If the Chinese-owned TikTok is deemed definitively by the US to be a national security threat, it is hard to see how the UK or other western countries could conclude differently.
But the fact that Donald Trump has walked into the White House talking of a reprieve for the video-sharing network, which restored its service in the US after going dark for a day, suggests something simpler is at work – Trumpian geopolitics.
With 14.8 million TikTok followers, Trump has his own reasons to be wary of closing down the app. Instead, his focus is to force at least a partial divestment of TikTok US to a tame American owner, though reports of a sale to Trump’s ally Elon Musk have been dismissed by the app’s owner, ByteDance, as “pure fiction”.
The US security argument against TikTok starts with the simple concern that large amounts of user data could end up in China, where it could ultimately fall into the hands of the country’s ruling Communist party.
TikTok’s privacy policy acknowledges that it collects significant amounts of personal data: phone numbers and email addresses; device and video location; usage patterns – and phone and social network contact lists, for those who have linked them.
Some of that is stored internationally, in Singapore, Malaysia, the US and Ireland – and as the US supreme court emphasised, some is processed in China, including data to train its recommendation algorithm.
Yet it is also worth noting that TikTok is not alone in that many other apps harvest significant quantities of user data. As Ciaran Martin, a former head of the UK cybersecurity agency NCSC, observes: “The system of personal data security across social media and other apps is so broken TikTok scarcely matters.”
TikTok has admitted it accessed the accounts of two technology journalists (actually, in one case, her cat’s) seeking the sources of their stories about the company itself. But another allegation about covert ChineseCommunist party meddling has been set aside by a US court, amid concerns about the central witness’s reliability.
The former FBI chief Christopher Wray warned Congress in January last year that TikTok could allow China “to control data collection on millions of users, which can be used for all sorts of intelligence operations or influence operations”. But the reality is that these concerns are mostly theoretical.
Though it is undeniable that Beijing has engaged in the hacking of western computer systems to spy, steal intellectual property and obtain personal data, there is no evidence that TikTok is a vehicle for ongoing mass surveillance.
A recent breach of US phone networks by Chinese hackers labelled Salt Typhoon did not take advantage of software from China but instead “hacked US and other western-built infrastructure”, Martin added.
TikTok is not available in China (ByteDance runs a sister app there, Douyin) and is not overtly censored on Communist party lines, though it has been argued its soft power has influenced young people in independent Taiwan to be more pro-Beijing.
Switching to become an explicit vehicle for interference would be a huge change of tack, arguably similar to that adopted by Musk after his takeover of Twitter.
National security concerns about TikTok were accepted without debate by the US supreme court last week. Judges focused on whether Congress’s proposed ban on TikTok violated US free speech protections. The court concluded that the US legislation did not, because of overriding “national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and [its] relationship with a foreign adversary”.
In the UK, concerns about the leakage of government data underpinned a decision in March 2023 to ban TikTok from the phones of ministers and civil servants. However, the idea of a nationwide ban was dismissed on Sunday by Darren Jones, the chief security to the Treasury, who said “consumers who want to post videos of their cats or dancing, that doesn’t seem like a national security threat to me”.
It is a position that has been previously stated by British intelligence officials. The former GCHQ head Jeremy Fleming said he would encourage young people to use TikTok.
Yet if the argument about TikTok is really a geopolitical battle between the US and China, smaller Britain is wisest to keep out of the way. “It makes sense to see how this plays out in the US first,” says Martin. “Because if the US succeeds in getting TikTok sold, the problem goes away.”
