The House of Representatives declared on Wednesday that TikTok poses a grave risk to national security, which is being forced to be sold to a non-Chinese owner. This real shows the deeper side of the whole problem with TikTok. In the past four years this arguement has been going on. It was made clear that the problem with TikTok security isn’t the owner of the app, instead it’s the one who creates the codes and algorithms.
Those algorithms is what makes this app so addicting, because they are personalized for everyone who uses the app. Half of the country (170 million users) is addicted to the endless scrolling and customed “for you page”. However the problem is that TikTok doesn’t know these algorithms, instead they are being developed by engineers who work for this Chinese company “ByteDance”, which assembles the code in great secrecy in its software labs in Bejing, Singapore, and Mountain View. But China has issued these regulations that require the government review before any ByteDance’s algorithms could be used to any outsiders.
Now the bill would require a new Western-owned Tiktok to be cut off from any “opertional relationship” with ByteDance “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” So the new, American-based company would have to develop its own, made-in-America algorithm. Maybe that would work, or maybe it would flop. But a version of TikTok without its classic algorithm might quickly become useless to users and worthless to investors.
The House vote “was a nice symbolic gesture,” James A. Lewis, who leads the cyber research program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on Wednesday. “But the Chinese get a vote, too.”
It is all part of a broader standoff between the world’s two most powerful technology superpowers. The sparring plays out every day, including in President Biden’s refusal to sell China the most advanced computer chips and in China’s objections to a forced sale of one of the most successful consumer apps in history. A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that Washington was “resorting to hegemonic moves when one could not succeed in fair competition.” It accused China’s intelligence agencies of cleaning out the Office of Personnel Management, stealing the security clearance files of more than 22 million American government officials and contractors.
No one was contemplating the possibility that Chinese engineers could design code that seemed to understand the mind-set of American consumers better than Americans did themselves. By the millions, Americans began to put Chinese-designed software, whose innards no one really understood, on their iPhones and Androids, first for dance videos, then for the memes and now for news. So I do understand why it’s become a huge concern for the US government, it’s a privacy issue but they also have to realize how big of an impact China has on the United States. The House believes it will become a weapon against us which is why they need a new owner, or even ban completely.
