An Eye for an Eye

What does TikTok have to do with American National security? A lot, it turns out, but not in the way you think.

Credit to Spencer Ackerman and Ken Klippenstein whose work is referenced heavily here

There’s a certain familiar McCarthyism to lawmaker conversations about TikTok. Despite a total lack of evidence, legislators claim publicly that the platform is potentially a dangerous tool of the Chinese surveillance state geared towards supplying Americans with misinformation. People like Rep. Pelosi claim congress doesn’t seek to ban the social media giant at all, insistent that it should divest from Chinese parent company, Bytedance. While the FTC Chair calls the 6 month timeline “totally reasonable” experts say Chinese legal precedent would make this sort of sale difficult within 6 months, even if all parties were willing, which they most certainly are not. Lawmakers continue to voice nebulous and unsubstantiated fears of Chinese influence on the platform, despite multiple credible independent analyses which have found that the platform is, like all other social media companies, primarily profit-motivated. 

In interviews and testimony to Congress about TikTok, leaders of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence have in fact been careful to qualify the national security threat posed by TikTok as purely hypothetical. With access to much of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, they are well placed to know.  Ken Klippenstein, the Intercept

Nonetheless, the US House of Representatives, armed with nothing more than speculation, is in unprecedented consensus on a TikTok ban. The legislature’s notorious propensity for intransigence seems momentarily non-existent in the wake of a staggering bipartisan majority who voted for the bill. This is a meaningful departure from form for the House of Representatives. Usually, no matter the expert or public consensus on an issue, from public health to national budget to foreign affairs, our legislature is largely incapable of…legislating. When Congress does act, it tends to take months of bargaining to arrive at a law that only a slim minority of Americans will support in any capacity. Keeping with their usual unpopularity, public opposition to a Tiktok ban is at an all-time high. Nonetheless, the bill’s rapid passage and fervent support is a meaningful deviation from legislative norms worth an earnest examination.

What makes TikTok so special?

Whether it’s a recently revealed CIA operation to improve Trump’s reputation on Chinese social media, or it’s Israel’s bot army aimed at swaying US Democratic politicians towards defunding the UNRWA, the truth is, social media manipulation and state-funded misinformation are mainstays of our political reality. Facebook/Meta and Twitter/X have long been fertile ground for these types of propaganda campaigns. I have no expectation that TikTok would be any different. It’s ultimately up to users to bring a healthy skepticism to what they see.

“The problem with TikTok isn’t related to their ownership; it’s a problem of surveillance capitalism and it’s true of all social media companies,’ computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The Intercept. ‘In 2016 Russia did this with Facebook and they didn’t have to own Facebook — they just bought ads like everybody else.” Bruce Schneier, The Intercept

Unlike holistic legislation for citizen data privacy like the EU’s GDPR provisions, American lawmakers opted for a more targeted approach, despite meaningful evidence that false information has lower engagement on TikTok than other U.S. based platforms like X and YouTube, where the opposite is true. According to the EU pilot study on disinformation cited in that article, “Twitter[had] the highest overall mis/disinformation discoverability[...] Facebook has the second highest mis/disinformation ratio.” For relative context, these values represent what portion of search results for key subjects contained mis/disinformation. 

Mis/disinformation discoverability index

 Why now?

Unlike previous attempts at a TikTok ban that were fueled in part by Meta and other competitors, this latest push to force the sale of the app doesn’t seem like market competition turned political. In fact, experts predict that the effects of the ban would be catastrophic for the global economy. Looking outside of strictly capitalist reasons, I’ve seen vague claims that would tie AIPAC to the bill through their support of its author, rep. Mike Gallagher. While it is true that TikTok doesn’t censor Pro-Palestinian content like Meta, and that AIPAC-aligned orgs have singled out TikTok amidst a sea of rising antisemitism and islamaphobia across many social media platforms, the truth is, no single lobby possesses the power to create such unified support for anything. AIPAC may be morally repugnant, but to baselessly insist on their omnipotence is lazy, and may verge on antisemitism. Moreover, Rep. Gallagher has financiers with far clearer interest in doing away with TikTok. Topping his list of 2024 donors is CIA/NSA/FBI-backed data broker, Palantir, notorious for its revolving door policy with Pentagon employees, followed closely by search-engine giant Google. Both have a vested interest in maximizing the availability of user data for sale to the US government.

“The government avoids the normal oversight and privacy protections that come with requesting information from companies via a court order, and then it spends untold taxpayer dollars for the privilege” Senator Ron Wyden, Vox

At home and abroad security experts agree that the desire for a ban seems to pertain most directly to US intelligence-based data collection efforts. This understanding begins to crystallize in the context of House intelligence chair, Rep. Mike Turner, whose propensity for fear-mongering misinformation has led many to call for his resignation. Turner has been a staunch advocate for banning TikTok, claiming that the vague comments exchanged between Chinese premier Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are proof of a global conspiracy which jeopardizes democracy, of which TikTok is a key part. Turner’s fears of government surveillance are conspicuously absent on the home front, where he uses made-up threats to call for the expanded surveillance on US citizens.

TikTok represents a complication. Its tremendously successful entrance into the American market creates credible foreign competition to U.S. social media companies. And unlike those U.S. social media companies, the data American TikTok users generate does not easily flow from ByteDance servers into NSA repositories Spencer Ackerman, Forever Wars

I urge those of you who are ambivalent or even supportive of the TikTok ban to view it within a framework not unlike global warming. There is some marginal portion of people whose lives have already been needlessly uprooted by the US surveillance apparatus. As its influence grows, so will the number of people adversely impacted. If we care about the future of our data privacy, the choices we make now must be ones that embrace the long view, instead of catering to the McCarthyist fears of xenophobic legislators, so afraid of a Chinese surveillance state that they would build a bigger, meaner American one to combat it.

Parting thoughts

To paraphrase Robert Weissman, imagine if the roles were reversed–If China were to ban the use of Meta or Twitter unless they sold the business to a Chinese company. imagine if then, China’s former Finance minister attempted to buy the company its government had mandated the sale of. We would all call it what it is—corruption, extortion, and nepotism.