The House of Representatives last week overwhelmingly passed legislation designed to force China to sell TikTok, which is now on 170 million American devices. The Chinese regime will certainly do all it can to prevent a sale, but the U.S., for the first time, has the leverage to overpower Beijing on this matter.
To protect America, the Biden administration will have to, among other things, seize control of the TikTok algorithm that curates content.
On the 13th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act." The bill, H.R. 7521, requires the "qualified divestiture"—as determined by the president—of any "foreign adversary controlled application," within 180 days. The proposed act specifically covers applications operated by TikTok and its Chinese parent, ByteDance Ltd.
If a divestiture does not occur during the 180-day period, the legislation prohibits U.S. app stores and web-hosting services from providing a designated app to the public.
Nobody believes China's central government will allow a sale of TikTok. Already, the foreign and commerce ministries in Beijing have used harsh terms to describe the U.S. actions. "Bullying act" and "robbers' logic," said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on the 14th, after the passage of the House bill.
This decade, Beijing has moved fast to protect Chinese tech. For instance, after President Donald Trump tried to force a sale of TikTok, China in 2020 added content-recommendation algorithms to its export-control list. Last year, China essentially stiffed the U.S. Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. by suggesting it would not approve a required sale. Finally, ByteDance, a private Chinese company, did not receive Beijing's approval for an agreement with Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. to set up a new U.S. company, TikTok Global.
Some have concluded that, given Beijing's obstinacy, the U.S. government will not be able to force a sale of TikTok. After all, no one would buy the app without the "secret sauce," the curation algorithm.
"Detaching the algorithm from ByteDance would be a very complex process," Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a note to investors. China and ByteDance, he stated, "will never allow the source code to be sold to a U.S. tech company in our view, which makes this all a spiderweb issue for any potential strategic buyer."
But the U.S. has far more leverage than experts think. Axios reported in August 2022 that Oracle had already begun "vetting TikTok's algorithms" as a part of Project Texas. TikTok in 2021 hatched Project Texas, essentially a partnership between TikTok and Oracle to assure U.S. authorities that the app was not surreptitiously sending data of U.S. users to China and was not, with the curation algorithm, "boosting the signal" of Chinese propaganda or harmful content.
"Over the past year, we took the unprecedented step of granting Oracle full access to our source code and algorithm," a TikTok spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal in January. She also said that the app stores the algorithm with Oracle. The algorithm, in the spokeswoman's words as summarized by the paper, is "supervised by employees" within a unit officially called TikTok U.S. Data Security, or USDS.
As that paper also reported, ByteDance is frustrating Oracle's review. "The Project Texas workers soon found a mountain of code waiting for them to verify each morning," the Journal reported in January. "Under pressure to work quickly, employees found the task to be impossible without more personnel, according to people familiar with the unit. Meanwhile, TikTok's algorithm is incorporating a growing number of updates that the Project Texas team hasn't run through a review."
U.S. authorities have to be concerned that ByteDance, by deluging Oracle with daily blizzards, is trying to insert malicious changes to the all-important algorithm.
So what can be done? The first step is to recognize that America has the upper hand. China, in effect, has already exported its content-recommendation technology. "It is likely, given the talent of the engineers at Oracle, that they could replicate the algorithm simply from observing it in action for as long as they have," Brandon Weichert, defense and technology analyst and publisher of the Weichert Report, told me this week. "Chinese officials can say they must approve a transfer according to their rules, but they have already lost practical control."
The federal government does not need to wait for H.R. 7521 to become law. Radio Free Asia reported in August 2020 that a People's Liberation Army intelligence unit, working out of China's Houston consulate, used big data to identify Americans likely to participate in Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests and then created and sent them "tailor-made" videos on how to organize riots. Related reporting reveals the videos were distributed by TikTok.
China's use of the app in this circumstance constituted, in addition to an act of war, a federal crime. Therefore, U.S. authorities have the right, under existing forfeiture laws, to seize TikTok and its curation algorithm without compensation.
The U.S. must, one way or another, make sure that the Chinese regime can no longer employ TikTok. Forcing change of ownership of the company will not be sufficient. Biden must, one way or another, take the algorithm from China too.
Drastic? Maybe, but as Weichert says, "It's about time we gave the Chinese a dose of their own medicine."
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and China Is Going to War. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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