For Heaven’s Sake, Let’s Not Ban Tik Tok

On Whether Unprecedented Restrictions on the Freedom of Information Flows is Worth Keeping The West Safe from a Peaking Geopolitical Power

Brief Reconnaissance of a Sticky Situation

Whether you love it and you can’t stop watching whatever it is people watch on it, or whether you hate it and look on it with derision as a harbinger of a decadent culture (like me), whether you use it—I’ve never used it or ever been on it—or not. Whether you think it’s a threat to national security, or completely benign.

As with practically everything nowadays, everyone has some kind of opinion on it. And I think those of us who are disposed to hate it want to ban it while those of us who love it would much rather keep it and ignore the China issue—the issue as to whether a mindless social media app consisting mainly of people singing, dancing, screaming and yelling in videos lasting only seconds long is a serious national security threat. It might surprise you, I’m inclined to take the side of the latter group, keep the app, and err on the side of aloof disinterest regarding the CCP, as much as I personally despise the app as a major purveyor of the moral degeneration of American society.

I was a Tik Tok banner for the last couple months, as in someone who would support a federal ban, and I think my personal antipathy towards the platform, stemming from my original loathing of social media and mass entertainment in general, was not a small factor tempting my partiality, to see it as a threat to national security.

Now that I’ve come out of that dark self-serving forest and changed my mind, I thought it would be productive to make a blog post where I shine the cold light of reason on a subject about which one’s judgment is apt to be so prejudicial it impairs one’s ability to make a rational assessment of Tik Tok’s actual national security risk.

I don’t think we should ban Tik Tok now because I think the cost of doing so for the sake of the ideal of freedom of information outweighs the benefit we would reap to protect ourselves from the influence of the Chinese Communist Party. I saw a headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day that the Biden administration is planning to force Tik Tok to sell its stakes in China, or otherwise face a federal ban in America. This is extreme. Trump offered the same ultimatum. And it is a flagrant violation of the neoliberal Berman amendments that legally protect the free exchange of information from control by executive authority. Here’s a description of the Berman amendments from the Journal,

“Mr. Berman’s 1988 leg­is­la­tion amended U.S. eco­nomic-sanc­tions laws to end the pres­i­dent’s au­thor­ity to reg­u­late or ban im­ports or ex­ports of “pub­li­ca­tions, films, posters, phono­graph records, pho­tographs, mi­cro­films, mi­crofiche, tapes or other in­for­ma­tional ma­te­ri­als.” A fur­ther change in 1994 ex­panded the Berman amend­ment to ap­ply “re­gard­less of for­mat or medium of trans­mis­sion,” which ex­panded pro­tec­tions to emerg­ing forms of digi­tal me­dia. 

“He {Berman} now works for a law firm that suc­cess­fully rep­re­sented Tik­Tok in fight­ing the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ef­fort to de­clare the app a na­tional-se­cu­rity threat and force its sale or shut­down.”

The Berman amendments are a great law. Now predictably bipartisan moral panic and collective outrage of course is converging on it from all sides, from moderates like John Thune to extremists like Josh Hawley of course. And no thanks to Joe Biden the schizoid progressive white nationalist/ green new deal socialist president we have now. Perhaps we can consider banning Tik Tok another installment in his “Buy American” “bipartisan” infrastructure central planning.

How I Became a Tik Tok Banner

In the very beginning, I was dismissive of the concern of Chinese ownership of the app, and Bytedance. Then one day I was reading the paper, and I happened to read an intriguing column by Marco Rubio and Mike Gallagher in the Washington Post. I didn’t know who Mike Gallagher was (now I do and he freaks me out), but since I think Marco Rubio is an idiot, I read the article, “Tik Tok Time’s up, the App Should be Banned in America,” with a grain of salt. But I found the pair of Republicans made a quite convincing case against Tik Tok. Here is an excerpt,

“According to Forbes, LinkedIn profiles reveal that 23 of ByteDance’s directors previously worked for CCP propaganda outlets, and at least 15 ByteDance employees work for them now. Moreover, the company’s editor in chief, who also happens to be the secretary of its internal CCP committee, stressed that the committee would “take the lead” in “all product lines and business lines” to ensure that ByteDance’s products have “correct political direction.”

Just about ever since that day I had slipped into rationalizing my opposition to Tik Tok as a kind of vice, adding in my condemnation of it as a national security threat. Now again I am changing my mind to the extent that I prize the unrestricted exchange of information and technology across borders as a globalist, and I am anxious that the US fear of China in general is without warrant.

How I have Used Reason and Logic to Deduce that a Ban Would Be Ridiculous

Yes. Bytedance is subject to influence by the CCP potentially, and Tik Tok’s activities in the US lead back to Bytedance, and therefore Beijing, technically speaking. They probably do have the ability to harvest American citizens’ personal data. Indeed they have gathered our data before, that of two journalists, so I remember reading.

But then again don’t a million untold shitton of companies have privileged access to our data? Doesn’t the NSA not necessarily a friend of American privacy, have access to all our data, and our private phone calls? And Russia attempted to swing the 2016 election with a very negligible impact, targeting mostly voters who were already voting for Trump, fruitlessly. I just read earlier today that Russian interference was very minimal, as a French cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, wrote on Persuasion, a Substack,

“When it comes to mass persuasion attempts, failure is the rule rather than the exception. I have reviewed recent evidence from history, psychology, and the social sciences, which shows that persuasion attempts such as advertising, authoritarian speeches, and political campaigns all fail to convince the overwhelming majority of their audience. If you find that implausible, just remember the 2020 Democratic primaries. Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign. Tom Steyer shelled out close to $350 million. Together, they accounted for over half of all the expenses in that primary. Yet their advertising blitzes led them nowhere: they failed to get any traction with voters, and dropped out.”

More Logical Reasoning

Facebook is one way to try and control minds. Tik tok where videos only last a certain number of seconds that won’t get any attention unless someone screams or dances in them, I think are much less likely to succeed or to be used as a propaganda tool. And I think even if the CCP were to try, it would be pretty easy for even the dumbest Tik Tok user to identify communist propaganda when it’s being probably screamed into one’s face. And to ban a social media platform I think would set a very dangerous precedent, not to mention it would likely backfire and make our rampant distrust of government worse especially with young people.

You know what I personally consider more of a national security threat than Tik Tok? Fox. But I don’t think anyone would have the authority to ban Fox. I wouldn’t want to give anyone that authority. Maybe if we banned Fox then when Ron Desantis is elected or Trump came back to office, we would ban the New York Times. Ukraine uses social media a lot for messaging. Maybe if Republicans don’t want to fund Ukraine, they would propose banning Ukraine on social media. For national security. Just ban the free press altogether for national security.

Concluding Statement

To ban Tik Tok is a fucking terrible idea.

— Jay