By Karl Hoerr -
With the flurry of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in the United States, Australians could be forgiven for not catching the news that one of these orders related to the popular social media platform, TikTok.
The Chinese-owned platform was briefly out of action, because of legislation approved last year, requiring its parent company ByteDance to sell up.
Dr Rob Nicholls is a Senior Researcher at the University of Sydney. He’s an expert industry consultant in media and communications and his research focusses on the intersection of technology and regulation.
“[T]he banning of TikTok wasn’t really quite a banning,” Nicholls tells LSJ.
“It was a bipartisan approach that said that if TikTok wants to continue operating in the US, it has to be under US control.”
The legislation was approved on national security grounds, due to concerns about the platform accessing the data of users. It was challenged by ByteDance on the grounds of impinging free speech, but the case was dismissed by the US Supreme Court.
Enter President Trump, whose executive order extended the period of time allowed before the prohibitions in the law would apply.
TikTok thanked the President and restored its service, but Nicholls says both Google Play and Apple’s App Store are still not making the app available in the United States.
“[N]ow TikTok is frozen in time, because you can’t download a new version of TikTok…”
“[B]oth stores said if you had TikTok you can download it again but if you didn’t have TikTok after the effective date of the piece of legislation, you can’t download it. So that’s left a position where TikTok’s operating in the US but you can’t update the software and the 75 day clock is ticking down…”
It’s expected the platform’s ownership will change, rather than it having to bow out of a massive market.
“What’s actually happening commercially … it’s really difficult to tell,” observes Nicholls.
“But it seems that ByteDance has now taken the view that it would rather have a share of the revenue flowing from the US, than simply closing down.”
Rob Nicholls says an interesting reaction to the ban was that many Americans who were annoyed by it, signed up to a TikTok-style piece of software with direct links to the Chinese Communist Party.
“So a million Americans have said, ‘This is stupid’, and ended up sharing their data directly with the CCP. So like many of these things, approaches to banning popular social media is always quite difficult.”
What about Australia?
In Australia, there doesn’t appear to be any appetite for a similar ban, but there is one proviso to this. “There is a Commonwealth Government policy that TikTok can’t be installed on Commonwealth issued devised,” says Nicholls.
“[T]he Commonwealth has a view that there might be a security issue, so if you’re a public servant with a smartphone issued as part of your work, you can’t put TikTok on it.”
He says the government has adopted a pragmatic approach to the issue.
“(The approach) said, ‘Well, people enjoy using TikTok’, including and not limited to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.”
Increased competition
TikTok’s rise has been an issue for the United States, which is facing increased competition in its enormous technology sector. “Perhaps it’s been reinforced … with the sudden interest in DeepSeek,” says Nicholls.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company which develops open source large language models. It claims to have developed its models at a fraction of the cost of its major US-based competitors and has sent some stocks tumbling.
Nicholls says the company’s rise appears to have been a result of regulatory moves to restrict the use of chips developed in the United States.
“The particular company bought not even the second best chips, the third-best chips and then put a lot of effort into working out how to make them talk to each other more effectively,” he says.
“Intervention, even at fundamental levels like, ‘We’ll never let it happen because we won’t let the chips go out the door’, doesn’t really work when you’ve got a bunch of smart people in any country who then think, ‘Well … I’ve got this as a basis, I’ll try and come up with something based on that.”
