It’s time to ban TikTok
The threat is real
It’s time to ban TikTok — for real.
Despite a functional ban being signed into law more than six months ago, TikTok lives on. The Trump Administration has extended TikTok’s deadline to divest itself from Chinese parent company ByteDance or be banned in the U.S. multiple times, functionally rendering the Congressional TikTok ban moot.
Most recently, The Verge reported that Senator Ed Markey has language in a draft bill that will keep TikTok available for U.S. users “as long as it provides transparency into its content moderation and keeps US user data out of countries like China.”
Good luck with that.
Senator Markey misses the point entirely — the “ban TikTok” saga is years in the making and far more nuanced than protecting user data. Apropos of user privacy, here are a few facts:
The Chinese government has one of ByteDance’s (TikTok’s owner) three board seats, a move made in 2021 described as a decision “by the Chinese government to rein in [tech firms] and take control.”
Engineers in China access U.S. data.
TikTok officials in China dictate how and by whom U.S. user information is accessed, a policy in conflict with a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in front of the U.S. Senate.
The Chinese government’s laws — specifically, the 2017 National Intelligence Law — allows their government to compel TikTok to provide data on Americans to Chinese intelligence agencies.
Despite its flagrant abuses, the question whether to ban TikTok, like every other topic du jour in American politics, is not a one sided debate. The Atlantic Council notes that TikTok’s data collection practices on Americans are similar to those of American social media companies (e.g., Meta and Twitter) and could give authoritarian countries precedent to ban American apps.
Here’s the problem with those arguments. First, just because TikTok’s practices are not dissimilar to other American-based social media companies does not mean their practices are equally harmless — to equate them is to functionally ignore geopolitical realities.
Second, China has already banned a boatload of American tech companies: All of Google’s services (Gmail, YouTube, etc), Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, Netflix, a bunch of news outlets, Slack, Wikipedia, and more are all inaccessible to anyone living in or visiting China.
Oh, by the way, TikTok is banned in China, too (!!!). Yes, seriously (more on that in a bit).
As for those aforementioned geopolitical realities…
It isn’t (only) about access to data
The Atlantic Council is right on one front — China can access way more information about Americans through illicit means than they can through compelling TikTok to turn over user data.
It’s never been (primarily) about that.
It’s the fact that China is the United States’ number one geopolitical adversary by a mile, as well as China’s well-documented history of grey zone activities — “coercive actions that are shy of armed conflict but beyond normal diplomatic, economic, and other activities.” Look no further than the similarly well-documented examples of the Chinese government using information online to influence an adversarial populus’ behavior.
China has directly targeted Americans on social media who express views against those held by the Chinese government: They’ve used spamouflage networks — state-sponsored generative AI bots that pretend to be real people online to seed ideas beneficial to the Chinese government — to cause discord online in the U.S. during the COVID pandemic, they run aggressive anti-U.S. digital misinformation campaigns in Taiwan — the list goes on.
So why wouldn’t the Chinese government also use TikTok to sow narratives that are beneficial to the People’s Republic of China and harmful for the U.S. among its 170 million monthly American users?
Hint: They might.
All social media platforms are not made equal
China’s own restrictive policies show us that they understand that social media can be used for the proverbial “good” or “bad” of a population.
Remember: The international version of TikTok is banned in China. The Chinese government only allows the Chinese-only Douyin, an app which is subject to strict censorship and built to favor educational and skills-related content.
Stay with me: The Chinese government banned TikTok because it’s full of brain rot memes, stupid people dancing, and anti-western content — that’s what they want international users to see. The Chinese government only allows Douyin because they want Chinese users to consume educational content that’s good for them.
That the Chinese government is putting its finger on the scale to show its geopolitical adversaries “bad” content and its own citizens “good” content is why equivocating Meta or Twitter with TikTok is to willfully ignore facts.
Yes, there is sufficient evidence that short form video is bad.
Yes, people addicted to short form videos have “higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, social anxiety, attention problems, and lower life satisfaction and sleep quality.”
Yes, kids addicted to short form videos do worse in school, are unable to focus as well as peers, and are more likely to develop body dissatisfaction.
Yes, this does (sadly) hold true for social media use in general.
If we agree that social media and short form video is nominally not great, and compare all the social media platforms who have that not-great-thing as a product (Meta, Twitter, and YouTube) who can be regulated aggressively by U.S. government agencies with the one other social media company in TikTok who is governed (by law!!!) by a Chinese government with a well-documented history of using social media to destabilize or otherwise create unrest amongst its adversaries — of which the U.S. is most certainly one — any reasonable observer can see one of these things is not like the other.
Banning TikTok is not just a matter of access to American’s information (though we should care about that too) or a matter of social media being addictive and bad for us (it is) — this is about enabling a near-peer adversary of the United States widespread and free access to influence the hearts and minds of Americans.
That is not something that any U.S. Administration or any politician should allow to continue.
It’s time to ban TikTok — for real.
Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.
We might all look at this differently if we called it like it is - “do we want a Chinese company to program the minds of our citizens”
Couldn’t agree more!