On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into the looming US ban of TikTok, the “social media app many are addicted to thanks to its cooking tutorials and dances that are impossible for anyone born before 1985 to look cool doing”.
TikTok has 170 million active users in the US – a third of US adults, and the majority of people under 30, use the app. “All of which makes it pretty remarkable that it may be on the brink of going away,” said Oliver. In April of this year, the Senate passed a bill giving the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and ultimatum: sell TikTok or face a ban in the US over national security risks.
Though nearly 40% of adults under 30 say they regularly get their news on TikTok and more than 7m small businesses use it, lawmakers from both parties insist it is a major threat to the nation. As one put it: “TikTok is like a gun aimed at Americans’ heads.”
“Those are some strong words, because we all know Congress will not stand by and watch someone pointing a metaphorical gun at Americans’ heads,” Oliver deadpanned. “Actual guns, that’s a complicated issue for some reason, but metaphorical gun violence will not stand.”
Oliver delved into how the TikTok debate “is actually a lot more nuanced than you might think”, starting with the app’s history. TikTok exploded in the US during the pandemic, “when all of a sudden, many of us were stuck at home with nothing to do but learn how to make cloud bread, whip up coffee and try to master the Savage dance”, he explained. “It is genuinely hard to imagine a better scenario for TikTok to thrive in than a pandemic. Suddenly they had a captive audience whose only other entertainment options were getting into sourdough, Windexing groceries a third time or, of course, retreating into a blank void where they slowly went insane.”
Lawmakers were already raising alarm about TikTok’s Chinese parent company in 2020; Trump banned it by executive order, which never went into effect, as a court found he overstepped and blocked the measure. In the years since, TikTok has tried to publicly distance itself from China by launching Project Texas, which promised to store US users’ data on US servers maintained by a third-party US company, though many experts have raised doubts about those protections being anything more than a “wink and a nod”.
Oliver examined the government’s two main concerns: the data TikTok is collecting from its users and the power it has to push content to them. TikTok is distinguished by its proprietary algorithm that quickly figures out what you like and linger on, so it can feed you more and more of it, “not unlike a doting grandmother or Marvel studios”, Oliver joked.
TikTok knows your likes and dislikes and maybe, in the case of some users, your sexuality. It also knows the device you are using, your location, IP address, search history, content of your messages and exactly what you’re viewing. In the US, according to its own privacy policy, it can collect biometric information such as faceprints and voiceprints from any content you post.
Oliver noted that some concern over TikTok’s data, such as the company harvesting it for future blackmail, is overblown – “a huge component of blackmail requires shame, and if you’re not on TikTok, you’re missing out on just how little shame its users have,” he said. But the company is vulnerable to the whims of the Chinese government, which “has shown a clear willingness to go after American data”.
“If China wanted to pressure ByteDance to do something for it, the company wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight,” he said, though he noted that TikTok doesn’t collect any more data than your typical mainstream social media network.
“I am not giving TikTok a pass here, I’m just pointing out that its behavior is pretty consistent with Silicon Valley’s own very shitty standards,” he said.
As for fears that it could push propaganda, Oliver noted that the Chinese version of the app plays by the government’s censorship rules; in the US, the company claims to have transparent moderation rules, though some researchers have raised concerns that material critical of China’s ruling party, such as history of Tiananmen Square, was under-represented on the platform. Oliver questioned some of the study’s methodology, though “ultimately it is hard to know for sure” if ByteDance censors anti-CCP content, since the algorithm is proprietary.
US intelligence agencies have admitted they have no evidence that China has used TikTok for propaganda purposes in the US, though there is “significant risk” that is could happen. “But as long as this argument is about what could be the case, we should probably ask, could there be any ulterior motive behind the US government’s approach here?” said Oliver. “Because alongside the concern about national security, it does feel like there can be an undercurrent of xenophobia.” And also “plenty of big US tech companies that would very much like their marketshare back from TikTok”, including YouTube and Meta, which both have their own TikTok knock-offs.
As justification for the ban, lawmakers have also referenced “classified” evidence of threats that the US public is not privy to. “Right, we haven’t seen it, so maybe you need to show it to us,” said Oliver. “Because saying ‘trust us, it’s super scary’ only really works if the person saying it is someone you fundamentally trust in the first place.”
“Claiming you’re protecting Americans’ privacy by banning TikTok feels like claiming you’re fighting climate change by banning the Kia Sorento,” he added. “Sure, it’s technically not nothing, but in a larger sense, basically nothing.”
Ultimately, Oliver hadn’t yet arrived at a clear path forward. “There is so much we don’t know, and coming from two sides I don’t remotely trust,” he said. “Because you’re either taking the word of a multinational tech company that profits off your data, or the US government, which seems more than happy to turn a blind eye whenever American companies do the exact same thing.”
The one thing experts agree on is that the risks to Americans’ data online “in no way end with China or TikTok”, as the US lacks adequate privacy protections to human data. “We have been behind the rest of the world on this issue for an embarrassingly long time,” Oliver concluded. “This TikTok ban ultimately may not even be necessary, but it definitely isn’t sufficient.”