The Debate over Banning TikTok, Summarized
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Many experts seem sure that banning TikTok is a great idea, or a bad idea, but I’m enjoying having doubts. There’s too much the public doesn’t know about US classified data, TikTok’s secret algorithm, and more, for any of us to know for certain if our elected officials are over — or under — -reacting. And whether the law will ever be enforced could be even harder to guess.
Before it becomes a ban, the new law President Biden signed on April 24th pressures TikTok owner ByteDance to sell, though few analysts expects this to happen. And it will soon faces challenges in court. But now that Congress and the White House have acted, there are two not-quite-opposing views on the ban that seem the most persuasive. Let’s call them “pro-ban” and “ban or don’t ban, it won’t work.”
The case for at least attempting the ban was well-summarized by The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson on his podcast, Plain English. Citing posts by the Taiwan-based tech writer Ben Thompson (no relation), Matthew Yglesias, and others, Derek Thompson presented evidence for three claims: “That TikTok is indeed, among other things, a source of news,” he said. “That the Chinese state has a history of directly influencing some of its largest companies; and… that the Chinese state has a demonstrable interest in controlling speech around the world.”
The whole thing is worth a listen and much more expansive than just these three ideas. But to the first point, Thompson notes that “170 million Americans are on TikTok, and roughly half of them say they get their news from the site. Among Americans under 30, TikTok is a more popular source of news than cable news, local news, newspapers, magazines, radio, or podcasts.”
It’s hard to deny TikTok’s reach, so Thompson moves on to China’s history with superstar companies. Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba and one of the richest men in the world, disappeared for four months after he criticized Chinese policy and regulations. During his absence, the Chinese Communist Party took over his company and sold parts of it for scrap. When he returned to public view, it was as a teacher, not a business man.
Then there’s Tencent, among the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world when the Chinese government decided that too many young people were playing video games. The CCP enforced an eight-month freeze on new games, radically reoirtening one of its biggest company’s business models. Thompson also mentioned the tech giant Huawei, some products of which have been banned in the US over security concerns, and which is the target of regulators in North America and Europe. There’s no reason to think TikTok would be exempt from meddling.
Finally, he shows how Chinese companies including TikTok censored information on US culture war issues like Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. TikTok is already attempting to shape cultural movements in America, in addition to blocking discussion of Chinese genocide, Tank Man, Hong Kong protests, and because of social media actions by their employees, Marriott Hotels and the NBA’s Houston Rockets. Thompson worries that it’s only a matter of time before ByteDance is pressured by China to influence American policy — if it hasn’t already happened.
“Do you want to learn after the next George Floyd-style cataclysm in the culture war that Gen Z has been algorithmically spoon-fed a specific agenda?” he asks. “Do you want to learn months after the 2024 election that the CCP put pressure on ByteDance to tweak their black box algorithm to give greater weight to — let’s just say — your political opponent?”
On the other hand, the case for something like ban nihilism was outlined by Nicole Narea at Vox. As Narea points out, it’s not at all clear that the ban is constitutional in the US, and a similar state-level initiative in Montana recently failed in the courts. Trump previously tried to ban TikTok twice through executive action, only for judges to block the efforts.
Even if a ban does pass, enforcement may be tough; attempts to censor some types of TikTok content in Russia proved difficult. And some of the experts in Narea’s reporting point out that addressing privacy concerns with TikTok does nothing about, you know, the rest of the internet.
Narea quotes David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying, “This bill would fail to protect us from the many threats to our digital privacy posed by criminals, private companies, and foreign actors. Comprehensive data privacy legislation is the solution we need — not bans of certain categories of apps.” Even if the ban holds up in courts, it’s fair to wonder how it’ll improve the lives of Americans, or if it’ll just change which companies hoard our data.
Perhaps after the presidential election we’ll learn of TikTok propaganda campaigns ordered by the Chinese government. Perhaps, instead, we’ll hear that most of our elected officials can’t tell a hashtag from hash browns. Maybe both are true, and maybe we’ll never find out. But TikTok was already turning into a digital mall with TikTok Shop, and I doubt any creators who used it will be silent for long. I don’t know if the TikTok ban is a good idea, and I don’t know if it’ll work, but I know to celebrate the creators and not the platforms.
The Debate over Banning TikTok, Summarized
Wren Graves
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