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      Is the US really preparing to ban TikTok?

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      The House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a total ban in the United States.The legislation now moves to the Senate, where its likelihood of passing is uncertain. But with a landslide of support in the House – 352 Congress members voted in favor of the bill and only 65 voted against – it’s clear that TikTok is facing its biggest existential threat yet in the US.Here’s what you need to know about the bill, how likely TikTok is to be banned, and what that means for the platform’s 170 million US users.Is the US really trying to ban TikTok, and why?The bill that passed in the House on Wednesday is the latest salvo in an ongoing political battle over the platform, which exploded in popularity after its emergence in 2017. It quickly surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in downloads in 2018 and reported a 45% increase in monthly active users between July 2020 and July 2022.The platform’s meteoric rise alarmed some lawmakers, who believe that TikTok’s China-based parent company could collect sensitive user data and censor content that goes against the Chinese government.TikTok has repeatedly stated it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government, but lawmakers’ concerns were exacerbated by news investigations that showed China-based employees at ByteDance had accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users.TikTok has argued that US user data is not held in China but in Singapore and in the US, where it is routed through cloud infrastructure operated by Oracle, an American company. In 2023, TikTok opened a data center in Ireland where it handles EU citizen data.These measures have not been sufficient for many US lawmakers, and in March 2023 the TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was called before Congress, where he faced more than five hours of intensive questioning about these and other practices. Lawmakers asked Chew about his own nationality, accusing him of fealty to China. He is, in fact, Singaporean.Various efforts to police TikTok and how it engages with US user data have been floated in Congress in the past year, culminating in the bill passed on Wednesday.Is this bill really a TikTok ban?Under the new bill, ByteDance would have 165 days to divest from TikTok, meaning it would have to sell the social media platform to a company not based in China. If it did not, app stores including the Apple App Store and Google Play would be legally barred from hosting TikTok or providing web-hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.Authors of the bill have argued it does not constitute a ban, as it gives ByteDance the opportunity to sell TikTok and avoid being blocked in the US.“TikTok could live on and people could do whatever they want on it provided there is that separation,” said Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair of the House select China committee. “It is not a ban – think of this as a surgery designed to remove the tumor and thereby save the patient in the process.”TikTok has argued otherwise, stating that it is not clear whether China would approve a sale or that it could even complete a sale within six months.“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” the company said after the committee vote. “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression. This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”How did we get here?TikTok has faced a number of bans and attempted bans in recent years, starting with an executive order by Donald Trump in 2020, which was ultimately blocked by courts on first amendment grounds. Trump has since reversed his stance, now opposing a ban on TikTok. Joe Biden, by contrast, has said he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk.Montana attempted to impose a statewide ban on the app in 2023, but the law was struck down by a federal judge over first amendment violations. The app was banned on government-issued phones in the US in 2022, and as of 2023 at least 34 states have also banned TikTok from government devices. At least 50 universities in the US have banned TikTok from on-campus wifi and university-owned computers.The treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in March 2023 demanded ByteDance sell its TikTok shares or face the possibility of the app being banned, Reuters reported, but no action has been taken.TikTok was banned in India in 2020 after a wave of dangerous “challenges” led to the deaths of some users. The ban had a marked effect on competition in India, handing a significant market to YouTube’s Shorts and Instagram Reels, direct competitors of TikTok. The app is not available in China itself, where Douyin, a separate app from parent company ByteDance with firmer moderation, is widely used.How would a ban on TikTok be enforced?Due to the decentralized nature of the internet, enforcing a ban would be complex. The bill passed by the House would penalize app stores daily for making TikTok available for download, but for users who already have the app on their phones, it would be difficult to stop individual use.Internet service providers could also be forced to block IP addresses associated with TikTok, but such practices can be easily evaded on computer browsers by using a VPN, or virtual private network, which re-routes computer connections to other locations.To fully limit access to TikTok, the US government would have to employ methods used by countries like Iran and China, which structure their internet in a way that makes content restrictions more easily enforceable.Who supports the potential TikTok ban?While Trump – who started the war on TikTok in 2020 – has reversed his stance on the potential ban, most Republican lawmakers have expressed support of it. The Biden administration has also backed the bill, with the press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying the administration wants “to see this bill get done so it can get to the president’s desk”. Biden’s campaign joined TikTok last month.Despite Trump’s opposition to the bill, many Republicans are pushing forward with the effort to ban TikTok or force its sale to an American company.“Well, he’s wrong. And by the way, he had his own executive orders and his own actions he was doing, and now … he’s suddenly flipped around on that,” said the representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and member of the far-right Freedom Caucus. “I mean, it’s not the first or last time that I’ll disagree with the former president. The TikTok issue is pretty straightforward.”Who opposes the TikTok bill?TikTok has vocally opposed the legislation, urging the Senate not to pass it. “We are hopeful that the Senate will consider the facts, listen to their constituents, and realize the impact on the economy, 7m small businesses, and the 170 million Americans who use our service,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said following Wednesday’s vote.Within the House, 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against the bill, including the Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who cited her experiences of being banned from social media. House Democrats including Maxwell Frost of Florida and Delia Ramirez of Illinois joined TikTok creators outside the Capitol following the vote to express opposition to the bill. More

