TikTok Isn't National Security Threat, Academic Group Says

TikTok isn’t a national security threat and shouldn’t be subject to a government ban, said Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Governance Project in a report this week (see 2212270051). The group said all “evidence indicates that TikTok is a commercially motivated enterprise and not a tool of the Chinese state,” saying the app isn’t “exporting censorship” and the personal data it collects “is very similar to the data collected by its peer competitors.” A ban on the app, as several U.S. lawmakers have proposed (see 2212200074), would “impose unfair harms on millions of innocent American users of the app” and “risk retaliation against American businesses by China,” said the group, composed of professors, researchers and students at Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy. A ban could give other countries “fuel for hitting US firms with tech-nationalist and data protectionist policies." The “attack” on TikTok is “really a kind of proxy war waged by a specific political faction” in the U.S. that “wants to fully decouple the US and Chinese economies because it sees US-China relations entirely as a zero-sum struggle for world dominance, and rejects peaceful co-existence,” the report said. “This faction can further its agenda by presenting any form of economic interaction with the Chinese economy as a national security threat. The attack on TikTok takes this logic to an absurd extent. Our analysis of the national security risks of TikTok exposes how indiscriminate and weak their case is, and how destructive it can be.” The Biden administration and TikTok in September reportedly drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns raised by ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, which would ultimately involve a mitigation agreement overseen by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.