Numerous governmental agencies and private businesses throughout the world have imposed or attempted to impose temporary or indefinite bans on the social media service TikTok.
Malaysia must look at this issue considering persistent claims of hate speech and political interference.
TikTok is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can be up to 10 minutes long. ByteDance has long maintained that it does not share data with the Chinese government and that its data is not held in China.
Despite such claims of being an independent company, it is no secret that China's private sector is in reality at the beck and call of the country's government, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) having pressured state owned enterprises and other commercial entities to do their bidding. Therefore, it is no surprise that TikTok have been accused of sharing user data with the Chinese government. Consequently, a growing list of countries are imposing a partial or total ban on the rapidly growing social media application.
The app has been accused of promoting harmful content, such as hate speech, misinformation, and propaganda. This could have serious implications for national security, especially in countries that are dealing with delicate political or social issues.
India became one of the first countries to ban TikTok, along with 58 other Chinese-created apps. They were banned completely in India by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in mid-2020, with a statement saying they were "prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state, and public order".
Yet more than three years after TikTok's largest market, India, banned the Chinese-owned social media app over geopolitical tensions, troves of personal data of Indian citizens who once used TikTok remain widely accessible to employees at the company and its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance according to sources.
Meanwhile in the USA, in 2020 President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would have completely banned TikTok and WeChat. A federal judge put a temporary block on the ban, and the ban was revoked by President Biden. Later on Biden banned all federal devices from having TikTok.
In 2023 Biden demanded that China divest from the app or it could face a nationwide ban.
A proposal to ban TikTok in the US has garnered bipartisan support. It is seen as a possible solution to the country's national security concerns about the potential for China to surveil or manipulate Americans.
But more importantly, and for Malaysia, TikTok has proven to be problematic. Take for example reports where several videos warning of a repeat of the May 13, 1969 riots were going viral on the platform. It has been suggested that certain politicians are behind some of these paid videos calling for violence.
Considering the gravity of the situation where vulnerable individuals may actually carry out violent acts, we would expect the platform to be more responsible in moderating and monitoring its content but this has not happened.
Indeed, a well established political party has emerged as somehow having been a beneficiary of TikTok's reach, with an influential party member attributing the party's victory during the 15th general election (GE15) to the platform.
TikTok though, denied that its platform was influenced by the presence of a political leader among its staff, after a TikTok creator claimed that an information chief of a party at the state division works at TikTok's parent company ByteDance, which included a stint at its content moderation team.
These are disturbing claims indeed, especially when one would expect that a party which claims to fight for the rights and interests of Muslims is seemingly silent on the persecution against the Uyghurs.
Or could this be another case of chequebook diplomacy? As Leo Suryadinata, a senior visiting fellow at ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, points out to the fact that China's Islamic diplomacy in Indonesia is seeing results.
Citing the instance of providing scholarships for Indonesian students and inviting leaders of Islamic organisations to visit China that seem to be paying off. Or at the very least in producing young academics like Novi Basuki, who has been defending China's actions in Xinjiang. Likewise Indonesia's response to China's Xinjiang Uyghur internment camps is muted, in stark contrast to their more vocal stance over the Rohingya crisis.
Considering these developments why should Malaysia not follow the example of other countries in banning the app? It is clear that as Twitter and Facebook used to be blamed for being tools to manipulate targeted segments of the population, now TikTok has emerged as a far more potent tool for such purposes.
Perhaps a full ban might not be feasible but Malaysia must protect its national security interests by taking a range of measures, regulating the use of TikTok, strengthening cybersecurity measures, increasing awareness on risks, and even developing alternative social media platforms.
In the final analysis, the bitter truth is doing nothing leaves us at the mercy of foreign powers.
*The writer is a widely quoted economist and international relations expert. He is a senior consultant with Global Asia Consulting and was previously attached to a leading local think tank where he was engaged as a consultant for government agencies and international institutions. He did his graduate studies at Macquarie University, Australia.