The US has lots to lose and little to gain by banning TikTok and WeChat

Banning TikTok and WeChat would cut off many Americans from popular social media. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Jeremy Straub, North Dakota State University

The Trump administration’s recently announced bans on Chinese-owned social media platforms TikTok and WeChat could have unintended consequences. The orders bar the apps from doing business in the U.S. or with U.S. persons or businesses after Sept. 20 and require divestiture of TikTok by Nov. 12.

The executive orders are based on national security grounds, though the threats cited are to citizens rather than the government. Foreign policy analysts see the move as part of the administration’s ongoing wrestling match with the Chinese government for leverage in the global economy.

Whatever the motivation, as someone who researches both cybersecurity and technology policy, I am not convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs. The bans threaten Americans’ freedom of speech, and may harm foreign investment in the U.S. and American companies’ ability to sell software abroad, while delivering minimal privacy and cybersecurity benefits.

National security threat?

The threats posed by TikTok and WeChat, according to the executive orders, include the potential for the platforms to be used for disinformation campaigns by the Chinese government and to give the Chinese government access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.

TikTok is an immensely popular social media platform that allows people to share short video clips. Aaron Yoo/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The U.S. is not the only country concerned about Chinese apps. The Australian military accused WeChat, a messaging, social media and mobile payment app, of acting as spyware, saying the app was caught sending data to Chinese Intelligence servers.

Disinformation campaigns may be of particular concern, due to the upcoming election and the impact of the alleged “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The potential for espionage is less pronounced, given that the apps access basic contact information and details about the videos Americans watch and the topics they search on, and not more sensitive data.

But banning the apps and requiring Chinese divestiture also has a national security downside. It damages the U.S.‘s moral authority to push for free speech and democracy abroad. Critics have frequently contended that America’s moral authority has been severely damaged during the Trump administration and this action could arguably add to the decline.

Protecting personal information

The administration’s principal argument against TikTok is that it collects Americans’ personal data and could provide it to the Chinese government. The executive order states that this could allow China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.

Skeptics have argued that the government hasn’t presented clear evidence of privacy issues and that the service’s practices are standard in the industry. TikTok’s terms of service do say that it can share information with its China-based corporate parent, ByteDance.

WeChat is a messaging, social media and mobile payment app that is nearly ubiquitous in China. Albert Hsieh/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The order against WeChat is similar. It also mentions that the app captures the personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States. However, some of these visiting Chinese nationals have expressed concern that banning WeChat may limit their ability to communicate with friends and family in China.

While TikTok and WeChat do raise cybersecurity concerns, they are not significantly different from those raised by other smart phone apps. In my view, these concerns could be better addressed by enacting national privacy legislation, similar to Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, to dictate how data is collected and used and where it is stored. Another remedy is to have Google, Apple and others review the apps for cybersecurity concerns before allowing new versions to be made available in their app stores.

Freedom of speech

Perhaps the greatest concern raised by the bans are their impact on people’s ability to communicate, and whether they violate the First Amendment. Both TikTok and WeChat are communications channels and TikTok publishes and hosts content.

While the courts have allowed some regulation of speech, to withstand a legal challenge the restrictions must advance a legitimate government interest and be “narrowly tailored” to do so. National security is a legitimate governmental interest. However, in my opinion it’s questionable whether a real national security concern exists with these specific apps.

In the case of TikTok, banning an app that is being used for political commentary and activism would raise pronounced constitutional claims and likely be overturned by the courts.

Whether the bans hold up in court, the executive orders instituting them put the U.S. in uncomfortable territory: the list of countries that have banned social media platforms. These include Egypt, Hong Kong, Turkey, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Russia and China.

Though the U.S. bans may not be aimed at curtailing dissent, they echo actions that harm free speech and democracy globally. Social media gives freedom fighters, protesters and dissidents all over the world a voice. It enables citizens to voice concerns and organize protests about monarchies, sexual and other human rights abuses, discriminatory laws and civil rights violations. When authoritarian governments clamp down on dissent, they frequently target social media.

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Risk of retaliation

The bans could also harm the U.S. economy because other countries could ban U.S. companies in retaliation. China and the U.S. have already gone through a cycle of reciprocal company banning, in addition to reciprocal consulate closures.

The U.S. has placed Chinese telecom firm Huawei on the Bureau of Industry Security Entity List, preventing U.S. firms from conducting business with it. While this has prevented Huawei from selling wireless hardware in the U.S., it has also prevented U.S. software sales to the telecom giant and caused it to use its own chips instead of buying them from U.S. firms.

