market
dynamics and start to unpick what had seemed to be TikTok’s unstoppable
success, replicating its viral appeal? Just ask Snapchat.
In reality, TikTok is not the electronic
spyware machine some suggest—that’s no more credible than suggesting Huawei
smartphone users risk the same. There are no genuine national security concerns
that TikTok is vacuuming up petabytes of user data for analysis in Beijing.
The real issue is all those impressionable young users who have
become addicted to the platform—and that’s harder to stop.
In a world where social media has become such a
prominent disseminator of news, especially to the young, a platform based in an
adversarial state with an install base in the hundreds of millions across major
western democracies is a threat. The ability on any level to manipulate all
those feeds is significant. Facebook is based in the U.S., and just
look at the power it wields. TikTok is on a similar path.
And so to the latest domino to fall: FBI
Director Christopher Wray lambasting China as the greatest threat
to the security and prosperity of the United States. In a world where that
is true, the unstoppable rise of TikTok was always set to be challenged. What
has happened this last week is that TikTok has inadvertently opened itself up
to the beginning of that process. The U.S. government knows that if this
opportunity is missed, it may be much harder later. China is now a serious
problem for lockdown’s most iconic success story—and there’s no obvious fix.
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