The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
China already engages in espionage on an industrial scale. On January 14, the FBI announced that malware from Mustang Panda, a Chinese government-backed hacker group, had infected thousands of computers, stealing sensitive security information.
COMMENT | TODD G. BUCHHOLZ | When the US president, Congress, and Supreme Court are all in a tizzy at the same time, the topic under discussion is usually a global meltdown or, at the very least, income taxes. Today, the concern is dancing cat videos. In his first day back in the White House, Donald Trump launched a strike against the Court and Congress by signing an executive order to pause the ban on TikTok, earning applause from the Chinese-owned company. TikTok’s online content creators are relieved, too, for many warn that a ban (or a forced sale to a US company) would devastate them. I call it the TikTokalypse.
But this fear is based on a misunderstanding of the app’s security risks and of the resiliency of creators and internet platforms. With TikTok users, including 170 million in the US, spending an average of 90 minutes per day on the app – more time than Americans spend eating and drinking – China has gained a surveillance tool that Joseph Stalin and Ernst Blofeld could only have dreamed about.
China already engages in espionage on an industrial scale. On January 14, the FBI announced that malware from Mustang Panda, a Chinese government-backed hacker group, had infected thousands of computers, stealing sensitive security information.
Last year, the FBI revealed that China had waged a campaign that could have been pulled from a Die Hard movie: Chinese operatives had infiltrated critical US infrastructure networks. If the US government had not disrupted the campaign, the hackers would have been able to cripple a wide range of systems, from drinking water to gas pipelines and air-traffic control. In chilling testimony before Congress, former FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed in his first term, said that “China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure […] to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike.”
While it is easy to scoff at some of China’s more farcical attempts at spying, like the great balloon chase of 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping has been clear about his quest for hegemony through a “smokeless war.” Given that, no one should consider the risk posed by TikTok a joke. While ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, tried to dispel security concerns by promising to store US users’ data on third-party US servers, leaked recordings of internal company meetings revealed that the app’s China-based engineers had repeatedly accessed everything from location data to browsing histories. When 39% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 – including military personnel and government employees – regularly get their news from TikTok, this becomes about more than dancing teenagers and makeup tips.
TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t just track Americans; it shapes US political discourse. Research from the Alliance for Securing Democracy found that the app often fails to correctly label content from state-controlled media, leading to a proliferation of Russian state propaganda on topics as crucial as the war in Ukraine. And TikTok’s search algorithm has been found to display less anti-China content than other platforms for search terms such as “Tiananmen,” “Tibet,” and “Uyghur.” During the recent Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, TikTok was awash in pro-Hamas videos.
The US has a long and reasoned history of guarding against foreign ownership of major media outlets, going back to the Communications Act of 1934. And, of course, in earlier, cruder times, patriotic citizens would simply tar and feather foreign agents.
In light of today’s economic and cultural realities, forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to American owners is hardly the digital apocalypse that creators fear it would be. For starters, there are plenty of other platforms through which to reach audiences. Creators can even post content in the same short-form video format. Instagram Reels can reach its two billion monthly active users, for example, and YouTube Shorts collectively receive more than 70 billion views per day. Digital creators, for their part, are far more resilient than many imagine. When Vine shut down in 2017, its creators didn’t vanish; they evolved, successfully migrating to other platforms.
With Trump eager to forge a deal on TikTok, ByteDance is poised to receive high bids from US firms. I would not be surprised if TikTok fetched a price that tops the value of Spotify, at $101 billion, and reaches the heights of Netflix and Disney, which are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The creator economy isn’t built on a single Chinese app, but rather on Western innovation, from the iPhone to the internet itself. Cat videos and dance challenges will find new homes, just as they migrated from “America’s Funniest Home Videos” on network television to YouTube to TikTok.
The choice isn’t between creativity and security; it’s between naivete and prudence. In an era when data are the new plutonium, that’s no choice at all.
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Todd G. Buchholz, a former White House director of economic policy under President George H.W. Bush and managing director of the Tiger hedge fund, is the recipient of the Harvard Department of Economics’ Allyn Young Teaching Prize. He is the author of New Ideas from Dead Economists (Plume, 2021) and The Price of Prosperity (Harper, 2016), and a co-author of the musical Glory Ride.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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