To the usual tribe of lobbyists and other influence merchants who swarm around Washington, this week dozens of tiktokers summoned by the company that owns the popular Chinese social network for short videos. With the silhouette of the Capitol in the background, a classic image of the anonymous citizen who crosses the country to ask their representatives for explanations, Chicago Latina Giovanna González (@TheFirstGenMentor on the app, where she is followed by almost 200,000 accounts), last Tuesday raised a hashtag which said #keepmostiktok. He also met with some congressmen to try to disabuse him, he said, of “those old men.” boomers targets who want to ban” the tool that allowed her to turn her “passion for financial education into a full-time job as a content creator and paid speaker.”
González was not successful: the next day the House of Representatives took the first step to force ByteDance, the parent company, to sell TikTok to an American company if it wants to avoid being blocked in the application stores of a country where it has 170 million of users, more than half of its population. In a geostrategic key, the gesture could be interpreted as a challenge that fuels the growing commercial and diplomatic tensions between the United States and China.
Despite its penetration into society, few issues in Washington have elicited so much agreement in the most ineffective House of Representatives in memory. The initiative garnered 352 votes in favor and 65 against. In another demonstration of the enormous influence of the company, the congressmen received calls from tiktokers to whom the social network sent a message with a link to enter the zip code and forward the complaints to the office of their corresponding representative. Now that the law continues its way in the Senate, where it is not certain that it will be approved, the company went on the attack again. On Thursday, his CEO, Shou Zi Chew, made a visit to Capitol Hill during which he declared: “No one has been able to explain to me exactly what we did wrong.” The next day, they sent another post. It said, “Tell your senator how important TikTok is to you.” It is not the first time that a technology company has tried to pressure legislators using its users, but surely none had done it before in such an aggressive way.
Joe Biden has warned that he will sign the law if it finally lands on his table. Although his re-election campaign has opened an account on the social network to reach Generation Z voters – who are entertained, informed, learn and practically live on the social network -, the president agrees with cybersecurity experts who remember that ByteDance is obliged by the Chinese espionage law to share its users’ data with Beijing if the authorities demand it. Also, that the addictive tool can contribute to misinformation and influence American public opinion in this election year. And that worries the intelligence services, as the directors of the FBI and the CIA insisted this week in the Senate.
“So far, critics of TikTok in Congress have not offered real examples of why it is a threat to national security,” Paul Triolo, one of the leading experts on the technological struggle between China and the United States, clarifies in an email. . “Personal data voluntarily provided by its users does not appear to constitute anything resembling a threat. The malign influence argument is also dubious, as the vast majority of content is generated by anonymous citizens. There is no evidence that the Chinese government is interested or able to force ByteDance and TikTok to alter the way the algorithm works, and if they did that move would be too obvious to those same users.”
ByteDance has repeatedly denied sharing its data with Chinese authorities. To defend itself, the company invokes freedom of expression (an argument shared by prominent civil rights associations) and talks about the economic impact that the ban could have on users such as the couple formed by Paul Tran and Lynda Truong, business owners. of cosmetics (@loveandpebble, 138,000 followers), which owes “90%” of its income to the platform. “We are not only on TikTok, prosperamos on TikTok. If they pass this bill, they will be destroying the American dream,” explains Tran.
The list of the 65 congressmen who voted against (50 Democrats and 15 Republicans) is a curious list of strange bedfellows, which brings together some of the representatives located further to the left, such as Pramila Jayapal or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who He complained that the process had been “incredibly rushed,” with members of Trumpism’s praetorian guard, from Matt Gaetz to Marjorie Taylor Greene. The youngest member of the Chamber, Maxwell Alejandro Frost, 27, also joined the group.
The voice of generation Z
Frost is the voice of Generation Z on Capitol Hill, a mass of voters that the parties risk losing with this operation. Not only: although 72% of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, agree with greater government regulation of what technology companies do with their data, an AP survey in February pegged the opinion at a mere 31%. party that is in favor of a TikTok ban.
