TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is standing before a US Congress committee today to testify in the investigation into the popular video app. Concerns about TikTok are increasing and American politicians are afraid that the app will share data with the Chinese government and use the app for propaganda and manipulation.
And the Chinese think that is all very exaggerated, as China Tech watcher Ed Sander knows. According to Sander, it is a political move to accuse TikTok parent company ByteDance of espionage and propaganda, “because there is no hard evidence,” he says.
Sander emphasizes that there are actually remarkably few cases of concrete evidence that the Chinese government uses data from TikTok. ‘There is only one known case in which the Chinese government has used location data from journalists,’ he continues. ‘Data or information was leaked from ByteDance to journalists, and then an attempt was made to find out which ByteDance employee was behind it using the location data. By looking at when they were at the same locations as the journalists.’
Although he calls it a bad thing, Sander does not think it is a stepping stone to large-scale data sharing with the Chinese government. “There’s no proof, but it’s much harder to prove you didn’t do something.”
Officials are banned
In any case, the fear is well within civil servants, as governments around the world are more than good at showing: civil servants are advised and sometimes even obliged to remove TikTok from work phones. Sander states that the fear is mainly based on the concern that something could happen, ‘although I think it is wise not to install certain apps on government phones anyway,’ he continues. “Regardless of whether something happens or not.”
“It is wise in any case not to install certain apps on government phones”
At the same time, Sander wonders whether there should also be concerns about American apps, in connection with the revelations about the NSA made by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
Three possible outcomes
According to Sander, there are three possible outcomes of the hearing with Chew, who has already mentioned that he may want to settle in the United States. ‘First of all there is Project Texas, a project by ByteDance itself in which they completely shield the app from China’, says Sander. ‘And so no form of data transfer to China is possible anymore.’
For this, ByteDance wants to move all servers to Texas, which immediately establishes a US supervisory board. “They keep a close eye on what is happening, as if a fortress is being built around TikTok.”
Project Texas can safely be seen as the most voluntary of the three possible outcomes. An alternative is that the Americans will force ByteDance to sell TikTok, otherwise US President Joe Biden can choose to ban TikTok completely by presidential decree.”
