The Biden administration is demanding that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance Ltd. sell to an American company or face a national ban on the app in the U.S. Some members of the Hillsdale College faculty and student body think that such a ban has been a long time coming.  

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States made the demand recently following the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of TikTok’s surveillance of American journalists revealed last December. U.S. lawmakers have cited increasing concerns that the app poses national cybersecurity threats and may censor content for political purposes.

Hillsdale Associate Professor of Economics Charles Steele said that banning TikTok is a matter of national security against a foreign threat, and it is not a free trade or free speech violation as some have proposed.

“TikTok should be banned,” Steele said. “That’s not an infringement on somebody’s rights. This is shutting down a Chinese espionage operation. It’s an intelligence and sabotage operation. It would be the same as if someone said, ‘Can’t I choose my friends?’ Yes, you can. But what if your friend was a Chinese agent arrested for espionage? You can still choose your friends, that’s not the point.”

According to Steele, TikTok is being weaponized by the Chinese to collect data on its users. 

“TikTok is collecting data on you, the person using it,” Steele said. “They put keystroke loggers on phones and other computers. They target the data that you receive, so they’re shaping your news stories… It’s a Chinese intelligence operation.”

Even though TikTok is not directly run by the Chinese Communist Party, Steele said, it still has access to data the app collects on its users.

“Every Chinese firm is required by Chinese law to operate on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party if the party says so,” Steele said. “They have CCP leaders within TikTok, so there’s no question about that.”

Steele said that a sale of TikTok to an American company would not solve the cybersecurity threats that the app poses.

“The ownership of the hardware, software, and system is not the fundamental issue,” Steele said. “The system is designed to capture data, and it will be accessible to the Chinese Communist Party regardless.”

The House Foreign Affairs Committee cited similar concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and connection to the Chinese government when they passed a bill known as the DATA Act on March 1 that would effectively block American interactions with ByteDance. 

The U.S. has previously banned the app from federally issued devices, and some U.S. allies seem to be following suit. New Zealand announced on March 17 that it will ban the app from devices linked to Parliament. Britain, Canada, and the EU banned TikTok from government-issued devices in recent months.

Freshman Aidan Christian, who had a TikTok account in high school but has since deleted it, agreed with Steele that a TikTok ban is necessary because the app poses a threat to the privacy of its users, especially if they are federal employees.

“TikTok has a lot more stringent privacy violations than most social media apps,” Christian said. “It tracks keystrokes on your phone whether or not the app is open, whatever app you’re in. It sees everything you type. It tracks location, just like everything else. It tracks app interactions like what you visit and how long you spend on each thing. It’s very in-depth information. There should be nobody who works in any sort of field where sensitive information is dealt with who has a TikTok, because one data breach could lead to disaster worldwide.”

Sophomore Gavin Listro agreed that the bans currently in place against TikTok on federally issued phones are necessary to protect sensitive information. Listro added that he would personally be in favor of a national ban against TikTok, but is not sure whether the U.S. government can legally take that action.

“I wish more people made the personal choice not to use it, and it would therefore be obsolete,” Listro said. “If it’s being weaponized, then yes, it should be gotten rid of. But if there’s no easy way to prove it, then it might be seen as a first amendment violation.”

According to Assistant Professor of History Edward Gutiérrez, it is because people will not make the personal choice to use the app that the government must step in and impose the ban.

“What we have here is the friction between ethics and politics,” Gutiérrez said. “The former must precede the latter…when man cannot regulate himself, the law must…Social media, with TikTok being the ultimate example, is exhibitionism. Now amplify this moral degradation with a national security risk. This should not be an issue, but since our ethical standards have sunk so low, we require laws to mitigate that failure.”

Freshman Emma Kate Mellors, who recently deleted her TikTok account, said she believes TikTok poses a privacy threat to its users. However, she doubts that most college students will be concerned about the privacy issues of the app because of its popularity and addictive format. 

“We don’t really think that far in advance sometimes,” said Mellors. “Plus there’s the thought of ‘what do I have to be revealed?’”

Steele said in light of the recent consensus across the world in banning TikTok, all college students should be concerned about the privacy threat they are imposing on themselves by using TikTok, even if the ban does not go through.

“I think if someone hears what I have to say about it and still uses TikTok, they’re either ignorant or malicious,” Steel said. “I understand that it is entertaining…But this is a much more serious issue than that. Get rid of it.”