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      in US Politics

      House votes to force TikTok owner ByteDance to divest or face US ban

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      The House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that would require the TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a total ban in the United States.The vote was a landslide, with 352 Congress members voting in favor and only 65 against. The bill, which was fast-tracked to a vote after being unanimously approved by a committee last week, gives China-based ByteDance 165 days to divest from TikTok. If it did not, app stores including the Apple App store and Google Play would be legally barred from hosting TikTok or providing web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.The vote in the House represents the most concrete threat to TikTok in an ongoing political battle over allegations the China-based company could collect sensitive user data and politically censor content. TikTok has repeatedly stated it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government.Despite those arguments, TikTok faced an attempted ban by Donald Trump in 2020 and a state-level ban passed in Montana in 2023. Courts blocked both of those bans on grounds of first amendment violations, and Trump has since reversed his stance, now opposing a ban on TikTok.The treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in March 2023 demanded ByteDance sell their TikTok shares or face the possibility of the app being banned, Reuters reported, but no action has been taken.The bill’s future is less certain in the Senate. Some Senate Democrats have publicly opposed the bill, citing freedom of speech concerns, and suggested measures that would address concerns of foreign influence across social media without targeting TikTok specifically. “We need curbs on social media, but we need those curbs to apply across the board,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said.The Democratic senator Mark Warner, who proposed a separate bill last year to give the White House new powers over TikTok, said he had “some concerns about the constitutionality of an approach that names specific companies”, but will take “a close look at this bill”.The White House has backed the legislation, with the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, saying the administration wants “to see this bill get done so it can get to the president’s desk”.Authors of the bill have argued it does not constitute a ban, as it gives ByteDance the opportunity to sell TikTok and avoid being blocked in the US. Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House select China committee, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the panel’s top Democrat, introduced legislation to address national security concerns posed by Chinese ownership of the app.“TikTok could live on and people could do whatever they want on it provided there is that separation,” Gallagher said, urging US ByteDance investors to support a sale. “It is not a ban – think of this as a surgery designed to remove the tumor and thereby save the patient in the process.”TikTok, which has 170 million users in the US, has argued otherwise, stating that it is not clear if China would approve any sale, or that it could be divested in six months.“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” the company said after the committee vote. “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression. This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFollowing the committee’s passage of the bill, staffers complained that TikTok supporters had flooded Congress with phone calls, after the app pushed out a notification urging users to oppose the legislation.“Why are Members of Congress complaining about hearing from their constituents? Respectfully, isn’t that their job?” TikTok said on X.Although the bill was written with TikTok in mind, it is possible other China-owned platforms could be affected, including US operations of Tencent’s WeChat, which Trump also sought to ban in 2020. Gallagher said he would not speculate on what other impacts the bill could have, but said “going forward we can debate what companies fall” under the bill.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Tech firms sign ‘reasonable precautions’ to stop AI-generated election chaos

