中文
By Hannan Hussain
"A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide." This was the response from TikTok's spokeswoman after the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a controversial vote on March 1, empowering the American president to ban the Chinese short video app based on made-up "national security" pretexts.
The move brings Washington seemingly closer to violating the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans. It also identifies as the polar opposite of the view from Britain that there is zero evidence to warrant any prospective ban.
As such, the discriminatory legislation could give way to the most unprecedented U.S. crackdown against any single social media app to date, underlining the extent of U.S. insecurities towards the platform's rampant success, data transparency and competitive gains. "TikTok is a national security threat ... It is time to act," said Representative Michael McCaul, the Republican chair who sponsored the bill. This preposterous facade of "national security" asks to be taken down decisively.
First, it is a fact that the Chinese app has been targeted through a long-running campaign that sought to frame it as a "security threat" to drum up domestic traction. But even some of America's most powerful national security bodies brought no proof to light and fell flat on claims of evidence. Present rhetoric, that user data is subject to state espionage or backdoor infiltration, is entirely of America's own making, and is reinforced by the Committee's failure to recognize objective legal grounds. The resulting push to discriminate against a top-performing Chinese app and other fast-growing Chinese subsidiaries is a glaring illustration of U.S. double standards on business protection and free speech.
Conflicting divisions within U.S. consumers and business community, coupled with a divisive audience in the U.S. House and Senate, invite dark clouds over the fate of the sanction legislation. It appears that TikTok's substantial market growth within the U.S. and its transformative take on free expression are triumphs too big for U.S. hawks to digest without prejudice.
Understand that the legislation – akin to U.S. pressure on Europe – will not deter TikTok's rise as a social media powerhouse in major social media markets. For one, the bill operates on the wrongful assumption that Joe Biden must also ban any entity that "may" transfer sensitive personal data to what it peddles to be the Chinese government control.
Falsehoods about unauthorized access and backdoors are nonstarters, because none of the presumed influence has been publicly established. Moreover, the legislation's own failure to account for suppressive market practices, flawed legal grounding and free speech attacks render it undistinguished from Trump-era TikTok threats. Those banking on the legislation to drive American monopoly on innovation are for a very big surprise.
According to eMarketer, a market research company, almost half of America's social network users already use TikTok, and its trailblazing success in advertising revenue and profits has transformed the face of an innovative, open-communication model in the country. These feats are enough to compel key lawmakers within the House Foreign Affairs Committee to rise up in arms against TikTok and the resilient brand of social media innovation that it has come to represent. If anything, the bill's "national security" characterization only reinforces the poverty of reasoning and evidence against TikTok, effectively easing the path to taking down each anti-competitive U.S. breach.
Ultimately, the U.S. House panel's vote makes clear that a prejudiced outlook on data violations and unauthorized access dominates Washington's approach to TikTok, and other Chinese smart tech offshoots. Pushing with the ban will only fuel TikTok's pivot towards more market innovation and growth, all the while pitting the legislation as a counter to the very values of free speech that the United States claims to uphold.
Hannan Hussain is a foreign affairs commentator and author. He is a Fulbright recipient at the University of Maryland, the U.S., and a former assistant researcher at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute.
