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As the dust settles over the US shoot down of an alleged Chinese spy balloon, Republicans have turned to another, more familiar Chinese target of opportunity — TikTok, the social media app thought by many to be little more than Chinese spyware.
Speaking on Fox News after a US F-22 Raptor shot down the balloon — which China insists was a wayward weather balloon — Republican senator Tom Cotton was incensed.
“I think this spy balloon that so vividly went across America is a very high-profile reminder to Americans about what the Chinese communists have been up to,” Cotton said over the weekend.
“I got to tell you viewers, if they’re worried about a spy balloon flying across the middle of America, let me tell them about the TikTok app that they may have on their phone and what it means for their security and their privacy and that of their children, as well.”
Cotton was not alone in calling out the social media app.
“A big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese TikTok balloons on our phones. Let’s shut them all down,” said Republican senator and ex-presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Twitter.
“First, it was TikTok and Huawei. Now, it’s floating balloons to spy on Americans in full view,” Republican congressman Mike Flood tweeted. But Matt Gaetz probably had the most succinct comment on the matter.
“Now blow up TikTok,” he tweeted, just moments after the balloon was shot down.
TikTok has already been banned at a government level in a number of Republican states after the director of the FBI singled out the app as a dangerous tool for manipulating content last year. Congress has also banned the app on government-issued devices. Some universities are even following suit, with the University of Wisconsin being just the latest.
Here in Australia, Liberal senator James Paterson is leading the charge against the Chinese-made app. Last year, he wrote to Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security about the matter, before tweeting his concerns.
“I’ve written to Minister for Cyber Security Clare O'Neil to urge the Albanese government to take action to protect Australia’s 7 million TikTok users given these concerning revelations,” Senator Paterson wrote in a Twitter post in July 2022.
What’s so dangerous about TikTok
If you want to understand how TikTok has come to be so demonised by many Western leaders, it’s useful to look at the differences in how the app works within China itself, compared to the rest of the world.
China’s version of TikTok operates under the name Douyin and features a lot more content controls, particularly when it comes to children. Chinese kids under the age of 14 are presented with educational content and are limited to just 40 minutes of use.
“It’s almost like they recognise that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok,” social media advocate Tristan Harris said in an interview with 60 Minutes last November, “while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.”
The TikTok we see in the rest of the world does have time limit controls baked in, but they are voluntary and many parents likely don’t know they even exist.
The other issue that TikTok presents is one of data privacy and this is what most concerns many politicians. TikTok tracks by default a huge swathe of data, from what device it is being used on and where, and can access calendars and contacts. With all of this data — the app has about 1 billion users actively using it each month — being within reach of Chinese authorities, it’s easy to understand the concern.
And TikTok’s own executives are not helping the matter much. When asked last year if the Chinese government had ever made a request for such information and if TikTok could refuse such a request, Brent Thomas, TikTok’s director of public policy in Australia, said only that no such request had ever been made.
“Only people who need the data ‘in order to do their jobs’ have access”, Thomas told Senator Patterson via correspondence last year.
For many, what some of those ‘jobs’ might be is what worries them the most.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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