Time Is Running Out on TikTok in the U. S.

 

The video-sharing app TikTok has come up several times in this space in the last year, and never in a complimentary way.  In April, I noted that a couple who learned the suicidal art of fractal woodburning over TikTok succeeded in killing themselves and burning their house down.  In September, a number of U. S. TikTok executives resigned in protest over being forced to take orders from the Chinese corporate headquarters (TikTok is a subsidiary of the Chinese company ByteDance).  And just last week, following revelations that TikTok executives lied about whether data from U. S. users could be accessed from China, several states banned its use from all state-provided devices and members of Congress began looking into the possibility of banning it from the U. S. altogether.

 

A recent article in National Review outlines the increasing concerns that TikTok poses for uses who don't want to be spied on by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or be subjected to propaganda and social-media manipulation coordinated by that entity. 

 

According to members of the U. S. House's Oversight Committee, TikTok executives told them that "China-based staff cannot access U. S. users' locations."  A few weeks later, reports indicated that the China-based parent company ByteDance was laying plans to do exactly that. 

 

In common with many China-based corporations, part of ByteDance is owned by the CCP and hosts a CCP committee that meets at the company's headquarters.  We have learned that there are "no meaningful firewalls" between the U. S. division of TikTok and ByteDance, and 300 TikTok and ByteDance employees formerly held jobs with the Chinese state media, which are not known for fairness or objectivity.  While there is no smoking gun showing that TikTok is taking orders direct from Xi Jinping, it's pretty clear that ByteDance and consequently TikTok are heavily influenced by CCP policies and goals, including its policies toward the minority Uyghurs.

 

Among the actions taken against TikTok this week were bans on using it on state-provided devices in South Dakota and Texas.  This follows a bill introduced by Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Mike Gallagher to ban the app outright in the U. S.  The FBI and the Treasury Department are also beginning to view TikTok as a threat to national security, as the app is beginning to cover more general news and political issues, as well as music videos and failed juggling attempts.

 

TikTok appears to be most appealing to people under 30, who increasingly rely on it for Google-type services as well as amusement and social connections.  This poses a problem for laws that would ban it outright, but less radical steps such as insisting that ByteDance relinquish ownership of the U. S.-based TikTok division are more likely to succeed.

 

The Internet famously knows no boundaries:  global, state, or local.  And so it's not surprising that one of the newest rapidly-growing and popular social media apps (it became available worldwide only in 2018) originated in China. 

 

As we have learned in recent years, there is no such thing as a neutral social-media app.  The depths of human depravity ensure that as an app grows beyond a few hundred thousand users, the worst stuff on it will be so bad that some form of control or monitoring becomes necessary, even with the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts internet service providers (e. g. TikTok) from lawsuits over content provided by third parties. 

 

Given that TikTok has to exert some kind of control over its content, and also has to amass user-generated data to satisfy its advertisers, why should we be worried that all this goes on under the watchful eye of the CCP?  It all depends on how well you trust the CCP to act benevolently toward the United States, its citizens, and anybody in the U. S. who has drawn its unfavorable attention. 

 

In my somewhat misspent teenage years, one day I was rummaging through some old books at our house and came upon a slim volume with a black-and-white dust cover that carried the bold title "YOU CAN TRUST THE COMMUNISTS—to do exactly as they say!"  In other words, when a country such as China excoriates another country such as the U. S. for doing things like being friendly to Taiwan and protesting maltreatment of Uyghurs, and China threatens to take over the world in the future, there's no reason not to believe that they are serious. 

 

In such a situation, allowing a CCP-friendly company to embed itself so deeply in the lives of U. S. citizens and residents as to track their movements all the way from Beijing is a dumb thing to do.  Fortunately, more and more government leaders are seeing things that way, and the main question now is how to disengage from TikTok without fomenting a revolution among those 25 and under.

 

Perhaps a corporate breakup similar to what happened with Standard Oil or AT&T is in the best interests both of the U. S. at large, and the millions of TikTok users who depend on their daily fifteen seconds of buffoonery and news reports, or whatever it is they use TikTok for.  But any breakup will have to be rigorously enforced, because corporate breakups have a way of losing effectiveness after a while.  Even in such a relatively benign case as AT&T, after a decade or two the sundered pieces began rejoining like a cut-up flatworm turning into lots of little flatworms that crawl back together for a party.  (That's a lousy simile, but then again, I never took biology.) 

 

The point is that even if the U. S. division of TikTok is formally severed from its ByteDance parent, informal ties through corporate leaders and relationships could persist—in fact, would have to persist unless there was a leadership shakeup along with it.  As one of the most popular apps for sharing music, TikTok worldwide is on track to garner $12 billion in revenue in 2022, so a split-off piece of it would probably attract U. S. investors, who could then dispense with the political slant toward China and concentrate on just making money.

 

That won't mean TikTok's troubles are over, as accusations of addiction and other problems will not be solved by a change of ownership.  But at least if TikTok was cut off from its Chinese corporate parent, we wouldn't be harboring a giant social-media spy network, which is pretty much what it looks like right now.

 

Sources:  I referred to a National Review article calling for the ban of TikTok in the U. S. at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/ban-tiktok-from-operating-in-america/, Gov. Abbott's declaration of a ban of TikTok on state-provided devices at https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-orders-aggressive-action-against-tiktok, and a Fortune profile of TikTok at https://fortune.com/2022/11/08/tiktok-profits-record-industry-wants-increase-royalties-revenue/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on TikTok.

