Editorial: Forced sale of TikTok ignores network of problems

By The Herald Editorial Board

The debate over how to regulate and protect digital privacy — now focused on TikTok because of its popularity among youths but its ownership by a Chinese company — came to a head Wednesday with a significant and bipartisan vote in the U.S. House to ban the video-sharing service if it wasn’t sold by ByteDance, its Chinese-based owner.

A split vote among Washington state’s U.S. House delegation further outlines the concerns and differences on how to grapple with not only the unease over TikTok in particular but social media apps in general, their reach into users’ lives and their handling of private data.

In a lopsided 352-65 vote, both of Washington state’s Republicans and six of the Democrats voted to force the sale of TikTok or shut down access to users in the United States, while two Democrats voted against the legislation.

Notably, the vote split the three Democratic House members whose districts include portions of Snohomish County. Both Rep. Suzan DelBene, who represents the 1st Congressional District, and Rep. Kim Schrier, who represents the county’s eastern communities in the 8th District, voted for the legislation. Rep. Rick Larsen, who represents the 2nd District’s Snohomish County communities, largely west of I-5, voted against the proposal.

Supporters of the forced sale have expressed alarm that users’ personal data could be shared with Chinese officials or that China would seek to influence the views of Americans through the app, although TikTok has denied both allegations and there’s been no proof of China gaining access to such data, according to reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Opponents have raised First Amendment free speech concerns for the app’s 170 million users in the United States — about half the U.S. population — including some 7 million small businesses, who use the videos for promotion. At the urging of TikTok, the app’s users flooded House offices with phone calls, seeking rejection of the ban.

The First Amendment concern was behind Larsen’s objection.

“My ‘no’ vote on the TikTok bill reflects my concerns about the U.S. government deciding what information Americans may or may not see or hear,” he said in a prepared statement.

But even in voting to approve the bill, DelBene appears unsatisfied with Congress’ approach thus far and the legislation’s sole focus on TikTok.

“The current Whac-A-Mole approach lawmakers are taking is leaving Americans vulnerable,” she said in a prepared statement. “We need a strong foundational national privacy law so the federal government can both be proactive and respond faster to emerging privacy and security threats. This is how we can put Americans back in control of their personal information.”

With that, Larsen was in agreement.

“Congress can address the challenges posed by TikTok and protect Americans’ digital privacy by developing and passing more comprehensive legislation that is consistent with our constitutional right to freedom of expression,” he said.

While President Biden has said he would sign the bill passed by the House, the legislation’s path in the Senate is uncertain. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was noncommittal about bringing it to the floor, the Times said, and it would face legal challenges even if signed by the president.

Among those who already were hashing out the issue in the Senate is Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chair of the Senate’s Commerce Committee. After the House vote, Cantwell was sympathetic toward the bill’s aims.

“I’m very concerned about foreign adversaries’ exploitation of Americans’ sensitive data and their attempts to build backdoors in our information communication technology and services supply chains,” she said in a prepared statement. “These are national security threats and it is good members in both chambers are taking them seriously.”

Last summer Cantwell proposed broader legislation that would have given the White House greater rule-making authority to identify and address potential data privacy risks, while also allowing Congress oversight over the actions of the executive branch. Her proposal was in response to another plan by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., that would have given the Commerce Department direct authority to ban TikTok.

Cantwell’s office could not confirm at press time whether the senator still planned to pursue that legislation, but her statement said she would work with colleagues in the Senate and House to “find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties.”

DelBene said she would support broader legislation.

“The debates around issues like TikTok, FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), and AI make painfully clear to Americans how vulnerable their personal information is for collection, misuse and sale to third parties,” she said in the statement. “The same was true after Roe v. Wade was overturned and people realized their personal health information was vulnerable. Technology has advanced faster than lawmakers can keep up and we are already far behind other countries that are leading the way globally.”

The House vote with its threat to ByteDance to sell TikTok or see it switched off in the U.S. has served to return the issue to public and congressional debate, but even if successful, the legislation leaves too much unresolved.

The sale would remove the threat of China peering over the shoulders of TikTok users at their personal data, and it would block China’s ability to influence users’ opinions, but a transfer would only shift those concerns to new owners — corporate or otherwise — without assuring greater data privacy or freedom from undue influence and misinformation.

Nor would the law address how social media companies are already collecting and using that data themselves to fuel the algorithms that direct content and advertising to users.

Last May, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, in a 19-page advisory, warned that the effects of social media — in the form of popular phone apps such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and others — on adolescent mental health were not fully understood and that the lack of understanding is occurring at a time of growing concern for the mental health, physical well-being and social development of children and teens.

Parents and policymakers have a responsibility to demand and mandate that technology companies provide far greater transparency about their platforms, how they work and — especially — the data that they are collecting from users, young and old, of those platforms.

What China might seek from TikTok users is only one of many anxieties we need to confront.