TikTok Should Sell While It Still Can

TikTok — the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that is, not incidentally, banned in China — is once again in Congress’s crosshairs. It should be clear by now that the company’s owner has one option left: sell.

Last week, the House passed a bipartisan bill that would effectively ban TikTok from the US unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd., divests the app. The measure now moves to the Senate. President Joe Biden — who has previously blocked TikTok from government devices and tightened restrictions on data sharing — says he’ll sign it if it passes.

In a perfect world, the US wouldn’t go down this road. Banning speech platforms isn’t in the American tradition, while TikTok has offered salutary competition for big US tech companies. Plenty of entrepreneurs make their living on the service and some useful innovations have resulted. The kids love it.

But let’s not be naive. Lawmakers are worried about TikTok because it’s a black box embedded in the phones of 170 million Americans. It collects expansive information on users, serves up videos according to an inscrutable algorithm, and is by Chinese law answerable to the country’s intelligence services. Its executives have been accused of lying to Congress, while the director of the FBI has said the app “screams out with national-security concerns.” Most of its content is not, let’s say, of vital civic importance.

More to the point, the US has long restricted foreign ownership in strategically important industries, including energy and communications. Social media surely now qualifies. It offers ample opportunities for siphoning data, spreading propaganda or simply disseminating divisive content. A report last week from the US intelligence community warned that a “propaganda arm” of the Chinese government was using the app to interfere in US elections. One goal, it said, was to “magnify US societal divisions.” (China’s claim that the proposed ban amounts to “bullying” is not exactly persuasive. China presumptively bans all American social-media apps.)

TikTok has hardly improved its reputation by engaging in an unseemly lobbying campaign to derail this legislation. Its users — at the company’s instigation — have sent lawmakers a barrage of unhinged messages, while its parent company has spent millions of dollars cajoling Washington power brokers. (This latter effort evidently had the desired effect on Donald Trump, on whom blandishments are never wasted. He has now reversed himself and taken TikTok’s side.)