《TAIPEI TIMES》Taiwan should follow US’ lead on TikTok: academic

By Fang Wei-li and Esme Yeh / Staff reporter, with staff writer

Taiwan should tighten control over TikTok in line with the US if the platform constitutes a threat to cybersecurity or national security, a Taiwanese academic said.

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The US Court of Appeals on Dec. 7 rejected TikTok’s petition to overturn a legal act demanding that it either separate itself from its current parent company, ByteDance Limited （字節跳動）, by the Jan. 19 deadline or be banned from the US market thereafter.

Senior judge Douglas Ginsburg said in the court’s majority opinion that “the [US] government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation [China] and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States,” CBS News reported at the time.

“The multi-year efforts of both political branches to investigate the national security risks posed by the TikTok platform, and to consider potential remedies proposed by TikTok, weigh heavily in favor of the act,” Ginsburg was cited by CBS News as saying.

TikTok and ByteDance on Dec. 9 filed an emergency motion with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking for more time to make its case to the US Supreme Court. The appeals court on Friday rejected the emergency bid by TikTok to temporarily block the law.

Washington can introduce tough legislative regulations like this mainly because the US values data and national security, Academia Sinica’s Institutum Iurisprudentiae researcher Su Yen-tu （蘇彥圖） said earlier in the week.

Bipartisan support was secured in the US Senate after US national security agencies gathered sufficient evidence that TikTok was collecting sensitive private information, he said.

Although Taiwan is a small country, the government should take action if TikTok is found to constitute a cybersecurity or national security threat, Su said, adding that regulatory moves are necessary even with only 60 percent effectiveness.

Legal countermeasures can be divided into practical and normative aspects, he said.

While US approaches can be consulted, a broader social support and consensus must be achieved before putting these discussions into practice, Su said.

Additional reporting by Reuters

新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES