Tick-Tock for TikTok
The clock may finally be running out on the Chinese espionage and propaganda app, revealing many who are unserious about the reality of confronting America’s foes.
TikTok, the extremely popular social media video app, may, at long last, be meeting its proverbial maker. After years of controversy and various threats of bans or forced sales, the app’s incredibly successful run in America may be ending in the coming months. A new bill that was introduced and rapidly passed through the House of Representatives would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app or face what would amount to a nationwide ban. This is excellent news for those of us who have been driving the anti-TikTok bandwagon for nearly 5 years now. I have written quite a bit on the subject already, mostly in the summer of 2020, when the Trump administration first mooted the ban idea. Since that time, the case against TikTok has only gotten stronger.
The fatal flaws inherent the app were summarized in the coda to my Case Against TikTok article (read the full thing for a more thorough accounting):
“When all of the evidence provided to this point is aggregated and examined as a whole, the picture becomes much clearer. TikTok collects an abnormal amount of personal user data and receives several phone permissions which allow it to scrape nearly all of a user’s non-app data as well as execute commands on the phone itself (like recording video or audio). This data is stored in Chinese servers which are accessible on demand by the Chinese security services. The Chinese government has an extremely long-term view of global politics compared to Westerners, especially us Americans who are infamously impatient. The collection of sensitive data on America’s youth via TikTok, combined with the previous (and ongoing) theft of personal information from their families, will allow the CCP to create an infinitely detailed personal record on nearly every future US CEO, government employee, military officer, scientist, professor, and journalist. After all, America’s youth will one day become our leaders; indeed, the Chinese government is relying on that. More subtly, the Chinese censorship regime and government control over data and internal processes at many of China’s most prominent businesses allows the CCP to exert undue control over the political discussions of foreign countries. It can shape the conversation, disallow certain perspectives, and push blatant misinformation designed to prop up Chinese interests. If a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Facebook ads were enough to launch a multiyear investigation into Russian electoral influence, what should Chinese Communist Party control over America’s most newly popular social network launch?”
In the nearly four years since that paragraph was published, the case has grown in power through repeated demonstration and the rapid expansion of TikTok as a platform. An Australian Senate committee investigated TikTok’s China connections and found significant overlap between CCP and ByteDance officials, particularly in the realm of foreign manipulation and propaganda. In 2022, ByteDance was forced to admit that it had used TikTok to spy on multiple American journalists, tracking their location and improperly accessing their user data at a granular level. The company blamed “rogue employees” who were summarily fired, but a nugget in the story shows a far larger problem than ByteDance was letting on. The employees were members of the company’s internal audit department, which is supposed to investigate company wrongdoing and enforce proper standards of corporate behavior. That this team – essentially the TikTok internal police – acted so wrongly does not speak highly of the corporate culture or the company’s control over data access and use. In addition, former ByteDance executives have claimed that members of the CCP had “superuser” access, allowing them to view and scrape all TikTok user data globally. This access was apparently used to aid the Chinese government in its persecution of peaceful Hong Kong democracy protestors. These scandals are so egregious that they have sparked an ongoing FBI and Justice Department inquiry. The US Senate, just this week, received a classified briefing on TikTok’s incredible espionage potential – logging keystrokes, remotely and surreptitiously recording audio and video, and scraping data from other apps on the same device. At this point, the evidence is crystal clear for those who wish to look.
The pernicious propaganda aspects of TikTok have also been proven in spades, especially in the past few months. During the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok has consistently promoted the pro-Palestinian narrative – conveniently aligning with the official Chinese government view – to the tune of 69 to 1. It has actively pushed videos with falsehoods about Israel and antisemitic tropes, while limiting the reach of corrective information. The app has also played host to scores of popular pro-Russia accounts proffering lies about Ukraine throughout their two-year war, some of which may have helped lead to the defenestration of the Ukrainian defense minister. This matters even more now, as TikTok has increased massively in popularity, particularly among American youth. It is the third-most-popular social media app among Americans aged 18 to 29, behind only Snapchat and Instagram, with 62% of that cohort using it regularly. Concerningly, they seem to be using it for news, a trend that amplifies the very legitimate concerns about its value as a propaganda platform. This is the opposite of most social media apps, which have seen their salience as news platforms decline since 2020. In Britain, for example, TikTok is the number one news source for children aged 12 to 15, a critical developmental period. This cannot stand.
