Data privacy, national security, or free speech

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 30th of April, 2024. You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re glad you are! Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

For years, U.S. officials have been trying to separate TikTok from China. So far, nothing has made it past the courts.

Last month, the U.S. House passed a bill with overwhelming bipartisan support to force the sale of TikTok. That bill stalled in the Senate. So lawmakers tied a new version to a foreign-aid bill. President Joe Biden signed it into law last week.

REICHARD: Under the law, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has nine months to divest, or be banned in the U.S. WORLD Radio’s Mary Muncy has the story.

MARY MUNCY, REPORTER: Briana Dariy owns an online boutique and advertises clothing and accessories on TikTok.

BRIANA DARIY: You can access a very niche group of people because TikTok will put your videos on people's pages who are interested in the same things as you.

And since TikTok added an online store in September, Dariy has seen a big jump in revenue.

She also uses TikTok to keep up with the news. If something big happens, she’ll usually see it on her “For You Page,” where the app uses an algorithm to suggest videos tailored to a user’s interests.

DARIY: Most of my algorithm is like things that I enjoy, like, you know, baking or recipes, or Star Wars, or Harry Potter. But then, you know, it filters in like the news stuff pretty frequently.

Dariy says news stories don’t pop up on Facebook and Instagram, and her friends who don’t have TikTok often don’t know about current events except through word of mouth.

DARIY: I think the government doesn't like that we have access to so much information and access for people to share their opinions so openly without really any limits.

So why are legislators so concerned about the social media app?

After a closed-door briefing on the first bill, Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher told reporters that there’s broad consensus on this issue: every major national security official from both the Biden and Trump administrations says there are too many risks to national security from the Chinese-owned app.

MIKE GALLEGHER: What we’ve tried to do here is be very thoughtful and deliberate on balancing the need to force a divestiture from TikTok without granting any authority to the executive branch to regulate content or go after any American company. This is about foreign adversary control of American social media and by extension the dominant news platform for young Americans.

While the bill garnered overwhelming bipartisan support from politicians, there were some dissenters.

Congressman Maxwell Frost of Florida attended the same briefing, but he says the supposed national security risks are not great enough to justify hurting the economy by taking away advertising for small businesses on TikTok.

ROBERT GARCIA: I believe that it is an infringement on our First Amendment rights and that it violates the Constitution. I hear from students all the time that get their information—the truth about what has happened in this country—from content creators on TikTok and on different social media platforms.

Frost, a Democrat, voted against the bill in the House.

The recent bills come after the government tried and failed to shut down TikTok in 2020.

DONALD TRUMP: It’ll close down on September 15 unless Microsoft or somebody else is able to buy it.

Then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order to force ByteDance to divest TikTok.

The action came at the recommendation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. It said the divestiture was necessary to “protect U.S. users from exploitation of their personal data.”

But the courts blocked the order, saying Trump overstepped his bounds and failed to consider other, more reasonable alternatives.

MARK MONTGOMERY: I think they were more worried about the data privacy issue than the national security issue.

Mark Montgomery runs the cyber center at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

He says foreign entities like TikTok shouldn’t be allowed in the country when they are controlled by nations like China that seek to undermine U.S. national security.

MONTGOMERY: The First Amendment wasn't created for that purpose, it was created for that for you to have freedom of expression, as a citizen, not as a corporate entity working at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.

So what about the First Amendment rights of citizens who use TikTok? For now, it’s unclear where the law courts will fall on the question of free speech, but in the court of public opinion, perspectives are mixed.

REAGAN PARKER: I think TikTok could be used to influence like the younger audience, I think I think it probably has, but I mean, I don't know if this should be banned.

Reagan Parker started taking TikTok seriously in 2020 and worked full-time posting videos on the app for about a year. He isn’t full-time anymore but he still uses it for supplemental income and pays attention to what goes viral.

PARKER: If there was something that would normally wouldn't go viral that they wanted to go viral like they could 100 percent do that. Which if they wanted to use that sort of thing to influence people then they definitely could.

But, Parker says that’s the same as any other social media app. It just comes down to who’s controlling it.

ByteDance says there are no national security concerns, it will not sell TikTok, and that it will sue based on First Amendment issues.

If the courts don’t agree with ByteDance, and it doesn’t sell the app, TikTok will be unavailable in the U.S. early next year.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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