Graphic by Lucy Chen
The Trump-era movement to ban Tik Tok is returning; and as the fog surrounding the midterm elections starts to lift, people are starting to see that if Republicans are holding the gavels in Congress next year, the movement might just succeed in getting the results that advocates had hoped for back in 2020.
With the possibility of a Republican house and senate takeover looming over the heads of politicians, numerous conservative commentators, lawmakers, and former Trump administration officials have taken it upon themselves to capitalize on the circumstances and bring back the effort to ban TikTok.
Senator Marco Rubio said in a statement to NBC News that President Biden “needs to reverse course immediately and demand nothing less than TikTok’s full divestment from ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company).” Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called TikTok a “Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party.” And on November 1, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr told Axios in an interview that he wanted to see the app banned.
TikTok critics fear that Americans’ data is being diverted to the hands of the Chinese government and that Chinese authorities are manipulating the content that Americans are viewing on the app - concerns TikTok says are unfounded. In June, BuzzFeed News reported that china-based employees of ByteDance had accessed private data about U.S. users. While TikTok confirmed allegations that Chinese employees had partial access to American data, they denied turning it over.
Concerns about TikTok’s inability to properly fact-check its content have also risen amidst the clamor for transparency in the app’s data management. Seeing as nearly 30% of all major-party candidates in Senate races and 20% of all major-party house candidates have public accounts on TikTok, a stable fact-checking system is especially pivotal as we head into the midterm, and eventually, presidential elections.
Despite recent demands for better regulation of its content, TikTok is not as well equipped to deal with misinformation compared to alternative social media platforms. Global Witness and the New York University Cybersecurity for Democracy Team conducted an experiment in which researchers submitted 20 ads with false election claims to TikTok, Facebook, and Youtube. While Youtube was able to detect and reject every test submission and suspend the channel used to post them, TikTok approved almost 90% of the ads that contained blatantly false or misleading information.
Despite the growing movement against the app, alternate courses of action involving reforms instead of an outright ban have also been suggested, a new federal law being the most popular of such ideas.
While a complete ban of the app is unlikely, the future of TikTok remains as hazy as it did 2 years ago.
Credits:
Written by: Maja Mazzocca
Edited by: Caridee Chau
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