What a TikTok ban would look like for users
A U.S. government ban of TikTok could push users to figure out alternative ways to access the app, something that has become more common in other parts of the world as governments have instituted varying rules on tech companies.
On Wednesday, the House passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would amount to a ban on TikTok unless TikTok’s parent company sells the app. The bill still needs to clear the Senate, but President Joe Biden said last week that he would sign it if it comes to his desk.
If passed as written, the bill would give the president the power to force certain foreign-owned social media apps to choose between selling them off or being banned if U.S. intelligence agencies deem them a threat.
The bill’s most vocal proponents and national security officials have said this would apply to TikTok’s parent company, China-based Bytedance, for two reasons: the app collects data on its 170 million American users, and in theory it could be used to push Chinese propaganda.
Privacy advocates have long said that TikTok doesn’t collect substantially more information on its users than other apps, and a better solution would be to simply pass a substantial data privacy law, which the U.S. does not have. And while China is frequently accused of trying to seed online propaganda aimed at swaying American opinion, it is usually strikingly ineffective at it.
If the bill passed and Biden were to use its authorities to compel Bytedance to sell TikTok, the company would have 180 days to find a buyer. That would be enormously frantic, said Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based tech policy think tank that opposes the bill.
“There aren’t really that many entities in this world with the kind of money that it would take to be able to purchase something as expensive as TikTok likely is,” Ruane said.
“And in a deal that’s big, it would probably need to undergo — and I think that we would likely want it to undergo — antitrust review in the United States. And antitrust merger review, especially in big complicated deals, can take a long time. Likely longer than six months,” she said.
It’s also unclear that Bytedance has any interest in selling TikTok, regardless of the U.S. Congress. Bytedance didn’t respond to an email requesting comment. Sarah Kreps, the director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, said she was skeptical Bytedance would sell.
“China’s not in a great place economically, but this is something they’ve done that is very visibly successful around the world. So I don’t see why they would sell it off,” Kreps said.
If a sale didn’t happen, it could set off an unprecedented situation in American history: A popular smartphone app used by half the country’s population would suddenly become banned.
Under the language of the bill, app stores would be forbidden from hosting any banned app. That would mostly apply to Google, which maintains the Play Store for Android users; and Apple, which hosts the App Store. Neither company responded to a request for comment, but both historically comply with U.S. law.
In that case, the TikTok app would no longer be easily accessible for most Americans, and ease of use is a huge part of the app’s appeal. But it also would likely drive many TikTok fans to find workarounds, said Cooper Quintin, the senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes civil liberties in relation to technology.
“I think you’ll see a lot of kids learning how to circumvent the restrictions on their phones, Quintin said.
“They’re certainly not going to stop people from using TikTok by banning it. Yeah, you’ll probably cut down on the number of people using it, but that just makes it more exciting,” he said. “They’re gonna create a whole new generation of hackers.”
TikTok users in India, for instance, which banned TikTok in 2020, often post videos showing ways to circumvent the ban, though it isn’t clear that they all always work.
It also isn’t fully clear how the app store ban would work. Both Google and Apple require users to have accounts with their services to use their app stores, and those accounts have several potential ways of identifying the user’s location.
While app stores may generally categorize a person by country, both companies allow users to change what country they’re in. And it’s possible to make a second account while visiting another country in order to appear to be resident there and download its apps.
Laurin Weissinger, a visiting scholar at the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University, told NBC News that he frequently does this while traveling in Europe.
“During Covid, I went to Europe, flying into Frankfurt. Germany at the time had an app to show vaccination status,” he said. “The app was not available in the U.S. App Store. So I had to make another account and get the app."
It’s also possible to load apps directly onto a phone without going through a store, though it’s significantly harder to do so on iPhones than on Android phones. That may lead to more TikTok obsessives trying to load the program directly onto their phone — or to accidentally downloading a malicious hacker’s version, Quintin said.
“My concern is what’ll spread is links to backdoored versions of TikTok that are malicious, that are actually malware,” he said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
