Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Trump and Biden Make Too Big a Deal of TikTok

The arrangement between Oracle, Walmart and Bytedance seems like the smallest of fig leaves.

September 26, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

The youths can’t get enough.
Photographer: Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images

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We’re still waiting to see what’s going to happen to the TikTok deal — at the moment, the ball’s in Beijing’s court — but as China ponders, I’d like to offer three reasons that the whole contretemps may be less serious than it appears:

1. The U.S. isn’t exactly the superstar of data protection.