Hey all. Parker here.
Today’s will be a quick one.
On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 352-65 to force ByteDance, a China-based company, to sell TikTok or risk having the app banned in the U.S.
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Here are 3 takes on the potential TikTok ban/forced sale from people who know more about this than I do:
“What if nobody owned our children's data?” (Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick, 3/13/24)
The anti-TikTok push in Washington is built on top of a mess of false assumptions and bizarre contradictions. As John Herrman pointed out in New York Magazine this week, the app has been banned on federal phones since late 2022, so lawmakers that aren't using burners don't really know how to use the app or what it’s like to be on it. But they assume it's a powerful Chinese cyberweapon and, troublingly, want to own it.
The problem is, Washington can't nationalize TikTok the way they think China has. So they're fine offering it up to Silicon Valley or banning it entirely. Because they either think Silicon Valley can run it just as well, or because they think it’d be easy for the geniuses in the valley to spin up a new globally relevant video app. Except they can't. Because if they could, they would have built TikTok. If you’d have asked me, in 2018, whether or not I thought lawmakers would be talking about TikTok the way those scientists in Watchmen talk about Dr. Manhattan just six years later, I would have thought you were out of your mind.
In fact, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan asked reporters yesterday: "Do we want the data from TikTok — children’s data, adults’ data — to be going — to be staying here in America or going to China?"
What about, uh, no one? What if nobody had… our children's data?
“The U.S. Wants to Ban TikTok for the Sins of Every Social Media Company” (404 Media, Jason Koebler, 3/13/24)
This is just to say that TikTok and the specter of China’s control of it has become a blank canvas for which anyone who has any complaint about social media to paint their argument on, and has become a punching bag receiving scrutiny we should also be applying to every other social media giant.
When Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash and Bird ignore local laws or face the specter of bans or regulation, they use push notifications, email, and popups within their apps asking customers to complain to legislators. When these American apps do this, they are simply leveraging their popularity to “mobilize users.” When TikTok does the same, it is Chinese interference in American politics. When American TikTok users use their platform to share their progressive or leftist politics and TikTok’s algorithms allow them to go viral, that’s Chinese interference. When TikTok deletes content that violates its terms of service, that’s Chinese censorship. When Facebook and Google allow advertisers to create psychographic, biographic, and behavioral-based profiles of their users to target ads to them, that’s “personalized advertising.” When TikTok does ads, it’s Chinese spying. When TikTok users see content that promotes suicide, eating disorders, and makes people feel bad about themselves, it’s China brainwashing our children, undermining America, and threatening our existence. When Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube users see the same, it’s inconvenient and unfortunate, but can be solved with a blasé spokesperson statement that these platforms care about safety and will strive to do better.
“The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power” (Disconnect, Paris Marx, 3/14/24)
Maybe you’re an American and you think the TikTok ban makes sense. Sure, US tech companies can track virtually everything you (and people in many countries outside the US) do, will hand that data over to the government, and even sell it to a ton of data brokers — but at least they’re US companies. Chinese ones shouldn’t be allowed to do the same thing, at least to US residents. That line of thinking makes no sense to me, but I can see how people only thinking of their own narrow national interests can believe it.
But why should a Canadian, a European, a Brazilian, a South Korean, or people from any number of other countries outside the United States defend that reality or find it in any way acceptable? When previous forms of media like radio, film, or television and communications technologies like the telephone rolled out, countries often placed rules on foreign ownership and content distribution, but with the internet little of that was allowed. Countries were expected to accept US dominance of the new medium, yet now we see what happens when those US firms start to face real competition at home: the US government does exactly what it long said no one else was allowed to do and protects its domestic industry.
Whatever happens with the TikTok ban, it’s time to reconsider the myths that have been built up about the internet and digital technology that were designed to serve the interests of US tech companies. China is in the crosshairs today because it’s the only country that’s developed domestic tech industry that can really give Silicon Valley a run for its money. Should the rest of the world, or even just Western countries, really be expected to accept the dominance of Facebook, Amazon, and Google in perpetuity? Instead of defending US tech companies from Chinese competition, we must work toward a vision of an internet (and a world) that rejects the dominance of either.
That’s it for me today. I’ll be back with another edition of The Present Age tomorrow.
Related reading:
“Fear the Wrath of the TikTok Voter” (The New Republic, Grace Segers, 3/21/23)
“Don’t Ban TikTok” (Fight For The Future)
“H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” (Congress.gov)
Whenever you see something rushed through Congress with big bipartisan majorities, it's usually something really, really stupid. Like starting a war with Iraq based on lies about weapons of mass destruction.
And just to state the bleedin' obvious, Facebook is full of Russian propaganda. Is that because Facebook is owned by Russia? Or is it because Facebook is social media, and ALL social media is full of propaganda of all sorts?
I've become increasingly convinced that all this social media - Facebook, twitter, tiktok, etc - is bad for humans from a health perspective, a social perspective, and a political one. I'm not sure that banning one in particular will help, though, and certainly not if they ban it because of some geopolitical, vaguely racist strife with China. What I truly would prefer would be for us to decide together to stop using these platforms. Easier said than done, I know.