- Title: 'Extremely difficult and probably unlikely' for TikTok to be banned in the US
- Date: 7th March 2023
- Summary: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (RECENT - MARCH 2, 2023) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) CO-FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN AT TEACHAIDS AND THE FORMER CLICK FRAUD CZAR AT GOOGLE, SHUMAN GHOSEMAJUMDER, SAYING: "It's extremely difficult to imagine TikTok or any app of this scale being banned across the United States. There are a number of problems that are associated with the government doing that, not the least of which is, it's sort of unprecedented in terms of there's been no other app like this that has reached this level of popularity that has suddenly become banned in the United States. So I think practically, it's extremely difficult and probably unlikely."
- Embargoed: 21st March 2023 20:02
- Keywords: Duke Loves Taxes Shuman The Jarr TikTok
- Location: VARIOUS
- City: VARIOUS
- Country: US
- Topics: Lawmaking,North America,Government/Politics,Editors' Choice
- Reuters ID: LVA00G444602032023RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: CONTAINS PROFANE LANGUAGE
A bipartisan group of 12 U.S. senators is set to introduce legislation on Tuesday (March 7) that would give Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they are found to pose national security threats.
The app is used by more than 100 million Americans.
TikTok, a unit of China's ByteDance, has come under increasing fire over fears that user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests. TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew is due to appear before the U.S. Congress on March 23.
"It's extremely difficult to imagine TikTok or any app of this scale being banned across the United States," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, co-founder and chairman at TeachAids, a nonprofit building health education software and the former click fraud czar at Google. "There are a number of problems that are associated with the government doing that, not the least of which is, it's sort of unprecedented in terms of there's been no other app like this that has reached this level of popularity that has suddenly become banned in the United States. So I think practically, it's extremely difficult and probably unlikely."
For TikTok content creator Duke Alexander Moore, he owes his success to the social media platform.
Moore went from being unhoused to creating a 7-figure tax business in just two years thanks to TikTok. He grew up in Dallas, Texas loving math and was always interested in taxes ever since his parents drove him to H&R Block when he was 16 years old so he could file his taxes from the income he made as a model for JCPenney and Frito-Lay.
His life hit rock bottom in his 20s.
"In this picture, I am pretty much dead. It was my fifth or sixth failed suicide attempt," Moore said in his TikTok @dukelovestaxes with more than 3 million followers. "When I finally came out of it, I had tubes going all throughout my body and I was also handcuffed to the hospital bed."
For most of 2013 through 2017, he spent most of his time in mental hospitals, drug rehabilitation and jail. He ended up getting evicted from his apartment and his truck got repossessed. He filed for bankruptcy.
"One day I woke up and I was like, 'I'm tired of living like this.' I'm sick of it," he said.
Moore said he had nowhere to go but up.
"I had nothing to lose. Nothing. I had all to give. I believe when you're that low, you push yourself to really do these things that are just incredible," he said.
He started his tax consulting business in 2018 but "it didn't do well."
"It was terrible," he said. "I mean, we had like 20 clients. I was just making ends meet, I was trying so hard."
While Moore was scrolling through TikTok one day, he saw someone giving advice on taxes and he had a lightbulb moment.
"I can do that," he said. "I can do that. I got this."
When the pandemic hit, people flocked to his TikTok looking for tax advice.
"The information was so important and it needed to get out there, especially during COVID with all the stimulus checks, child tax credit, PPP (Paycheck Protection Program), EIDL (Economic Injury Disaster Loan) loans, all that," Moore said. "Taxes are boring, but taxes control our everyday life. So how do we get the information out there, and how do we get people to watch it? So it's two stones, like this is so boring to talk about. That's why I was like, 'OK let's try to make this thing entertaining and engaging.'"
He created skits and acted out what would otherwise be a dry topic to watch.
Moore's TikTok viewership took off. It's currently at 36.5 million likes. Moore was on track to bring in $1 million for his tax business in 2021, according to his TikTok.
"Everything just got good for the better," he said. "We had more business clients. My following started to grow and so forth. It's definitely been a journey. I've just never given up and just focused on progress, not perfection."
While Moore loves math because it's complicated and challenging, he loves giving tax advice even more because of the people he helps.
"People would actually tell me, 'Duke, you've changed my life,'" he said. "They've come up to me crying like, 'Duke, that information you told me, I did not know about.' It's the gratitude that I get from it, from other people, knowing I am truly creating an impact in this world."
