The IT Nerd

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for TikTok. Fresh off of effectively being banned in the US, EU President Ursula von der Leyen has made it clear that a TikTok ban in the EU is on the table. Here’s what she said via Politico:

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hinted that banning TikTok in the European Union is an option, during a debate this evening in Maastricht, featuring parties’ lead candidates for the bloc’s 2024 election.

“It is not excluded,” von der Leyen said, after the moderator referred to the United States, where TikTok faces a national ban unless it is sold by its owner, ByteDance. 

She immediately added that the Commission was “the very first institution worldwide to ban TikTok on our corporate phones. “

“We know exactly the danger of TikTok.”

One thing to keep in mind is that TikTok is already in the EU doghouse as it was caught trying to bribe users into watching more videos on the platform. And seeing as the EU are the type of people to find the biggest hammer available to swing at most problems that it has to deal with, it would not at all surprise me if sometime in the next year, TikTok is banned there too. TikTok can act like none of this matters, as they tried to do right after the US ban. But at some point they will have to reconsider their life choices if they want to still be relevant. Though I have to wonder when that will happen.

A Reuters report that was posted late yesterday has blown my mind. In short, ByteDance who’s back is against the way because of Congress all but banning TikTok if ByteDance doesn’t sell it, actually prefers that that the app be banned in the US if legal options fail here’s why:

The algorithms TikTok relies on for its operations are deemed core to ByteDance’s overall operations, which would make a sale of the app with algorithms highly unlikely, said the sources close to the parent.

TikTok accounts for a small share of ByteDance’s total revenues and daily active users, so the parent would rather have the app shut down in the U.S. in a worst case scenario than sell it to a potential American buyer, they said.

A shutdown would have limited impact on ByteDance’s business while the company would not have to give up its core algorithm, said the sources, who declined to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Assuming that this is true, I have to wonder what do those algorithms do? Every social network except Mastodon has them. But they’re usually to present you with stuff that you’re interested in. Or try to target advertising towards you. The cynic in me says that they do a lot more than that, and ByteDance doesn’t want anyone to find those details out. That also suggests to me that TikTok and ByteDance fighting to keep the app alive in the USA is not about users or free speech or anything like that. Which makes this ban the right decision as clearly ByteDance has something to hide that likely is counter to their core agreements.

To quote Dr. Strange from the movie Avengers: Infinity War, “We’re in the endgame now”.

ByteDance is gambling on fighting the TikTok ban that President Joe Biden signed into law yesterday by winning in court:

 TikTok’s chief executive said on Wednesday the social media company expects to win a legal challenge to block legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden that he said would ban its popular short video app used by 170 million Americans.

“Rest assured – we aren’t going anywhere,” CEO Shou Zi Chew said in a video posted moments after Biden signed the bill that gives China-based ByteDance 270 days to divest TikTok’s US assets or face a ban. “The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we expect to prevail again.”

I say that it’s a gamble because there’s no guarantee that they will win in court. Yes there’s been a couple of cases where TikTok has fought off bans by going to court, but this time might be different:

Congress is arguing that TikTok poses a national-security risk, and the courts tend to defer to that governing body when it comes to issues of national security, experts told Business Insider. The federal government has more authority on that subject than a state like Montana does.

“The court will look at the merits of the case, but really driven by deference to Congress as having much more understanding of the national-security risks than the judges themselves do,” Matthew Schettenhelm, a senior litigation analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told BI. Schettenhelm estimated the law had a 70% chance of surviving a legal challenge.

So what this means is that ByteDance may be placing itself in a position where they have guaranteed that TikTok will be banned. And the clock is ticking. If I were them, I’d be queuing up a plan B. Like, right now.

The House passed this bill, then the Senate, and now President Joe Biden has signed the bill that among other things forces ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban. That means that the threat of TikTok being banned in the US has just gotten real for TikTok. Yes, they said that they’re going to fight this bill. But to be honest, the damage has already been done. There have been so many smaller scale bans in various places such as this one, this one or this one that at this point, nobody trusts TikTok. And I am not sure if TikTok can overcome this. That in my mind means that ByteDance which is TikTok’s parent company selling the social media platform might be the only way out.

Who would want to buy TikTok has to be the next question? This article will help with the likely suitors for the social media platform. But if I had billions of dollars lying around, I am not sure that I would buy TikTok. With everything that has gone on, it doesn’t seem to be a good investment that I would make money on. But I as always am free to be corrected on that.

The bottom line is that stuff has just gotten real for TikTok, and it’s over to them and their corporate masters at ByteDance to see how they deal with this.

Game on.

Last night, the Senate passed a bill that among other things, forces TikTok owner ByteDance to either sell the company or be banned in the US:

The bill, which President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law, stemmed from concerns among lawmakers about potential data access and surveillance by China through the app. It had already passed the House of Representatives over the weekend and the president has alreayd indicated that he will sign it into law when it lands on his desk.

“For years we have allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of the most popular apps in America that was dangerously shortsighted,” Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said following the bill’s passage.

“A new law is going to require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for America.”

Now, ByteDance has nine months to sell the company, with the possibility of a three-month extension if a sale is under way.

For the 170 million American users of the app, a ban would not automatically remove TikTok from their cellphones. 

Instead, the app would be unavailable on Apple and Google’s app stores and so users won’t be able to download it and TikTok won’t be able to send updates or fixes. 

TikTok has told its employees that it will fight attempts to ban the app in the US.

Now that this appears to be the start of the endgame in this fight, one has to wonder where this goes next. I am certain that other countries are watching this because they would be looking to do something similar to TikTok. Which is bad news for TikTok of course. Which is why I fully expect them to fight hard all the way to the Supreme Court.

