The US Appeals Court has sided with the Biden administration, ruling that the First Amendment, a constitutional pillar of free speech, cannot be exploited to compromise US national security. Tiktok may appeal to the US Supreme Court, but the highest court in the US is not obligated to entertain the appeal.
So, it may decline to take the matter, essentially confirming TikTok’s departure from the US digital market.
Even if the Supreme Court decides to hear the appeal, given the suffocating number of conservative justices there, it is highly unlikely the ban will be lifted.
With that in mind, the US TikTok users, estimated to be around 170 million, will slowly be stopped from using the popular app.
However, despite the US controlling two mammoth Play Stores, Apple and Google, this is not the full story.
The US is backing the idea of having those giant Play Store owners scrub the TikTok app there, terminating its downloading and updating functionalities and depriving it of an Internet support system.
On the surface, this looks like TikTok will be a done deal, but that may not necessarily be true regarding technology and legal manoeuvres.
This article speculates on TikTok’s options for avoiding the ban by leveraging technology and legal tools to stay in the lucrative US market.
The US law banning TikTok in the US and forcing it to sell to US companies is not straightforward.
It is littered with booby traps in every angle one peeks at the issue.
US Congressional representatives took a swipe at TikTok, citing that US national security was at risk, but what is said in public is not necessarily what is being discussed in private.
At the heart of the TikTok ban is a digital war pitting Meta – the owners of Facebook on one hand and TikTok on the other.
READ RELATED: TikTok Turmoil: U.S. Legislation Threatens Ban if Not Sold to American Interests
President-elect Trump was spot on when recently, on the campaign trail, he backpedalled from his earlier TikTok ban posture, highlighting his genuine fears of Facebook monopolising social media platforms in the US.
Facebook has struggled to emulate TikTok’s exceptional logarithms that allow short, fast videos to pop up, play, and share.
Logarithmic functionalities are owned by the TikTok parent company, ByteDance, based in China.
ByteDance and the Chinese government have stated that TikTok is not for sale. I have been wondering, if TikTok—US is not for sale and is not planning to leave the lucrative US market, what will happen next?
ByteDance has indicated it will never sell its Tiktok logarithms, meaning purchasing TikTok minus its logarithms amounts to purchasing a shell company only with a Tiktok logo!
Most TikTok users will take a flight in a stampede once the sophistication of the short videos is unavailable in a new TikTok app or its equivalent.
TikTok has attempted to ingratiate the US regulators that user data is not shared by the parent company, ByteDance, in China, which can potentially be shared with the Chinese government that may be reprogrammed to indoctrinate the Americans with Chinese propaganda or compromise the US national security.
Some TikTok users disagree with the claim TikTok user data is even an issue.
They say all social media companies sell their user data to whoever can pay.
They intoned that if China needed US user data, it would always be available for sale without solely being dependent on TikTok for access and usage.
One Tiktok user posted a video of when she wanted to buy jewellery from the US website, and two days later, she got an email from a Chinese Alibaba giant company asking whether she was interested in buying the same earrings she had inquired from the US company.
Her question was, how did the Chinese company learn about her earrings’ search on the US website unless the US company sold her user data to the Chinese Alibaba company?
She concluded by saying she did not do the search on TikTok but on the US website, but the Chinese website already knew her exact search and was urging her to buy from them!
TikTok was not the culprit in her case, but greedy American companies were selling user data to whoever needed it.
She also noted that the ban on TikTok aimed to bulge Facebook with former TikTok members. She swore never to return to Facebook even if TikTok was banned on US soil.
Another TikTok US content creator whose livelihood is at stake believed in the national security reasons being circulated to justify the ban and suggested a more menacing reason behind the ban.
He said he had honed his skills over the years to make a comfortable living from TikTok, and all that may be turned into ashes by the ban is to shield US politicians who fear TikTok is opening younger voters’ eyes.
He said younger Americans were interacting with the outside world and were beginning to learn that their politicians were lying to them about foreign countries.
As far as he was concerned, political survival was traded against his economic survival!
The TikTok ban does not criminalize using the app but prohibits mobile app stores, such as Google and Apple, from allowing users to download or update it. It also denies Internet hosting services from hosting the app, effectively shutting it down in the US.
Both the Chinese government and the owners of the TikTok franchise, ByteDance, have said TikTok is not for sale, opting to keep TikTok’s proprietary algorithms under Chinese control.
TikTok tried to appease the federal government by shelling billions of dollars into storing user data in the US. However, some TikTok employees revealed that TikTok was still sharing user data with the parent company, ByteDance, based in China, which undermined that effort.
Oracle, a US company, will suffer financially when the ban takes effect on US soil because Tiktok will no longer need her services.
Oracle has received billions of dollars from TikTok for its user data storage. In June 2022, Tiktok moved its US user data to Oracle’s cloud platform, the short-form video company Tiktok had announced.
At the time, that decision was thought to have quelled US officials’ concerns that the social media company’s Chinese ties couldn’t pose US national security risks.
In a 2022 blog post, TikTok said it has “changed the default storage location of US user data” to Oracle and that “100% of US user traffic” was being hosted by the cloud provider, following more than a year of discussions with the company.
TikTok’s backups of US user data continued to be held on its proprietary servers in Virginia and Singapore until then, TikTok said, but those would eventually be deleted as part of the ongoing switch to Oracle (ORCL).
