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Senior British MPs have raised concerns about TikTok’s ownership in the UK, after the US House of Representatives last week approved a bill that would ban distribution of the video app unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company.
The legislation still requires approval by the Senate and President Joe Biden’s signature, but if passed, ByteDance would be given 180 days to divest ownership of TikTok to avoid the ban, after the House of Representatives acted on concerns that the company’s ownership structure was a national security risk.
The bill has triggered interventions from the leaders of two UK parliamentary select committees, who have demanded answers from the government about the platform’s future ownership on their side of the Atlantic.
Liam Byrne, Labour MP and chair of the House of Commons business and trade committee, told the Financial Times that while scrutiny of TikTok had focused on the safety of user data, it was the platform’s effect on democratic elections that concerned him.
“The point is about algorithms that are capable of flexing disinformation to the top of people’s news feeds in a way that is totally uncontrolled,” he said. “If you’ve got an organisation that could be influenced by someone like China, that should be a matter of concern.”
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last week proposed changing the law to block the purchase of The Telegraph newspaper by a foreign state to prevent other countries from having influence over the British press.
“Why wouldn’t we apply the same rule to China and an app that’s twice as important to people’s news gathering in the UK?” Byrne asked.
He pointed to research by the communications regulator Ofcom that found 5 per cent of UK adults got some of their news from The Telegraph website or app, while 10 per cent got some of their news from TikTok.
Ensuring the electorate was “well informed” and equipped with accurate information was part of a “strong and robust democracy”, Byrne said, adding: “Defending democracy is a matter of national security.”
Byrne said he planned to lay an amendment to the digital markets, competition and consumers bill when it returns to the Commons. This would seek to force the government to disclose its assessment of the value of requiring ByteDance to divest of TikTok in the UK.
Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP and chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told the FT she was not convinced the government should follow Congress’s lead, but nonetheless signalled UK action on TikTok was needed.
She said the legislation passed by Congress did “not solve the issues of algorithmic tampering in pursuit of transnational interference, nor data exfiltration on TikTok, nor the wider social media app market”. Exfiltration is the unauthorised removal of data.
The UK could instead look at “designation of social media apps” under the control of foreign adversaries as national security threats, or “tougher data exfiltration laws”, she suggested.
Kearns also said the digital markets bill, which in part aims to protect consumer rights, would provide an opportunity for MPs to examine the issue. However, she warned it was “quite possible it descends into another debate around designating China a threat, or not”.
The UK government last year labelled China an “epoch-defining challenge”, to the international order but has stopped short of branding it a “threat”.
TikTok said: “These security concerns are misplaced — TikTok is not available in China and ByteDance is a global company that is not controlled by any government.”
In the US, multinational tech group Oracle has been given powers to audit TikTok’s algorithm and content moderation models to ensure they are not manipulated, the company added.
It has also invested more than £10bn in Project Clover, it said, which is the name of its effort to transfer user data to secure sites in Europe for storage.
Last year, several countries including the UK banned the use of TikTok on government devices owing to security concerns.
A separate amendment to the data protection and digital information bill, which will seek to curtail TikTok’s power to transfer user data to China, is expected to be debated in the coming weeks.
ByteDance has previously admitted that employees at the company based in China inappropriately accessed data from UK and US users through their TikTok accounts, including location data, to track them.
China has powers to block the export of ByteDance’s algorithms that power TikTok and Beijing’s commerce ministry said last year it would “firmly oppose” a forced sale by ByteDance.
The UK government said in a statement that it was working “to ensure we can rapidly address threats to our democratic processes, and we will not hesitate to take action to protect our national security if needed”.
“The use of TikTok remains a personal choice,” it added. “We will continue to work with TikTok and others to understand how they plan to meet the high data and cyber security standards we expect.”