Damned if You Do (Premium)

Over the weekend, Microsoft admitted that it would like to acquire the non-Chinese assets of TikTok. Doing so would be a mistake.

News of Microsoft’s interest in TikTok, a social media network that specializes in goofy, user-made videos, first surfaced last Friday. But the software giant confirmed the rumors over the weekend after the U.S. White House revealed that it was considering “banning” TikTok for national security reasons.

That assertion is devoid of evidence, and as with the U.S. government’s bizarre unilateral actions against networking giant Huawei, it is instead based solely on xenophobic fears that TikTok, a Chinese-based company will be forced by the Chinese government, or the Communist Party, or whatever, to … do something. Turn over private data about its users, I guess, or perhaps even spy on its users. Whatever the perceived risks, they’re all hypothetical at this point. What we used to call FUD (“fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”)

But whatever. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok means that an acquisition of at least its non-Chinese assets would result in some sort of oversight by a trustworthy, U.S.-based tech giant. So no matter where you fall on the spectrum of FUD around TikTok and other Chinese companies, we can all at least agree that with Microsoft as its steward, TikTok would be less suspicious to the U.S. government and to those citizens who believe that everything Chinese is evil. Problem solved, right?

Not so fast.

Many critics have pointed out that Microsoft hasn’t exactly exceled at consumer services in recent years and that it could thus end up being the worst thing that ever happened to TikTok. And too many are falling into the all-too-obvious trap of telling outdated jokes about how Microsoft might rename the service.

That all misses the point. Microsoft won’t buy TikTok just to integrate it into Bing or Microsoft 365 or whatever. Microsoft is buying the service for the same singular reason it acquired LinkedIn, Minecraft, and GitHub: For its massive community of users. And it will treat this acquisition as it did those, by letting it continue to run independently as its own company.

Whether that is a good strategy is debatable. But I’m not at all worried that Microsoft’s lack of success with consumers will impact TikTok: The firm’s hands-off approach will mean that TikTok can sink or swim against Facebook and Twitter on its own.

No, the problem with Microsoft acquiring TikTok is that simply doing so will promote the xenophobic policies of the current U.S. administration and will amount to the theft of a huge chunk of a Chinese company by an American tech giant. This is exactly the kind of behavior that we, as Americans, are told to expect of the Chinese: That the government will meddle with a supposedly independent corporation. Ironic.

To be clear, TikTok does not want to be sold, and it does not want to be broken up. It is only considering this outcome to s...