Over a dozen U.S. companies urged the White House not to ban WeChat because it would hurt their business in China.

Other countries might use the U.S. bans of Chinese firms as justification for banning U.S. companies, even though the U.S. has not taken action against them or their companies directly. These trade restrictions harm the U.S.‘s moral authority, harm the global economy and stifle innovation. They also cut U.S. firms off from the high-growth Chinese market.

TikTok is in negotiations with Microsoft and Walmart and an Oracle-led consortium about a possible acquisition that would leave the company with American ownership and negate the ban.

Oversight, not banishment

Though the TikTok and WeChat apps do raise some concerns, it is not apparent that cause exists to ban them. The issues could be solved through better oversight and the enactment of privacy laws that could otherwise benefit Americans.

Of course, the government could have other causes for concern that it hasn’t yet made public. Given the consequences of banning an avenue of expression, if other concerns exist the government should share them with the American public. If not, I’d argue less drastic action would be more appropriate and better serve the American people.

Jeremy Straub, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, North Dakota State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

TikTok is a unique blend of social media platforms – here's why kids love it

Young people creating a TikTok video in Lithuania. Photo by Alfredas Pliadis/Xinhua via Getty Images

Kevin Munger, Pennsylvania State University

TikTok, a social media platform targeted at young mobile phone users, was the second-most downloaded app in the world in 2019. It was the most downloaded app in July 2020.

It’s also become a geopolitical football. Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok has been banned by India along with 58 other Chinese-owned apps in July in response to escalating border tensions between the two countries. The Trump administration issued an executive order banning TikTok and Chinese-owned messaging platform WeChat from engaging in transactions in the United States beginning on Sept. 15. The company sued the Trump administration in August in response to the ban.

As a political scientist who studies social media, I’ve looked at what makes TikTok unique and why young people have flocked to it. In short, the phone-only app lets users record themselves dancing or goofing around to a music or spoken-word clip and then alter the videos using a wide array of effects. Despite its superficially frivolous nature, young people have been using the platform to send political messages, coordinate political actions and hang out in an online space largely free of adults.

How it works

Each tiktok is a 3- to 60-second-long video that loops when finished. The majority of the screen is taken up by the video uploaded by the user. The app offers a wide range of options for customizing and combining these videos, including video taken with the user’s smartphone, photos uploaded from the web, emojis and other text superimposed on the video, and special effects. The app’s library of filters and video-distorting effects is like Instagram filters but for video.

The bottom of the screen contains information about the “sound”: the audio file that accompanies the video. These “sounds” can either be user-uploaded or chosen from a library of popular sounds. This library contains both snippets of songs by professional musicians and silly recordings of people talking. “Sounds” have had a huge impact on the music industry: “Old Town Road,” one of the most popular songs of all time, first gained popularity as a TikTok “sound” with an associated dance.

When you open the app, you encounter a tiktok that starts playing. This is the “For You Page,” which plays tiktoks that TikTok’s algorithm recommends for you. To go to the next tiktok, you swipe up. To see the account that uploaded the current tiktok, swipe right.

Comedian Sarah Cooper’s TikTok page shows thumbnails of her videos, or tiktoks, on the social media platform. Photo Illustration by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

How it compares

Comparing TikTok with other digital media platforms shows what makes it unique. Like YouTube, TikTok consists entirely of videos. Like Facebook and Twitter the primary mode of consuming tiktoks is by navigating through a “feed” of short, digestible posts.

Like Netflix, the default mode of encountering content is through the recommendation algorithm, not through the construction of “friend” or “follower” networks. And like Snapchat and Instagram, TikTok can only be produced on mobile phones, favoring younger users who are more fluent with smartphones than computers.

TikTok is the first social media platform to combine these characteristics. The result is a unique way of conveying and consuming information.

Information density

The combination of video media and the “feed” makes TikTok especially information dense. There’s a lot going on with each tiktok, and there is a never-ending stream of tiktoks.

Unlike text, video media operates on two parallel pathways, conveying explicit information (the kind found in speech or writing) and implicit information (social cues like the TikToker’s clothes and hairstyle, or emotional affect from music) at the same time.

The “feed” enables a social media consumer to scan through several pieces of bite-sized content per minute, extracting information in a much more efficient fashion than from a television broadcast. In combination, these trends make scrolling through the “For You Page” a whirlwind experience, a significant advance in information density.

