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TikTok has been an increasingly popular social media platform, especially among younger people. But behind the viral videos and influencer culture are aggressive efforts at data mining, accusations of censorship and national security fears.
Most people didn’t give much thought to the influence TikTok could have until teen users of the platform duped Donald Trump’s campaign into thinking tens or even hundreds of thousands of people would attend his 2020 rally in Tulsa. The crowd was much smaller than anticipated, drawing the ire of the former president. But behind the scenes, national security experts already had other concerns about the platform.
Before the summer of 2020, all most of us knew about TikTok were all those addicting lip-synched dance videos.
By then, we’d gone through several waves of social media innovators — first MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat before TikTok became the app favored by the younger generations.
But when then-President Donald Trump came to Tulsa, we got a whole new view of how influential this platform could be.
Back then, the country was struggling through the first surges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus threatened to undermine Trump’s reelection hopes, so the thinking was that a triumphal restart of his highly attended campaign rallies — which had been on hold for months — would give Trump and his supporters a boost of needed energy.
We all know what happened next. Teenage TikTok users found a flaw in the ticketing system used by the Trump campaign for its rallies and created a mirage of demand. Campaign officials were expecting tens or even hundreds of thousands of supporters to converge on downtown Tulsa. Instead, Trump flew to town to see a BOK Center arena that was a little more than half full.
TikTok was in his gunsights, and he publicly threatened to ban it in the U.S. Most took this as a backlash against all those clever kids who posed as supporters gobbling up tickets to the rally, only to become a horde of no-shows.
But TikTok drew concern from national security experts well before Trump’s Tulsa rally fizzled.
The Chinese-owned company, like other social media providers, was a relentless collector of user data.
The U.S. military, the Transportation Security Administration and others banned employees from downloading the app on government-issued devices dating as far back as 2019. Earlier this year, the chief administrative officer of the U.S. House of Representatives warned members of Congress against installing the app because of the data it collects.
And the real fear is not just the data that’s collected, but who has access to it. While TikTok maintains that it keeps its data secure from the Chinese government, there are concerns that such a firewall is not nearly as secure as TikTok claims.
Furthermore, at a time when social media platforms are weathering criticism about censorship, TikTok in particular has been viewed as heavy-handed in its moderation policies, especially regarding any content that could be seen as critical of the Chinese government.
TikTok is owned by a Beijing company called ByteDance. It created a video-based platform called Douyin, which still serves as the Chinese version of TikTok. The app we’ve come to know was born when ByteDance bought an American company called Music.ly for $1 billion, then combined that with Douyin in 2017.
Since then, TikTok has been downloaded by about a billion users worldwide and boasts 135 million users in the U.S. alone.
TikTok, like other social media apps, makes money by selling ads. But to do that effectively, it aggressively mines its users for data. It notices what videos you watch, which ones you like, and then targets you with similar content — and ads — designed to appeal to specific user profiles.
But it doesn’t stop there. TikTok can access your contacts, device location, calendar, other running applications, WiFi networks, phone numbers and even the serial number on your cellphone’s SIM card.
All of this data, tracked over years, is stored in ByteDance’s servers.
These facts — not just the undermined Trump rally — were the main drivers behind a push to ban the app in the U.S.
That didn’t happen, but it did force ByteDance to “silo” its TikTok data from the rest of the company. It insists that there are high barriers that keep the Chinese government away from U.S. user data.
“Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok US user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team,” said TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, as quoted in Wired magazine.
Chew also said the company has not “provided U.S. user data to the (Chinese Communist Party), nor would we if asked.”
That doesn’t sound ironclad, and if Beijing were to gain access to U.S. TikTok user data there isn’t an equivalent U.S. beach head; Chinese social media platforms are closely controlled by the government, and U.S.-based social media platforms aren’t allowed to operate there, meaning there’s no sly way of accessing Chinese social media user data beyond breaching Beijing’s substantial internet firewall.
Even if we were able to take Chew’s word for it, there have been other signs that the Chinese government has its hand on the TikTok wheel.
Accusations of censorship have been numerous. In 2019, a leaked document showed that TikTok content moderators were told to take down videos that mentioned Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or the banned religious group Falun Gong.
It also restricted content that highlighted controversial subjects (ethnic, sectarian or religious conflicts) and anything about a list of 20 foreign leaders and well-known figures. That list included people like the Kim family rulers of North Korea, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, among others.
The company says it has since changed those policies: “As TikTok began to take off globally last year, we recognized that this was not the correct approach, and began working to empower local teams that have a nuanced understanding of each market,” the company said in a statement to The Guardian. “As we’ve grown we’ve implemented this localized approach across everything from product, to team, to policy development.
“The old guidelines in question are outdated and no longer in use.”
Still, more accusations have arisen. The Independent Lens documentary “TikTok, Boom” profiles the plight of Feroza Aziz, some of whose posted videos were taken down and her account suspended.
Aziz is the American daughter of Afghan immigrants and has spent much of her online time posting fashion videos. But in other posts, she highlighted the persecution suffered by the Uyghur people of western China, about a million of whom have been detained and sent to detention camps in what many say is an act of ethnocide by the Chinese government.
Aziz went public, accusing TikTok of silencing her on behalf of the Chinese government. The company apologized but blamed her ban on a satirical post she made on another subject that they said ran afoul of company user guidelines.
Aziz wasn’t having any of it.
“Do I believe they took it away because of an unrelated satirical video that was deleted on a previous deleted account of mine? Right after I finished posting a three-part video about the Uyghurs? No,” she posted on Twitter in 2019.
Censorship accusations, data collection and the outsized role that social media are taking in people’s lives aren’t new. Facebook has been blamed for fueling ethnic cleansing in numerous developing world countries, while Twitter was a favorite platform for Russian cyberwarriors bent on sowing discord in the United States and other Western democracies.
Both were seen as instrumental in the rise of Q-Anon and the resulting violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the challenge of TikTok is different. It’s wildly popular, particularly among the young. It’s mostly innocuous fun. But it’s hard to shake the idea that TikTok, despite reassurances from its corporate leadership, might have a Trojan horse quality to it that has national security implications.
bob.doucette@tulsaworld.com
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TikTok has been an increasingly popular social media platform, especially among younger people. But behind the viral videos and influencer culture are aggressive efforts at data mining, accusations of censorship and national security fears.
Most people didn’t give much thought to the influence TikTok could have until teen users of the platform duped Donald Trump’s campaign into thinking tens or even hundreds of thousands of people would attend his 2020 rally in Tulsa. The crowd was much smaller than anticipated, drawing the ire of the former president. But behind the scenes, national security experts already had other concerns about the platform.
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