Once More With Feeling: Banning TikTok Doesn’t Do Much If We Don’t Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Privacy Law

While it seemed like our national policy hysteria over TikTok had waned slightly in 2024, it bubbled up once again last week upon rumors that the White House is supporting a “welcome and important” new bill that would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States.

The bipartisan bill (full text) — which moved forward last week in spite of TikTok’s ham-fisted attempt to overload Congress with phone calls from users — sponsored by Reps Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, prevents all ByteDance-controlled applications from enjoying app store availability or web hosting services in the U.S., unless TikTok “severs ties to entities like ByteDance that are subject to the control of a foreign adversary.” Basically, the bill wants ByteDance to divest TikTok, preferably to an American company.

You’ll recall the Trump administration’s big “solution” for TikTok was basically cronyism: to force the company to sell itself to Walmart and Oracle. That is: companies controlled by Trump’s cronies, with their own track records of bad behavior and privacy violations. You’ll also recall that Facebook has been very busy sowing congressional angst for years about TikTok for purely anti-competitive reasons.

The bill applies to any company owned by ByteDance, whether or not anybody has actually proven any sort of meaningful connection to Chinese intelligence (we’re working off of vibes here, man). There’s also some murky language in the legislation that curiously excludes companies that deal in reviews, a nice treat for whatever company successfully lobbied for that exemption:

EXCLUSION: The term ‘‘covered company’’ does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.

To be very clear: TikTok certainly isn’t without surveillance, national security, and notable privacy concerns. And the authoritarian Chinese government is, without question, an oppressive genocidal shitshow.

But banning TikTok, while refusing to pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers (which traffic in significantly greater volumes of sensitive data at much greater collective scale), winds up mostly being a performative endeavor driven more by anti-competitive intent (and a desire to control the flow and scope of modern news, information and propaganda) than any desire for serious reform.

A lot of the congressional opposition (especially on the GOP side) to TikTok comes largely from the belief that white owned and controlled American companies are owed, by divine right, access to the massive ad revenues Chinese-owned TikTok enjoys. For Luddites and policy nitwits like Tommy Tuberville, I strongly doubt the thinking extends much further than that.

I also think Republicans very much don’t like the idea of a company that could potentially traffic in propaganda that isn’t theirs. They’ve worked very hard for several years to scare feckless U.S. tech giants away from policing race-baiting political propaganda online (a cornerstone of modern GOP power), and their inability to control TikTok presents an obvious concern for entirely self-serving reasons.

But even lawmakers who sincerely believe that banning TikTok makes meaningful inroads on national security or consumer privacy generally don’t seem to understand the size and scope of the problem we’re dealing with.

You could ban TikTok with a patriotic flourish from the heavens immediately, but if we fail to regulate data brokers, pass a privacy law, or combat corruption, Chinese (or Russian, or Iranian) intelligence can simply turn around and buy that same data (and detailed profiles of American consumers) from an unlimited parade of different data brokers, telecoms, app makers, marketing companies, or services.

And they can do that because the U.S. has proven to be, time and time again, too corrupt to do the right thing or hold giant corporations (domestic or otherwise) accountable for privacy abuses. The result has been the creation of an historically massive, planet-wide, data monetization and surveillance machine that fails — over and over and over again — to meaningfully protect public safety and consumer privacy.

Congress has repeatedly made it very clear that making money is significantly more important than consumer welfare and public safety, as the scandal over sensitive abortion clinic location data makes clear. The U.S. government is also disincentivized to act, because it’s found exploitation of this privacy-optional nightmare to be a super handy way to avoid having to get warrants for domestic surveillance.

The Biden administration does appear to at least recognize the threat, as evident by their recent executive order trying to slow the flow of data broker data to problematic governments.

But it’s not enough. Congress needs to pass a privacy law for the internet-era with teeth that applies to all companies that operate in the U.S., foreign or domestic. It needs to adequately staff and fund the FTC so it can actually address the problem at the scale it’s operating at. And it needs to close the privacy loopholes that lets government surveillance efforts exploit the dysfunction.

But Congress won’t do that because Congress is comically, blisteringly corrupt. We’ve defanged our regulators for decades under the pretense it fostered an innovative, free market renaissance that never happened. When discussing our failure to meaningful protect U.S. consumer (and industry privacy), this corruption just isn’t mentioned–as if it’s simply somehow not relevant to the problem at hand.

Countries that care about national security make fleeting efforts to combat corruption, and don’t support NYC real estate conmen with fourth grade reading levels for the most powerful office in the land.

Countries that care about consumer privacy pass privacy laws, regulate data brokers, and generally hold corporations (and executives) meaningfully accountable for failing to secure consumer data. T-Mobile has been hacked eight times in five years due to comically lax security and privacy standards, and I’ve yet to see Congress lift so much as an eyebrow.

The myopic hyperventilation about TikTok (and TikTok only!) is mostly a distraction. A distraction from the GOP’s ongoing quest to turn the internet into a propaganda dumpster fire. A distraction from our failures on consumer protection. A distraction from Congressional corruption. A distraction from the fact that we’ve lobotomized our regulators in exchange for Utopian promises never actually delivered.

Banning an app that may not even be popular five years from now — but doing absolutely nothing about the corruptive rot that enabled its privacy abuses — is a hollow performance that simply doesn’t strike at the heart of the actual problem.