Time’s Up for TikTok
The Chinese-owned app’s ban will not make America freer, but continue to eliminate the line between a liberal democracy and autocracy.
I don’t even use TikTok. I don’t like any of the new short-form clip sites including Shorts, Reels, etc. It doesn’t fit how I watch video. If it were up to me we’d all be watching linear broadcast television like God intended. And while I’m a radical supporter of the first amendment, if the option existed to amend the constitution to outlaw vertical video I’d head the campaign. But in banning TikTok, ostensibly because of their ties with China, America is doing what we saw so often during the Cold War and again during the War on Terror - losing our own moral ground to ward off theoretical “threats” that usually only exist in politicians’ minds. In the process, they drive away our allies.
Earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled that the law requiring TikTok to divest it’s U.S. division to an American company or face a ban by January 19th was constitutional. The incoming president argues that TikTok shouldn’t be banned, despite being the president who initially started the attempt at banning it during his first administration. The outgoing president did what Biden’s administration is best at - making a hash out of things - by being in favor of banning TikTok, signing the legislation into law (hey at least they actually legislated something for once!), and now trying to back track on the law’s ban. As I wrote on Bluesky earlier this week, Trump shouldn’t have won but man it was good to see Biden’s team lose.
I’m not going to get into the legal issues around TikTok because my law degree is from the University of Twitter, which is now so defunct I think I can now get my loans forgiven. There are some fantastic resources from actual lawyers and experts including Cathy Gellis, who I’ve been following on this since she appeared on a podcast as the sole voice of sanity regarding this case months ago. The TikTok case, no matter what ends up happening on Sunday, does show how inept both parties are at dealing with China.
Red Note, a Chinese domestic app that looks to be a bit like Instagram or Pinterest, topped the App Store charts after TikTok influencers flocked to it as a retaliation against the American ban. Honestly, that is hilarious and actually a very good protest (and one the Chinese government is particularly not keen on either, as they do not want a bunch of Americans interacting with their citizens). In response there have been pangs of frustration among leaders - why would these kids go to an explicitly Chinese app that isn’t even a TikTok replacement rather than using an American app? Why are they so comfortable with China, even making fun of having to “say goodbye to their Chinese spy?”
There is an argument, which I am sympathetic to, that these very online younger generations are less opposed to autocracy, something we see across the age range right now unfortunately, due to a perceived lack of functioning of democratic economies. This is of course rubbish, since millennials and adult Gen Z as wealthy or more than any other generation at their age, but that’s not the perception. I would argue, however, that these kids understand, as seen by the Chinese spy meme, the bias that exists on TikTok. Just like someone who watches CCTV would understand that there is a Chinese government bias. There is another argument, which is that China bans all of our social media companies, why shouldn’t we ban theirs? I’m sympathetic to this as well, but historically we haven’t done that. We allow CCTV to exist in America, we allow RT to exist. Foreign governments and companies have a first amendment right to speak to Americans, and Americans have a first amendment right to participate positively or negatively with these channels.
More importantly, like we see with the Trump rhetoric around Greenland and Panama, when we ignore our liberal democratic principles to try to stave off autocratic governments, we end up with the worst of both worlds and pushing our allies towards China. In both cases, Trump argues that an encroaching China threatens American interests in those countries, a fact which he’s not entirely wrong on. China’s soft power and economic development has been a topic of concern for decades now. But it’s unclear how threatening to invade and seize a country’s sovereign territory is supposed to drive them back to being allies with America. The opposite is true: Beijing can promise to protect them from American bullying and protect their sovereignty, even while meddling in their internal affairs and slowly removing their sovereignty themselves through economic constraints, not TV bullying as Trump does.
I’ve written before that historically, rigid oppressed societies don’t last. The longest surviving governments are those that are relatively free and open. The role of the government can be to educate on TikTok’s ownership, show how it is manipulated by their owners, and to argue with China for better access for American social media. But banning something entirely, even if it’s a negotiating ploy, is far beyond what should be acceptable to Americans, and we shouldn’t be surprised when cynical people start to see less of a difference between the autocratic government in Beijing and ours when we start pulling back on those freedoms.