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So far, Project Texas has been seen primarily as an exercise in geography, which seems to be a good way to address concerns about the Chinese government accessing Americans’ personal information. But it did not discuss other ways China could use the platform, such as tweaking TikTok’s algorithm to increase exposure to divisive content, or setting up the platform to spread or encourage disinformation campaigns.
Adam Segal, director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told BuzzFeed News that the Chinese government’s influence over TikTok’s algorithm is a more pressing concern than data exfiltration. “I’ve never seen a good argument about what the Chinese can get from TikTok data that they can’t get from hundreds of other sources,” he said. But he pointed to examples of the Chinese Communist Party using technology to undermine digital discourse, including TikTok’s speech censorship before it threatened China’s “national honor,” and a 2020 attempt by China-based Zoom employees to disrupt a video meeting to commemorate Tiananmen. Massacre in the square.
TikTok strongly denies allegations that it censors critical speech about China today. And members of TikTok’s Trust & Safety team, which creates and enforces content policies for the company, describe it as well insulated from ByteDance’s influence. Employees described Trust & Safety workers as having less frequent contact with Beijing, and clearer reporting lines, than other employees BuzzFeed News spoke to — and described TikTok’s Trust & Safety practices as similar to those adopted by the US-based tech giant. However, the question of the reporting structure looms large: Like other senior officials of TikTok, the head of Trust & Safety reports to the CEO of TikTok, who reports to ByteDance as the owner of the company TikTok. And as long as the buck stops with ByteDance, “there’s a ceiling” to how far TikTok can get away from the Chinese government, Lewis said.
A US lawmaker explained that concerns about TikTok go beyond the data it stores. In 2019 tweet, Sen. Chuck Schumer said that under Chinese law, TikTok and ByteDance “could be forced to cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” At the October 2021 Senate hearing, TikTok’s Head of Public Policy for the Americas Michael Beckerman testified that TikTok’s privacy policy allows for the sharing of collected information (including US user data) with ByteDance. He refused to answer questions from Sen. Ted Cruz on whether the policy allows TikTok to share its data with Beijing ByteDance Technology, another ByteDance subsidiary that is partially owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
In the same hearing, Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Beckerman whether ByteDance employees had access to TikTok’s algorithm. Beckerman, not directly answering the question, said that US user data is stored in the US. Blackburn also asked whether there are programmers, product developers, and data teams in China working on TikTok. Beckerman confirmed that there was.
Lawmakers outside the US have also raised concerns about TikTok’s ties to China. In June 2020, the Indian government banned TikTok, WeChat, and more than 50 other Chinese apps after clashes along the India-China border killed 20 Indian soldiers. India’s regulatory body, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, said the app “steals and surreptitiously transmits” data of Indian users to data centers outside India. In August 2020, intelligence agencies in Australia began investigating whether TikTok posed a security threat to the country. In September 2021, the Irish Data Protection Commission opened an investigation into how TikTok sent user data to countries outside the EU.
The similarities between different countries’ regulatory concerns regarding TikTok and China underscore the potential importance of Project Texas. If successful in the US, the project could become a roadmap for TikTok in other jurisdictions (perhaps in India, where it has been banned). It could serve as a model for other large companies, such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google, which face similar concerns from overseas regulators about collecting their citizens’ personal information.
Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the Stanford–New America DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, sees TikTok as a “guinea pig” for lawmakers’ innate skepticism about foreign companies collecting citizens’ data. Still, Webster says he’s optimistic, because ByteDance has a heavy incentive to make regulators comfortable with TikTok.
“This is a company that is looking for ways to make it work,” he said. “They will continue to try until there is clear defeat, because there is so much money on the table.” ●
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