#vii Beyond Citations | TikTok is ticking
TikTok has rattled one and all. But should it?
Curated by Lokendra Sharma, Beyond Citations grounds vital tech developments in foundational scholarship. Because academic work is deeply relevant beyond citations in the scholarly universe.
The Trump administration is hopeful that TikTok will find a partner by 5 April 2025 deadline. There are questions being raised in India whether TikTok would be back like other hitherto banned Chinese apps making a comeback. This edition of Beyond Citations asks a basic question: From the US to India, from Australia to the EU, should everyone be singularly concerned about TikTok?
In a May 2024 opinion for The Hill, Craig Albert characterised TikTok as a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused before it is too late. For two months before publication of his piece, March-April 2024, the US Congress, Senate and Biden administration joined hands to bring a law into operation that forced TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to either sell its US business or face a ban. The deadline for ByteDance was 19 January 2025, just a day before the next US president’s inauguration. For the entirety of 2024, the law in question was mired in legal challenges in the court; this was finally laid to a rest when the US Supreme Court upheld the law on 17 January 2025. After briefly going dark, TikTok was resurrected — albeit temporarily — when the newly inaugurated President Trump (2.0 version) on his very first day in office signed an executive order extending the deadline for 75 days. US Vice President Vance expects a framework of a TikTok deal by 5 April 2025, the new deadline.
Closer home, in India, questions are being asked whether TikTok would return to India the same way some of the other hitherto banned Chinese apps are. In June 2020, in the aftermath of deadly border clashes in Galwan at India-China LAC, the Indian government banned 59 Chinese apps on the grounds that these were ‘engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.’ About five years later, and following an easing of tensions, some of the apps are making a comeback in India. The curious case is that of Shein, a fast-fashion e-commerce platform that has returned in partnership with Reliance — the latter will handle the retail part and data, while technology would remain with Shein’s parent company. TikTok could potentially follow Shein’s template to re-enter India. But as I argue in my recent piece for Moneycontrol:
The Shein template would not work in the case of TikTok. Both are different types of apps altogether: the earlier is a fast-fashion e-commerce platform, while the latter is a social media platform. According to the Shein template, the technology would remain with Shein’s parent company. While this can still work for an e-commerce platform, for TikTok this would not. This is because it is in the TikTok's algorithm that cognitive autonomy concern stems from. While data privacy and sovereignty as well as cybersecurity are often emphasized in popular writings, cognitive autonomy of Indian citizens is important too, especially in the age of information warfare. The TikTok algorithm can be potentially used to amplify or de-amplify content to suit ByteDance's (and thereby Chinese Communist Party's) objectives. To make matters worse, the effects of influence operations mounted through algorithmic bias may be ‘unseen yet pervasive’ and ‘more likely to have a deeper impact (both cognitively at individual level, and collectively at societal level)’.
Elsewhere, close allies of the US — the UK and Australia — have banned TikTok in a limited manner, that is, in government devices. In 2023, the EU had also banned TikTok usage in staff devices. But is ‘whacking-a-mole’ the right approach? Does everything begin and end with TikTok for democracies figuring out how to deal with China? Bernot, Cooney-O'Donoghue and Mann in their following 2024 provide some answers:
Bernot, A. & Cooney-O'Donoghue, D. & Mann, M. (2024). Governing Chinese technologies: TikTok, foreign interference, and technological sovereignty. Internet Policy Review, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.1.1741
Bernot et al. conduct a detailed examination of how the US, UK, Australia (the AUKUS members) and the EU have dealt with TikTok over the years. The authors compare these four actors ‘through the conceptual lenses of technological sovereignty and foreign interference.’
While it may appear so at the outset, the paper is not soft on TikTok. It discusses TikTok’s corporate structure and rightly identifies the central problem facing any Chinese tech company that goes global — comply with intrusive Chinese laws while at the same time satisfy privacy regulations in different jurisdictions, including democracies. The authors also note that the lack of transparency displayed by TikTok has not helped its case.
Notwithstanding how threatening TikTok is for Western democracies, the primary finding of the authors is that an excessive focus on TikTok carries the ‘risk of overshadowing other foreign interference risks, including the risks posed by Western social media companies.’ Further, they note: ‘We also emphasise that framing foreign interference threats as solely originating in China creates a policy blind spot, including that of mis-/disinformation and election interference … ’
They find that the ‘whack-a-mole’ approach primarily adopted by the AUKUS countries is problematic. This ‘will not suffice as a long-term solution that protects citizens and their personal data as such approaches are founded in wider geopolitical attempts to assert and maintain international power and dominance over the internet.’ In contact, according to the authors, the EU approach of a rights-based protective framework is a better way.
Their findings are relevant for India. Even as India singularly focuses on the threat from Chinese apps such as TikTok, should it ignore the potential cognitive concerns stemming from Western social media platforms? Or, for that matter, any platform, irrespective of origin?