Getting rid of this malicious ‘social media’ application – in reality, a Chinese Communist Party controlled espionage/surveillance/propaganda app – is necessary to preserve America’s national security and remove a key tool of our foremost enemy. And that is exactly what H.R. 7521, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, seeks to accomplish.
The bill, introduced by outgoing Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), passed its House committee with unanimous bipartisan support. It made it through the whole House of Representatives with similar cross-partisan backing, passing by a margin of 352 to 65. More Democrats than Republicans voted against it, but large majorities of both caucuses gave the bill their imprimatur. Many who have argued about the bill’s specifics fail to present the actual text; please take the time to read the legislation yourself – it’s not too long or complicated – and make up your own mind. But if you want my take, here it is.
I genuinely think this is the best bill to confront the danger of TikTok that could possibly be passed by Congress and signed into law. Is it perfect? No. As I wrote in 2020, I would prefer an outright ban so as to not reward ByteDance monetarily for its anti-American activity. But we cannot afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here; it is imperative that Chinese influence be removed as soon as possible from the US media ecosystem, particularly during a key election cycle and as a potential invasion of Taiwan draws closer. This bill is not itself a ban, but a forced divestment. It would ensure that ByteDance – and therefore the CCP – is carved out of TikTok’s ownership structure and pass all of the company’s assets, including its infamous algorithm, to American control. If ByteDance refuses to sell TikTok to an approved buyer, earning itself tens of billions of dollars in the process, it would face a ban from the US market. This would be accomplished similarly to the way economic sanctions operate, penalizing the companies that platform TikTok in their app stores if it is not removed. This puts ByteDance and its CCP cadres into a conundrum: if it accepts the buyout, it loses control of its key espionage/propaganda tool, but if it refuses the buyout and the cash, it proves the point that we have been making for years – that TikTok is not a business at all, but a tool of an adversarial government. This clever and airtight drafting (more on that front later) has earned my support, as has the fact that this bill seems eminently passable.
The incredibly hostile reactions to this bill from TikTok, ByteDance, and the Chinese government give the game away and show just why getting this tool out of CCP hands is so profoundly important. Chinese state mouthpieces have harshly criticized the legislation, threatening nebulous retaliation (they already ban almost every American social media app, as well as TikTok itself) and arguing that the bill is a restriction on free speech – something that is quite rich coming from a regime that routinely disappears democracy advocates, imprisons opposition press figures and religious leaders, and ran down peaceful demonstrators with tanks the last time protests pressured the leadership in Beijing. TikTok’s CEO has stated that it is “not feasible” to divest the company from ByteDance, even though such a sale would be supremely rewarding monetarily and follow a well-trodden path for upstart social media networks. There can only be nefarious reasons as to why this totally normal sale would be impossible. As the China economic expert Christopher Balding tweeted: “So why hold on? Three reasons only: a) China burns it down to make a point, b) intel too valuable, c) don’t want US coders looking inside.”
The company has also launched an all-out lobbying campaign to convince lawmakers to oppose the bill, which has had mixed results. In the plus column for the CCP/ByteDance/TikTok club, we have right-wing billionaire investor Jeff Yass, who has donated immense sums to several key politicians who have vocally opposed the ban, including Vivek Ramaswamy and former president Donald Trump, who himself wished to ban the app just four short years ago. The funds have gone to more senators (like Rand Paul) than congressmen, potentially making the path forward for the bill far tougher. Combined with the Trump flip-flop, this could portend poorly for a future ban if the ex-president follows the Grover Cleveland path and gains a second term. But the loss column for TikTok is also quite full.
