TikTok has spent years attempting to distance itself from its origins under a Chinese state-managed economy. Still,it cannot emancipate itself from its parent company ByteDance,or concerns about the threat of data harvesting and surveillance.
China’s own laws have made this situation difficult for TikTok to explain away. Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law is so broad that it would be difficult for any company to navigate under pressure. “Any organisation or citizen shall support,assist and co-operate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law,” it states.
TikTok,which was contacted for comment,has maintained it will not transfer data to the Chinese government if requested and holds all of its international data in the US,Singapore and,from next year,Ireland. But its own stumbles have made a tricky situation worse.
In June,BuzzFeed News reported on leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings,that revealed China-based employees of ByteDance repeatedly accessed non-public data about US TikTok users between September 2021 and January 2022,months after the company reassured regulators that US data would not be sent to China.
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The claims,along with a series of data leaks,have made sure that national security concerns about TikTok have survived a change of government in both the US and Australia.
The Trump administration – in the midst of its trade war with China – said it would ban downloads of TikTok from the US app store in 2020. US President Joe Biden is now reportedly considering limiting the data the app can collect on Americans.
In Australia,Home Affairs Minister Claire O’Neill has asked her department to investigate its data collection practices as the Coalition calls for her to consider banning the platform.
“If they say the national security risks are so grave that they cannot be addressed in any other way,then I think[banning] it needs to be on the table,” said James Paterson,the Coalition’s spokesman for cybersecurity.
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Censorship also remains a critical concern for governments. After initially restricting content critical of China,TikTok has since opened up more space for public discussion on topics that would be off limits on the Chinese version of the app Douyin.
More than 5 million people have watched Taiwan’s simulated response to an attack by China to the tune of MGMT’sLittle Dark Age,while 39 million people follow the hashtag for the Uyghurs – the persecuted Muslim minority in north-west China.
One of its most popular videos is of a Uyghur child screaming outside a security compound:“Don’t you have any mercy? Why are you doing this? Where is my sibling? Where is my father?” Other videos appear to mirror the happy dancing minorities prevalent in Chinese propaganda.
In November 2020,TikTok’s British director of public policy,Elizabeth Kanter,appeared before a UK Parliamentary Committee hearing in London. She was unusually frank with her interrogators.
“In the early days of TikTok there were some policies in place that took what we call a ‘blunt instrument’ to the way in which content was censored,” she said.
“At that time we took a decision to not allow conflict on the platform,and so there were some incidents where content was not allowed on the platform,specifically with regard to the Uyghur situation.”
The question regulators in the US and Australia are now asking is whether TikTok could do it again.
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