If you spend a few hours on TikTok, you’ll see how this works. Other media begins to feel “slow,” even formerly compelling products like a YouTube video or Twitter feed. Younger people tend to love intensity – loud music, bright lights – and its no surprise they find TikTok compelling.

Different costs and benefits

TikTok also shifts the costs and benefits of posting. On the costs side, because TikTok is designed for smartphones it’s easier for some people to use, and harder for others. As a general rule, the more years of your life you spend using a technology – and the earlier in the life cycle those years are – the more skilled you become at using that technology.

TikTok also encourages videos filmed in the vertical orientation inherent to smartphones, so they can be created wherever the user goes, whenever they have a spare moment.

In terms of benefits, the importance of the recommendation algorithm over “friend” networks means that everyone is guaranteed to get at least a few views, even on their first tiktok. On Twitter, say, you might log on and tweet dozens of times before you get any “likes” due to the importance of “follower” networks in determining what people see.

TikTok’s “For You Page” varies between showing the user extremely popular tiktoks and tiktoks with only a handful of views, thus promoting greater equality than on traditional social networks. Overall, TikTok offers an online platform for young people that feels unusually disconnected from the adult world, one in which they are sure to get some amount of attention.

Common sounds, unique moves

Finally, the “sounds” that users combine with their personalized videos represent a novel way to categorize and navigate a social media platform, a feature unique to TikTok. If you click on the “sound” at the bottom of a tiktok, you can see all of the other tiktoks that use that sound file.

The most common example involves a specific dance routine paired with the accompanying “sound.” The audio is constant across this group of tiktoks, but each user provides a unique video of themselves performing the dance.

These dances are examples of TikTok memes. “Memes” on more text- or image-focused platforms involve some fixed “meme format” that is then remixed by users who edit the image or text to create a given “meme.” On TikTok, however, the raw material being remixed is the user’s body, as the user performs the behavior associated with the meme format, what I call “embodied memes.”

This makes the body much more prominent on TikTok than other platforms. Whereas clever wordplay goes a long way on Twitter, TikTok rewards conventionally attractive or otherwise striking bodies to an even greater extent than Instagram.

This also means that the identity categories that are increasingly central to politics play a major role on TikTok. Embodied memes often play with the race, gender, appearance or physical location of the TikToker.

More conventional image memes can seem anonymous or disembodied as they are shared around the web. With TikTok, it’s impossible to separate the individual from the meme.

Kevin Munger, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of 'ghosting' in the age of surveillance

The federal government has used military-grade border patrol drones like this one to monitor protests in US cities. _ Jonathan Cutrer/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, University of San Diego

Drones of all sizes are being used by environmental advocates to monitor deforestation, by conservationists to track poachers, and by journalists and activists to document large protests. As a political sociologist who studies social movements and drones, I document a wide range of nonviolent and pro-social drone uses in my new book, “The Good Drone.” I show that these efforts have the potential to democratize surveillance.

But when the Department of Homeland Security redirects large, fixed-wing drones from the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor protests, and when towns experiment with using drones to test people for fevers, it’s time to think about how many eyes are in the sky and how to avoid unwanted aerial surveillance. One way that’s within reach of nearly everyone is learning how to simply disappear from view.

Crowded skies

Over the past decade there’s been an explosion in the public’s use of drones – everyday people with everyday tech doing interesting things. As drones enter already-crowded airspace, the Federal Aviation Administration is struggling to respond. The near future is likely to see even more of these devices in the sky, flown by an ever-growing cast of social, political and economic actors.

A law enforcement drone flew over demonstrators, Friday, June 5, 2020, in Atlanta. AP Photo/Mike Stewart

Public opinion about the use and spread of drones is still up in the air, but burgeoning drone use has sparked numerous efforts to curtail drones. These responses range from public policies exerting community control over local airspace, to the development of sophisticated jamming equipment and tactics for knocking drones out of the sky.

From startups to major defense contractors, there is a scramble to deny airspace to drones, to hijack drones digitally, to control drones physically and to shoot drones down. Anti-drone measures range from simple blunt force, 10-gauge shotguns, to the poetic: well-trained hawks.

Many of these anti-drone measures are expensive and complicated. Some are illegal. The most affordable – and legal – way to avoid drone technology is hiding.

How to disappear

The first thing you can do to hide from a drone is to take advantage of the natural and built environment. It’s possible to wait for bad weather, since smaller devices like those used by local police have a hard time flying in high winds, dense fogs and heavy rains.

Trees, walls, alcoves and tunnels are more reliable than the weather, and they offer shelter from the high-flying drones used by the Department of Homeland Security.

