This week could see the end of the TikTok saga, and if it does — regardless of what the ending is — I for one will be grateful if that happens. As faithful readers of The Torment Nexus (like you) will no doubt remember, I wrote in September that the crusade against TikTok was a “ridiculous waste of time” and I stand by that position. If anything, in fact, I feel it even more strongly now, given some of the rhetoric that we’ve seen published about the looming ban — including some of the commentary from the Supreme Court, who are supposed to be omniscient and wise in all things, but are really just people with flawed opinions and political concerns like everyone else (and some of those political concerns are more obvious than others, as we’ve recently learned about Justice Alito).
The Supremes are expected to rule this weekend on TikTok’s appeal of the law that was passed last April, which requires owner Bytedance to either sell the app to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban in the US. According to some reports based on the questions and commentary from the court, the justices appear to be leaning towards rejecting the appeal on national security grounds. Anonymous sources also told Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal that China was considering selling the app to Elon Musk, which would definitely be the fastest way to destroy TikTok \Bytedance said that if it loses its court challenge, it is planning to shut the app down completely rather than allow existing users to keep using it, which feels like a PR exercise. And Trump is trying to come up with ways to save it.
Setting aside all of this sturm und drang, let’s talk about what’s at the root of it: Are people seriously arguing that an app where people watch short video clips of girls dancing or cats riding Roomba vacuums is somehow a threat to the national security of the United States? Yes, they sure are. And is this argument just as ridiculous as it was the last time I wrote about it? Yes, it sure is.
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How exactly would this even work? No one has been able to explain it — it’s always “algorithms something something propaganda something something national security.” This reminds me of the “Underpant Gnomes” scene from South Park, where a gnome points to a whiteboard that reads: Phase 1) Collect underpants, 2) ? 3) Profit. No one is quite sure how TikTok and its Chinese government masters are using the app to control the minds of innocent young Americans, but they are pretty sure it is. Or maybe they are concerned that China is hoovering up data on the likes and dislikes of young American users — in which case it is exactly like every other social-media app in the universe. Couldn’t the Chinese government just buy data on the open market? Of course it could.
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Stupid and performative
Banning TikTok, Mike Masnick of Techdirt has written, 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.” 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.” And is there any evidence at all that the Chinese government has used TikTok’s algorithms to misinform or use propaganda on American citizens in order to influence their beliefs? No. Even the government’s own filings in the case against TikTok acknowledge that they have no information that Chinese officials have manipulated the platform in the US in any way.
I am normally a big fan of Ben Thompson and the rigorous technology analysis he does in his newsletter Stratechery, but I confess that I don’t find his position on TikTok and whether the US should ban it convincing at all. Here’s what he said in an issue of his newsletter in 2020, when the issue came up again (as it has with depressingn regularity over the last five years):
The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?
We’ve had decades of fear-mongering about both American and foreign companies manipulating people’s minds, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but there’s no evidence that any of it has actually changed people’s minds. All of the Russian manipulation of Facebook and other platforms that allegedly influenced the 2016 election amounted to not much of anything, according to social scientists. I would argue that Fox News is a far bigger problem than Russia ever was. And even if the Chinese government forces TikTok to block mentions of Tiananmen Square (as it has forced Google to), it’s a massive leap to assume that this would somehow affect the minds of gullible young TikTok users in any significant way. In my opinion, people should be a lot more concerned about how Apple — despite all of its bragging about protecting the privacy of its users — gave the Chinese government effective control over all of its data.
Switching to the Little Red Book
One of the arguments that Bytedance has made in court, as I described in my earlier post, is that banning the app is a breach of the First Amendment. “This law imposes extraordinary speech prohibition based on indeterminate future risks,” ByteDance’s lawyer Andrew Pincus has told the court. Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, argued 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 is concerned “no such reason exists here.”
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.” Justice Elena Kagan suggested that Bytedance doesn’t have any First Amendment rights because it is a foreign corporation, and users are free to post elsewhere.
When I suggested in the headline of this piece that the TikTok saga was getting stupider, I wasn’t just referring to these kinds of arguments about how a viral video-clip app is somehow endangering national security. In the latest ridiculous development — which would be rejected by the writers of any TV show or movie as too unbelievable to commit to the page — users of TikTok are responding to the potential ban by moving en masse to another Chinese social-media app. The app’s official name is Xiaohongshu, but it is known colloquially as RedNote or Little Red Book (is this a reference to Chinese dictator Mao Zedong’s book of aphorisms from 1964? Maybe or maybe maybe not).
The app — which mostly has posts in Mandarin, as well as menus and other instructions in the Chinese language — was one of the top downloads on iOS and Android last week. Ironically, it is heavily censored by the Chinese government, with references to LGBTQ issues and other topics banned and immediately removed. Despite this, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up and were posting enthusiastically to RedNote, even making jokes about the allegations of undue influence by using the hashtag #mychinesespy. Another app called Lemon8, which is also owned by Bytedance and is said to be more of a Pinterest clone, also saw a sizable increase in downloads in the US.
A back door for government diplomats
Interestingly enough, if there is a TikTok ban, it would not apply to some members of the US government, provided they are involved with “public diplomacy,” according to Ken Klippenstein, who says he got hold of an internal memo signed by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. According to the document, the Biden administration has quietly exempted these personnel from the ban “regardless of any potential failure of TikTok to be divested of its foreign PRC [People’s Republic of China] ownership.” Public diplomacy refers to U.S. State Department messaging (i.e., propaganda) targeted at foreign audiences to “promote U.S. interests abroad,” as the Department puts it. In other words, while the Biden administration is trying to ban TikTok over foreign influence concerns, the White House is using it for its own foreign influence activities.
One of the most perceptive posts about the TikTok brouhaha that I’ve come across lately came from Ryan Broderick, who publishes a great newsletter called Garbage Day. Here’s how he described it:
The reason all of this has been so annoying and confusing is that the entire divestment-or-ban plan was built on top of a pile of false assumptions about both what TikTok is, philosophically, and what their business model is, practically. Our lawmakers believe that TikTok is a social platform. This is why they are so nervous about Chinese governmental interference and the app’s algorithmic influence. They assume it’s doing to us what American companies like Meta and Google have done to other countries.
Which is why they can’t actually admit that none of this is about free speech or national security. It’s primarily about measuring — and defining — Chinese soft power. But not only is America not TikTok’s biggest audience, it’s not even the largest amount of users they’ve lost to a country-level ban. Right now, TikTok’s biggest user base is Indonesia, where it has about 160 million monthly active users. The US and Brazil are second with 100 million users. When the Indian government banned TikTok in 2020, there were 200 million Indian users on the app, double what they have in the US.
In other words, America isn’t even that important to Bytedance or TikTok, although it might be to the Chinese government. But even if the Chinese government directly controls TikTok in every way — which I have no doubt it either does, or could if it wanted to — that still doesn’t prove that the app somehow has a magical hold over the minds of its audience or users, all programmed via the almighty algorithm, like the dials on a secret lobotomy ray-gun. If the US wants to ban TikTok to strike back at China, or because the Chinese dictatorship is reprehensible in a number of ways — which it definitely is — that’s fine. But let’s not pretend its because TikTok endangers national security.
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@mathewi
Gird yourself for four years of relentless stupidity.