TikTok and the Chinese Connection

 

One of the newest stars in the social-media constellations is TikTok, a free video-sharing app that is very popular among young users.  Ostensibly, you have to be at least 13 to join TikTok, but such age limits are notoriously easy to evade.  Like other social-media apps, the TikTok app has various ways of making money, including advertising, contests, and in-app purchases.  It was the first non-Meta app (e. g. not Facebook or its ilk) to reach the threshold of three billion downloads worldwide, even with the handicap of being banned in India.

 

The reason India banned TikTok in 2019, only two years after it went global, was that an Indian court viewed it as a source of pornographic content and a medium likely to be used by sexual predators.  In 2020, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a permanent ban, citing national security concerns.  Although there have been efforts to ban TikTok in the U. S., they have been unsuccessful so far.

 

TikTok is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ByteDance, a company based in China.  The U. S. division of TikTok recently made the news when five executives resigned after facing interference by ByteDance into the U. S. organization's internal workings. According to an article originally published in National Review, one executive complained that "A lot of our guidance came from HQ, and we weren't necessarily part of strategy building. . . . I don't want to be told what to do."  Coming after earlier reports of a leaked strategy document from ByteDance that ordered subsidiaries to "play down the China connection," one wonders just how tight a rein ByteDance holds on its foreign TikTok operations.

 

Nothing major goes on in China without at least the passive acquiescence of the government.  So we can be sure that Chinese government leaders are aware of what ByteDance is doing.  This is one reason that the TikTok app itself is not available in China.  Instead, a modified version called Douyin is available there.  But the leaked document urges PR people to respond to questions about Chinese control of TikTok by saying that "TikTok is not available in China."  It's the truth, it's nothing but the truth, but it's not the whole truth.

 

The question of how much control a central ownership hub should exert over foreign subsidiaries is nothing new.  Dodgy things were done during World War II with regard to American-owned properties in Nazi Germany, at least up to the point when Germany blocked American assets there once the U. S. declared war on Germany. 

 

The U. S. isn't at war with China.  But one could be pardoned for wondering why China is exporting tons of fentanyl for illegal consumption in the U. S.  Perhaps it's in revenge for the Opium Wars, a sordid episode in the relationship between China and the West that forced China to open its doors to opium imported from British-colonized India in the 1800s.  Whatever the reason, some people doubt that China has the best interests of the U. S. at heart, and look with suspicion on the way ByteDance is consolidating control of TikTok in China.

 

Starting in the 1990s, globalizing free trade became a worldwide goal and, just as Adam Smith would have predicted, raised the living standards of billions of people around the globe.  Most of these were in the developing world, but Walmart wouldn't be able to sell most of its stuff as cheaply as it does if it weren't for China, so to that extent the U. S. benefited as well. 

 

But lately, we are seeing a variety of ways in which the pernicious effects of social media are becoming increasingly obvious—in the toxicity of political discourse, in the soaring rates of depression and suicide among young people, and in the general distractedness of the U. S. population.  A purely U. S. version of TikTok might not be much better than the one we have, but the fact that its strings are being pulled by Chinese masters adds a sinister look to an already fraught situation.

 

If sovereignty means anything, it means that a sovereign government can control the kind of activities and commerce that foreign-owned and foreign-operated enterprises conduct.  So as a theoretical matter, the U. S. would be entirely in its rights to ban TikTok outright, as India in fact has.  Yes, there would be a howl, but people would get over it.  And probably something similar to TikTok would spring up overnight and try to evade the ban. 

 

But that presumes a unity and coherence of action on the part of government which is notably absent today.  As with everything else, a serious movement to ban TikTok would become politicized, with Republicans (probably) favoring it and Democrats (probably) opposing the ban on account of free speech, or possibly even just because the Republicans favor it and we're opposed to whatever Republicans are in favor of.  And then the outcome would depend on which party controls the levers of power, unless there is a stalemate. 

 

That is the good old small-d democratic way, but social media itself has thrown numerous monkey wrenches in the formerly smooth operations of democratic governance.  I have never viewed TikTok, but by its reputation it doesn't seem that political.  (I wouldn't put it past the Beto for Texas Governor campaign to put an ad on it, though—he reportedly joined TikTok in March of 2020, just in time for COVID-19.) 

 

I begin to wonder whether we are ever going to get back to the former compromising and horse-trading that went on when U. S. politicians knew both how to condemn the other side in fiery speeches, and then join their opposite-aisle colleagues at the bar after work for a friendly chat about how to wrangle out legislation that would leave most parties at least partly satisfied.  The current style of take-no-prisoners scorched-earth politics may make for entertaining sound bites, but it doesn't get much done.  Including banning TikTok, if in fact that is what we ought to do.

 

Sources:  The article "TikTok Execs Resign After Being Asked to Take Orders from Parent Company" originally appeared in National Review, but was republished at https://www.yahoo.com/video/tiktok-execs-resign-being-asked-143812196.html.  I also referred to an article at Gizmodo at https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-master-messaging-pr-playbook-china-music-1849334736, the website GoBankingRates at https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/business/how-does-tiktok-make-money/, and the Wikipedia articles "TikTok" and "Censorship of TikTok."