What TikTok’s Users Should Know About the Allegations Raised Against It
Kirby Harris
March 24, 2020
A collection of TikTok Videos
If you’ve spent anytime online in the last six months, you probably know what TikTok is. If you identify as a member of Generation Z, I’d even bet that you have it downloaded on your phone. In November, TikTok reported the app had been downloaded over 1.5 billion times, and since TikTok’s popularity has only grown[1]. The video platforms confusing algorithm gives everyone a chance to go viral at least once. I experienced this first-hand when I started posting on the app a few months ago and amassed nearly 200,000 likes with only 600 followers.
For a lot of young people, the allure of fame brings them back again and again. TikTok fame happens fast and is completely unpredictable. Fifteen-year-old Charli D’amelio has amassed over 30 million (and growing) followers on the app within a few months for her trendy dance videos. She even appeared in a Superbowl commercial. TikTok has essentially taken over the social media world. However, the app (and its Chinese parent company ByteDance) has managed to collect some pretty serious claims of illegal data extraction and censorship. Currently, the United States government if investigating TikTok and ByteDance are threats to U.S. national security. When I sat down with some university students who use the app on a regular basis, it was clear these allegations were not common knowledge.
Sophie, a 19-year-old student, uses TikTok “pretty much daily” but wasn’t aware of the current investigation into TikTok and its parent company ByteDance by the United States Government. News of an investigation worried her, responding with “[an investigation] tends to mean that there is something worth investigating”. The rest of the students I spoke to had similar responses - nobody had heard of the investigation, but were intrigued when it was brought up. Sophie went on to say, “I wish I knew more about the scale of what they are doing right now and how my perspective on the app would change as a result of that information.”. In order to answer Sophies concerns (as well as my own), I had to go back to a few years ago before TikTok even hit the app store.
Before TikTok began to gain traction in 2018, it existed as Music.ly. It was primarily a lip-syncing app with an extremely young user base, and became TikTok after it was bought for reportedly one billion US dollars by the Chinese company ByteDance. TikTok has continued the trend of this young user base, despite the increasing amount of celebrities and older creators popping up on the app every day. While most of TikTok’s users come from China and India, the US is not far behind. According to TikTok, 60% of the apps monthly US-based users are under 24, and 80% are under 34. The app is particularly popular with high school and middle school students.
While TikTok is becoming a household name in North America, it has already become one of the biggest apps in China. China has the most TikTok downloads, with 466 million as of November, 2019. More recently, it was reported that TikTok has over 400 million daily active users in China, almost as much as Chinese social media giant Weibo. Due to the rapid growth of the app, it is safe to assume that those numbers have likely increased much substantially in the past few months.
Users seem to like the idea that, since anybody has the ability to go viral, it’s easy to build a platform. It’s what Sophie told me she liked about the app. In reference to the platform, Sophie said, “it makes it easy for small creators to get recognition on the app”. With platforms like YouTube and Instagram becoming more and more commercialized and oversaturated, it makes sense that creators would flock to an app where they may have a much higher chance at building a following. This allows for lots of different kinds of content. You can find everything from dance to comedy to art to dog videos on the app without having to look too hard. Comedy videos that integrate song lyrics in clever ways tend to get a lot of likes.
By January of 2020, TikTok had already surpassed Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, and Weibo in monthly active users - that makes TikTok the sixth most actively used social platform in the world. It also means TikTok is the highest platform on that list which is not owned by a well-established social media giant, such as Facebook or Tencent (a major Chinese conglomerate). Right now, TikTok has what it’s users might call “the hype” - an unexplainable, and maybe unstoppable, growth in popularity. The term arose to describe the wave of young, popular creators who are seeing unprecedented social media growth on TikTok. Mentioned earlier, 15-year-old Charli D’amelio is the embodiment of TikTok popularity. Charli’s dance videos to popular songs have amassed her tens of millions of followers and nearly two billion likes.
TikTok’s reach is big, and it’s seemingly only getting bigger. TikTok might just take over the social media world. However, before it can do that, it has some big hurdles to face. Mainly, the United States government.
Multiple branches of the United States government have become quite wary of TikTok since it was purchased by ByteDance. In November of 2019, The United States opened a national security investigation into the app. Lawmakers are concerned that ByteDance’s collection of U.S. citizens personal data could end up with that data in the hands of the Chinese government.
In December, the United States Army and Navy banned TikTok from government-issued phones. Since then, other branches of security forces have done the same. As of March 2020, the Air Force, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, TSA, and Department of Homeland security have all followed suit. While the government cannot force employees to delete the app from their personal smartphones, all military personnel were advised to delete the app from their personal devices. This is not the first time an app has been banned from government-issued devices. In 2016, The United States Defense Department banned Pokemon Go, citing concerns over distraction and productivity. However, it’s not watching too many videos that the US government is concerned about this time.
In November of 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (or CFIUS) officially opened an investigation on TikTok and ByteDance. When ByteDance first purchased TikTok, they did not file for a review with CFIUS, which is common practice when foreign companies acquire a U.S. business. CFIUS was able to open an investigation as ByteDance never officially requested clearance on their buyout of TikTok, meaning that it was not formally approved by the U.S. government. Although these submissions are supposed to be voluntary, CFIUS can review or investigate companies who do not follow these procedures. Most of the acquisitions submitted to CFIUS pass without issue, although of the five proposed acquisitions which have been blocked in the last ten years, four of them have been from Chinese companies.
United States officials are worried about a possibility of ByteDance handing the data of US users over to the Chinese government. With the new intelligence laws, Chinese companies have to hand over company data if asked for it. The Canadian government stated, “the human and technical reach of Chinese companies now give the intelligence services opportunities to gain direct access to many governments within the developing world as well as many Allied and European countries with inroads to other societies”. While this could result in positive economic growth, the US lawmakers spearheading the investigation are concerned that by the Chinese government having access to US citizen’s data, particularly military personnel, it could pose a serious national security threat.
