On Sunday morning, roughly 170 million American TikTok users found themselves offline. By Sunday night, they were back on. For how long, no one can say.
Meanwhile, there’s much to be said about the newly on-again off-again app. For starters, the controversial bill that banned TikTok was passed 79-18 in the Senate, marking strong bipartisanship.
That same bill was then signed into law by President Joe Biden and upheld as constitutional by a far-right Supreme Court, making it even more unusual for both the outgoing and incoming presidents to refuse to uphold the new law.
Yet political inconsistency is a fraction of the discussion. According to cybersecurity expert Professor Chad Briggs at the Asian Institute of Management, TikTok isn’t the only social media platform that needs regulation. He suggests they all do, whether they are U.S.-based or not.
“I don’t use TikTok or have it installed on my phone,” he said, adding “but then I’ve also never kept Facebook or Instagram on my phones, either.
“I warned students about privacy and security issues for the past 10 years,” Briggs elaborated, almost sounding defeated. “Certainly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. Harvesting our data was really the Facebook business model, and when tied to political microtargeting, and selling such data to overseas buyers as well, most of the social media apps became liabilities.
“By then, however, we were all reliant on them for keeping in touch with friends and families, for small-business advertising, and we used Twitter for very real disaster warning systems. Most of those uses have now been compromised, and people remain on platforms often for FOMO reasons. That, and younger generations perhaps have no experience with networking and how to keep in communication with people without those apps.”
Some social media users, including Briggs, have tried to leverage their knowledge of data tracking systems to reduce the potential negative impacts. This includes limiting the devices the apps operate on, reconfiguring app settings to limit how much data is collected or sold, and limiting the ways in which they use the site.
But for many experts, such attempts to manage data privacy on their own have become too risky and ineffective in the larger political climate, and by design, most social media users have no idea about such privacy settings in the first place. Still, Briggs is clear the problem isn’t only with TikTok, even if it is a little riskier than others due to foreign ownership.
“The problem really isn’t the Chinese government,” he says. “They’ve been stealing data for years, such as the OPM data breach. The problem is the unwillingness of the U.S. government to create and enforce privacy regulations for all users, regardless of platform or who owns a social media company. And some argue the lack of regulation is too valuable for the oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk, but also for the U.S. government itself.
“We’ve had this massive surveillance state in place since 2001, and now the holders of incredible masses of our personal info are in the hands of men who have pledged to help Trump and his cabinet. Imagine what a weaponized FBI can do with all that information, what J. Edgar Hoover would have done with it.”
What Briggs refers to should raise alarm bells for all Americans. For more than 20 years, our political leaders have failed to properly regulate the digital space. Now, even domestic companies have huge user profiles on American citizens that can be sold to the highest bidder, including abroad, with little interference or oversight. It’s like Congress opened Pandora’s box and is trying to slightly stuff it closed by banning TikTok. But Briggs is clear this approach won’t work.
“No, one should not trust TikTok, but then we shouldn’t trust the other apps, either. The campaign to ban TikTok was mostly a whataboutism deflection, so that we ignore the problems of data privacy and disinformation on the Meta and X platforms.
“And now the government looks as though it won’t go through with the ban, anyway, so how serious were they? With Musk, Bezos and Zuck guests of honor at the Trump inauguration, what will happen to our data and metadata that they store?”
Wouldn’t we all like to know.
Trish Zornio is a columnist for The Colorado Sun, a reader-supported, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Colorado issues. Reach her on X at @trish_zornio. To learn more about the Sun, visit coloradosun.com.