Last week the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would require TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell to a US company or face a national “ban”.

“To be fair, TikTok sucks for lots of reasons,” says Samantha Floreani, Head of Policy at Australia-based Digital Rights Watch.

“TikTok is a privacy nightmare; its recommender system takes users down harmful content rabbit holes and can facilitate the “filter bubble” effect; it’s full of influencers and scammers and misinformation; it has a track record of bad content moderation decisions. But show me any major social media platform that doesn’t share that rap sheet.”

If US lawmakers genuinely cared about protecting their citizens’ data, Floreani writes, they would develop robust federal privacy law, pass data transparency rules, crack down on the data broker and adtech industries, defend encryption and enforce no-tracking across apps.

“This is not to deny genuine concerns about the Chinese government, but such blinkered focus on TikTok […] derails the more pressing task of meaningfully unpicking underlying surveillance capitalism business models,” Floreani adds.