The TikTok Cyberthreat: Why It Needs To Be Shut Down

In September 2016, the tech giant ByteDance released the famous app “Douyin,” which was marketed as a social networking and content creation app. Later in 2017, ByteDance acquired the social media app Musical.ly, an app known for its 15-second lip-sync videos, and used its database and format to create a platform with familiar features under its new, infamous name–Tiktok. At the peak of the digital age, TikTok has outdone any other social media platform by becoming the fastest-growing app today. With this high increase in users in the last four years, they now possess a huge database that contains the majority of the globe’s information. The quick rise of TikTok lies in its algorithm and its quick analysis of the user's likes and dislikes, making the app by far the most addicting social media platform ever known. Fascinated by its popularity, people have started to look deeper into the way the app operates. Disguised as a ploy for self-expression, community building, and stardom, TikTok has become a global phenomenon with omnipotent power. The app is known to be subject to political obstruction, placing the globe's data in a dangerous limbo. Thus, it has become the biggest cyber threat to our society. More than any other social media platform, TikTok compromises global privacy and security and is now known to have a negative impact on its users psychologically. Therefore, the app needs to be not moderated, updated, or intercepted but completely shut down.

TikTok hides behind its mission statement: “To inspire creativity and bring joy.” Like most social media platforms, the app makes most of its profit by offering advertising services to businesses looking to target a specific audience. Social media is, by far, the most accurate and smartest marketing tool today. We recognize this business by observing the patterns of data tracking and ad targeting in the past years with some of our most beloved apps, like Facebook. However, users tend to forget the role they play when scrolling through their FYPs, feeding TikTok’s powerful algorithm, which consumes their data.

Because the app profits from advertising, its biggest priority is maintaining its user engagement through its algorithm. Studies show how it is “optimized not to provide accuracy but to maximize user attention spent on the site” (Rhaman, 2018). Prioritizing their business, the app tends to overlook things like misinformation, violence, and the user's safety overall. This makes the algorithm people's main focus when studying the app. TikTok has publicly shared a broad outline of the way it operates: likes, comments, shares, captions, sounds, and hashtags are just a few things that the algorithm evaluates. Yet, arguably, one of the most essential things the algorithm analyzes is how much time you spend on videos. Every video you watch steers you into what people popularly like to call the different “sides” of TikTok. The algorithm makes the user addicted by studying what they like and sending an infinite stream of related videos in return. With every video, TikTok can figure out the user’s sexuality, music taste, and even if the user is depressed. This kind of sensitive information can be used to micro-target users into becoming more dependent on the app. Innocent apps like TikTok “know far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens” (Lanchester, 10). 

Ever since the rise of social media, there have been big privacy conversations attached to companies like TikTok. Though previously posed as an individual privacy issue, it has become increasingly concerning as we relate it to monopoly power. TikTok's past acquisition of other social media platforms raises the question of the potential monopolization of the company and its gatekeeping power over content and information. Big data influences the way society works at large, enabling issues within monopolies, like scoring systems that continue to encourage pre-existing biases. Therefore, “It becomes not just a personal issue but a structural one: a way to limit the kinds of data that firms can collect, in turn reducing the risk of arbitrary and biased technological power” (Rhaman, 2018). Along with these concerns, TikTok has been accused of selling people's data to third parties. In 2019, TikTok agreed to pay $5.9 million to settle FTC allegations about the collection and storing of the personal data of minors who frequented the app. Therefore, countries like India and Bangladesh have decided to ban TikTok and identify it as “a threat to the privacy of its citizens.”

In fact, in August 2020, former president Trump issued an order to ban TikTok in the U.S. that read: “TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.” The order claimed that TikTok had the means to track government officials and employees while potentially using the data as blackmail. The order was later revoked by President Joe Biden, but he did have some of his own concerns, for which he assigned the US Commerce Department to work with other agencies to protect the data of people in the United States. Tensions continue to spread to a lot of countries: In Ireland, investigations are being conducted that look into the potential transfer of TikTok’s data to China. The UK, for example, also expressed concerns about data security risks linked to the app, which caused the parliament to shut down its account.  However, this isn’t a new phenomenon. People have always been surveilled by governments, and social media has only made that task easier today. Documents obtained by The Intercept show how “Intelligence-gathering by the federal government has employed open-source information, such as social media, to profile and keep track of activists” (Joseph, Hussain, 2018). There's a common misconception that the data acquired from the platform's users is freely given away. However, this is hardly the case when companies are collecting information that users don’t exactly consider valuable or a violation of one’s privacy.