At an event at Georgetown University, influential technology journalist Kara Swisher tried to reassure a couple hundred students on Thursday: “First thing: guys, TikTok is not going away,” she told them. “She’s worth too much to let her die. The point is to prevent access to this data to Beijing, which is involved in all Chinese companies, although [ByteDance] deny it and claim that it is based in Singapore. Why wouldn’t the Communist Party spy if it can? Wouldn’t the United States Government do the same? Much better than a balloon flying over our heads,” he said, referring to the device that crossed the skies of North America last year and unleashed another diplomatic crisis between the two powers, “is having 170 million sentinels stuck in our phones.” “It is obvious that Mark Zuckerberg also watches us, but I feel safer if he does Facebook than TikTok,” the journalist added.
Swisher, however, is more concerned about TikTok’s propaganda power than the national security threat that an app whose download is already prohibited to officials at almost all levels of the United States Administration, and also in countries such as the United Kingdom or Belgium or organizations such as the European Commission or NATO. “It is as if we gave ownership of all the cable television networks to a foreign government: the Chinese one, to be exact,” warns the expert. “Or worse, because TikTok has more power than CNN, MSNBC and Fox News combined.”
If the law goes ahead, ByteDance is confident that it could still be overturned by the US courts, as happened when Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully in 2020 to get his hands on the Chinese technology company. If he failed then it was also because the then president did not have the support of Congress.
But that was not entirely in vain: it forced ByteDance to store the data of American users on servers located in Texas and controlled by the technology giant Oracle. The Chinese company, which grew enormously in the United States during the pandemic, has also been in negotiations for years with an agency called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which monitors companies that may pose risks to national security. CFIUS gave gay dating app Grindr a TikTok-like ultimatum in 2019, and its Chinese owners opted to sell it.
Trump is now against the closure of TikTok because he fears that it will increase, he says, the power of Meta, a technology company that he considers “the enemy of the people” and is the owner of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, a social network that expelled the former president after the assault. to the Capitol. These days the American media has shed more light on this change of heart: it turns out that Jeff Yass, one of the most powerful donors to his campaign, owns 15% of ByteDance. And the Republican candidate for the White House is considering naming him Treasury secretary if he wins the election in November.
At the point of the forced sale, the bill says that it would have to be closed within six months. Among the names that experts are considering are some of the big technology companies in Silicon Valley. Steven Munchin, former Treasury secretary under Trump, announced the day after the vote that he is gathering a group of investors to bid. According to CB Insights, ByteDance was valued in December at 225 billion dollars (206 billion euros), but the price of TikTok, whose Chinese version is called Douyin, is not yet known, although some valuations speak of 84 billion.
And the algorithm?
So it’s not clear how much, but neither is what. Swisher is convinced that if ByteDance finally sells, it will keep TikTok’s great secret weapon for itself: the algorithm that has transformed internet culture and that makes its users always want more, among other things, because in order to sell it, it needs the permission from Beijing. The legislative project that now goes to the Senate, where its debate promises to be delayed while the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has not yet decided whether to force a vote, also requires the new ownership to cut any “operational relationship” with ByteDance.
“It is unlikely that the Chinese government will approve the transfer or licensing of that artificial intelligence algorithm,” says Triolo. “It is also true that no one is going to pay what TikTok costs without having access to that secret. And it’s also unclear how that technology could be transferred, even if Beijing approved such a deal, because the engineers and developers are in China. Recreating the algorithm would be difficult, time-consuming and there would be significant uncertainty around this process, which would worry investors.”
If, taking all these conditions into account, an American company was still interested in buying TikTok, an operation that David E. Sanger compared in The New York Times with “acquiring a Ferrari without its famous engine”, the other big question is whether the tiktokers They will be faithful to the version made in America of the social network or if it will end up converted into a shiny abandoned shell.
It is also not known how the new algorithm would affect the more than seven million companies that, according to their own data, do business through TikTok. Some of them, a formidable business. On Friday, a company spokesperson sent this newspaper a link to the profile of Carlos Eduardo Espina, one of the content creators who came to Washington to pressure. In a featured video on his profile, he explains in Spanish how much money he made in 2023 with social networks, in which he defines himself as a “law student and immigrant rights activist”: he earned 1.28 million dollars in total , 770,000 on TikTok alone. In another clip, with the Capitol in the background, he warns his 8.8 million followers that the requirements for the sale would force him to change the app “drastically.” “And then,” she laments, “it wouldn’t be the platform we know and love.”
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