The most disturbing aspect of the lobbying blitz – and one that backfired spectacularly – was TikTok’s mobilization of its user base. It flooded the app with push notifications demanding users call Congress, while promoting disinformation about the legislation. At one point in the bill’s journey towards passage in the House, TikTok presented every single one of its millions of American users with a message falsely saying Congress was seeking a “total ban of TikTok” that would deny the “Constitutional right to free expression.” It also prompted users to call their local congressman, using the app’s geolocation features to precisely target the user’s congressional district, and giving them the number and link with which to do so. The scary part is that thousands of Americans did just that, including a majority of callers who were either clearly elderly or underage – some congressional staffers reported hearing school bells in the background and being asked “what is a congressman?” The common theme of these calls was the seeming necessity of the app, with various callers suggesting that they had nothing else to enjoy in their lives. Some callers escalated significantly. Several congressional offices reported receiving death threats, including one to the office of Senator Thom Tillis that was recorded. Other callers threatened suicide or self-harm if the bill passed. This weaponization of its user base, preying on the fears and emotions of the most vulnerable therein, proves the very point that TikTok hawks have been making for years.
Still, there are many in media, politics, and culture – on all sides of the political divide – who have found a way to argue against this legislation or tie it to their own pet cause. Many are the usual suspects in times like these, but there are some surprising and unfortunate members of this caucus of wrong. As such, and since the app itself is so popular and polarizing, it is worthwhile to go through these arguments and explain exactly why they are flawed, faulty, or just plain fraudulent.
Let’s begin with one of the sillier, more tendentious arguments and move towards the more facially compelling ones. Many online commentators, especially those of the populist bent, have seen this legislation magically conform perfectly to their political priors. To these pundits, the TikTok bill is “a bomb in disguise,” which is evinced by the simple fact that it has broad-based bipartisan support. This supposedly makes it suspicious, as the Washington ‘uniparty’ swamp would never agree on anything that isn’t terrible for the American people. Of course, this is ridiculous; plenty of good causes have bipartisan support, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. In a similar conspiratorial vein, some on the progressive left have portrayed the divestment legislation as driven by nefarious Zionist political influence. This sentiment has been amplified on TikTok itself and was even mentioned by the New York Times. Again, this is patently false, but it serves to reinforce the leftist hatred of Israel and confirm their priors.
The next critical argument against the anti-TikTok legislation is based on a faulty understanding of freedom of speech. Much of the criticism of the bill online claims that it restricts the freedom of American TikTok users or censors them; indeed, this is exactly the argument pushed by the app itself. But it is fundamentally false. No American’s speech rights are infringed by the forced divestment promoted in this bill. No information is censored. This is meant purely and entirely to remove Chinese government control from the American social media space. In a legal analysis compiled by one of the top constitutional law firms in the nation, there were no First Amendment implications found, as the bill’s target is not the user of TikTok, but its parent company ByteDance, a foreign company without free speech protections under law. As Heritage Foundation tech policy director Kara Frederick succinctly put it, “Last I checked the First Amendment does not apply to the Chinese Communist Party.” She is correct on that account. The legislation is content-neutral and would not even result in the banning of TikTok if ByteDance follows the law and divests its stake in the app.
Other critics focus on the wild content – particularly of the left-wing kind – that thrives on TikTok. They argue that getting rid of this one app will not fix the cultural rot they diagnose in American society. They see progressive opinion, which often reaches the height of the ludicrous, imprinted in major institutions and corporations across the country, impacting millions of American citizens in their daily lives. This attitude is exemplified by the cultural critic Walter Kirn, who, while sharing a screenshot of a ridiculous article in the New Scientist taking a nuanced view of cannibalism[1], wrote: “Banning TikTok won’t help.” In that respect, these critics aren’t wrong. Far-left nonsense will invariably migrate to other platforms if TikTok ceases to exist; hell, it already has a permanent home on several social media sites. But that’s not why this legislation exists – it’s not even the real problem with TikTok. I truly do not care what opinions people online can access and what ideas these social media companies are pushing – I’m about as close to a free speech absolutist as one can be. I care who is doing the pushing. In this case, the pusher is a hostile foreign power dedicated to upending the American-led world order and exporting its technological totalitarianism abroad.
