Efforts in Washington to “ban” TikTok are gaining steam. The scuttlebutt is that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) housed at the Treasury Department, which has been investigating TikTok for over three years now, will soon recommend a forced sale to a non-Chinese buyer. The Biden administration has also given its blessing to the Restrict Act, a congressional bill that would empower the Secretary of Commerce to ban foreign ownership of companies like TikTok.
There are legitimate concerns about the access the Chinese government has to TikTok’s algorithm and user data. In theory, the Chinese government could require TikTok to hand over data about any of its US users. And if it were to pressure TikTok’s content moderation team to algorithmically downgrade videos that didn’t toe the (literal) party line, we would have no way of knowing other than leaked documents and whistleblowers. As I’ve written before, shadowbanning and other secretive content moderation practices are a major concern given how important algorithmic discovery is to the future of culture and politics.
However, this ban is a hamfisted mistake that could destroy the very real value that TikTok has for its users, and do so in service of bad-faith actors who could not care less about the potential downsides.
The faction that has been banging the drum for a TikTok ban the loudest and longest are the Sinophobes who will support any action that would strike a blow at Chinese geopolitical power; a TikTok ban merely happens to be the latest tool at hand. If you think, as the Sinophobes do, that armed conflict with China is inevitable and imminent, then taking down TikTok is merely a logical preparation for what is to come.
But the idea that China will “subtly indoctrinate American citizens” via TikTok—as Marco Rubio has argued—is neo-Cold War paranoia. Bear in mind that the only concrete examples of pro-regime content moderation that the critics can point to come from 2019 or earlier, before TikTok’s explosion in the US. Since then, the company has hired localized moderators as part of what it calls “Project Texas” in an attempt to assuage policymakers that there is a firewall of sorts between the US and China.
Regardless of the extent to which the firewall is sound, TikTok knows perfectly well that overt pro-regime tampering in the US market would be a public relations disaster with existential consequences for the platform in its most profitable global market. They have an incentive to play by our rules and free speech norms just as US companies had an incentive to play along with Chinese censorship during the “Great Firewall” controversies of the 2000s.
If it comes out that TikTok really is systematically manipulating the algorithm to punish anti-CCP or reward pro-regime speech in the American market, I’ll be among the first to ditch the platform. But I will not take the word of congressional hawks that we should preemptively ban TikTok simply because they’re worried that it could someday, somehow, in some ill-defined manner, advance Chinese geopolitical aspirations.
The other constituency that favors a TikTok ban is TikTok’s competitors, especially Facebook. Facebook’s user base and engagement metrics in the US have been in steady decline for years and its attempts to create a TikTok clone failed miserably–RIP Lasso–and efforts to tweak Instagram to be more TikTok-like have alienated creators. What to do when you can’t compete effectively in the market? Turn to government.
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