In some parts of the world, hiding from drones is a matter of life and death. Drone Survival Guide, CC BY-NC

The second thing you can do is minimize your digital footprints. It’s smart to avoid using wireless devices like mobile phones or GPS systems, since they have digital signatures that can reveal your location. This is useful for evading drones, but is also important for avoiding other privacy-invading technologies.

The third thing you can do is confuse a drone. Placing mirrors on the ground, standing over broken glass, and wearing elaborate headgear, machine-readable blankets or sensor-jamming jackets can break up and distort the image a drone sees.

Mannequins and other forms of mimicry can confuse both on-board sensors and the analysts charged with monitoring the drone’s video and sensor feeds.

Drones equipped with infrared sensors will see right through the mannequin trick, but are confused by tactics that mask the body’s temperature. For example, a space blanket will mask significant amounts of the body’s heat, as will simply hiding in an area that matches the body’s temperature, like a building or sidewalk exhaust vent.

The fourth, and most practical, thing you can do to protect yourself from drone surveillance is to get a disguise. The growth of mass surveillance has led to an explosion in creative experiments meant to mask one’s identity. But some of the smartest ideas are decidedly old-school and low-tech. Clothing is the first choice, because hats, glasses, masks and scarves go a long way toward scrambling drone-based facial-recognition software.

Clever use of makeup can thwart facial recognition systems. John C Bullas BSc MSc PhD MCIHT MIAT/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Your gait is as unique as your fingerprint. As gait-recognition software evolves, it will be important to also mask the key pivot points used in identifying the walker. It may be that the best response is affecting a limp, using a minor leg brace or wearing extremely loose clothing.

Artists and scientists have taken these approaches a step further, developing a hoodie wrap that’s intended to shield the owner’s heat signature and to scramble facial recognition software, and glasses intended to foil facial recognition systems.

Keep an umbrella handy

These innovations are alluring, but umbrellas may prove to be the most ubiquitous and robust tactic in this list. They’re affordable, easy to carry, hard to see around and can be disposed of in a hurry. Plus you can build a high-tech one, if you want.

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It would be nice to live in a world with fewer impositions on privacy, one in which law enforcement did not use small quadcopters and the Department of Homeland Security did not redeploy large Predator drones to surveil protesters. And, for people in some parts of the world, it would be nice not to associate the sound of a drone with impending missile fire. But given that those eyes are in the sky, it’s good to know how to hide.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is the author of:

The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance

MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Associate Professor of Political Sociology, University of San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The road to electric vehicles with lower sticker prices than gas cars – battery costs explained

Replacing carbon-emitting gas-powered cars with EVs requires whittling away EVs’ price premium, and that comes down to one thing: battery cost. Westend61 via Getty Images

Venkat Viswanathan, Carnegie Mellon University; Alexander Bills, Carnegie Mellon University, and Shashank Sripad, Carnegie Mellon University

Electric vehicle sales have grown exponentially in recent years, accompanied by dropping prices. However, adoption of EVs remains limited by their higher sticker price relative to comparable gas vehicles, even though overall cost of ownership for EVs is lower.

EVs and internal combustion engine vehicles are likely to reach sticker price parity sometime in the next decade. The timing hinges on one crucial factor: battery cost. An EV’s battery pack accounts for about a quarter of total vehicle cost, making it the most important factor in the sales price.

Battery pack prices have been falling fast. A typical EV battery pack stores 10-100 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity. For example, the Mitsubishi i-MIEV has a battery capacity of 16 kWh and a range of 62 miles, and the Tesla model S has a battery capacity of 100 kWh and a range of 400 miles. In 2010, the price of an EV battery pack was over $1,000 per kWh. That fell to $150 per kWh in 2019. The challenge for the automotive industry is figuring out how to drive the cost down further.

The Department of Energy goal for the industry is to reduce the price of battery packs to less than $100/kWh and ultimately to about $80/kWh. At these battery price points, the sticker price of an EV is likely to be lower than that of a comparable combustion engine vehicle.

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Forecasting when that price crossover will occur requires models that account for the cost variables: design, materials, labor, manufacturing capacity and demand. These models also show where researchers and manufacturers are focusing their efforts to reduce battery costs. Our group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a model of battery costs that accounts for all aspects of EV battery manufacturing.

From the bottom up

Models used for analyzing battery costs are classified either as “top down” or “bottom up.” Top-down models predict cost based primarily on demand and time. One popular top-down model that can forecast battery cost is Wright’s law, which predicts that costs go down as more units are produced. Economies of scale and the experience an industry acquires over time drive down costs.