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      Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world.Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies – including Elon Musk’s X – are also signing on to the accord.“Everybody recognizes that no one tech company, no one government, no one civil society organization is able to deal with the advent of this technology and its possible nefarious use on their own,” said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in an interview ahead of the summit.The accord is largely symbolic, but targets increasingly realistic AI-generated images, audio and video “that deceptively fake or alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates, election officials, and other key stakeholders in a democratic election, or that provide false information to voters about when, where, and how they can lawfully vote”.The companies aren’t committing to ban or remove deepfakes. Instead, the accord outlines methods they will use to try to detect and label deceptive AI content when it is created or distributed on their platforms. It notes the companies will share best practices with each other and provide “swift and proportionate responses” when that content starts to spread.The vagueness of the commitments and lack of any binding requirements likely helped win over a diverse swath of companies, but disappointed advocates were looking for stronger assurances.“The language isn’t quite as strong as one might have expected,” said Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “I think we should give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge that the companies do have a vested interest in their tools not being used to undermine free and fair elections. That said, it is voluntary, and we’ll be keeping an eye on whether they follow through.”Clegg said each company “quite rightly has its own set of content policies”.“This is not attempting to try to impose a straitjacket on everybody,” he said. “And in any event, no one in the industry thinks that you can deal with a whole new technological paradigm by sweeping things under the rug and trying to play Whac-a-Mole and finding everything that you think may mislead someone.”Several political leaders from Europe and the US also joined Friday’s announcement. Vera Jourová, the European Commission vice-president, said while such an agreement can’t be comprehensive, “it contains very impactful and positive elements”. She also urged fellow politicians to take responsibility to not use AI tools deceptively and warned that AI-fueled disinformation could bring about “the end of democracy, not only in the EU member states”.The agreement at the German city’s annual security meeting comes as more than 50 countries are due to hold national elections in 2024. Bangladesh, Taiwan, Pakistan and most recently Indonesia have already done so.Attempts at AI-generated election interference have already begun, such as when AI robocalls that mimicked the US president Joe Biden’s voice tried to discourage people from voting in New Hampshire’s primary election last month.Just days before Slovakia’s elections in November, AI-generated audio recordings impersonated a candidate discussing plans to raise beer prices and rig the election. Fact-checkers scrambled to identify them as false as they spread across social media.Politicians also have experimented with the technology, from using AI chatbots to communicate with voters to adding AI-generated images to ads.The accord calls on platforms to “pay attention to context and in particular to safeguarding educational, documentary, artistic, satirical, and political expression”.It said the companies will focus on transparency to users about their policies and work to educate the public about how they can avoid falling for AI fakes.Most companies have previously said they’re putting safeguards on their own generative AI tools that can manipulate images and sound, while also working to identify and label AI-generated content so that social media users know if what they’re seeing is real. But most of those proposed solutions haven’t yet rolled out and the companies have faced pressure to do more.That pressure is heightened in the US, where Congress has yet to pass laws regulating AI in politics, leaving companies to largely govern themselves.The Federal Communications Commission recently confirmed AI-generated audio clips in robocalls are against the law, but that doesn’t cover audio deepfakes when they circulate on social media or in campaign advertisements.Many social media companies already have policies in place to deter deceptive posts about electoral processes – AI-generated or not. Meta says it removes misinformation about “the dates, locations, times, and methods for voting, voter registration, or census participation” as well as other false posts meant to interfere with someone’s civic participation.Jeff Allen, co-founder of the Integrity Institute and a former Facebook data scientist, said the accord seems like a “positive step” but he’d still like to see social media companies taking other actions to combat misinformation, such as building content recommendation systems that don’t prioritize engagement above all else.Lisa Gilbert, executive vice-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, argued Friday that the accord is “not enough” and AI companies should “hold back technology” such as hyper-realistic text-to-video generators “until there are substantial and adequate safeguards in place to help us avert many potential problems”.In addition to the companies that helped broker Friday’s agreement, other signatories include chatbot developers Anthropic and Inflection AI; voice-clone startup ElevenLabs; chip designer Arm Holdings; security companies McAfee and TrendMicro; and Stability AI, known for making the image-generator Stable Diffusion.Notably absent is another popular AI image-generator, Midjourney. The San Francisco-based startup didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.The inclusion of X – not mentioned in an earlier announcement about the pending accord – was one of the surprises of Friday’s agreement. Musk sharply curtailed content-moderation teams after taking over the former Twitter and has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist”.In a statement Friday, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said “every citizen and company has a responsibility to safeguard free and fair elections”.“X is dedicated to playing its part, collaborating with peers to combat AI threats while also protecting free speech and maximizing transparency,” she said. More