TikTok did not provide a timeframe for the planned deletion.
The Oracle-Walmart Deal
During Trump’s first term, when the TikTok ban was being seriously considered, Oracle and Walmart weighed in by buying 20% of a new company that would have been called TikTok Global, with ByteDance (the Beijing-based owner of TikTok) retaining 80%.
Reports suggested that Walmart and Oracle might have paid US$12 billion for their stake in TikTok Global.
At that time, Trump indicated he wanted US$5 billion from companies creating TikTok Global to go into an education fund to teach American children “the real history of our country”!
It was profusely clear that then Trump’s first term administration envisaged a nationalisation attempt.
One does not direct how proceedings of a sale will be discharged unless that person is the owner of the property, period! Otherwise, it was a government hostile takeover or brazenly stealing private property.
How Tiktok Can Avoid the US Ban
One way is diversification, which Oracle – Walmart mulled over during the first term of the Trump administration.
This deal may still be renewed because it has the quiet support of both ByteDance and the Chinese government.
Changes in legal names flip mandates imposed by statutes.
The current TikTok ban in the US is based on the legal name TikTok. Still, once the name changes to TikTok Global, the ban will have no effect subject to regulatory permission for the diversification.
It will be very difficult for the US regulators to block the diversification when US conglomerates are in play.
US regulators may demand that servers in Singapore be permanently closed and that user data be stored only on US-based servers.
It is not difficult for TikTok to make this decision because ByteDance and the Chinese government have favourably considered this kind of discussion.
Still, there is what is not being said in public: the CEO of US-based social media platforms must be a US citizen.
During the congressional hearings on TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, the CEO, was asked why he is not a US citizen. Congressional leaders tend to mistrust foreigners running sensitive institutions in the US due to suspicions of divided loyalty.
Shou Zi Chew is a Singaporean business executive who has been the chief executive officer of TikTok, an online video platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, since 2021.
Shou Zi Chew had promised to acquire US citizenship in due time.
At the moment, Shou Zi Chew is still clutching a green card that offers him permanent residence status, but given the complexity of the politics vibrating right now, he will process his US citizenship quickly or prepare to cede the top position to an American citizen.
Suppose US regulators decline to allow TikTok diversification as considered above; what options are left?
TikTok will not have to look far for inspiration. A rival social media platform, Telegram, may teach it some vital lessons.
Telegram is not based in the US but is available in both Google and Apple Play Stores.
With this US ban, the situation is different. Telegram servers are hosted in third-party data centres, but Telegram owns the servers and networks that store personal data.
Telegram rents a designated space in these data centres and does not share personal data with them.
Telegram’s servers are distributed worldwide, with several data centres, while the headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
TikTok will follow the Telegram example of goodwill, allaying fears it is a Chinese snitch.
According to the Telegram boss, Pavel Durov, a Russian, frequently intimated that many times he lands on US soil, regulators confront him and privately ask him to share user data or help shape opinion in his telegram, an intrusive inclination that he had fled from Russia.
Now Pavel Durov has been indicted in France on charges of not stopping aiding or condoning by inaction criminal activities in his Telegram app, such as child phonograph, money laundering and paedophiles.
READ RELATED: Telegram CEO’s Arrest in Paris Sparks Debate on Freedom of Speech and Western Censorship
Pavel Durov is out on bail, awaiting a court hearing in Paris. This is a harsh reminder of the damaging challenges of owning and managing a popular social media platform at the height of explosive geopolitical tensions and mistrust.
Another alternative is that TikTok may have to apply technology to bypass the US Play Stores. My intuition tells me this is already on the cards.
Apps shouldn’t depend on Play Stores to launch, share, and update them. Instead, they should have those functionalities inside the apps themselves or access those functionalities from independent websites not hosted by Google and Apple.
Websites and apps themselves may be equipped with app sharing and updating options.
Besides, many TikTok clone apps are available and will continue mushrooming no sooner than the ban comes into effect because of the huge demand.
Another option is hosting equivalents to Google and Apple Stores to end the US monopoly that is now being parlayed to curb freedom of expression.
China, too, has banned most US social media platforms in what is called the Chinese firewall.
This, too, ought to end sometime in the future.
VPNs may help disguise user identity, but they have limitations, too. VPNs cannot replace Google and Apple Stores, and they are getting pricey and out of the reach of many users.
As former president Bill Clinton once counselled, the best way to fight technological nuisances is through technology itself, not through legislative effort. The incoming Trump administration will soon learn the wisdom of those words.
Suppose it succeeds in beating the US ban through technological means. In that case, it will alert other social media app operators that the digital leash imposed by American Play Store operators is self-imposed, along with the excessive annual fees to host those apps.
Many apps will declare freedom and empower their apps with app sharing and updating facilities inside those apps. It is a technological challenge within human reach.
The tug-of-war between US politicians on one side and the other may push for technological breakthroughs never anticipated, even as recently as today, to protect freedom of speech, which this ban is determined to curtail.
One Napoleon king was right when he said great generals are made in the wars. Can Tiktok rise and be counted in this hour of distressing need?
Over 170 million US users are counting on its audacious move to keep it alive on US soil despite congressional meddling and interference.
