The TikTok story, which is arguably almost over, offers many lessons for policymakers. Voters do the teaching.
Americans have shown that they will not take national security threats at face value. They need the details. Lawmakers reportedly gathered for a top-secret briefing on the dangers posed by TikTok before voting in favor of the bill in March. At the time, protesters outside the Capitol who opposed the ban were not informed of its findings.
Confidentiality has consequences. This week we saw that Americans are willing to directly snub lawmakers’ rhetoric about Chinese risk by migrating from US-based and operated TikTok to the fully Chinese-run lifestyle app Xiaohongshu (known in the US as “Red Note”).
Lawmakers are also likely assessing how fed up Americans are with big local tech. As one post by user Candacce put it: “I’d rather see language I don’t understand than use a social media [platform] owned by Mark Zuckerberg. “
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 passed, knowledge protections could expand beyond social media and into the U. S. drone market, a domain that lawmakers should also limit that of Chinese companies. The Commerce Department is contemplating a rule that would ban Chinese drones (industry comments will be submitted on March 4).
In some ways, 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 a single company. Given that China’s DJI dominates the US drone market, a law targeting a single company is plausible; In fact, a bill doing just that was introduced in April by Rep. Elise Stefanik and is currently under consideration.
Now, some lawmakers are responding, arguing that TikTok wants more time to locate a buyer. Their replacement of the center reflects the uncomfortable practical hurdles of suddenly cutting off access to a popular platform. While it’s not as tough as TikTok’s 170 million users in the U. S. In the US, the US drone network, the US drone network. The U. S. is equally enthusiastic and largely united in the assessment that there is no comparable option to DJI for the customer market. Even the New York Times Wirecutter recommends DJI.
The current and future chaos of those movements is only part of the explanation for why bans based on corporations and nationalities are irrelevant. Rather than taking limited action against Chinese drones, for example, lawmakers have a duty to offer Americans coverage tailored to today’s much broader technological reality. Data coverage laws, which exist in the European Union and, ironically, in China, are an imperfect starting point.
If lawmakers continue to shove underlying issues aside in favor of politically expedient anti-China bans, then they will keep failing to convince the public they are acting in its best interests.
Case in point: Reports suggest that TikTok users moved to Xiaohongshu basically out of malice. Their presence there will likely be short-lived, but it obviously shows how many Americans—those living outdoors in the fierce anti-China bubble in Washington, D. C. —resent the government’s choice to prioritize its festival with China over their rights as consumers.
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