One should be doubly suspicious when complaints about disinformation veer into McCarthyist territory — attaching legitimate foreign policy concerns to wild speculation about brainwashing of the U.S. electorate. Such theories deserve harsh scrutiny whether they involve Russian bots, or Chinese control of TikTok.
A couple weeks ago, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) suggested that TikTok might be the reason so many younger Americans support Hamas over Israel. “We know for a fact that the [Chinese Communist Party] uses TikTok to push its propaganda and censor views that diverge from the party line,” Gallagher wrote in the Free Press.
This is not the first such call to ban TikTok. The Trump administration tried but was rebuffed by courts even before President Biden rescinded the order. Montana now has its own statewide ban under a judge’s review. And this will probably not be the last such attempt. Contenders in the Republican presidential primary might not agree on much, but when moderators asked candidates on the debate stage about Gallagher’s essay, candidate after candidate rushed to say that, yes, TikTok is terrible, shut it down, or else force its Chinese owner to sell it.
This has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, and it’s tempting to dismiss it as a latter-day Red Scare. But before we reject it out of hand, we should consider the real reasons to worry about TikTok.
Last month, Axios reported that, over the last two weeks of October, engagement with videos hashtagged #StandWithPalestine had risen more than four times faster than it had with those tagged #StandWithIsrael — even though there were fewer pro-Palestinian videos made toward the end of the month. It’s hardly crazy to worry that China, which has long taken the Palestinian side of the Israel-Gaza conflict, might be using its influence over TikTok to stir hostility toward Israel and U.S. foreign policy in the region.
We know that companies headquartered in China are subject to a state that maintains one of the most stringent censorship regimes in the world, and harshly punishes dissent. We know the Chinese government is eager to export its censorship abroad — pressuring academia, Hollywood, sports leagues and dozens of other entities to hew to the Communist Party line on issues such as Taiwan. And we have good reason to believe that the CCP has in the past used its influence over ByteDance to prevent TikTok’s algorithms from amplifying content about Hong Kong protests or the Tiananmen Square massacre (though that policy appears to have been relaxed since the Guardian published an exposé in 2019).
So, it’s hard to brush off fears as simple paranoia. And while I’m reflexively pro-free-speech — and against government interference in markets — the idea of having our public opinion shaped by an illiberal government gives me pause. According to a Pew Research Center report from 2022, about a quarter of American young people regularly get news from TikTok.
Yet having reason for concern is not the same as having reason to ban a social media app used by tens of millions of Americans for everything from home maintenance tips to growing a small business. Banning the platform they use to communicate would restrict their First Amendment rights. Such a drastic step requires clear evidence of imminent harm, and “Well, they certainly could be messing with the algorithms” doesn’t rise to that level. There are other potential explanations for a pro-Palestinian skew on TikTok, including the app’s popularity in Muslim countries. Also, the divergence of young people from their elders on the Israeli-Palestinian issue started years ago, not on Oct. 7 — and is mirrored on other social media apps not controlled by the CCP.
Of course, I confess to a certain lingering uneasiness with Chinese control. And the U.S. government could take action short of a ban, such as forced divestment, as the Biden administration is reportedly considering. But though divestment might be an easier constitutional sell, it would still probably be tied up in court for years. And because the most likely buyer would be one of the major tech companies, this might be hard to square with the administration’s otherwise aggressively anti-megamerger antitrust policy.
All this simply might not be worth the effort, even though, yes, it’s valid to worry about a foreign regime influencing U.S. institutions. Americans in the 1950s were also right to worry about the influence of a brutal Soviet dictatorship. Communist Party members really did try to bend U.S. institutions to communist purposes, not to mention steal our nuclear secrets. That still doesn’t justify McCarthyism.
Because while the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn’t wrong about communism, it was wrong about Americans, in the same way that the TikTok panickers are wrong today. We are not so easily brainwashed or subverted. Despite the best efforts of the Soviet commissars, the United States in the 1950s was far too successful, and too individualistic, to embrace communism. And while the CCP might have better technology at its disposal, I suspect it has no better odds of prevailing against American common sense.
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