TikTok represents the latest chapter in the U.S.'s history of cyber paranoia
HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Update: President Joe Biden signed the TikTok divestment bill on Wednesday, April, 24 after it was passed by the House of Representatives. This is the same bill that was introduced by the U.S. House of Energy and Commerce in March.
Maddie Schrader, a senior at Marist College, is a woman of many talents. She grew up the youngest of four siblings in central New Jersey and was a multi-sport athlete growing up, playing basketball, soccer and lacrosse, but chose to stay on with the latter because it’s the one she believed she was where she was best. She continued to play lacrosse for her team at Hopewell Valley High School and soon enough she was thinking about continuing her athletic career into college. She claims that she always knew she was going to be playing in college because her older sisters did and Schrader had a feeling she’d continue the trend. She eventually found her way to Marist’s women's lacrosse clinic and has been playing for the women’s team ever since.
Around the time she was transitioning into college though, she found another platform to shine on that eventually became her passion and hopes for a future career in media, TikTok.
Schrader had first heard about the short reels video app in 2019, three years after its launch, but didn’t think much of it at first and saw it more as just a dancing app and that being an “influencer” wasn’t really a thing yet. Despite this, she made an account, under the name m00bie, her senior year of high school and started posting briefly during her freshman year of college. She started doing short video clips her sophomore year as well, but it wasn’t until her junior year that things really started clicking.
By her third year at Marist, she was able to grow her account to around 6,000 followers and she made her first video that went viral in January 2022. The video was humorously titled “Forgot to post this dammit.” The short montage video of her going about her day as a student-athlete ended up amassing 324,500 views and this was when she started to get serious about her account. She started posting more actively and set a goal to get to 10,000 followers by the end of the summer that year. Not only did she accomplish this but her viewer counts started climbing from the thousands to the ten thousands, then the ten thousands to the hundred thousands, and sometimes even millions. Her follower count was rising as well as 10,000 followers quickly rose to around 50,000 and at this point, she was all in on sharing herself to the world.
“As soon as I picked up the camera, I just ate it up,” Schrader said. “There weren’t really that many student-athletes that were like a nut job.”
She also started to create a unique identity for her fans on the app. She started calling her followers and anyone who took the time to watch her videos, drum roll please, Jim. Everyone who follows her and appreciates her content are her “Jims” and she thinks this has been a great tool to set herself apart, as well.
“It was a great way to personify my audience,” Schrader said. “It kind of set me apart in a weird way. Oh, she’s the Jim girl, oh she’s m00bie.”
There was no doubt about it, she was making a name for herself on the platform, a name that did not go unnoticed by some top-tier companies. Jack McGuire aka Jack Mac, who works for Barstool Sports Social Media team, was impressed with Schrader’s content and they formed a business connection last summer. Schrader eventually ended up doing two interviews, including with the head of Barstool’s social team and landed herself a job as a media talent and content creator for the company.
Today, Schrader posts daily videos for herself and the company. Since joining Barstool she has gained a whole new audience and her following has skyrocketed from around 50,000 followers to almost 220,000. After she graduates in May, Schrader plans to move in with her older sister in New York to be closer to Barstool’s headquarters and continue her career on the platform.
There’s only one problem. The existence of Tiktok, which has been the subject of political consternation, is up in the air.
A long history of paranoia
As recently as Thursday, March 7, the U.S. House of Energy and Commerce introduced a bill called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. This act is the latest attempt at a “TikTok ban” and specifically targets the app’s parent company ByteDance. It also singles out any online application the U.S. deems as a foreign adversary.
On the week of March 13, the House of Representatives approved the bill and sent it to the Senate.
If approved in the Senate and signed into law, Bytedance would have 180 days, or six months, to sell the app and rid it of its connection to the Chinese economy or risk getting banned on U.S. app stores, prohibiting Americans from either downloading or updating the app in any way.
The concept of this is something that Schrader admits “kinda freaks her out” both for her future and because the task of switching to other media platforms to continue her career would certainly come with challenges.
“Obviously it’s my job; it (the potential of a TikTok ban) makes me think of other platforms that I could be excelling on that I’m not,” Schrader said.
Schrader also hasn’t had much time to focus on developing on other platforms such as YouTube being busy as a lacrosse player, and talks about how certain tasks like finding an editor “has been tricky in season.”
The good news for those like Schrader is that if the history of paranoia surrounding TikTok has proven anything, attempting to ban the app on a national scale has proven challenging dating all the way back to the Trump administration.
Progress on this latest bill has already reportedly slowed in the Senate with those like Chuck Schumer debating whether or not to bring it to the Senate Floor, and that rewrites of the bill could be coming.
Outside of this though, several attempts to restrict or ban the app have been made over the years since the pandemic at both the government level and the private sector with varying degrees of success.
