China, which blocks all western social media on the mainland, mocked the United States government for trying to stop young people from using TikTok, the most downloaded app during the pandemic.
The White House issued a 30-days notice to government organizations on Monday to make sure that TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd, is removed from all federal devices and systems.
Canada also announced on the same day that it is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, effective from Tuesday. This came after the European Commissionon on February 23, amid security concerns, asked all employees to delete the TikTok app from their work devices by March 15.
Since US President Joe Biden ordered the shooting-down of a Chinese “spy balloon” flying in the US airspace on February 4, China-US tensions have increased.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Representative Michael McCaul last week introduced a bill, the Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries Act, which if passed and signed into law will allow the president to ban the use of TikTok nationwide.
“Anyone with TikTok downloaded on their device has given the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) a backdoor to all their personal information,” said McCaul. “It’s a spy balloon into your phone.”
“As the world’s largest country, the US is lacking self-confidence as it is afraid of an application software that young people like,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson of the Chinese foreign minister, said Tuesday. “We firmly oppose the wrong practice of the US to generalize the concept of national security, abuse state power and unreasonably suppress companies from other countries.”
Mao said the US should provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for companies from all over the world to invest and operate in it.
Currently, China, the world’s second largest economy after the US, does not allow people on the mainland to use Google, Facebook or Twitter. People who are determined to access overseas news websites and social media need to disguise themselves online by subsribing to virtual private networks (VPNs).
In fact, people on mainland China have no access to TikTok itself but can only use Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. They can also use Weibo and WeChat to communicate but their posts are heavily censored.
Last December, the US Congress passed the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act,” which bans the use of the Chinese app in government’s work devices, except for national security, law enforcement and research purposes. McCaul is now pushing forward a bill that will give Biden the power to ban TikTok nationwide.
However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a century-old non-profit organisation, on Monday called for the withdrawal of the bill.
“This legislation is intended to ban TikTok in the US and would likely result in banning many other businesses and applications as well,” said ACLU’s Federal Policy Director Christopher Anders. “This vague and overbroad legislation would violate the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use TikTok to communicate, gather information, and express themselves daily.”
The ACLU said the House Committee on Foreign Affairs should hold a hearing on the matter before pushing forward this legislation.
In 2020, then-US President Donald Trump issued executive orders to ban downloads of the TikTok app in the US and force ByteDance to sell its US TikTok operations. Although Oracle was close to buying the unit, the plan lapsed after President Joe Biden took office.
In June 2021, Biden ordered the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-agency committee of the US government, to review the TikTok case.
Last June, TikTok told the media that it had started using Oracle’s hosting services in Texas and would delete US users’s private data from its own data centers. That was seen as a move to ease public concerns over privacy issues.
A mainland-based IT columnist says in an article that due to the tightening rules in the US, ByteDance will eventually have to choose between leaving the US markets or selling its American unit. He says if ByteDance wants to sell its US businesses, it needs an approval from the Chinese government, which will check whether the deal fulfills China’s technology export rules.
Since its launch in 2016, the TikTok app has been downloaded 3.5 billion times worldwide. During the pandemic in 2021, it ranked as the most downloaded app as people, particularly those aged between 15 and 25, turned to social media in their free time.
By the end of last year, TikTok had more than 1 billion monthly active users globally. In the US, there are about 113.3 million active TikTok users.
Analysts say TikTok will not be seriously affected by the latest ban announced by the European Commission, the US and Canada as most people use the app on their personal phones.
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Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3