Wright’s law is generic. It works across all technologies, which makes it possible to predict battery cost declines based on solar panel cost declines. However, Wright’s law - like other top-down models - doesn’t allow for the analysis of the sources of the cost declines. For that, a bottom-up model is required.

The battery pack, the large gray block filling the chassis in this diagram of an electric car, contributes the most of any component to the price of an EV. Sven Loeffler/iStock via Getty Images

To build a bottom-up cost model, it’s important to understand what goes into making a battery. Lithium-ion batteries consist of a positive electrode, the cathode, a negative electrode, the anode and an electrolyte, as well as auxiliary components such as terminals and casing.

Each component has a cost associated with its materials, manufacturing, assembly, expenses related to factory maintenance, and overhead costs. For EVs, batteries also need to be integrated into small groups of cells, or modules, which are then combined into packs.

Our open source, bottom-up battery cost model follows the same structure as the battery manufacturing process itself. The model uses inputs to the battery manufacturing process as inputs to the model, including battery design specifications, commodity and labor prices, capital investment requirements like manufacturing plants and equipment, overhead rates and manufacturing volume to account for economies of scale. It uses these inputs to calculate manufacturing costs, material costs and overhead costs, and those costs are summed to arrive at the final cost.

Cost-cutting opportunities

Using our bottom-up cost model, we can break down the contributions of each part of the battery to the total battery cost and use those insights to analyze the impact of battery innovations on EV cost. Materials make up the largest portion of the total battery cost, around 50%. The cathode accounts for around 43% of the materials cost, and other cell materials account for around 36%.

Improvements in cathode materials are the most important innovations, because the cathode is the largest component of battery cost. This drives strong interest in commodity prices.

The most common cathode materials for electric vehicles are nickel cobalt aluminum oxide used in Tesla vehicles, nickel manganese cobalt oxide used in most other electric vehicles, and lithium iron phosphate used in most electric buses.

Nickel cobalt aluminum oxide has the lowest cost-per-energy-content and highest energy-per-unit-mass, or specific energy, of these three materials. A low cost per unit of energy results from a high specific energy because fewer cells are needed to build a battery pack. This results in a lower cost for other cell materials. Cobalt is the most expensive material within the cathode, so formulations of these materials with less cobalt typically lead to cheaper batteries.

Inactive cell materials such as tabs and containers account for roughly 36% of the total cell materials cost. These other cell materials do not add energy content to the battery. Therefore, reducing inactive materials reduces the weight and size of battery cells without reducing energy content. This drives interest in improving cell design with innovations such as tabless batteries like those being teased by Tesla.

The battery pack cost also decreases significantly with an increase in the number of cells manufacturers produce annually. As more EV battery factories come on-line, economies of scale and further improvement in battery manufacturing and design should lead to further cost declines.

Road to price-parity

Predicting a timeline for price parity with ICE vehicles requires forecasting a future trajectory of battery costs. We estimate that reduction in raw material costs, improvements in performance and learning by manufacturing together are likely to lead to batteries with pack costs below $80/kWh by 2025.

Assuming batteries represent a quarter of the EV cost, a 100 kWh battery pack at $75 per kilowatt hour yields a cost of about $30,000. This should result in EV sticker prices that are lower than the sticker prices for comparable models of gas-powered cars.

Abhinav Misalkar contributed to this article while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Venkat Viswanathan, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University; Alexander Bills, Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, and Shashank Sripad, Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The US has lots to lose and little to gain by banning TikTok and WeChat

Banning TikTok and WeChat would cut off many Americans from popular social media. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Jeremy Straub, North Dakota State University

The Trump administration’s recently announced bans on Chinese-owned social media platforms TikTok and WeChat could have unintended consequences. The orders bar the apps from doing business in the U.S. or with U.S. persons or businesses after Sept. 20 and require divestiture of TikTok by Nov. 12.

The executive orders are based on national security grounds, though the threats cited are to citizens rather than the government. Foreign policy analysts see the move as part of the administration’s ongoing wrestling match with the Chinese government for leverage in the global economy.

Whatever the motivation, as someone who researches both cybersecurity and technology policy, I am not convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs. The bans threaten Americans’ freedom of speech, and may harm foreign investment in the U.S. and American companies’ ability to sell software abroad, while delivering minimal privacy and cybersecurity benefits.

National security threat?

The threats posed by TikTok and WeChat, according to the executive orders, include the potential for the platforms to be used for disinformation campaigns by the Chinese government and to give the Chinese government access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.