Nevertheless, as we all know, mass surveillance is not new. Author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff has warned us about social media’s surveillance and its menacing evolution. In an article for The Guardian, she describes surveillance capitalism as “a titanic struggle between capital and each one of us. It is a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy.” TikTok’s moderators have access to information its users post privately, videos under the “friends only” and “only me” sections, and direct messages. This unlimited access to user data sets TikTok apart from other apps that are now offering end-to-end encryption on messages, for example, Signal. Criticism of TikTok’s big data collection is based on the ear of data brokers selling and third parties acquiring people’s personal data. ByteDance is believed to be under obligation by Chinese law to share information with its government. Skepticism around TikTok is due to the Chinese Communist Party’s strict surveillance model, its aggressive approach to controlling its population, and its belief in global dominance. TikTok has since denied the claims that they share or sell data to any third party. Most people are not as concerned with the collection of data as they are with the platform's potential use of it as a political weapon. However, the general public shouldn't only be concerned with China’s surveillance: “Even if TikTok were American-owned, there is no law or regulation that prevents Beijing from buying its data on the open data broker market” (Smith, 2021).

People commonly look at social media as a luxury and feel honored to use it. Their data collection feels like a small price to pay for the benefits offered by social media. Some users fail to recognize targeted advertisements and algorithms as a loss of autonomy and commodification. Therefore, social media platforms are praised similarly to the way new information technologies were in Silicon Valley during the 70s as something that seeks to “empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state” (Barbrook, Cameron, 7). TikTok has become second nature to an entire generation, it almost acts as their own language, hence the strong devotion to it. In 2020, talks about the US banning TikTok mostly led to a big discussion about the importance of free speech. People seem more concerned with the idea of being censored than the violation of their own privacy, failing to acknowledge the already ongoing censorship inside TikTok. There is no such thing as free speech in social media. Speech is being constantly moderated, some voices are silenced while others are amplified, all based on the algorithms. The app not only regulates speech but also has the ability to “shadowban” and delete accounts as it collects data. Inside TikTok, speech is only free so long as they allow it. 

Other than its threat to privacy and security, TikTok is a social media platform that participates in the misinformation epidemic. The app focuses so much on generating content that will keep the users engaged that it fails to acknowledge the major issue of misinformation. There is no way out of it, as a user you are relying on moderators, "legions of low-paid workers [who] are reviewing posts flagged as harmful, a task gruesome enough that the company has agreed to pay $52 million in mental-health compensation to settle a lawsuit by more than 10,000 moderators” (Bazelon, 2021). Misinformation and the platform's format of 15-second, vertical content have proved to have adverse psychological effects on the generations most susceptible. According to Forbes, 167 million TikTok videos are watched in a minute, achieving something that no other app has: “TikTok has met the consumer with the perfect delivery length for our narrowing attention spans” (Fallon, 2022). TikTok changed the game for generations to come, Gen Z was raised with YouTube, and now, TikTok. Think of the recent exposure and content on what we have come to know as “The first TikTok war” (Russia- Ukraine). The oversaturation of media and its overwhelming production of content is something we have grown accustomed to. Its rapid spread only continues to desensitize users. 

This generation will never fully recover its autonomy, ceding their data under ignorance and lust for platforms like TikTok. The app essentially owns its users, yet they are starting to refuse and protest against this surveillance. My belief is that we are in too deep. Scholars argue that “a more radical response, then, would be to impose structural restraints: limits on the structure of technology firms, their powers, and their business models, to forestall the dynamics that lead to the most troubling forms of infrastructural power in the first place.” (Rhaman, 2018) However, seeing this attempt at constructing these regulations through antitrust laws, it's clear that big data is evolving at an incredible speed that can no longer be controlled. Big tech companies face anti-trust lawsuits regularly, most related to global privacy concerns. There is no real evidence to prove TikTok has sold any of its users' data. Yet, they can handle and outsmart these regulations. Since a lot of information is going in and out of the backdoor, users cannot even begin to process how their privacy is being fully violated by apps like TikTok. We have no preexisting knowledge of how to stop it from happening. Hopefully, the public will soon run its course of "cancelling" TikTok. Therefore, I believe shutting the app down is the only efficient way to ensure our safety and regain autonomy over our data and the course of our lives. 

Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 1996, pp. 44–72., https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439609526455.

Bazelon, Emily. “Why Is Big Tech Policing Speech? Because the Government Isn't.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Jan. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/magazine/free-speech-tech.html.

Joseph, George, and Murtaza Hussain. “FBI Tracked an Activist Involved with Black Lives Matter as They Traveled across the U.S., Documents Show.” The Intercept, The Intercept, 19 Mar. 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-surveillance/.

Keith White. “The Killer App.” The Baffler, 10 June 2020, http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/the-killer-app.

Lanchester, John. “You Are the Product.” London Review of Books, Aug. 2017.

Rhaman, K. Sabeel. “The New Octopus.” Logic Magazine, 28 May 2019, https://logicmag.io/scale/the-new-octopus/.

Smith, Ben. “How TikTok Reads Your Mind.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Dec. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. YouTube, YouTube, 20 Dec. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw.