Shortly before the U.S. Department of Commerce’s ban on all TikTok app downloads and application updates within the U.S. took effect on September 20, Donald Trump approved a deal that allows TikTok to continue to operate in the U.S. as long as it is acquired by Oracle or Walmart. Yet the ban, imposed by the U.S. on grounds of national security concerns, continues to apply to WeChat. The Trump administration’s move has taken into account the trade war and information war between China and the U.S., and military tension in the Indo-Pacific region. It also highlights the fact that the U.S. is now alerted to how the Chinese government has long been penetrating U.S. society via its social media platforms and communication software. Such infiltration has seriously jeopardized the security of America’s national defense and the country’s overall national interests.

Under the premise of maintaining the stability of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule and within the confines of a planned economy, China’s state-controlled cyberspace has over the years developed into an online ecosystem that replaces all kinds of international platforms. Weibo, Douyin, Weixin and Youku are respectively the Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp (or Messenger) and YouTube of China. QQ, similar to online platforms such as MSN, is also self-sufficient. Multinational companies can hardly circumvent the high wall erected by China. There is almost no free market competition. Meanwhile, TikTok and WeChat, which have stretched their tentacles to democratic countries, do not only pose risks but are a crisis that democratic states have to deal with.

TikTok, an app widely popular among young people, was launched in 2017. Since then, it has made its way into foreign markets through mergers and acquisitions. To date, its global market share is bigger than that of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. As of the first quarter of 2020, the app surpassed 165 million downloads in the U.S.. Between January to April, amid lockdowns prompted by the Wuhan coronavirus that was spreading around the world from China, people turned to the internet and relied on the social media more than ever as a means to keep in touch with others. As a result, TikTok recorded even more downloads and a sharp increase in revenue.

WeChat and WeChat Pay, on the other hand, are chiefly used by Chinese people living in different parts of the world and people who have to contact companies or individuals in China. In China, one can hardly use any app other than WeChat to contact their friends and families within the country. As an app facilitating domestic online communication and communication between residents in China and people overseas, WeChat enjoys an almost monopolistic position.

As democratic countries let netizens roam around the cyberspace while China bans Western social media platforms and communication software, anyone who wants to make instant contact with Chinese companies and individuals in China cannot but use WeChat. This is how WeChat gets to dominate the market. And although TikTok is the overseas version of Douyin, it can hardly be treated as an entity separate from its parent company ByteDance. With China banning Western social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and amid the pandemic, TikTok has been able to greatly expand its market in Europe and the U.S., crowding out the market space for the said Western platforms and resulting in seriously unfair competition.

If such violation of free competition goes on, multinational companies that have economic and trade ties with China or engage in cultural exchange with the country would all be forced to use WeChat, and the general public would become highly dependent on TikTok. When that happens, WeChat and TikTok would be a monster monopolizing the global market and at the same time fed by China.

Although people use TikTok and WeChat for different reasons, they both pose great risks to democratic societies. This is because the two apps, controlled by a government that needs to gather military intelligence and implements its commercial competition strategy, use their own “backdoor” feature to gather users' background, biometrics, and data on users' commercial and political behaviors. On August 28, before TikTok’s U.S. operation was to be sold, the Chinese government, in what was an urgent move, released a list of prohibited and restricted technology export items. These items include TikTok’s core artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and algorithms. The move suggests TikTok’s back-end technology may well harm other countries' national security. If the U.S. acquires the technology, the world can justify its accusations that China uses the social media to carry out hacking activities and steal a huge amount of personal data. Therefore, Beijing would rather lose the U.S. market than export TikTok’s algorithms.

The success of the merger is largely attributable to the fact that Oracle and Walmart, unlike Microsoft, do not insist on a full-scale acquisition of TikTok’s algorithms and AI technologies. Meanwhile, almost everyone knows that WeChat users' comments, texts and audiovisual elements, and data related to the consumption behaviors on WeChat Pay all get analyzed by AI technologies after being sent to China and will be used by the Chinese authorities to violate human rights.

To be sure, major internet platforms in the U.S. may also utilize users' personal information to their advantage and would not want to publicize their algorithms. Nevertheless, there is free market competition in the U.S. market. Although American companies cannot exclude state-sponsored advertisements related to government policies, they still enjoy a high degree of autonomy. In criminal investigations, if the authorities try to obtain from them users' personal data, most U.S. companies would say no if the authorities' demand has no legal basis or comes with no court order. But TikTok and WeChat can never say no to the Chinese government, which controls them from behind the scenes. The AI technologies and algorithms that back the operations of TikTok and WeChat are not merely capital tools but a means for China to permeate the whole world and steal core technologies as it strives for significant military progress.

These days, there has been markedly greater improvement in cooperation and trust between Taiwan and the U.S. on the diplomatic front. That reflects their joint effort to go against China. As the U.S. is taking actions against TikTok and WeChat, Taiwan needs to seek to win greater trust from the U.S.. Taiwan should also take into account the fact that TikTok and WeChat may endanger its own interests and information security. So, at a time when the Digital Development Department is about to be set up, Taiwan should enact related legislations or existing regulations via the Draft Digital Communication Act, make advanced plans targeting Chinese platforms, and impose strict restrictions on platforms that seek to be listed publicly in Taiwan. TikTok and WeChat are no less harmful than iQiyi. If Taiwan misses the opportunity to stop the apps from infiltrating the country, it would find it difficult to guard itself against the offensive of China’s information war in the future.

(PengJui-jen, research fellow of the Science and Technology Law Institute at the Institute for Information Industry, and assistant professor of the Department of Political Science at Soochow University)

Click here for Chinese version

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play