On denying American kids their birthright to be self-absorbed
The US Congress, in a surprising bipartisan move, approved a requirement that the social media app TikTok be sold or banned in the US. TikTok, for anyone who may not know, is a video app from ByteDance, a highly successful Chinese company. President Biden has said he would sign a bill containing a ban. Now it is up to the Senate.
Users of TikTok are outraged. How can American free speech, free press, free ability-to-do-anything-I-want be threatened by such insidious government censorship? American teenagers are panicked.
But the principal user of TikTok – CCP – is the most outraged of all.
Per CCP, the threat is part and parcel of the US government attack on China. The Chinese government is not merely expressing support for a local company embroiled in a foreign dispute. CCP wants and needs TikTok functioning in the US, and able to respond to CCP directives. CCP has marshaled protest groups and signs in support of TikTok and free speech – forgetting for the moment that western social media is absolutely banned in China.
Even some China scholars have gotten into the act. Respected China scholar William Kirby has more than once delivered remarks in which he derided what he considered a panicked American worldview toward China. He dismissed the US government concern with TikTok as focusing attention on a “teenage video app.” Kirby, as thoughtful and experienced as he is, has clearly drunk the Koolaid of CCP kumbaya. His “can’t we all just get along?” refrain completely ignores potential secondary effects of policy – which ignorance CCP pointedly does not do. In the TikTok case, secondary effects would include both censorship of material detrimental to CCP and inclusion of more kumbaya material. When CCP knows what you look at online and who you contact, could blackmail be out of the question? The CCP United Front Department – what Mao considered a critical strategic tool - is also a key tool for Xi Jinping’s foreign policy. The United Front gathers intelligence on and attempts to gain influence over elite individuals and organizations outside China. it is active in many ways internationally, including support for Confucius Institutes and Chinese neighborhood non-profits in the US.
Lest one worry that I am being as paranoid as CCP and Kirby would think, we should note that online censorship is not limited to TikTok. Chat GPT has recently been found to censor references to COVID. And there is no shortage of social media censorship stories, and business policies to include or exclude or remove content are unclear and usually unstated.
But CCP deserves some special treatment. TikTok is thought to be actively engaged in spying on Hong Kong activists. From a 2023 Al Jazeera story -
China’s Communist Party (CCP) can access user data collected by TikTok owner ByteDance through a “god credential” that it used to monitor and track Hong Kong activists and protesters in 2018, a former ByteDance executive has claimed in a lawsuit. In a court filing, Yintao “Roger” Yu, a former head of engineering at ByteDance in the United States, said that a special committee in Beijing had a backdoor to firewalls erected by ByteDance to protect user data and used this access to spy on users in Hong Kong.
Yu said the existence of the “god credential” is well known among ByteDance executives and directly contradicts promises they have made to legislators in the US and other countries who are debating whether to ban TikTok over national security concerns, according to the filing.
Yu said he also witnessed ByteDance using TikTok to further the CCP’s political agenda, including promoting content “that expressed hatred for Japan” and demoting content that expressed support for Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement democracy protests, according to the filing.
As some of you will recall, current Chinese law requires any business located in China to assist the government in any way that supports state policy. There is no separation of business and government. What CCP wants, CCP gets. The argument that TikTok servers are located in the US, and therefore not accessible to CCP, fails any credibility test. China actively hacks American internet now - Treasury Department Sanctions China on Infrastructure Hacking. FBI director Christopher Wray was not over the top in seeing China as an “all-of-society” threat.
The US still needs legislative policy on controlling social media, even as the US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of State now cooperate in finding and controlling Chinese IP theft and media influence. This lack of policy is not to be celebrated as a victory for free speech, free press, and the ability-to-do-anything-I-want. The American government needs an ability to counter foreign media that – even potentially - favors CCP goals. Action on TikTok is an excellent place to start. Not a ban, not a sale, but a concerted analysis of content by media observers public and private, with a warning to TikTok that it is under scrutiny for violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). American policy wonks need to pull up their socks in defense of their democratic rights, lest they someday become only privileges. With regard to media influence, the US is moving too close to fulfilling Marx’s observation about selling the rope.
