TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — News broke Dec. 5 that Taiwan’s new Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) had banned public sector employees from having the social media video platform TikTok and the sister China-centric version of the software Douyin (抖音) installed on their devices.
New Taipei City government announced it would follow suit. The U.S. federal government and many states have done something similar. India has banned them outright nationwide for all users, along with 58 other Chinese apps.
Both TikTok and Douyin are owned by Beijing-based Bytedance Ltd, which is loyal to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and partly owned by the Chinese government via state-owned media giant TV channel CCTV. Bytedance by law must have a CCP cell to hand down official party edicts and also to take a role in company governance.
Worse, the company falls under Chinese laws requiring information demanded by the government to be handed over and to spread information on the internet that is beneficial to the CCP, including the National Security Law implemented by the CCP in 2015, as well as the National Intelligence Law and the Cybersecurity Law implemented in 2017. As for the international version, TikTok, it was discovered employees improperly accessed data on two journalists.
Then, April 25, 2019, ByteDance signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
TikTok (including) Douyin, which claims to have over 1 billion users, has been found to be riddled with disinformation, featuring content promoting eating disorders and self-harm, and spreads CCP propaganda in Taiwan. A search for Xinjiang on TikTok is dominated by videos denying the genocide, as ByteDance actively works to aid the CCP propaganda machine, though one clever teen used a makeup video as cover for getting the truth out.
Douyin is even more heavy-handed. It banned a woman for mentioning Taiwanese pineapples, a Taiwanese kid for calling Xi Jinping (習近平) a “fatty,” and possibly using facial recognition to kick a foreigner out of a livestream after only one minute.
TikTok is a Trojan Horse
Being on at least one CCP naughty list and being aware of the risks, I haven’t installed TikTok and don’t know how easy it is to opt out of the data that the app collects, but the list is frighteningly long, as this list on Google Play (Android version) demonstrates. The list of what isn’t optional alone should make one nervous.
Just some of the data collected includes your name, user IDs (plural, so may include for other apps), “other info” (not specified), in-app search history, “app interactions,” web browsing history (all, not just in the app), “device or other IDs,” and ”other app performance data.”
That’s a pretty scary list of data that the CCP can access about you, on top of all your content and all your personal messages sent via the app. Here are just some of the things the app lists as “optional,” but presumably requiring you to opt-out manually where the Android system doesn’t ask you for permissions to be granted: your precise location, email, address, phone number, user payment info, purchase history, “other financial info,” your emails, and all your contacts including phone numbers and Facebook friends.
With all of that information, the CCP could piece together a very detailed picture of your life, who you interact with, where you go, what you do and what you spend money on. Banning TikTok and Douyin for government and military personnel is a no-brainer, the national security implications are enormous.
Should Taiwan follow India’s lead in completely banning them from Taiwan altogether? This month MODA will convene a multi-departmental meeting to discuss completely banning both, as well as Xiaohongshu.
The latter is an Instagram-like platform whose name translates literally as “Little Red Book” (小紅書). This is the nickname used for the famous book of Mao Zedong quotations that the Red Guards waved about while committing atrocities during the Cultural Revolution.
Douyin unofficially banned
It appears that Douyin is, in effect, unofficially banned in Taiwan. Searches in English and Chinese on the app stores of Google Play (Android), Apple (iPhone), Microsoft and Amazon either defaulted to TikTok or showed no results for the Douyin app, meaning someone would have to work pretty hard inside Taiwan to download it.
Banning the more relatively free international TikTok for everyone in Taiwan does come with some free speech and personal choice questions. Most of the content on TikTok from all descriptions is largely benign and apolitical, mostly fun videos, dance crazes and the like. This could be important for content creators, musicians and those who engage in dance competitions and will never cross the CCP’s radar.
Plus, the cat is largely out of the bag, the majority of the people who are going to download it probably already have. It’s not realistic to search everyone’s phones to get them to remove it.
The problem of misinformation, disinformation and CCP propaganda is also widespread, TikTok makes up only a tiny fraction of it. It is pervasive on all social media platforms, in some media outlets, in comments sections, on websites that are pushed up in the search rankings deliberately, in the answer sections on sites like Quora, just to name a few.
That is not to say that the government shouldn’t do anything at all. The ban on government employees should be extended to state-owned enterprises, especially those in key military, infrastructure management and financial sectors.
The ban could also be promoted to private firms in key positions in Taiwan’s economy. Executives and key employees in the semiconductor industry and military contractors, for example, put Taiwan at risk by installing TikTok.
The government could be doing a lot more to fight disinformation, misinformation, CCP propaganda and the risks of installing Chinese apps in general. Courses should be taught in schools, and a well-funded range of ads highlighting various topics (including the data risks of installing TikTok) should be rolled out across a range of media, including on social media and on in-app adverts.
These campaigns should also, in some cases, be tailored to specific demographics. Helpfully, DoubleThink Lab already has demographic information on those groups more susceptible, and they and other civil organizations have a wealth of material, research and experience to help out with the sort of information a campaign would need.
'Harm mitigation'
The government is also considering legislation that would make it harder for the CCP to spread propaganda in order to affect “harm mitigation,” knowing it would be almost impossible to remove all the installations of TikTok already out there. This is a good idea.
It would also be a good idea to have the equivalent of cigarette health warnings in all the app stores, including Google and Apple, on Chinese apps that potentially pose a risk. For example, for TikTok, a warning that outlines the data it collects, that it includes even personal messages, that data is kept forever, and that it is a platform that may promote propaganda to the user.
And for those who need the platform for work or to keep in touch with their friends, who may all be on the platform, they need to understand the importance of turning off as much of the data collection as possible. Ideally, they’ll even have a separate phone with no other personal information on it, just for risky Chinese apps.
The goal of all of these actions is to ensure that anyone who chooses to download TikTok and other apps like it that originate in China knows what they are getting into and the risks they are taking. I have a clear idea why it is dangerous for me to install TikTok, and more people need to understand this as well.