That brings us to the next critique of the legislation, that other companies are just as bad as TikTok in terms of data collection, foreign ties, and ownership bias. This theory has proponents from all sides of the political divide, who each find their own particular bogeyman to fearmonger over. On the left, these activists have latched on to the idea that former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin may be putting together a consortium of investors to bid for TikTok if it goes up for sale. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that American security would not be improved if “the next owner of TikTok is a MAGA Trump crony backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund,” which ignores the fact that Saudi is a US ally and absurdly likens Trump fans to the genocidal CCP. Other left-wingers have focused on their personal distaste for Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, who also founded Starlink, a satellite internet company. In their minds, this billionaire who works closely with the American government and Department of Defense is akin to Xi Jinping. Clearly, these minds are addled.
The MAGA right is just as bad, led by the man himself, former president Trump. The ex-president and current candidate said in an interview with CNBC that he now opposes a TikTok ban as it would empower Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.” Various Trump-adjacent pundits and influencers have followed suit, claiming that since the Biden administration would potentially be in charge of approving a sale, it would necessarily lead to worse outcomes – even though the current state of play is quite obviously the worst outcome, with a sworn enemy of America running the show. The Federalist’s[2] Sean Davis doubled down on this flawed reasoning, arguing seriously that the bill is actually just the ‘Deep State’ “taking advantage of anti-China sentiment to transfer TikTok’s surveillance apparatus from China’s evil surveillance state to the U.S. government’s evil surveillance state.” The false equivalence here between the American government and the Chinese regime is grotesque, unpatriotic, and anti-American. That it is coming from a purported ‘America First’ patriot is a sickening irony.
The libertarians unsurprisingly are helping to lead the charge, arguing that since American companies also “vacuum up user data and cooperate with government censorship,” the TikTok ban is hypocritical or bad. This is a total nonsequitur. American companies, whatever their flaws, are private entities, not mere figureheads for an enemy regime. There is a difference in kind here, not just in degree. The aforementioned Christopher Balding put it well, comparing TikTok to Huawei, the CCP-connected telecommunications technology firm that has been blocked from integration into American communications networks for over a decade now. America is not afraid of competition from abroad, but is concerned about infiltration of an adversary power into critical nodes of our national communications and media ecosystem. America is not China, and thank God for that. Arguing that it is, or that American companies are akin to Chinese ones, is the height of folly. It betrays a lack of seriousness that should color any reasonable person’s response to these arguments.
The most compelling case to the layman against this bill is the argument that the proposed legislation is overbroad and will give government excessive powers to crack down on American social media companies. In their telling, these critics would support a TikTok ban, but not in this particular form. Usefully, this position is totally nonfalsifiable; one cannot know whether they would support a different bill when this is the only one currently on offer. This particular tactic is most commonly seen among people with actual power who will need to vote on this legislation – namely our elected officials. In the House of Representatives, both Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have used this approach to justify their opposition to the bill. In the Senate, where the legislation moves next, several prominent members have voiced their hostility, including Mike Lee (R-UT). Senator Lee lays out the case in detail, claiming that the proposed law would give the president unilateral authority to label a company as a national security threat and force its divestment, including expansive new powers over Congress and the public.
This attack on the bill has been parroted by a wide variety of outside observers as well, who have declared the legislation a power grab concocted by a “power-hungry government.” They say that it “purports to stop abuse by one government by giving another even bigger powers to abuse,” and is entirely about, in the words of Elon Musk, “censorship and government control.” The fact that the legislation does not single out ByteDance or TikTok, instead focusing on “foreign adversary-controlled applications,” is supposedly suspect as well. Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) argued that the bill is “about politicians having the power to decide what thoughts, ideas, and information Americans are allowed to hear and see. It’s about freedom. It’s about destroying our democracy in the name of protecting it.” In a choice that would have looked silly in an Animal House remake, she ended this soliloquy with a quote from Benjamin Franklin. These seemingly legitimate arguments rely on the fact that most people reading or listening to them will not have read or understood the text of the bill itself. Because when one reviews the facts, it is clear that the critics are dead wrong.
