So long as TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, it will remain a dangerous vector for Beijing’s information warfare and a national security threat to the West. Canada should therefore follow the United States’ lead and ban the social media app, unless it is sold to an American buyer.
With an estimated 1 billion active users, TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social media platforms. While there is conflicting data on its market penetration, it appears that roughly 20-50 percent of Canadian and American adults are on the app, with usage heavily skewing towards younger demographics, especially teenagers.
This has profoundly influenced Westerners’ information diets. A 2024 poll found that 17 percent of all U.S. adults—and 39 percent of young adults specifically—regularly get their news from TikTok.
For years, Western policymakers have expressed concerns about the fact that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs and, despite being incorporated in the Cayman Islands, is functionally based in China. As Beijing’s authoritarian government can exert near-total control over any company headquartered on its territory, ByteDance is often considered a de facto state actor.
TikTok’s critics object to the fact that the app seemingly shares sensitive data with Beijing and that its algorithms apparently censor or amplify information based on China’s geostrategic interests. While media reports often portray these two concerns as being equally relevant, in truth, the latter is much more important.
Under its 2017 National Intelligence Law, Beijing can easily compel ByteDance to grant it access to TikTok’s data. While there is currently no evidence of widespread privacy breaches, ByteDance has been accused of helping Beijing identify Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protestors and spying on a small number of American journalists.
However, even if TikTok’s data is shared with Chinese officials, it is unclear whether this constitutes a significant national security threat.
While TikTok gathers more user data than most social media platforms, its practices nonetheless remain within industry norms. Critically, the data that TikTok can hand over to Beijing pales in comparison to what can be legally purchased on the open market from third-party data brokers.
These brokers, which predominantly operate in the United States, take advantage of lax privacy and data protection standards to aggregate information from a wide variety of sources (i.e. social media and credit card companies, customer loyalty programs, health tech services). They then sell individually-identified comprehensive profiles that are, in some cases, highly sensitive, creating significant security risks (i.e. exposing whether intelligence workers visit brothels).
Considering the realities of global data markets, it seems that TikTok’s threat primarily lies not in potential espionage but in the alleged politicization of its content-recommendation algorithms.
A TikTok app is shown on a phone in San Francisco, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. Jeff Chiu/AP Photo.
ByteDance keeps the details of its algorithms private, so the extent of this tampering, if it exists, remains unknown. However, a 2023 study by the Network Cognition Research Institute (NCRI) found credible evidence of bias by comparing how many posts were associated with certain hashtags (or subject matter) across TikTok and Instagram.
The researchers expected that, for any given hashtag, they would generally find between 1.5 to 2 times more posts on Instagram than TikTok, as Instagram has a commensurately larger user base. Hashtags unrelated to China’s interests generally conformed to this expectation, with pop culture hashtags having an average Instagram/TikTok ratio of 2.2 (i.e. searching “#TaylorSwift” yielded 21.3 million Instagram posts and 10.7 million TikTok posts).
However, geostrategically sensitive hashtags had highly unusual ratios—181.1 for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, 81.5 for Tiananmen Square, 37.7 for Tibet, and 15.3 for Taiwan. To illustrate concretely: searching “#HongKongProtest” yielded 132,359 posts on Instagram, but only 762 posts on TikTok.
The NCRI also found suspicious ratios for hashtags related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran’s pro-democracy protests, and the Kashmir independence movement. This suggests that TikTok heavily biased its algorithms in favour of Russia, Hamas, and the Iranian government while undermining India, China’s regional rival.
The researchers concluded that there was a “strong possibility” that TikTok amplifies or suppresses content according to Beijing’s interests. However, their results could not be replicated by third parties because, days after this study was published, TikTok disabled hashtag searches for most politically sensitive subjects, citing “misuse” of the feature.
Despite some methodological limitations, these findings make a solid case that TikTok is functionally an information warfare tool—so why should any Western government permit its use?
Some libertarians have argued that banning TikTok is an affront to free speech, but this is nonsense. Without TikTok, it is still perfectly possible to express pro-China views—there are countless other platforms for this type of speech. Banning TikTok only ensures that these views are not given an artificial advantage in the public marketplace of ideas.
A right to free speech does not entail a right to have one’s speech amplified by foreign adversaries. Were it otherwise, media outlets controlled by hostile states could conceivably operate with impunity just so long as they publish some political expression by local citizens.
Want to ban Russia Today? Too bad. That violates the “free speech” of its local correspondents and guests. Want to prosecute Tenet Media for clandestinely receiving millions in Russian funding to push Kremlin propaganda? Back off, lest you curtail the speech of its American talent roster.
See how silly this is?
Banning TikTok is not only ethically defensible, but it is also technically straightforward. The U.S.’s new law, which has yet to come into effect, will prevent internet service providers from accessing TikTok and prohibit app stores from distributing it, too (the latter prevents new downloads or software updates for mobile users).
Some determined users may bypass the ban (i.e. accessing TikTok’s desktop version via VPN), but that is fine. If 90 percent of users migrate off a platform in a given country, that renders it near-useless for the stragglers, because most of their friends are no longer there. The “social” aspect of “social media” means that a perfect ban is unnecessary.
Canada currently prohibits government workers from using TikTok due to espionage concerns, which misses the point. To protect Canadian sovereignty and thwart information warfare, a total ban is needed.
