Why are countries banning TikTok?

If Tombstone in Arizona was considered one of the most feared places of all wild, wild West towns of the 1800s because of so much lawlessness and gunfights, the worldwide web’s version may be the immensely popular video app TikTok.

There’s just anything and everything in this social media platform. In recent weeks, it was Ground Zero for an orchestrated attack against a beauty queen-turned-social-media personality spewed by “influencers” and “content creators” paid, she said, precisely to create fake news about her. These young trolls have confessed to the crime.

A billionaire’s daughter who is practically a phantom on social media was likewise surprised to see that her photographs found their way on TikTok.

And let’s not forget the May 2022 elections when a lot of disinformation and misinformation spread like wildfire through the app.

But more than the sometimes nonsense content you can find in this social media app – which isn’t really exclusive in this platform anyway – what is perhaps most concerning for many observers and governments is the app’s threat to national security and data privacy.

This is the reason many countries have decided to ban or regulate TikTok, citing threats to their national interests. These countries include the United States, India, the European Union, Canada, Australia, Afghanistan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Indonesia and Pakistan, according to news reports. The point was to prevent TikTok from sending data to the Chinese government.

‘Political theater’

TikTok of course has denied all allegations. In the US, TikTok has referred to the ban as “political theater” and criticized US lawmakers for attempting to censor Americans, according to an Oct. 10 report by The New York Times.

Excerpt:

“The swiftest and most thorough way to address any national security concerns about TikTok is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we worked with them on for nearly two years,” Brooke Oberwetter, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said in a statement. CFIUS is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

“Separately, TikTok has been trying to win allies, recently making an uncharacteristic push in Washington to meet with influential think tanks, public interest groups and lawmakers to promote the plan it submitted to the government,” the report said.

Geopolitical tensions

Should the Philippines consider banning the app, too? It’s a valid question, especially in light of the escalating tensions between the Philippines and China, given that TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

The Philippines is one of the 10 countries in the world with the highest number of adult – or those above 18 years old – TikTok users at 43.4 million, roughly 39 percent of the population as of 2023, according to DataReportal.

The total number of actual users could be significantly higher as TikTok appeals mainly to the younger population, or those below 18. These numbers show how much TikTok can influence Filipino kids.

Are the perceived threats to national security and data privacy valid? Should the Philippine government ban or regulate the app, too? Perhaps the government can look into the matter, considering that other countries have implemented their own, respective ban against the app to prevent local data collected by TikTok to be sent to the Chinese government.

As in any other social media platform, TikTok has the capacity to collect personal data. Could the links to China be real? We don’t know for sure; TikTok has denied it but it would be good for the government to at least take a look at this, especially given the escalating geopolitical tensions between Manila and Beijing.

On TikTok’s ownership, TikTok said that an entity affiliated with the Chinese government owns one percent of a ByteDance subsidiary, Douyin Information Service Co. Ltd. However, it stressed that this is a common arrangement for companies operating news and information platforms in China.

It also stressed that this arrangement is specific to services in the Chinese market, and has no bearing on ByteDance’s global operations outside of China.

But even Human Rights Watch is wary. Commenting on TikTok’s popularity in the US, HRW said in March that “TikTok genuinely might want to be like any other popular American social media company — whose business models unfortunately usually involve collecting massive amounts of personal data and relying on recommended algorithms that amplify misinformation and hate speech, while failing to protect the rights of vulnerable users — but the fact that TikTok is a Chinese company makes it extremely vulnerable to Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s demands. And the CCP has a record of making private Chinese companies  carry out its political deeds, including censoring and surveilling Americans.”

Given the size of TikTok’s users in the Philippines, from a national security perspective, the Marcos administration can at least take a close look at the exposure of our local data to China, considering ongoing tensions over the West Philippine Sea.

Indeed, with the growing number of cyberattacks and cybersecurity threats in the country involving our personal data, it would be good for the government to be a step ahead of these social media platforms.

As in the wild West, there’s a lot of lawlessness in the worldwide web. We better be safe than sorry.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen (Iris Gonzales) on Facebook.