As an aside, I personally don’t think this bill goes far enough. What good is a ban if the app is still on people’s phones because they would still be using the app, and the risks that were outlined above are still there? For this ban to be truly effective, Apple and Google should be required to not only remove the app from their app stores, but force it off people’s phones as well. I guess Congress didn’t want to go there as that would be a dangerous precedent as they would be telling people what apps they can and can’t have on their phones. Even though they’re basically doing that right now by banning TikTok.

Over the weekend, The House passed a huge bill that among other things forces TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the social media company, or face having it banned in the US:

The bill passed with a vote of 360-58 in the House, according to AP. It’ll now move on to the Senate, which could vote on it in just a matter of days. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said today that the Senate is working to reach an agreement on when the next vote will be for the foreign aid package that the TikTok bill is attached to, but it is expected to happen this coming Tuesday. President Joe Biden has previously said he would support the bill if Congress passes it.

This is going put pressure on TikTok. And they’re getting ready for a fight:

TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, Michael Beckerman, told staff in a memo after the vote that the bill was unconstitutional and TikTok would fight it in the courts.

“At the stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge,” he wrote in the memo, which was first reported by the tech news website The Information. Beckerman claimed that the bill violated the first amendment of the US constitution, which protects freedom of speech.

“We’ll continue to fight, as this legislation is a clear violation of the first amendment rights of the 170 million Americans on TikTok,” he wrote.

It’s an avenue that TikTok that have used before and they have had success with. I am not a lawyer. But success with this at the state level doesn’t mean that they will have success with the same argument at the Supreme Court. But I am free to be proven wrong.

Get your popcorn ready.

Hot off the heels of the US House Of Representatives passing a bill to potentially ban TikTok, come the news that the Canadian Government has been doing a national security review of TikTok:

The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of popular video app TikTok in September 2023 but did not disclose it publicly.

“This is still an ongoing case. We can’t comment further because of the confidentiality provisions of the Investment Canada Act,” a spokesperson for Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said.

“Our government has never hesitated to (take) action, when necessary, if a case under review is found to be injurious to Canada’s national security.”

The revelation comes after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday to ban TikTok unless its China-based owner sells its stake in the business.

That’s interesting. I have a comment from Ken Westin, Field CISO, Panther Labs relative to what the US has done. But is likely applicable to Canada as well:

I fear the bill to ban TikTok is mostly political grandstanding close to an election year feeding off of xenophobic rhetoric against China. That’s not to say the fear of the Chinese government accessing TikTok data isn’t real, but one has to wonder what value this data has, as the platform isn’t a place where documents or sensitive PII is stored. If the real intent is on protecting the data of US citizens, then it seems there should be a more robust set of legislation around the collection, sharing and selling of personal data in general. China can and probably has purchased data on US citizens from the same data brokers US companies buy it from. There is also a wealth of data often from data breaches available in underground forums that is free or cheap to access. It seems it would be better for us to focus on the real source of the problem, regarding private data access as well as bolstering cybersecurity to protect intellectual property from foreign powers which is what we’ve seen China and the nation state actors target in the past. 

I’ve gone on record multiple times as saying that TikTok needs to be banned because if we’re having this much discussion about it, it’s likely not a good thing. Or put another way, if there’s smoke there’s fire. Hopefully this whole episode leads to consumers on both sides of the border being better protected from adversaries like China.

TikTok might be in a bit of trouble as the House Of Representatives in the US have passed a bill that will do one of two things:

The bill, titled the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, would require TikTok to sever itself completely from its Chinese parent company ByteDance or face a potential ban from mobile app stores and web-hosting services. The bill would also create a process through which the president can designate certain social media applications with ties to foreign governments as a national security risk.

Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled lower chamber overwhelmingly supported the legislation, with 352 representatives voting in favor of the act, and just 65 opposing it. The vote breakdown contained little rhyme or reason in terms of party alignment, a rarity considering the months of partisan paralysis in the House.

The bill now goes to the Senate where it faces an uncertain future. Despite the fact that President Joe Biden supports this bill, it’s a question mark if the Senate will pass it. But if they do, one would have to think that TikTok’s days will be numbered.

UPDATE: Clearly TikTok is threatened by this based on this Tweet:

In my opinion, the poster is right. TikTok needs to be banned. In fact, it should have been banned years ago.

Not that I am surprised by this. But CNN did a test of TikTok and surprise, TikTok appears to censor content that is critical of China. To get the full context of this report, you can watch it via this link. But here’s the TL:DR. CNN anchor Jake Tapper interviewed TikTok’s head of public policy last year asking if they censored content critical of the Chinese party. “We do not censor content on behalf of any government,” the spokesperson answered.

But this week CNN reviewed data the total number of hashtags on both Instagram and on TikTok for topics that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government — and found stark differences. 

• Hashtag #Uyghurs appears in 10.4X more posts on Instagram than on TikTok.
• Hashtag #Tiananmen (referencing the 1989 pro-democracy protests) is 153 more likely to appear on Instagram than on TikTok.

On the surface, it seems that TikTok is suppressing these hashtags. Though I will point out that Instagram has been around way longer than TikTok which might account for this. But it does seem like one hell of a coincidence that a Chinese owned social media app has way less content that is critical of the Chinese government.

So why does this matter? TikTok is being looked at by Congress in relation to trying to manipulate how China and their policies are viewed. Which is another way of saying that they are looking at Chinese propaganda. That could lead to TikTok being banned. Thus TikTok really needs to explain this in a way that makes sense and is plausible.

So how about it TikTok?