TikTok is one of the biggest stories in business and geopolitics. US President Joe Biden has recently signed a law that would ban the massively popular app in nine months if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell it to a non-Chinese entity.
TikTok, for its part, has called the law “political theater,” and it is probably right: There is always some theatrics in politics, and bashing China is one of the most popular shows in town. Almost no other issue can unite the two major parties.
However, given the arrogance TikTok exhibited in the weeks and months leading up to the bill’s passage, the company’s leadership clearly has a fundamental misunderstanding of the US and Americans.
Compared with policymakers in other countries, US lawmakers are usually reluctant to regulate business, and many had previously opposed a forced sale of TikTok for fear that it could create a perception of corruption, reduce business and investor confidence, and undermine free speech. Most agree that when regulation does happen, it should clear the relatively high bar of serving the public interest.
Until a month ago, the main public-interest concern was data privacy. Questions such as who can access user data, and whether that data can be put to malign uses, are pertinent to all large social-media platforms. Over the past decade, the US Congress has held many hearings on the issue, often targeting large US companies such as Meta and Google.
These concerns are amplified in TikTok’s case, because many US lawmakers assume that the Chinese government can force TikTok to hand over the data of its US users. Under laws China enacted in 2017 and 2021, all Chinese organizations are required to assist the government’s intelligence-gathering and counterespionage work, if asked.
TikTok promised that it would store Americans’ data on servers outside China. That did not satisfy US lawmakers and security officials, who continued to worry about “backdoors,” an issue that contributed to the US Federal Trade Commission’s decision two years ago to ban equipment made by Huawei Technologies.
Still, at one point, there was hope for a workable solution whereby US regulators would conduct detailed examinations of the company’s technology. As data privacy is an industry-wide concern, TikTok could have played the issue to its advantage, such as by investing in data safeguards and supporting independent research of its own platform.
It could have met US lawmakers halfway, and approached the issue proactively, transparently and in the spirit of collaboration. TikTok could have been a positive force for change in the US tech industry.
Instead, TikTok adopted an aggressive stance, hired expensive lobbyists and in a catastrophic misstep, even mobilized its (predominantly young) US users to call their representatives in Congress. Pop-up messages urged users to “let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.” Some congressional offices received more than 1,000 calls in the space of a day.
On the surface, that might have seemed like a savvy strategy, given Uber’s earlier success in mobilizing its users to lobby against legislation it opposed. TikTok overlooked a crucial difference: Uber is a US company. By intervening in the US political process, TikTok made the situation much worse for itself, highlighting a second major threat that its critics say it could pose to the public interest.
Over the past decade, Americans and US lawmakers have grown increasingly concerned about social media’s undue influence on users’ beliefs, behaviors and voting decisions, and on how hostile foreign actors can exploit the major platforms for their own purposes. This risk strikes at the heart of US democracy, and it is not just hypothetical. Russia and other governments regularly try to interfere in US and European elections.
Given this context, TikTok’s mobilization of its users was not just an annoyance to elected officials’ staffers, it was an alarm bell. Many of those who responded to the call seemed not even to know what they were protesting. A foreign-owned company had brazenly demonstrated just how easy it is to manipulate its users to serve its own interests, confirming that it knew all along how much political influence it could exert. Suddenly, and understandably, the focus in the US shifted from Russian voter manipulation to Chinese voter manipulation.
Perhaps nothing could have saved TikTok from the forced-sale legislation, given the geopolitical climate. We will never know what could have been, but it is clear that the company’s aggressive strategy backfired. TikTok launched what many saw as an attack on US democracy, and ended up ensuring the majorities that were needed to push the bill through the US Congress.
TikTok’s future in the US is uncertain. Before it weighs its next moves, the company should fire its lobbyists and consultants, who should have advised it to be more respectful of Americans’ legitimate concerns about data privacy and threats to democracy. All other non-US firms should learn from TikTok’s recent missteps on what not to do.
Nancy Qian, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, is codirector of Northwestern University’s Global Poverty Research Lab and founding director of the China Econ Lab.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry gives it a strategic advantage, but that advantage would be threatened as the US seeks to end Taiwan’s monopoly in the industry and as China grows more assertive, analysts said at a security dialogue last week. While the semiconductor industry is Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” its dominance has been seen by some in the US as “a monopoly,” South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University academic Kwon Seok-joon said at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, Taiwan lacks sufficient energy sources and is vulnerable to natural disasters and geopolitical threats from China, he said.
After reading the article by Hideki Nagayama [English version on same page] published in the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Wednesday, I decided to write this article in hopes of ever so slightly easing my depression. In August, I visited the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, to attend a seminar. While there, I had the chance to look at the museum’s collections. I felt extreme annoyance at seeing that the museum had classified Taiwanese indigenous peoples as part of China’s ethnic minorities. I kept thinking about how I could make this known, but after returning
What value does the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hold in Taiwan? One might say that it is to defend — or at the very least, maintain — truly “blue” qualities. To be truly “blue” — without impurities, rejecting any “red” influence — is to uphold the ideology consistent with that on which the Republic of China (ROC) was established. The KMT would likely not object to this notion. However, if the current generation of KMT political elites do not understand what it means to be “blue” — or even light blue — their knowledge and bravery are far too lacking
Taipei’s population is estimated to drop below 2.5 million by the end of this month — the only city among the nation’s six special municipalities that has more people moving out than moving in this year. A city that is classified as a special municipality can have three deputy mayors if it has a population of more than 2.5 million people, Article 55 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) states. To counter the capital’s shrinking population, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) held a cross-departmental population policy committee meeting on Wednesday last week to discuss possible solutions. According to Taipei City Government data, Taipei’s