Time for TikTok to cut its ties to China
To stay on Western screens, the video app needs new owners
Mar 12th 2024
TIKTOK’S ADDICTIVE videos keep its users up late into the evening. But the app’s links to China are causing politicians to lose sleep, too. On March 13th America’s House of Representatives will vote on a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in America, TikTok’s largest market. Other countries, from Britain and France to Australia, have begun to introduce some restrictions of their own. The world’s most downloaded app, by one measure, may soon start disappearing from screens. To stay on them, TikTok must cut its ties to China.
Some fears about TikTok are overblown. True, the firm hoovers up plenty of data about its users. But there is no evidence that it takes more than it claims (or indeed any more than rivals such as Facebook). If Chinese spies want to find out about Americans, the country’s lax data-protection laws allow them to buy such information from third parties. Banning Chinese apps that gather personal data would mean banning many more of them, cutting off Western consumers from some of the world’s most dynamic digital services.