Name: America’s love-hate relationship with TikTok - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
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Hello, I'm lise doucet from the BBC world service.

The United States has called China its most active and persistent cyber threat.

Its warning Beijing could interfere in the 2024 election.

Washington has been consumed in a debate over the Chinese owned app TikTok.

Intelligence officials say the danger Chinese espionage and influence stretches far beyond the realm of social media.

How worried should Americans be about Chinese interference in this year's presidential election?

Joining us today is my colleague John Sudworth, a BBC North America correspondent based in in New York.

Also joining us from New York is McKenna Kelly, senior politics writer for the news website wired.

I know a lot of our global story listeners will be TikTok users, but

First, around the world, hundreds of millions of people use TikTok globally.

In the United States, about 170 million Americans use it.

And it's people of all ages, very young folks.

The app has a big reputation for talking to Gen Z and young people, but

a recent Pew study actually pointed out that the average TikTok user is about 30 years old.

Of course, there's people of all ages on the app.

I was really struck by a Pew Research survey last year that found about One third of U.S.

adults under the age of 30 not just use TikTok, they get their news from TikTok.

And I think for a lot of us, we still associate it with, you know, dancing dogs and fashion videos, but

it's not, is it at this point, it's more of a short form YouTube where you can find just about anything on the app.

There's of course, news, content, the dance content you mentioned, but other things as well.

Like I love using the app to find crochet patterns.

Those are some of the people that I follow.

No, I'm not into the TikTok crocheting community.

I don't think that is the part of TikTok that the US political establishment is all that concerned about.

But you know, as a journalist here in America, you can't help but be honest.

What is abundantly clear that a pretty well always divided House of Representatives voted with overwhelming bipartisan support to demand that TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, either sell TikTok or see it banned in the United States.

Why do you think suddenly TikTok has united the House of Representatives?

The whole issue of China is, if you like, a rare space of bipartisanship within a very divided US Political landscape that has shifted very quickly over the past sort of few years or so from a position where most US Administrations going back, you know, Clinton, Bush, Obama, took a relatively pragmatic view towards China.

From the moment of Donald Trump's election, that began to shift, and

the whole political spectrum has moved very dramatically.

But McCann, I was really struck when opposition was expressed to the bill.

It was the business community saying, my business is going to go under.

TikTok's for you page is a very accurate algorithm.

And if someone is selling whatever they're selling, T shirts that have a specific slogan on it or, I don't know, hand soaps or all kinds of, for me, crochet patterns on the TikTok shop, it's very easy to do and it's very easy to find your audience on TikTok, the people who want to buy those things.

So, yeah, there's many, many sneakers, small businesses, whether it's just someone in their house making little soaps that they want to sell to even bigger enterprises like huge makeup companies that sell on TikTok shop as well.

If you do ban TikTok, you make the others already powerful even more powerful.

And McKenna, Donald Trump said banning TikTok would make Facebook more powerful.

And he's already, at least on the day he spoke, said that Facebook was the enemy of, of the people.

They must be just sitting back and watching this and waiting.

Meta isn't exactly just standing by either.

In 2018, I believe it was reported that Facebook was paying a GOP marketing firm called Targeted victory to plant op eds in newspapers across the country that made TikTok look really bad.

They were part of this series of, if you remember, like pointing out the tide pod challenge and all these dangerous challenges that were on TikTok.

Of spreading a lot of this in local newspapers.

So the bill has been approved by the House of Representatives.

Then it goes to the senate and could take time there.

So will there ever be a day where this will actually go through?

The question is not whether you can ban TikTok, but

whether you can ban TikTok without undermining your own values of freedom of speech.

And there will be almost certainly room there for TikTok to challenge this on those grounds.

I think a good example is to bring up that, that Montana, the state of Montana here in the US tried to ban TikTok last year.

They passed a bill, it was signed by the governor.

And then TikTok and a group of creators sued the state of Montana saying that it was in violation of the First Amendment.

That case hasn't been totally resolved yet, but

the argument was valid enough for a federal judge late last year to at least file an injunction so it wouldn't go into place until it is totally resolved in the courts.

Do we actually know what, if anything, the Chinese government is doing when it comes to TikTok?

Last week, I know that the House and Senate were briefed on security threats related to TikTok before that vote that took place.

But some people came out of it saying that they felt extremely troubled.

And other lawmakers came out of it saying that this wasn't really anything that we hadn't heard before.

Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report calling China, and

I quote, the most active and persistent cyber threat to the US Government, private sector and critical infrastructure networks.

It warned of Chinese hacking and even more of espionage, and

said Beijing wanted to sow doubts about US Leadership and undermine democracy.

Well, in general terms, I don't think it is a controversial thing to say that China has an interest in undermining US Democracy.

It says so itself to a large extent, from the chairman of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping down.

They have made it very clear that they see themselves as in a sort of existential battle with Western values.

And in that context, we've seen over the past few years, decade or so, right across the full kind of array of tools that the Chinese propaganda machine has at its disposal, efforts to push that message not only to its own citizens in China, but

to take that message to global audiences as well.

You know, as John pointed out, they're only targeting TikTok because it has a Chinese owner.

Although ByteDance has tried to separate itself from, from, from China.

There is a discussion about the tech giants and how they control so much, and

it seems not many people are willing or able to do anything about them.

I feel like the Congress has been in this big discussion about data privacy and data security, not just for companies stationed abroad, but

US based companies like Meta, Twitter, now X Instagram, all kinds of different platforms.

And I think the last time this conversation really heated up around privacy was 2018 and the fallout from Cambridge Analytica with Facebook.