Update 3/10/24: Corrected an assumption that TikTok would be the first free consumer app pressured to decouple from a foreign owner. This happened to Grindr in 2020.
As the story around whether Congress will pass a bill that forces ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company gains momentum (Montana tried it, India did it), I am left to wonder… is TikTok all bad? Or rather, is TikTok any worse than Instagram/Facebook, Twitter/X, or Snap?
Concerns about surveillance and national security.
We know TikTok collects data on its users to sell ads. This is the same business model as Meta, which we aren’t outright banning because the data is owned by an American company, and U.S. political leaders are, supposedly, concerned about what Tik Tok is doing with American data.
It has been alleged that ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, used its now-defunct news app, TopBuzz, to disseminate pro-China messages and censor content critical of the Chinese government. Former employees claim that ByteDance instructed staff to place specific pro-China content in the app, sometimes promoting it prominently. So if BytdeDance did all this with TopBuzz, why not with TikTok?
Ok, so could ByteDance be collecting data about Americans to then sow discord the way the Russians did in 2016? U.S. senators certainly think so.
There are legitimate concerns intertwined with political agendas. Isn’t that why Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) made sure to say, “From proliferating videos on how to cross our border illegally to supporting Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America, Communist China is using TikTok as a tool to spread dangerous propaganda that undermines American national security. We cannot allow the CCP to continue to harness this digital weapon.”
This stuff is just so gnarly to parse.
In 2022 journalists were exposing how Tik Tok was polarizing American society using our most divisive topics such as guns, abortion, and structural racism. If anti-American content that is factual is circulating on a platform, isn’t banning it against our right to information? Even if the intention behind the narratives is to destabilize American society, if the information is not mis/disinformation, don’t Americans have a right to that information just as much as Chinese citizens have a right to information about Tiananmen Square or Uyghurs? And let’s say TikTok is surveilling and influencing the American public — why is this any more dangerous or a threat to democracy than an unregulated American social media company?
Until the U.S. government is able to pass regulation on social media companies, I say that we, as young people, need to think much more critically about how we engage with political content on social media. This is really where the far left and the far right converge — an intense distrust of mainstream media leads both groups susceptible to propaganda. I used to be a very impressionable Instagram user myself. I regularly reposted content from Redfish Media — a Kremlin-backed media outlet — and I saw nothing wrong with it. After all, I was exposing the truth, not lies, but now I cringe thinking about who I was mostly helping with my reposts and how I was manipulated by a political force I did not understand.
Unless people from the fringes are brought into the conversation, American society won’t make it. To me, it’s kind of that simple.
Could we have the Chinese version of TikTok?
There is a regulated TikTok in China that is just for children, and it has received a fair amount of attention from American leaders. Why doesn’t TikTok do that for America? The fear-mongering narrative is that China wants to give American children “opium” and its own children “spinach”, but Obama explains it best in this interview with The Verge. Simply put, we don’t have the regulation in place. Instead of passing real regulation like the EU’s GDPR, we have not passed comprehensive data protection regulation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization I trust, puts it well when they say that rather than single-out one business or country “we must enact comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation…By reducing the massive stores of personal data collected by all businesses, TikTok included, we will reduce opportunities for all governments, China included, to buy or steal this data.” I mean, duh.
No corporation, foreign or domestic, will prioritize the well-being of children over profits without a financial incentive to do so. Now if ByteDance sells TikTok to an American company, which would be enormously profitable for the American company, will the harms of TikTok go away? Perhaps the national security risk goes away, but will the harms?
The American Civil Liberties Union, who I generally trust, think it’s a really bad idea to ban TikTok. They believe this ban violates our First Amendment right. The experts at ACLU and EFF seem to think this bill is about the 2024 elections and politics. To be fair though, the proposed bill is not necessarily an outright ban — it is asking for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. based company, thus setting a precedent for preventing any “foreign adversaries” from “targeting, surveilling, and manipulating” Americans. Senators of both parties are concerned, and they’ve investigated it. So even if it is political posturing, is that such a bad thing?
What about new artists?
Someone who stands to lose quite a bit, at least temporarily, with a TikTok ban are independent artists and new artists in the U.S. who depend on TikTok for exposure and revenue. An experiment by the company in Australia was quickly found to hurt Australian artists like Kota Banks. In a beautifully articulated stream of thoughts, musician James Blake explains with devastating precision how the modern economics of the music industry hurts all artists. Yes Universal Music Group and TikTok are fighting over who gets to exploit artists more, but regardless of who wins, we lose as a society when the artist is unable to benefit from their own creation
These companies are powerful, bro.
While Congressmen/women may be upset that TikTok urged users to call their representative, it’s not different from what Facebook and Uber have done in the past. Yes TikTok seems to pose a national security risk, but honestly so did poor old, local tech company Discord.
Yesterday my boyfriend said to me in passing, “I heard Tik Tok might be banned,” to which I responded with, “No way… America doesn’t ban technology.”
I don’t know why I said this or if it’s true so I briefly looked into it and there seems to be no precedent for banning a free consumer technology. However, as of late, it seems we have banned technology-related commerce. The twist? It’s all commerce related to China.