The TikTok story, which could be nearly over, offers many lessons to policymakers. Voters are doing the teaching.
Americans have shown that they won’t take national security threats at face value. They want the details. Lawmakers reportedly gathered for a top-secret briefing on the risks posed by TikTok before voting in favor of the bill back in March. At the time, the protestors outside Capitol Hill who opposed the ban were not made privy to its findings.
Confidentiality has consequences. We witnessed this week that Americans are willing to directly snub lawmakers’ China threat rhetoric by migrating from the U.S.-based and managed TikTok to the entirely Chinese-run lifestyle app, Xiaohongshu.
Lawmakers may also be estimating the degree to which Americans are fed up with homegrown Big Tech. As one user put it, “I would rather stare at a language I can’t understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns.”
Hypocrisy may also have played a role in U.S. users’ decision not to fill the TikTok gap with domestic apps. Many have made the astute argument that Americans would be much better served by a data privacy law than a TikTok ban. Congressional support for the latter without the former is understandably read as insincere—many might deduce that the government cares enough to make their data inaccessible to its geopolitical rival, but domestic firms can have at it. Boycotting Meta is one way to get even.
If enacted, data protections could extend beyond social media and into the U.S. drone market, an area lawmakers are also keen to restrict Chinese firms’ access to. The Commerce Department is considering a rule that would ban Chinese drones (industry comments are due on March 4).
In a way, the proposed drone rule is at least more consistent in its logic than the TikTok ban, because it targets all drones of Chinese origin rather than one company. Since China’s DJI dominates the U.S. drone market, legislation that targets one firm is plausible; in fact, a bill that does just that was introduced by Rep. Elise Stefanik in April and is currently under consideration.
Now, some lawmakers are backtracking, arguing TikTok needs more time to find a buyer. Their change of heart reflects the inconvenient practical obstacles to suddenly cutting off access to a popular platform. While not as powerful a constituency as the 170 million U.S.-based TikTok users, the American drone community is similarly enthusiastic and broadly united in the assessment that there is no comparable alternative to DJI for the consumer market. Even the New York Times’ Wirecutter recommends DJI.
The current and potential chaos of these actions are just part of why firm-based and nationality-based bans miss the point. Rather than committing to bounded action against Chinese drones, for example, lawmakers have a responsibility to offer Americans protections fit for today’s much broader technological reality. Data protection laws, which exist in the European Union and, somewhat ironically, China, are an imperfect but necessary starting point.
If Congress continues to shove underlying issues aside in favor of politically expedient anti-China bans, then they will continue to fail to convince the public they are acting in its best interests.
Case in point: TikTok users moved to Xiaohongshu mostly out of spite. Their presence there is likely to be short-lived, but it puts on full display how many Americans—those who live outside the fiercely anti-China bubble of Washington, D.C.—feel about the government’s choice to prioritize its competition with China over their rights as consumers.