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      in Elections

      ‘I’m Singaporean’: TikTok CEO grilled by US Senator repeatedly about ties with China – video

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      US senator Tom Cotton repeatedly asked TikTok’s Singaporean chief Shou Zi Chew about his ties with China and if he had ever belonged to the Chinese Communist party during a hearing over alleged online harms to children. It was the first appearance by Chew before lawmakers in the US since March, when the Chinese-owned short video app company faced harsh questions, including some suggesting the app was damaging children’s mental health and that user data could be passed on to China’s government. More

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      in US Politics

      How 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok

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      Banning TikTok in the US seemed almost inevitable at the start of 2023. The previous year saw a trickle of legislative actions against the short-form video app, after dozens of individual states barred TikTok from government devices in late 2022 over security concerns. At the top of the new year, the US House followed suit, and four universities blocked TikTok from campus wifi.The movement to prohibit TikTok grew into a flash flood by spring. CEO Shou Zi Chew was called before Congress for brutal questioning in March. By April – with support from the White House (and Joe Biden’s predecessor) – it seemed a federal ban of the app was not just possible, but imminent.But now, as quickly as the deluge arrived, it has petered out – with the US Senate commerce committee confirming in December it would not be taking up TikTok-related legislation before the end of the year. With the final word from the Senate, 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok.“A lot of the momentum that was gained after the initial flurry of attention has faded,” said David Greene, a civil liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “It seems now like the idea of a ban was being pushed more so to make political points and less as a serious effort to legislate.”Lots of legislation, little actionThe political war over TikTok centered on allegations that its China-based parent company, ByteDance, could collect sensitive user data and censor content that goes against the demands of the Chinese Communist party.TikTok, which has more than 150 million users in the United States, denies it improperly uses US data and has emphasized its billion-dollar efforts to store that information on servers outside its home country. Reports have cast doubt on the veracity of some of TikTok’s assertions about user data. The company declined to comment on a potential federal ban.With distress over the influence of social media giants mounting for years, and tensions with China high after the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the US in February 2023, attacks on TikTok became more politically viable for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Legislative efforts ensued, and intensified.The House foreign affairs committee voted in March along party lines on a bill aimed at TikTok that Democrats said would require the administration to effectively ban the app and other subsidiaries of ByteDance. The US treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in March demanded that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell off the app or face the possibility of a ban. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and more than two dozen other senators in April sponsored legislation – backed by the White House – that would give the administration new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.But none of these laws ever made it to a vote, and many have stalled entirely as lawmakers turned their attention to the boom in artificial intelligence. Warner told Reuters in December that the bill he authored has faced intensive lobbying from TikTok and had little chance of survival. “There is going to be pushback on both ends of the political spectrum,” he said.The Montana effectMontana passed a total statewide ban on TikTok in May, to start on 1 January 2024, setting the stage for a federal one. That momentum for a nationwide prohibition ebbed, however, when a US judge last week blocked the legislation from going into effect – a move that TikTok applauded.“We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok,” the company’s statement reads.In a preliminary injunction blocking the ban, US district judge Donald Molloy said the law “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users”. The closely watched decision indicated that broader bans are unlikely to be successful.“The Montana court blocking the effort to ban TikTok not only threw a wet blanket on any federal efforts to do the same, but sent a clear message to every lawmaker that banning an app is a violation of the first amendment,” said Carl Szabo, general counsel at the freedom of speech advocacy group NetChoice, of which TikTok is a member.The EFF’s Greene, who also watched the Montana case closely, echoed that the results proved what many free speech advocates have long argued: a broad ban of an app is not viable under US law.“This confirmed what most people assumed, which is that what is being suggested is blatantly not possible,” he said. “Free speech regulation requires really, really precise tailoring to avoid banning more speech than necessary. And a total ban on an app simply does not do that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolitical discussions around the ban also exposed a need for comprehensive privacy legislation, Greene said. The same politicians raising concerns about the Chinese government collecting data had done little to address companies like Meta collecting similar reams of data in the US.“The ideas that were floated were legally problematic and belied a real, sincere interest in addressing privacy harms,” he said. “I think that can cause anyone to question whether they really cared about users.”Election year fearsMeanwhile, some analysts think Congress and the White House are unlikely to even attempt to ban TikTok in 2024, an election year, given the app’s popularity with young voters.Joe Biden’s re-election campaign team has been reportedly debating whether to join TikTok, on which the president does not currently have an official page, to attempt to reach more young voters. Nearly half of people between 18 and 30 in the US use TikTok, and 32% of users in that age group say they regularly consume news there. To date, Vivek Ramaswamy is the only Republican candidate to join the app, a move which has elicited lashings from his opponents in multiple debates.“The same lawmakers calling for a ban are going to need to pivot to online platforms like TikTok for their upcoming get-out-the-vote efforts,” said Szabo. “To cut off a major avenue of reaching voters during an election year doesn’t make political sense.”Even as interest in banning TikTok wanes – politically and among voters – the efforts are not entirely dead. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, told Reuters she is still working on legislation and in talks with federal agencies, noting that the Senate held a secure briefing on concerns about foreign influence by way of social media last month.Even as the interest and political power to fuel a TikTok ban wanes, social networks are going to be under the magnifying glass in the coming year, said Szabo.“As we go into 2024, I will say that control of speech on the internet is going to be even more heated, as lawmakers try to control what people can say about their campaigns,” he said. “I would also expect to see those very same politicians using the platform to raise money and to get out the vote.”Reuters contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Montana becomes first US state to ban TikTok

