The crusade against TikTok is a ridiculous waste of time
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in my inaugural post.) Since this is only the third edition of the newsletter, I am still working out some bugs, so please bear with me.
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When I read news and opinion pieces about TikTok, the video-sharing app owned by China-based ByteDance, it often reminds me of the old parable about the blind men and the elephant: when they touch the animal, each of the men touches a different part, and therefore he thinks it is something different — the one who touches the trunk thinks it is a snake, the one who touches the leg thinks it is a tree, and so on. In TikTok's case, younger users who enjoy scrolling through the videos probably see it as a harmless distraction; older users who don't spend any time on it probably think of it as a massive waste of time; and a number of legislators in Congress appear to see it as a dangerous psy-op designed by the Chinese government as a way of gathering data on American users and/or targeting them with misinformation and propaganda.
When I started writing this newsletter, I realized that I've been writing about the supposed dangers of TikTok, and the plans to either force ByteDance to sell or make TikTok illegal, for four years now. I first wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review in September of 2020, after then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok. Trump said he did it because the app "threatens the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," but even at the time it was clear that the ban was driven by a desire to do hurt China, which had become an economic powerhouse. The US had blocked mergers involving Chinese companies and imposed sanctions on of Chinese firms like Huawei, a maker of telecom equipment, and China had retaliated by hacking into US federal databases and the credit agency Equifax.
Even then, security experts said that TikTok was no more of a data or privacy risk than Facebook or Google. “I am the first to yell from the rooftops when there is a glaring privacy issue somewhere. But we just have not found anything we could call a smoking gun in TikTok,” security expert Will Strafach told The Associated Press in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump's order soon sparked a frenzy of attempts by US companies to acquire TikTok, immediately sparked a race to acquire TikTok’s assets before the September deadline, with Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart all in the running. But those plans hit a roadblock when the Chinese government issued new restrictions on the sale or export of artificial-intelligence software, which would include TikTok's recommendation algorithms.
Trump's order was blocked by the courts, who ruled that he didn't have the authority to ban the app, and when Joe Biden became president in 2020 he revoked the order. By 2022, however, anti-TikTok sentiment in Congress was ramping up again. Among other factors, a story from BuzzFeed stated that staffers at ByteDance routinely accessed data on US TikTok users, according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings. In December of 2022, officials at the Pentagon and the Justice Department started lobbying to force ByteDance to sell off TikTok, because of the risks that Beijing would access data on American users, and use the app’s algorithms to influence what they could see. Josh Hawley, a Republican US senator, introduced a bill that, echoing Trump’s old order, would ban the app for all American users.
In March of last year, Shou Zi Chew, TikTok's CEO, appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and argued that millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses in the US use TikTok, and that banning the app would place limits on freedom of expression (a somewhat ironic comment coming from the CEO of a Chinese app that has been known to censor things on behalf of the Chinese government, like images of Tiananmen Square.) In an interview with the Journal, Chew argued that banning TikTok or forcing its owners to sell wouldn’t accomplish anything that the company’s own proposed solution to US lawmakers’ concerns—an initiative known as Project Texas—doesn’t already achieve, including storing all US data on US servers.
Despite all of this, Biden in May signed a law that forces ByteDance to find a buyer for TikTok or face a complete ban on the app within the US by January 19 of next year. Within weeks, a number of parties had expressed interest in buying TikTok, including Steven Mnuchin, an investment banker and former treasury secretary, and Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard. Microsoft and Oracle were also said to be interested. However, Arthur Dong, a business professor at Georgetown University, said that China likely would not agree to a TikTok sale if it included the algorithms, because “it probably feels at this point that they’ve got a gun to their head.” That makes a ban more likely.
TikTok is now fighting the law in court. One of its arguments is that it is a breach of the company's First Amendment rights, and those of its millions of users. "This law imposes extraordinary speech prohibition based on indeterminate future risks," TikTok and ByteDance's lawyer Andrew Pincus told an appeals court in Washington this week. A Justice Department lawyer, however, said that since the app's recommendation engine was written by and is maintained by ByteDance," it is "not expression by Americans in America — it is expression by Chinese engineers in China." Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, argued earlier this year that under the law, the government can’t restrict access to ideas without having a very good reason for it, and as far as he was concerned "no such reason exists here."
The government's argument is that there is a reason, and that reason is national security. Since ByteDance is a Chinese company, the argument goes, it is either willingly or unwillingly subject to the demands of the Chinese government, which could include both harvesting data on American users and/or using the app to subtly control the information seen by US users, with the intent of misinforming them or subjecting them to propaganda. Is there any evidence of this? In a word, no. Even the government's own filings acknowledge that they have no information that Chinese officials have manipulated the platform in the US. Julia Angwin, the cofounder of The Markup, has said she wishes that all of the US tech giants that prey on users' data were getting the same level of scrutiny as TikTok, calling the sale-0r-ban law part of a new "red scare."
There is another argument that defenders of the TikTok ban use, which boils down to "China does it, so why shouldn't we." Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term 'net neutrality,' argued in an op-ed for the New York Times that a ban on TikTok was justified because of the way that China blocks foreign apps and services and censors content, calling it "an overdue response, a tit for tat, in a long battle for the soul of the internet." Mike Masnick of Techdirt, however, wrote that the US "shouldn’t take a page from the Chinese censorship playbook and basically give them the moral high ground. Don’t let the authoritarians set the agenda. We should be better than that." Banning TikTok, Masnick says, is a "stupid, performative, unconstitutional, authoritarian move that doesn’t do even the slightest bit to stop China from (1) getting data on Americans or (2) using propaganda to try to influence people."
As Masnick and others have noted, China can (and does) buy whatever data it wants on Americans and their social media habits, thanks to the dozens of private data brokers who willingly sell that kind of information to the highest bidder. "I’ve never seen a particularly good argument about what the Chinese could get from TikTok data that they can’t get from hundreds of other sources,” Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations told BuzzFeed News. And when it comes to fears that TikTok and its Chinese masters are manipulating American users, there is absolutely zero evidence that this is happening. We've had decades of fear-mongering about both American and foreign companies doing the same thing, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but there's no evidence that any of it has changed people's minds on key issues either.
The attack on TikTok started out as a cravenly political gambit to win points by going after China, turning the relatively harmless social video app into a privacy-breaching, propaganda-boosting bogeyman, and despite all of the rhetoric over the past four years, TikTok is still essentially a straw man. Forcing its sale won't change anything fundamental about how it operates, and a ban will only reinforce how far the American commitment to things like freedom of speech has fallen. Not only that, but it could set a precedent that would allow future governments to ban whatever apps and services they wish, based on pretences about "national security" or "foreign propaganda." Hopefully when the TikTok case gets to the Supreme Court, it will be revealed as the sham it is.
Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or post them on Substack or on my website, or you can also reach me on Twitter, Threads, BlueSky or Mastodon. And thanks for being a reader.
