J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Devotees of TikTok show their support outside the Capitol in Washington, before the House passed a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app, March 13, 2024.
The debate over whether to force divestment of TikTok’s Chinese ownership has scrambled the usual partisan and ideological alliances and led to a lot of misleading commentary. But the airing of the TikTok controversy has two useful side effects.
One is that it shines a light on Trump’s utter opportunism and hypocrisy on the issue—and has been the first occasion when large numbers of Republican legislators have been willing to defy Trump’s wishes. The other benefit is the logical conclusion that the data privacy problem and its remedies are hardly limited to an entity with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Last week, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill that would require the sale of TikTok to an entity not connected to the Chinese government, or its shutdown. The vote was 352 to 65, with about 90 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats in support.
TikTok’s lobbying machine then went into overdrive and has succeeded in slowing action in the Senate. Majority leader Chuck Schumer has refused to commit, as has Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell from tech-heavy Washington state.
Why not? Because the major domestic tech platforms have immense influence in the Democratic Party. And rather than being pleased about the possible weakening of a Chinese-owned rival, they are concerned that the broader privacy concerns behind the effort to force Chinese divestment of TikTok will logically be extended to them.
Indeed, even if the divestment legislation succeeds, an American buyer of TikTok may not be passing personal data to the Chinese spying apparatus; but in the absence of much broader data and privacy protections, a new domestic owner will join the rest of the tech industry in profiting by selling personal data.
Former Trump Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin is putting together a consortium to buy TikTok if its sale is forced. He has never been known as a great advocate of consumer privacy, much less regulation of tech.
As our friend Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project writes, in the definitive explainer piece on the subject, “Those who say ‘we can’t even regulate social media and now you want to divest TikTok’s ownership!’ have it 180 degrees backwards. Being able to address Chinese ownership of one video sharing platform is part of the movement to reform all platforms.”
And as Stoller recounts, even though Congress has not enacted a comprehensive data privacy law, Biden’s appointees at the FTC, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have made important inroads via litigation in constraining some of the most abusive practices by the tech giants. The newly assertive FTC, in several privacy cases, has gone after the sharing of medical data, fertility data, location data, and a good deal more, including cases against Avast, GoodRx, Premom, BetterHelp, Flo Health, and many more.
But this is just the beginning of what needs to be done. So it’s not a case of either go after Chinese ownership of TikTok, or have a comprehensive strategy on surveillance capitalism. It’s both/and.
This brings us back to Trump. In 2020, as part of his campaign against all things Chinese, Trump called for a ban on TikTok in the United States. But as the House was preparing to vote last week, Trump reversed course and claimed that forcing the sale of TikTok would only help his nemesis Facebook, which he described on his social media site as “a true Enemy of the People.”
It did not take long for a little investigation to reveal that billionaire Republican donor Jeff Yass owns 15 percent of TikTok parent ByteDance, valued at roughly $40 billion. Trump has denied doing a favor for Yass, but The Washington Post reports that Trump and his aides have spoken about TikTok to people with financial ties to Yass, who is the biggest donor to the conservative organization Club for Growth, which is currently paying former Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway to defend TikTok on Capitol Hill.
So the TikTok case not only puts us on a path that begins better safeguards for data privacy generally. It also begins the overdue process of other Republicans beginning to ignore Trump’s demands.