First of all, the legislation is constitutionally incapable of simply targeting TikTok by name. As clean as a law saying “TikTok is hereby banned from the United States” would be, it isn’t remotely feasible. The US Constitution, in Article I Section 9, bans so-called bills of attainder, which are laws specifically targeting individual legal persons or classes of persons for punishment. This means that Congress cannot pass a law declaring Donald Trump ineligible for electoral office, but it also means that it cannot ban TikTok directly. Instead, the law is very carefully written to target companies like TikTok without focusing on it alone. The text of the bill lays this out in precise detail, fully defining its terms and specifying exactly what types of apps would fall under its purview. Despite the bill’s critics, this is not easy to game; the criteria for foreign adversary control are stringent. US law defines “foreign adversary” exactly, including only the nations of North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia. The TikTok bill goes so far as to lay out the specifics of user count and content distribution mechanisms that qualify an app for potential sanction (Section G.2), as well as the percentage of foreign ownership that would raise red flags (Section G.1).
Analysis of the legislation by neutral constitutional law experts has shown it to be tightly-worded and unable to target companies like Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter. They argue compellingly that the law grants no expansive new authority to the president, citing case law and legal precedent in support of their claims. For example, they cite statutory language that explains that “foreign adversary control” cannot be construed to include vague “influence” or “alignment” with a foreign power, but only those “entities subject and obedient to a foreign government’s commands and instructions.” Similarly, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, an expert on the legal aspects of communications in the United States, details all of the hoops that any administration must jump through to force a divestment under this bill. His tweet is worth quoting at length [emphasis in original]:
“The bill does not apply to just any social media platform. Far from it. Here is the only and targeted application: 1. If you’re an individual user, the bill confers zero authority to the government over you. 2. The bill only applies to applications controlled by one of four foreign adversary governments previously codified in law by Congress—China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. The bill is clear that it is not enough to merely have operations there or do business there. It must be *controlled* by one of those four governments. 3. Even then, the bill only applies if the application presents a demonstrated and significant threat to national security. Control by one of four foreign governments alone isn’t even enough under the bill. 4. And then, only after public process provided and Congress reported to with a description of the specific national security threat. Every single one of those hoops (and more) must be cleared and met.”
Suffice it to say, this bill’s language is not at all overbroad. It is strictly limited to capture TikTok and other enemy espionage/propaganda efforts without giving the government even the possibility to extend this to controversial targets. It includes several checks in the process, including public comment and congressional oversight. It carefully defines its terms and uses the least damaging sanction possible to solve the problem: forced divestment. This is a good law that will go a long way to solving the problem posed by the CCP’s control over TikTok.
If you made it this far, congratulations! You have a longer attention span than the average TikTok user. But short attention spans, socially-destructive content, and social media addiction aren’t why this ban is being mooted. If they were, I would not support it. Those are concerns for individual adults and parents of children to address on their own. Their choices are not my worry, even if I would personally make different ones.
What is my worry, however, is the fact that America’s top global adversary wholly controls an app that works both as an espionage goldmine and an incredible propaganda tool. We saw both in action in TikTok’s lobbying effort against this legislation, but this is merely a taste of what could be to come. China has always taken a long-term approach to its geopolitical strategy, and this is no exception. They are banking on our (rightful) distaste for censorship and government overreach to insert their malign presence deeply into our culture and society without confrontation. They know our penchant for short-term thinking can blind us to the very real harms that this supposedly harmless video app can be leveraged to inflict in the future. And this is why we need to stop this enemy interference now. Congress must pass this bill, the president must sign it into law, and it must be enforced immediately. We do not have a moment to waste – the world is not getting quieter and China is not getting friendlier.
Time is ticking; let’s not let it TikTok away.
[1] Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds!
[2] Note: I have written quite often for The Federalist, even though I often disagree with its editorial stance on issues like this.