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      Montana has became the first US state to ban TikTok after the governor signed legislation prohibiting mobile application stores from offering the app within the state by next year.The move is among the most dramatic in a series of US escalations against TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. TikTok has come under increasing scrutiny over its ties to China, amid concerns that such links could pose a national security threat.The federal government, and more than half of US states, have prohibited the app on government devices and the Biden administration has threatened a national ban unless its parent company sells its shares.The company has previously denied that it has ever shared data with the Chinese government and has said the company would not do so if asked.TikTok said in a statement that the Montana bill “infringes on the first amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok”, and that the company intends to “defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana”.In March, TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China at a bipartisan congressional hearing, with lawmakers also grilling the CEO on the social network’s impact on the mental health of young people.TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social networks with more than 100 million US users, and questions remain about how such bans will be enforced and what their impact will be on creators who use the platform.Montana’s new law, which will take effect 1 January, prohibits downloads of TikTok in the state and would fine any “entity” – an app store or TikTok – $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access the social media platform or download the app. The penalties would not apply to users.Montana’s ban is expected to face legal challenges, and will serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned.Gianforte also prohibited the use of all social media applications that collect and provide personal information or data to foreign adversaries on government-issued devices. Among the apps he listed are WeChat, whose parent company is headquartered in China; and Telegram Messenger, which was founded in Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOpponents consider the measure to be government overreach and say Montana residents could easily circumvent the ban by using a virtual private network, a service that shields internet users by encrypting their data traffic, preventing others from observing their web browsing. Meanwhile, internet freedom advocates and others have criticized the US crackdown as amounting to censorship.Keegan Medrano, policy director for the ACLU of Montana, said the legislature “trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment”.NetChoice, a trade group that counts Google and TikTok as its members, called the bill unconstitutional.“This is a clear violation of the constitution, which prohibits the government from blocking Americans from accessing constitutionally-protected speech online via websites or apps,” Carl Szabo, who serves as the group’s vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. More

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      in US Politics

      TikTok must divest itself of Chinese ownership or face ban, FCC commissioner tells Australian inquiry

