Will Philippines’ proposed TikTok ban address concerns over China or curb free speech?

On Thursday, House deputy majority leader Bienvenido Abante filed a bill proposing a law – or An Act Regulating Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications – that would empower the president to identify countries that are “foreign adversaries of the Philippines” and impose a ban on digital applications that such adversaries could use to “infiltrate” and threaten national security.

Abante’s bill defines a foreign adversary-controlled application as any technology application operated by a company controlled by a foreign adversary.

In the explanatory note of the bill, Abante said “lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its [Beijing-based] parent company ByteDance may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.

The congressman representing the capital city of Manila noted that India had already banned TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps, “claiming in part that they were secretly transmitting users’ data to foreign servers”.

Abante’s bill would not only ban Tiktok but also the ownership of Chinese corporations in critical infrastructure in the Philippines such as power and telecommunications. He specifically identified stakes held by Chinese companies in Dito Telecommunity and the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines.

TikTok is very popular in the Philippines, with an estimated 49 million users as of January, according to data from German data-gathering platform Statista, or about 43 per cent of the country’s estimated population as of end-2023.

Abante has no official