Some of the earliest instances of bans on the app came when the U.S. Navy and Army banned the app on their government-issued devices over fears of it being a national security threat in late 2019. Both institutions previously used the app as a tool for promotional videos to attract future enlistees.
The first real attempt at the national level came when former President Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2020 suggesting a ban of the app.
At the time, Trump talked about concerns that the app can track user data, such as location data and browser/search histories. Trump was concerned that the People’s Republic of China could potentially use information like this to “track the location of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
This order ultimately did not stand though, as it was shot down by multiple federal judges throughout that year.
The executive order was revoked on June 9, 2021 when President Joe Biden signed another executive order surrounding the app with some significant alterations from Trump’s order. This time, the Biden Administration made no reference to TikTok directly, outside of revoking Trump’s previous order, but referred instead to technologies from foreign adversaries that threaten the “national security.” The order instructed several government offices like the Departments of Commerce and Defense to monitor technologies from foreign adversaries and report to the President’s office about potential risk factors, rather than suggesting a ban.
The framework became the foundation of other acts over the years since, proposed in Congress to try and restrict or Ban TikTok, including a future act with a particular focus on Commerce.
In order to try and combat America’s distrust of the app, ByteDance presented Congress with a potential solution.
In June 2022, TikTok announced a new $1.5 billion plan to help ensure U.S. data security on the app in a project called “Project Texas.” The main selling point of this plan was the creation of a new data division called U.S. Data Security.
The new data division would be run by the American Software Company Oracle, which is headquartered in Austin Texas, hence the project name. The goal here was to eventually move 100% of U.S. traffic on Tiktok to Oracle’s data servers for the purpose of “minimizing employee access to U.S. user data and minimizing data transfers across regions - including China.”
Problem solved right?
Apparently not.
Again, while this minimizes who can access American user data, the plan also vaguely states that data will still be accessible to TikTok employees “who need that access in order to do their jobs.” The plan also states that TikTok engineering teams across the world, including in China, might still need access to data for “engineering functions,” and that while U.S. traffic is 100% run through Oracle, TikTok still has data backup centers outside the country in places like Singapore.
As current and past legislation shows, minimizing the potential threat of data mining from China has never been enough for America’s politicians, and the legislation for TikTok restriction did not stop because of this project.
In December 2022, the Biden Administration signed into law the No TikTok on Government Devices Act which prevents any federal government officials from using the app on government-issued phones and devices.
Many state governments followed the federal government during the early months of 2023 and during the next year.
Throughout 2023 and 2024 39 states have followed suit and banned or restricted the app on state-issued phones and devices, with Montana being the first state to attempt to flat-out ban it on app stores in the state, although District Judge Donald Molloy halted that ban
In March 2023, Senator Mark. Warner (D-Virginia) also introduced what could be seen as the predecessor to the current bill to potentially ban TikTok, the Restrict Act.
The bill proposed the Secretary of Commerce have the sole power to monitor and potentially prevent the United States from having transactions in information technology with those the U.S. once again deems a foreign adversary. This bill however, was never passed and had critics who didn’t like the language and methodology of the act.
“It basically enables the Secretary of Commerce to have this authority without really clearly defining what that authority is. So they can review these transactions, they can mitigate the technology, they can analyze the technology, but it does not say what that means,” Kearston Wesner, associate professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University, said.
Wesner expressed concerns over what that means the federal government can do with American data.
“There’s been pushback on both sides of the political aisle asking for clarification as far as what the government can do with user data. Whether they can review our transactions, take our data, what they can do with it, there’s a lot of uncertainty around that,” Wesner said.
Despite multiple attempts over the past four years to restrict or ban the app in the country, the only success the government has had is banning it for itself.
Distrust of the app or distrust of China?
Why would the government want to ban the app beyond just the government sector?
That is a question that confuses regular people who use the app like Schrader, who think the information they give wouldn’t necessarily be important to the People’s Republic of China
“What do I have on the app? All I watch is like girls getting ready to go out,” Schrader said. “I don’t really see it as that much of a threat.”
To complicate things even further for the federal government, there hasn’t been much evidence to confirm that the People’s Republic of China has collected anyone’s data or done anything malicious using the app.
Why the cause for alarm?
Perhaps the state Government right here in Connecticut could give some clues as to why. Democratic Senator Bob Duff, who introduced a bill last year to restrict the app on state-issued phones and devices, claimed one of the main reasons this bill was deliberated on was due to concerns the Chinese Communist Party could request for ByteDance to hand over the data of users, in this case, the concern being American user’s data.
There may be some grounds for this concern. For example, when looking through the Cyber Security Law of the People’s Republic of China, articles in that document like Article 28 say that “Network Operators” should provide “assistance” to public and national security “organs” in matters of national security and criminal investigation. Article 29 goes on to say that the state supports network operator cooperation like “gathering, analysis, reporting, and emergency handling of cybersecurity information.”
While the document never specifically gives a definition for what a “network operator” is, it does seem to extend to a wide range of services in previous articles like network access, mobile phone network access, and publication or instant messaging services.
Based on these qualities, TikTok’s parent company could fall under the network operator label, with the ability to publish content on the app and communicate with friends and followers through functions like comment sections and direct messaging. So it could be possible that ByteDance is viewed as a network operator and could be asked to disclose information about users if that information is deemed as a threat criminally or nationally.
Additionally, Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China, makes it necessary for all organizations and citizens to “support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts,” and to keep national intelligence efforts secret.
There is also concern from cybersecurity experts in the U.S. over whether to trust China when it comes to cybersecurity products due to past incidents.
Former White House security officials Richard Clarke and Robert Knake, who served under the Bush and Obama administrations, respectively, wrote in their book The Fifth Domain that “the next major war the United States enters will be provoked by a Cyber Attack,” whether that be intentional or unintentional.
Frederick Scholl, director of the cybersecurity Master’s program at Quinnipiac, also recalls some other data breach-related incidents connected to China that led to further distrust of the country.
“There’s so much evidence the Chinese have already stolen so much information, like the Equifax breach,” Frederick Scholl, director of the cybersecurity Master’s program at Quinnipiac University, said.
“Imagine if they were harvesting the personal information for everybody in the country. They already did through the (Office of Personnel Management) hack. They stole information from people who were part of the U.S. Government service.”
In both the OPM hack and the Equifax breach, Chinese hackers allegedly compromised sensitive data of millions of Americans ranging from regular civilians to government employees. Also, the Equifax breach cost the FTC $425 million in damages.
Scholl said that while the CCP using TikTok to harvest the data of millions of Americans would be considered a “high-impact event,” the chances that it actually happens are near zero because there still hasn’t been any official evidence that the CCP has used TikTok in this way.
Thus, America’s repeated efforts to restrict or ban the app has been on the back of a bunch of ifs and maybes.
Connecticut senator Bob Duff. Provided by the Connecticut General Assembly
Connecticut senator Bob Duff. Provided by the Connecticut General Assembly
Connecticut Legislative Office Building
Connecticut Legislative Office Building
Do Americans even care?
Perhaps if the American people felt as much concern for the app as the government seems to feel then getting legislation passed for a nationwide restriction or ban wouldn’t be as difficult, but do Americans actually care about the concerns?
To find the answer, Quinnipiac surveyed hundreds of influencers across the country to get their ideas on the concerns surrounding the app. The government is clearly concerned, but what about those who use the app the most to create content? What are their thoughts on the alleged danger surrounding it and what are their thoughts on a potential ban?
The responses of those surveyed about the concerns can be summed up in one word, apathy. While respondents had different reasonings as to why they didn’t really care about the concerns surrounding the app, the feeling of apathy remained the same, and most were against banning the app.
Faren Kaposvari, an influencer from Dallas with over 425,000 likes on his TikTok of the same name, said he doesn’t necessarily care about China having access to his data but he is concerned about hackers potentially getting his information in the future. However, other outlets on TikTok take his mind off of this risk.
“It has come across my mind when I first started but I’m so focused on the monetization side of TikTok that I don’t think of the negatives,” Kaposvari said.
Robyn L. Garrett, CEO of her company Beamably and Author of the book Happy at Work, also takes her talents to TikTok under the name coureageousleadership where she has amassed over 120,000 followers. She cited the fact that other social media apps, including American apps, track user data.
“All social media companies collect user information to track and sell to you,” Garrett said. “This platform has huge ups and downs, but for me, it’s worth it.”
Then there’s those like Kayla Christine. She’s an influencer from West Virginia with almost a million followers and she’s been using the app for financial support. If the app were to go away it would mean pretty severe consequences for her and her kids.
“I was a single mom for three years supporting myself and her (her daughter) on this app. Making more money than I would’ve if I used my graduate degree,” Christine said. “Now I have a newborn as well and if this app goes away I have to put my son in daycare and make even less money because of that and my daughter in daycare during the summers.”
Outside of just influencers, larger swaths of Americans have also come out in support of the app since the latest potential ban was presented in Congress on March 7. #KeepTikTok was trending on the app over the following weeks since the House of Energy and Commerce’s bill was presented and currently stands at around 160,000 posts.
Also, Tiktok CEO Shou Chew said back in January that the app had grown to around 170 million users in the U.S. An additional 20 million followers from last year’s reported mark by Chew at 150 million.
What comes next for the app seems uncertain at the moment for those millions of users. Will Tiktok face a ban in the coming months? Will we ever even be able to prove that the CCP has used the app with malicious intent?
“Eventually an answer may come, it just may take a long time,” Duff said.
“I was a single mom for three years supporting myself and her (her daughter) on this app. Making more money than I would’ve if I used my graduate degree,” Christine said. “Now I have a newborn as well and if this app goes away I have to put my son in daycare and make even less money because of that and my daughter in daycare during the summers.”
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