TikTok: Banning could be a step towards technological revolution – 02/06/2023 – Igor Patrick

The US state of Montana is known for having more cattle than people in its more than 300 mountains and, in the past, for having been one of the main sources of gold, silver, copper and sapphire in the country.

Since mid-May, however, the region may have entered history for a fact that is perhaps small today, but with major consequences in the future: the banning of the Chinese social network TikTok.

Backed by Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican, the law prohibiting the use of the application was passed in the state House with relative ease, with a score of 54 to 43. The text accuses TikTok of “gathering important information from users, accessing data against their willingness to share them with the People’s Republic of China”, and establishes a daily fine of US$ 10,000 for violators.

It is, so far, the furthest any Western official has gone with regard to the popular Chinese network. It will be up to Justice to decide —the app’s controller, ByteDance, has already filed a lawsuit, alleging that the law violates the principles of freedom of expression provided for in the First Amendment—, but the offensive does not stop there.

The number of western countries willing to follow the same path multiplies, taking us to a new digital environment: that of a cracked internet, with well-defined borders. The UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the European Union have all passed laws banning the use of TikTok on devices owned by government employees. At the federal level, a committee of the US House of Representatives in March granted powers to Joe Biden to ban the company from operating in American territory.

Discussions around the topic were initially met with criticism from civil society organizations, but tempers changed when ByteDance admitted to using the app to spy on journalists from the Financial Times and BuzzFeed who covered the company. At least in the United States, concerns have left the halls of the Capitol and reached voters, as shown by a survey by the Pew Research Center: 50% of Americans now support the banning of the application, against 28% who are opposed.

Despite occasional scandals, there is still no robust evidence that TikTok is actively collecting information from its users (or that it has the power to do so ostensibly). Still, by being perceived as a threat to national security, the Chinese network may have ushered in an era in which the boundaries of the internet will be increasingly solid. Under the same allegation, Donald Trump wanted to ban WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging service, initially a local version of WhatsApp.

Elected or not in 2024, who guarantees that the republican (or his allies) will stop there?

In China, of course, this process has been going on for much longer. Since the end of the 1990s and more strongly since the mid-2000s, a powerful firewall blocks social networks, news sites and Western services. Google, Meta, Wikipedia and various media outlets have been inaccessible to Chinese citizens for decades. Under Xi Jinping, the siege became even tighter, with reports of people being taken to prison for using VPN services, a tool that circumvents the blockade.

The difference is that, despite the meticulous magnifying glass applied by Chinese censorship to the information available to its citizens, the West used to boast about its “free internet” model. The myth fell with the multiple blockades applied by Europe to the Russian state media during the invasion of Ukraine, and any illusion of the type must collapse once and for all with the possible restrictions on TikTok and Chinese congeners.

It will be a thorny issue to deal with, with direct consequences not only for what we see (and fail to see) on the internet, but also for the utopia of a free internet operating as a bridge between humans. On the horizon, Montana may have been the first step in a new chapter in the technological revolution.

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