If TikTok is about to be banned, Trudeau should tell us why

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The American House of Representatives has voted to ban TikTok from American app stores unless its Chinese-based parent company sells it within 180 days.

Here in Canada, the Trudeau government ordered a national security review of TikTok last September, but they won’t tell you anything about it.

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It’s a typical Canadian answer, sorry, to protect you, we can’t tell you what we are doing.

The review was confirmed by Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne on Thursday morning. Later in the day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to the issue but wouldn’t say much.

“As you know, Canada made the determination that no government phones or devices can have the TikTok app, that’s a matter of security and safety. We’re watching of course, the debate going on in the States, and I can’t comment on national security reviews,” Trudeau said Thursday in Windsor.

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It’s typical Canadian response, something is a matter of national security, but we can’t tell you any details in order to keep you safe.

There is obviously something up with TikTok and Canadians should be briefed on why this app on the phones of teens and young people across the country is such a concern.

It’s not just the Trudeau government in Ottawa that has banned the app on government devices – Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, B.C., Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, PEI and several municipalities have banned the app on government phones.

India banned the app outright in 2020 while other countries have either banned it or placed restrictions on it including Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Taiwan, the UK and EU.

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Tech giant Amazon asked workers to delete TikTok from their phones in 2020 but reversed course after experiencing a strong backlash.

Wednesday’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives passed with a strong bi-partisan majority, 352-65 with 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans opposing it. That should tell us this isn’t a matter of free speech being curtailed by government, but something larger.

The bill’s future in the Senate is unclear but it has the possibility of passing and if it does, President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill into law. Whether the bill would survive court challenges is also unclear, but the simple act of it passing would put incredible pressure on TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.

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The accusations against TikTok, via ByteDance, is that the company shares user data with the Chinese government. There are also accusations that the algorithm is manipulated to present pro-Beijing or other political agendas.

The Israeli government has made claims that TikTok promotes an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agenda. A recent study found that just 30 minutes a day on the app increased the likelihood of users hold anti-Semitic views by 17%.

Last fall, TikTok faced a barrage of negative headlines after video posts of people praising Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America, his manifesto on why he attacked the United States. It’s popularity in the days after the Hamas terror attacks was one of the key reasons TikTok was accused of manipulating their system to push political messaging.

Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are key pillars of western democratic values and need to be upheld. Yet, if ByteDance is using TikTok to funnel information or intelligence to Beijing then that is a problem that goes beyond freedom of speech.

If there are reasons for governments to consider banning TikTok, including our own government here in Canada, they should be upfront about what they know rather than hiding the information.

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