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      TikTok will either need to divest itself from Chinese ownership or face a ban in the United States, according to the commissioner of the US federal communications commission, Brendan Carr, who accused the company of “gaslighting” the public on surveillance concerns.Appearing before the Australian Senate inquiry into foreign influence through social media, the Trump appointee said concern about TikTok in the US was “broad and deep”, and crossed party lines.Following the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries’ ban of the app from government devices, the US is considering a full ban nationally. Legislation enacting a statewide ban was recently passed in Montana.TikTok has attempted to head off any potential ban by moving US user data to third-party servers within the country. It is also allowing its source code to be scrutinised by US tech firm Oracle, which will screen TikTok app updates.Carr told the committee while that was ultimately an issue being handled by the US Treasury department, there was a common view among Democrats and Republicans that the data could not be prevented from being accessed by Chinese government officials under the 2017 national security law.Carr, the most senior Republican member on the FCC, said only an outright ban of the app in the United States or removing all corporate ties to China would be acceptable.“Ultimately, I think some sort of … legislation that imposes a ban or a genuine divestiture is the way forward right now,” he said.“The argument that somehow TikTok is going to stand up to the CCP is belied by their inability to do it at any point in time publicly. For instance, when asked in US media interviews, whether they acknowledge the existence of the Uyghur genocide, their official on TV refused to address it.”Carr said that a Project Texas plan might work for other Chinese companies, but TikTok’s actions to date meant there was no trust for the United States.“We’ve had this years-long approach that strikes me is nothing short of a gaslighting in terms of their misrepresentations,” he said.A spokesperson for TikTok said divestment wouldn’t solve the problem if national security is the objective.“A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access. The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, US-based protection of US user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification, which we are already implementing.”The Australian government has announced no plans beyond the ban of TikTok from government devices, but the Coalition is likely to push the Labor government for more restrictions on the app.The chair of the inquiry and shadow home affairs minister, senator James Paterson, opened the hearing by saying that the inquiry would serve as a starting point on making Australians a harder target for foreign interference.“We cannot allow foreign authoritarian regimes to have unfettered access to the devices of millions of Australians and the powerful opportunity that offers them to influence our democracy,” he said. “The work starts today to make us a harder target against the threat of cyber enabled foreign interference.”TikTok this week issued a factcheck on claims made about the app, and denied that Australian user data could be accessed in China.The inquiry is holding initial hearings on Thursday and Friday, and is due to report back to parliament in August. More

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      in US Politics

      As the west tries to limit TikTok’s reach, what about China’s other apps?

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      As TikTok, the world’s most popular app, comes under increasing scrutiny in response to data privacy and security concerns, lawmakers in the west may soon set their sights on other Chinese platforms that have gone global.TikTok was built by ByteDance as a foreign version of its popular domestic video-sharing platform, Douyin. But it is far from being ByteDance’s only overseas moneymaker. The Chinese company owns dozens of apps that are available overseas, many of them English-language versions of Chinese offerings.CapCut is a video-editing app that is used by TikTok creators, while Lark is a workplace collaboration platform. Other apps, particularly e-commerce platforms such as Shein, have become hugely popular in the US and the UK.The US Congress is now considering the introduction of the Restrict Act, which would give the commerce department the power to ban TikTok and other apps that pose national security risks. Because the main concern about Chinese apps is that they are subject to interference from the Chinese Communist party, many household names could soon be in the line of fire.CapCutCapCut is the Chinese version of ByteDance’s JianYing. It was the fourth-most downloaded app globally in 2022, behind TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to Statista, which analyses market and consumer data.Despite the security concerns over TikTok, governments have said little about CapCut. India’s government is an outlier, banning the app in 2020 along with a host of others made by Chinese companies.First released in April 2020, CapCut has been downloaded more than 500m times on the Google Play store globally. On Apple devices, it was downloaded 25m times just last month, according to data analysts Sensor Tower. At times in 2021, CapCut was the most downloaded free app in the US.LarkLark, a workplace collaboration platform, launched in 2019. Its Chinese version is called Feishu, but the two platforms operate and store data separately, with Lark being managed from Singapore.It has already launched in the US, south-east Asia and Japan, and has plans to expand into Europe. Its target audience is multinational companies that work with China, or Chinese companies working overseas.Lark combines elements of Slack, Dropbox, Google Docs and Skype. It is a minnow compared with ByteDance’s other products, but is part of a strategy to diversify the company’s offering.Now, however, Lark’s future looks uncertain. It explicitly deals with the kind of proprietary data that western lawmakers and companies would want to keep secure. Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst who previously worked for tech firm Alibaba, said that, for years, Chinese apps pursued a strategy of developing “under the radar” before being discovered more widely. But, Yang said, “that trajectory has to shift because the American government doesn’t allow them to do that any more”.WeChatTencent’s WeChat – which has more than 1.1 billion users – is overwhelmingly used in China, where the all-encompassing app is essential for communications, bookings, finances, and even health monitoring during the pandemic.But it is popular in other countries, too, particularly for diaspora communities wanting to keep in touch with friends and family back in China. Disinformation is particularly rife on WeChat, in part because news spreads in private chat groups rather than on public feeds, so is harder to monitor.In 2022, it was downloaded more than 66m times in China, about 2.1m times in both the US and Indonesia, and more than 1m times in Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan.In September 2020, the then US president, Donald Trump, sought to ban WeChat and TikTok outright. This led to lawsuits and court-ordered stays on the ban, and in 2021 his successor, Joe Biden, withdrew Trump’s executive orders. Biden’s administration also launched national security reviews of apps created by companies with links to adversarial foreign governments such as China.WeChat is a Chinese-made app also used in the west, unlike TikTok, CapCut and others, which are western versions of Chinese apps. In 2021, WeChat said it had separated processes for its domestic Chinese users and those who log in with a foreign phone number.But in September last year, overseas users received pop-up messages warning them that “personal data [including] likes, comments, browsing and search history, content uploads, etc” would be stored on Chinese servers.SheinShein, pronounced “shee-in”, is the world’s largest fashion retailer. Founded in 2008 in Nanjing, last year it was the most-downloaded fashion and beauty app in the US, with more than 27m downloads, according to Statista.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConsumers are turning to Shein because it is cheap. But, said Yang, it is also “a lot more fun”. Chinese e-commerce apps are “a lot more engaging”, with pop-ups offering discounts and deals to gamify the shopping experience.Despite the cheap prices, its revenues are huge. In 2022, it raked in $22.7bn (£18.2bn), putting it in the same league as established behemoths such as H&M and Zara. Rui Ma, a China tech analyst and investor, said that Shein’s core advantage was its supply chain. Unlike other fashion companies, Shein works directly with the material suppliers and factories, so it has a detailed understanding of its own pipeline. Ma said Shein’s inventory waste “is one-10th that of the industry average”, which allowed it to keep prices down.TemuTemu only launched in the US in September 2022, but by January this year it was the most popular app in the country. The e-commerce platform sells everything from wireless earphones for $5.09 to a cat’s toothbrush for $0.44.Its inventory is a core part of its business model: it prioritises lightweight products to reduce cargo costs, and ships to consumers directly from factories in China. This allows it to offer rock-bottom prices. It also requires vendors to offer products that are not available on other platforms.It is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings Inc, a Chinese company that also owns the Chinese internet retailer Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo is the dark horse of the Chinese e-commerce market. Despite being much younger than Alibaba and JD.com, which dominate the industry, Pinduoduo has about 15% of the market share. Ma said PDD had “a team that is really good at execution, and they’re taking a lot of the Chinese advantages, and their knowhow, into expanding abroad”.Yang also notes that with US consumers being increasingly cash-strapped, they are willing to wait longer – Temu’s delivery times can be one to two weeks – for cheaper products. That is a challenge for US giants such as Amazon, which have prioritised speed of delivery above all else.AliExpressLast year AliExpress, the online marketplace of the tech giant Alibaba, was the third-most popular marketplace app in the UK, with 1m downloads, behind Amazon and eBay. Rather than working directly with factories, it connects small businesses in China with consumers around the world to sell cheap products, often in bulk.However, despite being backed by China’s leading e-commerce platform, AliExpress has failed to catch on in the west as successfully as newer rivals such as Temu and Shein. Yang said part of the reason for this was that it didn’t have the “laser focus” of its competitors. Yang said that AliExpress “was never really under pressure to thrive” in the west because Alibaba already had so many arms to its business, including Taobao, for shopping, and Alipay, a mobile payments system that is ubiquitous in China.What’s next for Chinese apps?In theory, many of the accusations that have been levelled against TikTok – such as that it is bad for children’s mental health or engages in censorship of political topics – should be less applicable to other Chinese apps that are popular in the west. Fast fashion and cheap cosmetics are less controversial than algorithmically delivered content that is seen as shaping young minds. And shopping apps like Temu and Shein are dependent on physical supply chains, so they are less able to change or mask their Chinese links.But US lawmakers have warned that any Chinese-owned apps could be vulnerable to data privacy breaches or interference from the Chinese Communist party.Some analysts have pointed out that the US does not have comprehensive data privacy laws, meaning that users of any apps have little control over how their data is used.Ma said: “It doesn’t make much sense to me that a shopping app is going to be put on the same level [of scrutiny] as a media app. But my view is that it’s not going to stop anyone from trying.” More