This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on April 17th, 2023. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
While American politicians try to ban TikTok, a similar app — with the same owner — is climbing the charts. The stage is set for a geopolitical game of cat and mouse.
“Mr. Chew, can TikTok access home wireless networks?”
Republican congressman Richard Hudson looked concerned as he questioned TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew, at the end of March. Together with colleagues, he grilled Chew for five hours in an effort to better understand the popular social media app. The quality of the questions varied considerably, and often seemed more focused on looking good on television than on actually learning anything.
The backdrop to the hearing is the geopolitical tension between the US and China. TikTok first ran into trouble during the Trump presidency, when it came close to being forced into a partnership with American IT giant Oracle — to ensure that data from American users didn’t end up with the Chinese government. President Biden reversed that decision, but has since had to return to something resembling the original plan. After it emerged that TikTok had spied on journalists, the app is now under investigation and faces the prospect of being banned entirely from the American market.
The question to ask is: how much effect can banning a single app actually have?
In the US, an app called Lemon8 is now rapidly gaining popularity. It resembles TikTok in many respects and has received over 650,000 downloads in the past two weeks. The company behind it is called Heliophilia Pte Ltd — a name most people are unlikely to recognize. Its registered address, however, is more familiar: it’s identical to TikTok’s office in Singapore. Both apps share the same majority owner — Chinese conglomerate ByteDance.
As an ordinary mobile user, it can be difficult to know who actually owns the popular apps you use. In Sweden, for example, the video editing app CapCut sits high on the app charts. It is also owned by ByteDance. A few positions lower is FaceApp — the digital face filter app whose parent company is registered in Cyprus, but whose founder, Yaroslav Goncharov, previously sold companies to — and worked at — Yandex, often described as “the Russian Google.” The app was investigated by the FBI a few years ago over concerns about Russian counterintelligence.
Banning a single app may sound like a simple solution, but the situation is more complex than that. In some cases — as above — it requires genuine detective work to figure out who actually owns the apps in question.
China has made things easy for itself in this regard. For many years, it has blocked the largest American internet companies. Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Pinterest are all on the list of products shut out of the country. China’s strong censorship means many of these sites fall foul of existing laws. It was therefore somewhat ironic when China protested to American authorities about the prospect of TikTok being kicked out of the US. There is no symmetry here.
Successfully regulating this messy situation is no easy task. The poor technological literacy of American lawmakers doesn’t help either. Congressional hearings with tech executives over the years have been near-parodically bad, and have produced no concrete legislation. Focusing a hearing on a single foreign app is one way to simplify the critique. Politicians — both Democrats and Republicans — appear to be saying “we believe China can spy on us via TikTok,” and have through this managed to find common ground. The proposed legislation, however, doesn’t name TikTok specifically — it would enable bans on technology services from any country the US has designated as an adversary. A list that can change over time.
It is now quite possible that TikTok will be forced into a sale or IPO to shed its Chinese ownership. A full ban from the US market is less likely. But even if that happened, the problem wouldn’t be solved. Lose one app and a thousand more appear. Should every popular app undergo a national security review? That’s not sustainable in practice. New services and apps that could pose a risk emerge every day. But that reality doesn’t make for good television hearings.
