Banning TikTok Should Be Just the Beginning
Mr. Harrell was a senior director on the National Security Council from 2021 to 2022. Mr. Wu was a special assistant to the president on the National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023.
There’s growing momentum in Congress to ban TikTok, the social media app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, for reasons of national security. Last week, the White House expressed support for a bipartisan bill in the Senate that would give President Biden the power to ban the app, and the White House is also reportedly pressing ByteDance to sell the company.
The security concern is not that we’ll be corrupted by goofy videos but rather that the Chinese government could use the TikTok apps installed on millions of American phones as a form of spyware — collecting sensitive data and personal information, including where we go and what we do. (On Friday, The Times reported that the Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of Americans by ByteDance.)
Congress is focused on TikTok for an obvious reason: It’s wildly popular and everyone’s heard of it. Banning it or forcing it to be sold off wouldn’t be a bad idea; the app does present serious privacy and security threats. But focusing just on TikTok would be a showy, inadequate response that would do far too little to protect Americans from the broad range of data security risks that China poses. Instead, Congress should pass a law to comprehensively protect American data and security.
