The battle for TikTok’s future could be drawn out by legal maneuvering or political posturing, but if the Chinese social media app loses those battles, the technological battle for its survival will quickly be over.
The battle for TikTok’s future could be drawn out by legal maneuvering or political posturing, but if the Chinese social media app loses those battles, the technological battle for its survival will quickly be over.
Facing a looming deadline to sell or be blocked from US servers, the Supreme Court of the United States has just agreed to hear the arguments on the future of TikTok in the final days before its deadline. Lawyers for TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, hope the high court will be swayed by arguments centered on the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.
“If I were a lawyer on the other side, I’d say, ‘Wait a second.’ Your client, the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party or TikTok, the Chinese company, are guilty of blocking hundreds and hundreds of much larger news sites,” said Gabriel Robins, a computer science professor at the University of Virginia.
“Isn’t that fallacious? Like they have no idea why we want to block one of their websites, when they’ve been blocking hundreds and hundreds of our websites for years,” he said. he added.
Robins noted that China already blocks websites like Google, YouTube and a number of international media outlets. He recounted the time he spoke about the Tiananmen Square massacre to Chinese students and they had no idea what he was talking about.
“They cast a very, very wide net when it came to censorship. And here we are trying to do it in a much gentler way, and just once, towards China, and this is met with enormous resistance from China,” he noted.
Robins said arguments that ByteDance is a completely independent private company don’t really ring true, since China can access all the data it wants.
“The company has no choice but to capitulate. There is no concept of due process or some sort of subpoena mechanism that they would need to prove that they have the right or the need to do this,” he said. “They literally come and take whatever they want from companies in China. This is how China works.
And he says that if ByteDance loses its efforts to keep TikTok, the same technology China uses to prevent citizens from reading the Washington Post, the New York Times or seeing anything on YouTube could also prevent TikTok from being viewed here.
“Technologically, Internet servers can refuse to transmit messages to or from the TikTok domain name, tiktok.com or any other server domain name they use,” Robins said.
Some people might try to get around the ban by using a VPN, but most people wouldn’t, and the site would lose a massive number of users to other social media platforms. But if ByteDance manages to reach a deal to sell the site, the process of transferring all the data could happen very quickly.
“Servers do not need to physically move. They can stay in place. A lot of things like servers are already on American soil anyway,” he noted. “(The new owner) will take it over step by step and keep it running for a while so that users won’t be disturbed and won’t get angry. And at some point, the last employees of TikTok will leave the building and the building will be occupied by employees (of the new owner).”
From there, it would be up to software engineers to ensure nothing is left in the software to allow China any future access to users and their data stored by TikTok.
“You have to go through the code line by line,” Robins said. “Sit down and look at all the source code line by line and remove from the source code any Trojans that might be left in place and with nefarious intent.”
Robins said it was all doable.
“Companies do this all the time. …When one bank buys another…they want to make sure that when they merge their customer base, their server base and their databases, you won’t have Trojan horses sneaking in through the backdoor , waiting to loot all your accounts and transfer all your money,” he said.
Get the latest news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
© 2024 WTOP. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located in the European Economic Area.