Micheál Martin joined the video-sharing platform TikTok last month and got a swift reminder of the perils of social media. One of the Taoiseach’s first videos featured a picture of a huge Cork mural of a man with a cardboard box over his head. It was deleted after street artist Asbestos said he owned the copyright to the photograph and complained it was used without permission. Martin apologised.
Another of the Taoiseach’s early videos was posted days after Fianna Fáil’s annual party shindig, featuring footage from the event. “How did our 80th Ard Fheis go?” the handlers of Martin’s account asked innocently. They got a flood of cynical and mocking responses. “Not many at it, was there?” responded one world-weary TikTokker. “I’ve seen more people queuing to rent a room in Dublin.”
Martin’s hesitance around embracing TikTok is a neat metaphor for the quandary facing the State when it comes to the Chinese-owned platform
In his first week on the platform Martin posted a flurry of new videos but this has since tailed off to a handful of irregular, staid postings. Social media is a combat zone and establishment politicians are guaranteed a hot reception anywhere that Irish young people gather. The leader of the country appears genuinely unsure about how to engage with users of the service, which is reported to have told advertisers that it has more than 2.2 million monthly active accounts here.
Martin’s hesitance around embracing TikTok is a neat metaphor for the quandary facing the State when it comes to the Chinese-owned platform. Should the State dance up close and personal with one of its most active private sector investors? TikTok is, after all, currently building a €600 million data centre here and is also boosting its workforce by 1,000 to 3,000.
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Or should the State remain standoffish with a Chinese-controlled company? It has become a lightening rod for political controversy in rival superpower the US, a traditional bastion of foreign capital flows to Ireland and home of most of this country’s other major investors. TikTok always strenuously denies accusations that the Chinese government has any influence over it or the huge amount of valuable personal data that it holds about its young western users.
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Yet the accusations, especially in the US, keep coming. Forbes recently raised concerns over how TikTok tracks US users, sparking furious denials from the company. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between genuine complaints and others that appear to veer more towards being nakedly anti-Chinese. Concerns over how a Chinese company might control data are reasonable but Republicans, in particular, are also prone to spouting all kinds of reds-under-the bed guff.
The government of US president Joe Biden has rowed back on crackdown threats from the previous administration and is trying to negotiate a framework with TikTok for how it must operate in the US.
Meanwhile, back in the US tech industry’s favourite little European island, Martin has trod a fine line, with his brand new TikTok account and a remarkably low-profile meeting to discuss investment earlier this year with TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew. The céad míle fáilte for the Chinese company from the State’s enterprise and political officials has always seemed less effusive than the one reserved for big US tech giants such as Apple and Google.
Recent events show why caution must remain the watchword. TikTok’s European users this week received a privacy update promoted by an Irish lawyer, Elaine Fox. A former senior Facebook executive in Dublin, she is now TikTok’s head of privacy for Europe. That puts her right on the front line of any battles in the European Union about how TikTok handles its users’ data.
TikTok told its European users in the update that their data can now be accessed by staff from outside the continent, including in China where the government has in recent years tightened the leash on its homegrown tech behemoths. Staff in countries such as Brazil, Canada, Israel the US and Singapore can also see the data, it said.
Fox insists European user data is only shared with staff in places such as China where it is “based on a demonstrated need to do their job”. But the prospect of any data flows from Europe to China is always liable to spark controversy. The Data Protection Commission here is already investigating TikTok over how it handles any transfers of data to China.
Meanwhile, the US and TikTok and its Chinese backers still seem intent on agreeing a framework to address US national security concerns. TikTok has already announced it will outsource users’ data to servers run by US company, Oracle. A wider agreement with the US seems to be taking a long time.
But if it comes, it might help to dial down the political rhetoric around the risks of TikTok’s emergence in the West as the dominant social media platform among impressionable young minds. CNN reported this week that Brendan Carr, a US federal communications commissioner, said it might be preferable to simply ban TikTok.
What new reputational and regulatory risks come for Ireland when it becomes the home next year of TikTok’s biggest farm of data servers?
That seems an extreme and, at this juncture, unlikely move. A TikTok ban would have geopolitical consequences for the already strained relationship between the US and China. If it were to happen, Ireland’s quandary about how closely it should dance with cash-rich TikTok would also turn into a full-blown dilemma.
How would the US government, the State’s biggest geopolitical backer outside of the EU, react to this State’s continued use by TikTok as its investment beachhead into Europe? Behind closed doors, it would be unlikely to be too warm. What new reputational and regulatory risks come for Ireland when it becomes the home next year of TikTok’s biggest farm of data servers?
The biggest risk for the State is that so many factors are largely out of the control of policymakers here. This includes relations between China and Ireland’s benefactor, the US, over TikTok. It also largely includes the attitude of the EU towards TikTok and any data flows it might have with China. Ireland could be buffeted if any of these issues ever heat up.
All the while, TikTok continues to invest heavily in the economy here. Ireland’s official approach for now seems to be to shut up and dance.
