TikTok lost a battle, but Washington has yet to win the war

TikTok has lost a major battle in Washington, and its ban in the United States seems inevitable, even if the government will have to be tactful before withdrawing the very popular platform from 150 million Americans.

His boss, Shou Chew, faced Thursday the rolling fire of attacks from a powerful parliamentary committee, without really having the opportunity to respond.

The elected officials, exceptionally united on the right and on the left, accuse TikTok, a subsidiary of the Chinese ByteDance, of serving as a tool for Beijing to spy on and manipulate Americans.

A hearing that ended in “disaster” for the platform, believes Dan Yves, of Webdush Securities, who expects an increase in “calls from lawmakers and the White House to ban TikTok in the United States if ByteDance does not separate from the company”.

Unless ByteDance finds an American buyer in “three to six months”, he estimates that “TikTok will probably be banned by the end of the year”.

Karine Jean-Pierre, spokeswoman for the White House, spoke on Thursday evening of “ongoing negotiations with ByteDance” and specified that the government “strongly supported” the RESTRICT Act, one of the bills aimed at banning TikTok.

The text, debated by senators this month, gives the Commerce Department new powers to ban technologies that threaten national security.

On Friday morning, the conservative New York Post daily made its front page, entitled “TikTok’s balance sheet”, with the photo of the parents of a dead teenager, present at Thursday’s hearing.

They recently filed a lawsuit against the platform, accusing it of showing thousands of unsolicited suicide videos to their son.

“Your company destroyed their lives,” Rep. Gus Bilirakis said, pointing to the family.

Confidentiality of user data, content moderation led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), misinformation, addiction, dangerous challenges, mental and physical health of children and adolescents… The list of grievances from elected officials is long.

The platform tried to anticipate it with a campaign, before the hearing, highlighting its popularity in the United States, a “miscalculation”, according to analyst Jasmine Enberg of Insider Intelligence, which “reinforced the argument” of parliamentarians.

The 150 million users in the United States “are so many Americans on whom the CCP can collect sensitive information, in order, in the end, to control what they see, hear and believe”, asserted Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chairman of the committee.

TikTok has also called on influencers to defend the service that made them famous.

But “highlighting the economic impact of TikTok is also a tricky strategy, given that its growth has taken place in part at the expense of American companies like Meta. Instagram and YouTube would be the first beneficiaries” of a ban in the United States.

The United States has already tried to Americanize or ban TikTok: former President Donald Trump, exasperated in particular by the content of users ridiculing him, was hitched to it in the name of national security, in vain.

The current strong tensions with China bring together Republicans and Democrats this time, and the voice seems free.

But freedom NGOs, some elected officials and many experts argue that TikTok poses essentially the same problems as Facebook, Twitter and the others.

“From a security point of view, we could certainly come up with a solution that minimizes the perceived risks,” Michael Daniel, director of Cyber ​​Threat Alliance, a cybersecurity NGO, told AFP.

“But would that be satisfactory for politicians? That’s another question”.

A ban would mean that “the United States, a democracy, is taking steps that restrict the ability of young voters (TikTok users) to express themselves and earn a living,” says Sarah Kreps, a law professor and director of the Tech Policy Institute.

“Given the costs of such a decision, and its limited benefits,” she continues, “legislators should first consider effective data protection laws, and risk control strategies, such as the Project Texas”, the compromise proposed by TikTok to protect American data.

“We are committed to providing a safe and inclusive platform,” Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s chief operating officer, tweeted Thursday. “It’s a shame that the conversation today seemed to emanate from xenophobia.”

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