TikTok and ByteDance have responded to these claims with assurance that all United States data is handled by U.S. based employees, and that data from the United States is stored in U.S. servers with a backup in Singapore, making none of that data subject to Chinese data laws. TikTok‘s statements on data and the government investigations are adamant in stating that their data is not subject to Chinese law, ensuring that the users of the app should not be worried about these investigations.
However, in December, ByteDance was hit with a class-action lawsuit by a student from California, claiming that the company secretly stole some of her data which ended up on Chinese servers. The student in question, Misty Hong, says that she downloaded TikTok in April of 2019 but never made an account. Hong says that the video drafts she made, as well as other private user data, was passed along to Chinese servers. Hong also claims that TikTok had made an account without her permission, using her phone number as the account password. This account was allegedly used to create a dossier of private information about Hong, some taken straight from her video drafts. If TikTok is found to be guilty in this case, it means that users should be concerned for where their data may end up.
However, data extraction is not the only worry that lawmakers have. Part of why some lawmakers called for this investigation is because of another issue: censorship.
U.S. lawmakers are also worried both about censorship and TikTok’s potential political influence. U.S. senator Marco Rubio first asked CFIUS to review ByteDance’s buyout back in October of 2019, and he cited censorship as the major issue. Rubio questioned the same thing many TikTok’s users had noticed at the time; that videos about the Hong Kong protests were being taken off of the platform or “shadowbanned”. Videos that are taken down are marked as “violation of community guidelines”, whereas videos referred to as being “shadowbanned” get marked as “visible to self”, making the content only accessible by the creator.
While TikTok’s rules have since been changed, the community guidelines in use before May of 2019 may be very telling. These old community guidelines which allowed for controversial content to be taken down or shadowbanned explicitly mentioned that the discussion of specific events or world leaders was off-limits. The guidelines pertaining to “hate speech and religion” placed a ban on content that criticizes policies and political or social systems of a nation, as well as “demonization or distortion of local or other countries’ history”, citing the Cambodian genocide and Tiananmen Square as examples. The guidelines also banned “highly controversial topics” such as religious or racial conflicts. These old guidelines even had a list of 20 “foreign leaders or sensitive figures” that were banned from discussion, including Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Mahatma Gandhi, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama.
These rules have since been retired, and the new general guidelines mainly focus on what may be seen as “harmful” to TikTok’s users, but the broad language used allows for interpretation. It is still made clear in TikTok’s terms of service that TikTok does not need to give advance or reason to removed content from their platform, even if no specific rules are mentioned. Some jurisdiction-specific terms and conditions do outline more nationalist policies. For example, in India, content that “threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, [or] friendly relations with foreign states” is off-limits. Jurisdiction-specific guidelines are posted for Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates.
While the censorship seems to have lessened on TikTok, some users are still complaining of their content being taken down. More specifically, LGBTQ+ creators and Muslim creators have reported their content being marginalized on the app. However, many users of all kinds have complained about innocent videos being taken down for seemingly no reason. Whether this is discovered to be an intentional silencing of specific groups, or simply a flaw in TikTok’s algorithm is yet to be decided.
I found that censorship was the issue students had the most to say about, even if there was very little confirmed information on the issue. When I spoke to some fellow students about TikTok, Sophie told me that she had heard about the issues surrounding censorship, saying, “taking down videos of LGBTQ+ creators…also Muslim creators, and anything going against the values that the current Chinese government holds.”. The students I spoke with didn’t agree with this kind of censorship, but found it tricky to say it shouldn’t be allowed to if that’s what the company wants. 19-year-old Olivia told me she didn’t think it was morally right to censor political content, but still believed as a private company, they had the right to do what they wanted. “It’s tricky”, she settled on.
Hopefully, the CFIUS investigation will be able to shed more light on TikTok’s censorship issues, giving students some concrete information on how the app’s algorithm works, what is intentional, and what is an issue of poor coding.
It is hard to say exactly where these investigations will lead. There were similar investigations by the CFIUS into the popular LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr after it was bought by the Chinese company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. This investigation resulted in CFIUS giving the company a deadline to sell the app because of evidence that US user data had been mishandled marking the acquisition by Kunlun Tech as a national security threat. In early March, Kunlun Tech announced that they were selling Grindr to a company called San Vincente Acquisition. Similar to ByteDance, Kunlun Tech did not submit a review of their original acquisition of Grindr, making them susceptible to investigations. Due to these similarities, some sources have stated that the CFIUS investigation may result in ByteDance being forced to sell TikTok.
Whatever the result is of these investigations, it is clear TikTok will not go quietly. The app’s popularity has impacted the media industry in ways that were hard to predict. Due to the nature of TikTok’s videos usually being accompanied by music, TikTok has begun to control the music industry. Songs like “Say So”, “hot girl bummer” and “ROXANNE” found immense popularity on TikTok before hitting the charts. TikTok is becoming unstoppable, with or without ByteDance behind it.
In Canada, TikTok is only expanding. One can speculate that TikTok has plans to open a Canadian office, as they have been posting job openings in the greater Toronto area. This would be adding to existing global offices in LA, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
As a result of TikTok’s immense popularity, it is hard to imagine that ByteDance will step away from the app without a fight. However, if ByteDance were to end up selling the app, it would not necessarily mean the end of TikTok but a transfer in ownership outside of China. Regardless, it is important that users of the app stay informed and understand the risks they may be taking in using TikTok. For now, none of these claims have been proven, and TikTok users must decide for themselves if using the app is in their best interest.