Does the West want to play cat and mouse with Beijing over social network apps?

Bytedance, which owns TikTok, runs its Chinese equivalent, Douyin, as an educational and cultural outreach app, while the former is used in the West to idiotize young people and spread fake news, is aggressively promoting a new app, called Lemon8, which is being marketed as a combination of Pinterest and Instagram.

The timing is nothing if not prescient: in the United States, there is talk of bannning TikTok, dividing society along age and ideological lines. Young people, many of them avid users of the app, are against its ban, while older generations see it as a threat managed by a foreign government. Republicans, more inclined to authoritarian tendencies, are in the majority in favor of banning it (62%), while only 33% of Democrats support it.

Meanwhile, TikTok continues to function as a vehicle of transmission in both senses: on the one hand, it allows the introduction of all kinds of ideas into society via choreographed dances, emojis and other seemingly innocent activities; and on the other, the app’s managers have information on all its users.

The people who run ByteDance are not stupid: aware that TikTok’s popularity will inevitably wane, it has already begun promoting its next app. If the US finally bans it, creating polarization and alienating young voters in the process, it will find a new app on the market that would allow the company to continue harvesting its users’ information. Over the last month, Lemon8 is the second most downloaded app in the United States, with more than seventeen million worldwide.

Is the problem with TikTok its content, or how it is used? Other apps have similar content and mechanics to TikTok’s, either because they already had them before, as in the case of Snap, or because they have copied them from TikTok itself, as in the case of Meta’s Instagram Reels.

Meta is a predatory company with the worst track record in the world for managing its users’ personal data… but of course, it is American, so nobody would think of banning it. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (later repeated by a CIA director about Panama’s Manuel Noriega), “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”.

The reason some governments want to ban TikTok is that it belongs to a Chinese company: we know that Beijing requires all firms operating in China to provide access to their customers’ personal data. At the same time, the company has used its app to spy on Western journalists, as well as manipulate its recommendation algorithms to recommend young girls’s dance routines to unrelated adults.

In short, ByteDance’s launch of Lemon8 puts the United States — and other countries concerned about spying — in a tricky situation: either ban all Chinese apps, or accept that banning TikTok would be stupid, because Lemon8 would simply take over its role.

Are we heading for a digital version of the Iron Curtain, where China bans many Western apps (which it already does), while the West applies tit-for-tat policies? Or will we simply let the issue pass because “we are not like them” and allow Beijing to continue to do what it wants? Believe me: there is far more geopolitics in that seemingly innocent question than can be found on any social network.

(En español, aquí)