In a capital city where Republicans and Democrats agree on almost nothing, it was remarkable when the House overwhelmingly declared on Wednesday that TikTok poses such a serious national security risk that it should be forced to sell its US operations to a non-Chinese owner.
But this reveals TikTok’s deeper security problem, which the legislation doesn’t fully address. In the four years that this battle has continued, it has become clear that the security threat posed by TikTok has far less to do with who owns it than with who writes the code and algorithms that make TikTok tick.
These algorithms, which guide how TikTok tracks its users and feeds them more of what they want, are the magic sauce of an app that 170 million Americans now have on their phones. That’s half the country.
But TikTok does not own these algorithms. they are developed by engineers working for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which assembles the code in great secrecy in its software labs. However, China has issued regulations that appear to be designed to require government review before any of ByteDance’s algorithms can be licensed to third parties. Few expect these licenses to be issued — meaning selling TikTok to an American owner without the underlying code could be like selling a Ferrari without its famous engine.
The bill would require a new, Western-owned TikTok to sever any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation in connection with the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” So the new American-based company would have to develop its own American-made algorithm. Maybe this would work, or maybe it would fail. But a version of TikTok without its classic algorithm can quickly become useless to users and useless to investors.
And right now, China has no incentive to back down.
The House vote “was a nice symbolic gesture,” James A. Lewis, who heads the cyber research program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Wednesday. “But the Chinese have a vote too.”
It’s all part of a wider confrontation between the world’s two most powerful technological superpowers. Sparring plays out daily, including President Biden’s refusal to sell China its most advanced computer chips and China’s objections to the forced sale of one of the most successful consumer apps in history. A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said Wednesday that Washington “resorts to hegemonic moves when one could not succeed in fair competition.”
It’s a remarkable problem, one that wasn’t envisioned when TikTok first launched its app in 2016. At the time, Washington was focused on other problems than Beijing. He accused China’s intelligence agencies of purging the Office of Personnel Management, stealing the security clearance records of more than 22 million US government officials and contractors. It still came from cyber-assisted US chip theft, jet engine technology and the F-35 fighter jet.
No one considered the possibility that Chinese engineers could design code that seemed to understand the mindset of American consumers better than the Americans themselves. By the millions, Americans began putting Chinese-designed software whose innards no one really understood onto their iPhones and Androids, first for dance videos, then for memes, and now for news.
It was the first piece of Chinese-designed consumer software to go extremely viral in the United States. No American company seemed capable of replacing it. And so it didn’t take long for its ubiquity to raise concerns about whether the Chinese government could use the data collected by TikTok to track the habits and tastes of American citizens. Panicked, state governments across the United States began banning the app from government phones. So does the military.
But officials know they can’t take it away from ordinary users — which is why threatening to ban TikTok, especially in an election year, is faintly ridiculous. With remarkable candour, Gina Raimondo, the Commerce Secretary, told Bloomberg last year that if a Democrat thinks they can ban the app altogether, “the politician in me thinks you’re going to lose literally every voter under 35, forever. “
The House bill passed Wednesday keeps open the threat of such a ban. But that’s probably not its real purpose. Rather, it seeks to give the United States leverage to force a sale. And for two years, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a secretive body that reviews corporate deals that could endanger national security, has been quietly trying to work out a deal that would prevent a real showdown. So far it has failed — one reason the bill passed.
During those negotiations, TikTok proposed that its US operations continue — while still fully owned by ByteDance — and that its algorithm be inspected and analyzed in the United States. It’s part of a larger plan that TikTok calls Project Texas.
Under Project Texas, all US-originating user data from TikTok will be stored on domestic servers operated by cloud computing company Oracle. To build confidence in the independence of its algorithm, TikTok also suggested that Oracle and a third party review its source code to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with.
TikTok says much of this plan is already in place. But government officials insist it’s hard to know how such inspections would actually work — even for the most seasoned experts, reviewing small changes to the code, at high speed, is a complicated proposition. Biden administration officials say it’s not like inspecting agricultural goods or counting guns under an arms treaty. Very subtle changes could alter the news delivered, whether it’s a presidential election or Chinese action against Taiwan.
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TikTok sought to incorporate this arrangement into a formal agreement to resolve the government’s national security concerns. But that idea met resistance from senior officials in the Biden administration, starting with Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, who felt it wasn’t tough enough to address their concerns.
Instead, the Biden administration and lawmakers pressured ByteDance to sell TikTok. Sen. Mark Warner, the tech-savvy Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and supports the new bill, said any sale of the app is needed to ensure the “algorithm doesn’t continue to reside in Beijing or be replaced by an algorithm that is completely independent of the algorithm that exists in Beijing.” It also needed to protect the security of TikTok’s data, he said.
But on the House floor, it was hard to tell what lawmakers were more worried about: privacy, the potential for misinformation or just the idea that Chinese-developed code was inside Americans’ (largely Chinese-made) iPhones. All these concerns were often confused with each other.
“Foreign adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party are the greatest national threat of our time,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rogers, the Washington Republican who leads the Energy and Commerce Committee, during Wednesday’s House debate on the bill. He called TikTok a “valuable propaganda tool for the CCP to exploit.”
TikTok may not allay that concern about how it lobbied to defeat the House bill. Ms McMorris Rodgers noted that TikTok had used a notification in its app to prompt users to contact Congress and ask for a “no”. Congressional offices were inundated with calls, some of which staff members believed were from teenagers. For TikTok executives, this was democracy in action. To some in Congress, he proved their point.
“This is a small taste of how the CCP is weaponizing the apps it controls to manipulate tens of millions of people to advance its agenda,” he said.
David McCabe contributed reporting from New York.
