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In the nation’s capital, where Republicans and Democrats have agreed on virtually nothing, the House of Representatives on Wednesday ruled that TikTok poses such a significant risk to national security that it must sell its U.S. operations to non-Chinese owners. It was noteworthy that an overwhelming majority declared that it would disappear.
But this masks TikTok’s serious security issues, which the law doesn’t fully address. Over the four years this battle has been going on, it has become clear that the security threat posed by TikTok has far more to do with who wrote the code and algorithms that run it than with who owns it.
These algorithms, which guide how TikTok monitors users and gives them more of what they want, are the source of the magic for the app, which 170 million Americans currently have installed on their phones. is. That’s half the country.
But TikTok doesn’t own those algorithms. They are being developed by engineers working for Chinese parent company ByteDance, who assemble the code in secret in software labs. But China has issued regulations that appear to be aimed at requiring government review before licensing ByteDance’s algorithms to outside parties. Few expect such licenses to be issued. That means selling TikTok to American owners without the underlying code could be like selling a Ferrari without the famous engine.
The bill would require Western-funded startup TikTok to sever itself from any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of content recommendation algorithms.” The new US-based company will therefore have to develop its own American-made algorithms. Maybe it will work, maybe it will fail. But his classic algorithm-free version of TikTok could quickly become useless to users and worthless to investors.
And for now, China has no incentive to relent.
James A. Lewis, director of the cyber research program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Wednesday that the House vote was “a great symbolic gesture.” “But the Chinese can also get a vote.”
This is all part of a broader conflict between two of the world’s most powerful technological superpowers. This sparring is happening daily, including over President Biden’s refusal to sell cutting-edge computer chips to China and China’s opposition to the forced sale of one of the most successful consumer apps in history. is also included. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Wednesday that the United States “relies on hegemonic means when it cannot succeed in fair competition.”
This is a notable issue, and one that wasn’t foreseen when TikTok first released its app in 2016. At the time, Washington was focused on other issues from Beijing. The report accused Chinese intelligence agencies of wiping out the Office of Personnel Management and stealing classified intelligence files on more than 22 million U.S. government employees and contractors. It still hadn’t gotten over the cyber-enabled theft of American chip designs, jet engine technology, and the F-35 fighter jet.
No one considered the possibility that Chinese engineers could design code that supposedly understood the American consumer’s mindset better than the Americans themselves. Millions of Americans began installing Chinese-designed software on their iPhones and Androids, first for dance videos, then for memes, and now for news, but no one knew what was inside. .
It was the first Chinese-designed consumer software to become a huge hit across the United States. There appears to be no American company that can replace it. So it didn’t take long for TikTok’s widespread adoption to raise concerns that the Chinese government could use the data his TikTok collects to track the habits and preferences of American citizens. did. Panicked, state governments across the country began banning the app from state-owned cell phones. So was the military.
But authorities know they can’t take TikTok away from ordinary users. That’s why the threat to ban TikTok, especially in an election year, is a little ridiculous. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Bloomberg last year with surprising candor that if a democracy thought it was possible to ban the app completely, “the politician in me would literally ban every voter under 35 forever.” I think we’re going to lose it,” he said. ”
The threat of such a ban remains in the House bill passed Wednesday. But that’s probably not its true meaning. Rather, it seeks to give the United States leverage to force a sale. And the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a secret agency that reviews corporate transactions that could threaten national security, has been secretly trying for two years to hammer out a deal to avoid a real showdown. So far it has failed, which is one of the reasons the bill passed.
During these negotiations, TikTok proposed that ByteDance continue to operate its U.S. operations while remaining wholly owned by ByteDance, and that its algorithms be inspected and dissected in the United States. This is part of a broader plan that TikTok is calling “Project Texas.”
Under Project Texas, all U.S.-originated user data from TikTok will be stored on domestic servers run by cloud computing company Oracle. TikTok is also proposing that Oracle and a third party review the source code to ensure it has not been tampered with, to build trust in the independence of the algorithm.
TikTok says much of this plan is already in place. But government officials argue that it is difficult to know how such tests would work in practice. Reviewing small changes to code at high speed is a complex proposition, even for the most experienced experts. Biden administration officials say it’s not like inspecting agricultural products or counting weapons under the arms treaty. Very subtle changes can change the news delivered, whether it’s about the presidential election or China’s actions toward Taiwan.
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TikTok is seeking to formalize the arrangement into a formal agreement to resolve the government’s national security concerns. But the idea ran into resistance from Biden administration officials, including Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, who felt it did not go far enough to address concerns.
Instead, the Biden administration and lawmakers have urged ByteDance to sell TikTok. Sen. Mark Warner, a tech-savvy Virginia Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee and is sponsoring the new bill, said app sales should be done to ensure that “algorithms do not remain in Beijing or are replaced by algorithms.” We need to do that,” he said. It is completely independent from Beijing’s algorithm. “There is also a need to protect the security of TikTok’s data, he said.
But in the House, lawmakers are wondering what they’re most concerned about: privacy, the potential for disinformation, or simply the fact that Americans’ (mostly Chinese-made) iPhones have Chinese-developed code in them. It was difficult to grasp the thought. All these worries were often jumbled together.
“Foreign adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party pose the greatest national threat of our time,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, said during Wednesday’s House debate on the bill. said. She described TikTok as a “valuable propaganda tool that the Chinese Communist Party can exploit.”
TikTok may not have been able to allay its concerns over how it lobbied to defeat the House bill. Ms. McMorris-Rogers pointed out that TikTok used in-app alerts to encourage users to contact Congress and urge them to vote “no.” Congressional offices were flooded with calls, and some staff believed the calls were from teenagers. For TikTok executives, this was democracy in action. For some in Congress, it vindicated their cause.
“This is just a glimpse of how the Chinese Communist Party is weaponizing the applications it controls and manipulating tens of millions of people to further its objectives,” she said.
david mccabe I contributed a report from New York.
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