For TikTok content creator Eli (pronounced Eee-Lie) Rallo (@thejarr), the social media platform "accelerated every dream I ever had."
Right before she moved to New York to get her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University, she let her 100,000 followers know that she wouldn't be posting as much content of filling up a giant family jar with snacks and instead would be posting more lifestyle videos, lists, life advice and whatever thoughts came to her mind. Her TikTok grew to over 650,000 followers with 88.8 million likes.
Out of that popularity, she got approached by Harvest, an imprint of HarperCollins, to write her book, "I Didn't Know I Needed This," to be released in the winter.
Rallo said it would be "devastating" if TikTok were banned in the U.S.
"TikTok is the reason that I have my book deal," she said. "But the thing that's so special to me about TikTok is that there were conversations a few months ago, like, 'The influencer is dead.' And I think that that conversation is correct when we are referencing the societally beautiful standard of beauty, the white privilege influencer. Because apps like TikTok have opened up the door for people of all walks of life and of all backgrounds to share their story and have a place to have their voice elevated in a way that was never possible before. And to take that away, I think that would be what devastates me the most, because I get to log on to that app every day, yes, with the immense responsibility and privilege of creating for an audience, but I also get to learn from and watch people who never had the chance to say, 'This is who I am,' and who are being celebrated for just being themselves. And that has never, ever happened, not on YouTube, not on Instagram, and now other apps are following suit. What TikTok has done for all of us in allowing us to be unapologetically ourselves and to have applause from that, it's so special."
The U.S. government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security body, in 2020 ordered Chinese company ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed onto China’s government.
"ByteDance wants to make money," said Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "It wants to be a normal company. It just can't be because it's embedded in a system where you don't get to be a normal company when the ministry of state security knocks on your door and says, 'Now you're going to do this for us or you're going to disappear,' and that actually happens, Chinese entrepreneurs disappear. Well, one disappeared two weeks ago. So ByteDance might want to be a normal company. They might want to be a good partner for the United States. But when the party tells them they can't do that anymore, then they can't. So it's a completely legitimate U.S. concern. We're not telling ByteDance, 'You want to mess with us.' We're telling them, 'You might not have any choice.'"
For three years, TikTok has been seeking to assure the United States that the personal data of American citizens cannot be accessed and its content cannot be manipulated by China's Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing's influence.
In November, the Biden administration banned approvals of new telecommunications equipment from China's Huawei Technologies and ZTE because they posed "an unacceptable risk" to U.S. national security.
The move was Washington's crackdown on the Chinese tech giants amid fears that Beijing could use them to spy on Americans.
Scissors said there were similarities between Huawei and TikTok.
"If there's a compromising phone conversation, we don't want Huawei to have access to it," he said. "If there's a compromising video of some sort, we don't want people to have access to it. The data threat is on both sides, the volume of the data and the nature of the data. And that's what makes TikTok and Huawei similar. And of course, they're both Chinese companies. They both claim to be private. ByteDance has a better claim to be private than Huawei. But ultimately, if you're a Chinese company, you are told what to do by the Communist Party because otherwise you can't stay in business. So even if ByteDance, 99% of the time is independent, it can be told what to do by the party when the chips are down, because otherwise there's no ByteDance, and that's the same situation as with Huawei."
The U.S. put more restrictions on Huawei than on TikTok because it's "more valuable to ordinary Americans than Huawei was," Scissors said.
"Huawei was trying to come in with lower cost telecom equipment to reduce the prices of cell service in remote areas and that's nice and all, but we didn't really need it," he said. "It didn't get very far. And TikTok, and I don't mean this in any nasty way, it kind of snuck in under the radar. Suddenly everybody's using this. It's really easy. It is a better algorithm than its competitors have, which means more and more users. So for Huawei, it was, 'OK well, we see a problem here, and we don't really care if we ban Huawei. They don't do very much for us.' And for TikTok, well, we see a problem, but there's a cost. In a way, TikTok is much more representative of the real US-China relationship. It's easy to go, 'Oh, Huawei is evil,' when there's no cost on the other side. We're struggling a lot more with TikTok because we do see a problem, but we also see the benefit. That's really more like the US-China economic relationship. There are serious costs, but also serious benefits. So Huawei got banned because it was easy. TikTok is harder."
TikTok and CFIUS have been negotiating for more than two years on data security requirements. TikTok said it has spent more than $1.5 billion on rigorous data security efforts and rejects spying allegations.
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