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The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
I'm worried about this one. It has bipartisan support between (to my understanding) the pro-censorship wing of the left and the China hawk wing of the right. Both groups hold a lot of power in Washington. The powers the RESTRICT act grants are broad and vague and would extend far past simply banning TikTok were it to be passed.
There are four points generally put forward by proponents of banning the app. I'll try to address these as best as I can. If I'm missing or misrepresenting one, let me know. These points are:
TikTok is should be banned because it harms the attention spans of young people and acts as a bad influence purely as a social media platform, independent of any Chinese interference.
TikTok has the potential as Chinese social media to let the CCP use algorithms to promote harmful viewpoints among American users.
TikTok gives the CCP unprecedented ability to spy on us and collect blackmail on future leaders through user data.
The CCP is our (the USG's) enemy and we should block any gains in cultural, political, or material power they are making and with any means at our disposal.
To the first point. There's no accusation of poisoning our youth, ruining our attention spans, or breaking our minds you can level at TikTok that doesn't also apply to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. All of them promote political extremism and use algorithms of varying complexity to feed users personalized content. TikTok is much better at creating a curated feed, but that's not for lack of trying on the part of its competitors.
An argument to ban TikTok for this reason is an argument to ban all of them. There are plenty of people who would YesChad at this, which is a fair position. I'm not on board with banning these sites for freedom of expression reasons, but they've caused a lot of genuine harm and are likely a net-negative on happiness overall. However, I don't think this is on the table regardless. The 1st Amendment will (rightfully) prevent the government from banning social media apps over this, and the RESTRICT act will only lead to a more regime-controlled version of them. Our lawmakers want to put social media more under government control, not ban it.
Also, if your politics are outside the American overton window, how exactly will you get your message out without social media? Would you believe the things you currently hold to be true if not for the narrative control the Internet has wrested from the government and legacy media? In the 20th century, there were only a few, tightly-controlled media companies that had any messaging power. Your worldview was constrained to what they, and the people around you, found acceptable.
Point two is the psyop potential we are giving the CCP. I'm not sure they have the competency to actually do anything meaningful to us, but it is a fair concern for the future. But what can they do to us that we haven't done to ourselves in the past 8 years, exactly? I believe this point is pushed disingenuously by censorious legislators to pass a law that will give them greater narrative control against their real enemy — domestic opposition, but I will go more into that further down.
Point three is that TikTok gives the CCP huge amounts of user data on Americans. This is a valid concern, and I can see the blackmail potential they would have on future leaders through leaking DMs, nudes, embarrassing old videos, etc. At the very least, I understand why we would want to block TikTok on the phones of anyone who works in the military or in a sensitive government position.
If your position is that no one should get to harvest our personal data, I support you and would like to see that privacy enshrined in law. If your position is that only China shouldn't get to do that… You may disagree with me on this, but as an entity, the CCP's ability to ruin my life seems much more... distant than the USG's. The current regime seems very interested in pointing the state at right-wingers. The linked press release describes the Biden administration's plans for dealing with domestic terrorism, with the outlined targets being white identity extremists and militia people. You may trust the Biden admin to fairly interpret the phrase "domestic terrorist," or trust our 3-letter agencies to not abuse their power or fabricate evidence, but the last few years have destroyed any trust I have in them.
Simply put, if I had to choose one state to get my data, I'd choose the CCP, simply because I'm a world away from them and have no power to break down my door should they desire to. They are not as much of a threat to my freedom or safety as the American government that views many of its citizens as domestic terror threats. I've no illusions about which country I'd actually want to live under, and the USG is not even in the same ballpark of political repression as the CCP, but that doesn't mean I trust my government with our data.
Point 4 is the China Hawk position many Republicans hold. The reasons for this are a combination of China's threat to U.S. hegemony, its desire to spread its politics and influence to client states, the desire to have a "common enemy" to reunite Americans on shared ground, and military-industrial complex-driven greed/warmongering.
This may be the position that gets the most pushback, but I just don't care about China. I don't want to spend more American money and lives on foreign conflicts when there is so much to work on domestically. I don't like the ideology and policies we are exporting to the rest of the world and don't want it to spread completely unopposed. I don't want to die in some "unifying" conflict across the world for a government that pushes domestic policies designed to economically and politically disenfranchise people who look like me. The USG has lost the Mandate of Heaven and it should focus on getting that back, rather than picking more fights abroad.
This is all before we get into what the RESTRICT act gives the government the power to do, which is a lot. It empowers the Secretary of Commerce and the President with the "authority to take any... action as necessary" against information and communications technology products and services that are deemed to be owned or controlled by foreign adversaries and present a national security act.
As I understand it, this would be a process that would require approval by committee, not congress, and lets the President or Secretary bypass 1st Amendment protections to move against any tech or social media company that they deemed to be foreign influenced. This would apply to social media, tech, crypto, etc., and gives these two individuals the power to go after any company they like at will after some procedural outcomes.
I've seen how freely the Russian Interference accusation is baselessly thrown around. It was used by our intelligence agencies to justify shutting down the Hunter Biden story in election time without any supporting evidence. I have no illusions about how this is going to be used, if the act is passed. It will give our government the power to do what it's wanted to for a long time: go after cryptocurrencies and enforce regime control on any platform it wants, free of the pesky constitutional freedoms that prevent it from doing so. It seems like a modern Patriot Act, or an updated Sedition Act of 1918.
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