TikTok is an immensely popular social media platform that allows people to share short video clips. Aaron Yoo/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The U.S. is not the only country concerned about Chinese apps. The Australian military accused WeChat, a messaging, social media and mobile payment app, of acting as spyware, saying the app was caught sending data to Chinese Intelligence servers.

Disinformation campaigns may be of particular concern, due to the upcoming election and the impact of the alleged “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The potential for espionage is less pronounced, given that the apps access basic contact information and details about the videos Americans watch and the topics they search on, and not more sensitive data.

But banning the apps and requiring Chinese divestiture also has a national security downside. It damages the U.S.‘s moral authority to push for free speech and democracy abroad. Critics have frequently contended that America’s moral authority has been severely damaged during the Trump administration and this action could arguably add to the decline.

Protecting personal information

The administration’s principal argument against TikTok is that it collects Americans’ personal data and could provide it to the Chinese government. The executive order states that this could allow China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.

Skeptics have argued that the government hasn’t presented clear evidence of privacy issues and that the service’s practices are standard in the industry. TikTok’s terms of service do say that it can share information with its China-based corporate parent, ByteDance.

WeChat is a messaging, social media and mobile payment app that is nearly ubiquitous in China. Albert Hsieh/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The order against WeChat is similar. It also mentions that the app captures the personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States. However, some of these visiting Chinese nationals have expressed concern that banning WeChat may limit their ability to communicate with friends and family in China.

While TikTok and WeChat do raise cybersecurity concerns, they are not significantly different from those raised by other smart phone apps. In my view, these concerns could be better addressed by enacting national privacy legislation, similar to Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, to dictate how data is collected and used and where it is stored. Another remedy is to have Google, Apple and others review the apps for cybersecurity concerns before allowing new versions to be made available in their app stores.

Freedom of speech

Perhaps the greatest concern raised by the bans are their impact on people’s ability to communicate, and whether they violate the First Amendment. Both TikTok and WeChat are communications channels and TikTok publishes and hosts content.

While the courts have allowed some regulation of speech, to withstand a legal challenge the restrictions must advance a legitimate government interest and be “narrowly tailored” to do so. National security is a legitimate governmental interest. However, in my opinion it’s questionable whether a real national security concern exists with these specific apps.

In the case of TikTok, banning an app that is being used for political commentary and activism would raise pronounced constitutional claims and likely be overturned by the courts.

Whether the bans hold up in court, the executive orders instituting them put the U.S. in uncomfortable territory: the list of countries that have banned social media platforms. These include Egypt, Hong Kong, Turkey, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Russia and China.

Though the U.S. bans may not be aimed at curtailing dissent, they echo actions that harm free speech and democracy globally. Social media gives freedom fighters, protesters and dissidents all over the world a voice. It enables citizens to voice concerns and organize protests about monarchies, sexual and other human rights abuses, discriminatory laws and civil rights violations. When authoritarian governments clamp down on dissent, they frequently target social media.

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Risk of retaliation

The bans could also harm the U.S. economy because other countries could ban U.S. companies in retaliation. China and the U.S. have already gone through a cycle of reciprocal company banning, in addition to reciprocal consulate closures.

The U.S. has placed Chinese telecom firm Huawei on the Bureau of Industry Security Entity List, preventing U.S. firms from conducting business with it. While this has prevented Huawei from selling wireless hardware in the U.S., it has also prevented U.S. software sales to the telecom giant and caused it to use its own chips instead of buying them from U.S. firms.

Over a dozen U.S. companies urged the White House not to ban WeChat because it would hurt their business in China.

Other countries might use the U.S. bans of Chinese firms as justification for banning U.S. companies, even though the U.S. has not taken action against them or their companies directly. These trade restrictions harm the U.S.‘s moral authority, harm the global economy and stifle innovation. They also cut U.S. firms off from the high-growth Chinese market.

TikTok is in negotiations with Microsoft and Walmart and an Oracle-led consortium about a possible acquisition that would leave the company with American ownership and negate the ban.

Oversight, not banishment

Though the TikTok and WeChat apps do raise some concerns, it is not apparent that cause exists to ban them. The issues could be solved through better oversight and the enactment of privacy laws that could otherwise benefit Americans.

Of course, the government could have other causes for concern that it hasn’t yet made public. Given the consequences of banning an avenue of expression, if other concerns exist the government should share them with the American public. If not, I’d argue less drastic action would be more appropriate and better serve the American people.

Jeremy Straub, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, North Dakota State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.