Lhe Congress of the United States of America is in a bellicose mood. Against China and Russia, but also against TikTok. It is also in the same text of law, approved on Saturday April 20 by an overwhelming majority, that he included, alongside aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, the ban on the network social. Or more precisely the obligation imposed on its owner, the Chinese group ByteDance, to sell its American activity within a year.
Parliamentarians are alarmed at the risk of espionage by the Chinese government, which would have access to all the private data of 170 million American users. The CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, may claim that Beijing had never asked him for anything and that if he did, he would refuse, nothing works.
Not even the 1.5 billion dollars (1.4 billion euros) spent since 2020 to secure data in the United States with the help of the Oracle group. It was enough for him to recognize that, technically, the parent company, in China, can access American data for this to be enough for politicians of all sides. The fight against China has become the last non-partisan issue in the United States.
Three previous attempts
But Shou Zi Chew did not lose the game. The three previous ban attempts have been lost in limbo or abandoned. That of President Donald Trump, in 2020, that of Montana, in November 2023, and, finally, a previous law adopted in mid-March by the same House of Representatives. Each time, the principle of freedom of expression, America’s first amendment, was the strongest.
Because if the American Congress is almost unified around its Chinese obsession, its posture hides another concern, that for its youth. A third of Americans under 30 get their news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. They buy there too. TikTok estimates its contribution to the country’s economy at $24 billion. Parliamentarians, whose average age is 58, no longer understand their grandchildren from Generation Z, born between 1995 and 2012, glued to their phones. Behind the resurgence of the “yellow peril” of the 1900s, the even older resurgence of the “young peril”. An explosive cocktail.