Aug 5, 2020 3:05 PM

Trump's TikTok Drama Is a Distraction

As the White House zeroes in on a single app, some experts say more pressing issues are going by the wayside.

Millions of young Americans were sent into a panic last weekend when President Donald Trump told reporters that he was “banning” TikTok from the United States. White House officials had already been discussing taking action against the social media platform and other Chinese-owned apps over national security concerns. But as is typical for Trump, it’s not exactly clear what, if anything, will happen next. On Sunday, Microsoft released a statement saying it had spoken with the president and planned to continue discussions about buying TikTok from its parent company, ByteDance, by September 15. For now, TikTok is still available in the US.

The episode is just the latest flare-up in the ongoing deterioration of relations between the US and China. Whether TikTok is sold or banned, the underlying security concerns it raises—about privacy, espionage, foreign manipulation and propaganda, human rights and civil liberties—are going to remain. In that respect, the drama unfolding around TikTok risks overshadowing larger questions about the future of the world’s two biggest superpowers. “I just think the notion that TikTok is the big issue in US–China relations is silliness, and I think it distracts from very important issues,” says Graham Webster, the editor in chief of the DigiChina Project, a collaboration between Stanford University and New America.

One of the biggest worries about TikTok is whether the Chinese government could compel ByteDance to hand over user data on Americans. TikTok has repeatedly said it wouldn’t share information with the Communist Party even if asked, but the possibility can’t be dismissed. At the same time, focusing on TikTok alone ignores a perhaps even more troubling reality: The United States doesn’t have robust data protection rules in place for any company. “Countries around the world are working on that type of regime, and the US is frankly not,” says Webster. After Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Congress briefly appeared interested in passing federal privacy legislation, but that effort seems to have stalled. It shouldn’t have: As more Americans work and socialize online, they’re creating even more personal data. Already, the US government says Chinese hackers have pilfered poorly protected information from a number of American institutions, including government agencies and a major credit bureau.

Another concern is whether the Chinese government could turn TikTok into a vector for propaganda. Not that they need a locally owned app to do that: The Chinese Communist Party has already been accused of launching disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Twitter targeting pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. But because the algorithms powering TikTok are still largely opaque and its parent company is in Beijing, the fear is that US officials wouldn’t catch state-sponsored manipulation until it was too late, as was the case when the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Social media companies also haven’t historically been eager to grant outside researchers or observers access to their technologies. TikTok has announced it is opening a transparency center in Los Angeles, where experts can see in person how it moderates content. And on Monday, the company said it was making it easier for users to report election misinformation and will expand partnerships with fact-checking organizations.

TikTok has over 100 million users in the US, but there are much larger, and potentially more serious, targets for foreign adversaries in the country. That includes the industrial infrastructure powering electric grids and water systems, for example, and experts say those areas could use the same kind of attention now being paid to a single app. “Industrial control systems is where you will see the most sophisticated, well-financed nation-state attacks first,” says Monta Elkins, “hacker in chief” at the security firm FoxGuard Solutions and an instructor at the SANS Institute. Elkins says there’s a shortage of professionals trained to work in industrial control systems and that some of the equipment is decades old. “Right now, we don’t run antivirus on these machines. They’re computers running software that might be vulnerable,” he says.

Bolstering national security and combating China’s authoritarian regime is also, of course, about more than just cybersecurity. TikTok’s critics have said Chinese-owned apps can’t be trusted because of the country’s terrible track record on human rights, particularly its oppression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang and its treatment of Hong Kong. At the same time, the US government has come under fire for failing to adequately address these abuses—and taking action on a social media app would do nothing to change that.

US officials have placed sanctions on companies who supply the surveillance technology used in Xinjiang, and Congress recently passed the historic Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which Trump signed. But the president also said he declined to sanction Chinese officials because of trade talks. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, claims Trump told Chinese leader Xi Xingping last year that building concentration camps for Uighurs was the right thing to do. Experts note that the US doesn’t have an asylum program for China’s Muslim minorities, nor nonpartisan funding for things like cultural education. “If we want to take the cultural genocide claim seriously, the way to do that is to promote Uighur heritage,” says Darren Byler, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado.

Darren says the US should also be working with other nations to implement global regulations for surveillance tools, especially things like facial recognition, which are often disproportionately used against minorities. “One of the things the US has to grapple with is that there’s often some genuine demand for these products despite their downsides,” says Sheena Greitens, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on East Asia and authoritarian politics. Last week, Greitens recommended to a federal commission that the US develop a comprehensive national strategy for dealing with Chinese surveillance technology, which is increasingly used around the world.

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Then there are the challenges the US is facing at home, including a pandemic with no end in sight, the nationwide impacts of racism, and other deeply rooted inequalities. “These are societal issues that are inextricable from a more holistic sense of national security,” says Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese military strategy and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan think tank. Kania says there’s a tendency in the debate over US-China relations to assume that it can be detached entirely from domestic policy and politics. “We can’t think about competition unless we’re able to sustain our democratic institutions and the continuity of our economy,” she says.

Kania also warns that as the US and China tumble into what could become a new Cold War, American officials need to be careful not to incite racism against Chinese Americans and other Asian people. Trump has referred to the novel coronavirus as the “kung flu,” for example, language human rights groups have connected to hate crimes against Asians. “We don’t want to promote new forms of xenophobia,” says Byler. “There has to be some effort put in place to really make clear what we’re opposing, which is an authoritarian state in China, human rights abuses, [and] these harmful forms of technology.”

Trump’s TikTok strategy is ultimately just another contribution to already fraying ties between Beijing and Washington. The app was a test case for whether the US and Chinese tech spheres could come together, and that experiment appears to have failed. In China, Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, has become the target of online critics who accused him of being a traitor for trying to appease the US government. In a letter he reportedly sent to employees earlier this week, Zhang acknowledged that “the attention of the outside world and rumors around TikTok might last for a while.”