FROM POLITICO | APRIL 2, 2023
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The recent grilling of TikTok’s CEO in front of an almost entirely hostile congressional committee was a reminder that a hardening stance against China is one of the few areas of genuine bipartisanship. That and an antagonistic stance toward Big Tech, so TikTok actually manages to check two boxes.
In general, it’s a positive when parties and officials across the political spectrum find common ground and work together to solve collective problems. In the case of TikTok, however, the rising chorus to ban the app and prevent or dramatically curtail access for American citizens is a profound mistake — not because TikTok per se matters greatly one way or the other, but because banning it violates the core strength of American society: its openness.
The animosity of Washington toward TikTok has been building for years. In 2020, as the popularity of the app soared in the early days of the pandemic, then-President Donald Trump threatened a ban, and coerced the Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to agree that all U.S. data would be housed and controlled by Oracle, an American server company. Yet, even as TikTok merged its U.S. data to Oracle servers in 2022, the drumbeat grew that the company was a national security threat that answers to the Chinese Communist Party.
President Joe Biden has not only continued his predecessor’s hawkish policies toward China but escalated them, using trade and commerce powers to halt the export of advanced semiconductor chips and equipment to China and barring TikTok from the computers and phones of federal employees.
The stated concern is that because TikTok’s parent company is Chinese owned, the government in Beijing could ultimately access data on hundreds of millions of American users. As FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government — and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns.” The other concern held by some critics is that the Chinese government could use TikTok’s algorithms to barrage American users with disinformation and propaganda, potentially creating domestic havoc in the United States.
These issues can’t be dismissed out right, but they are almost certainly overblown, according to security experts.
The data of TikTok users — age, region, passwords, names, buying habits — is no different than that collected by countless online merchants and other social media sites. While that data is private and encrypted, much of it can either be scraped anonymously (and often is for use in the vast and profitable commercial data market) or already accessed by cyber spy agencies. User data isn’t particularly secure anywhere. Whatever the Chinese government wanted to glean from TikTok users, it likely can glean anyway, regardless of where that data is stored.
Then there’s the chaos engine theory — that TikTok on instructions from the Chinese government could sow confusion in domestic politics or promote a certain ideology in the United States. It has echoes of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which naturally causes some alarm. But while a foreign government can try to use social media to spread disinformation and spur division, the net effect of that in the context of so much other noise in the cyber world is unclear. Could it amplify an already fractious political climate? Maybe, but almost certainly not on its own and not in any clear directional way, and that assumed full and total control of TikTok by Beijing, which is something hardly anyone currently believes or alleges.
But let’s say that the Communist Party of China could and will use TikTok. Even then, banning the app is a terrible idea for the United States. Why? Because the foundational strength of the United States is that it is an open society where information can and does flow freely. Banning TikTok, a platform of often astonishingly creative and often incredibly banal content that reaches 150 million Americans, is a step back from an open society and toward a closed one.
That is why the United States mulling a TikTok ban is a very different thing than, say, India, which has already barred TikTok. The government of Narendra Modi in India has been tightening its censorship in multiple spheres, and its moves against TikTok and other Chinese apps are part of a broader attempt to control information. The United States, however, has a rich tradition of free speech and has erected a legal apparatus designed to protect it and encourage the open flow of information. It’s not just the First Amendment to the Constitution and subsequent court cases and precedent designed to bolster the right of free expression; it’s the implied link between a healthy, robust democracy and the ability to communicate all ideas, even ones that many find wrong and reprehensible, without fear of censorship or government suppression.
The Chinese government holds no such values, and indeed it believes that information should first and foremost serve the interests of the state. Yes, the Chinese constitution does provide for the right of free speech but not if such speech “undermines the interests of the state.” Free speech in China is not seen as a key pillar of societal strength; it is provisional and valuable only insofar as it does not challenge the primary of the Communist Party.
The United States, by contrast, has championed an open society as the ultimate guarantor of human liberty and prosperity, and as one of the most robust checks on the untrammeled exercise of government or corporate power. We can debate if openness and free speech do in fact serve those functions, but they at the very least make exercising control more difficult. And the sheer noisy vibrancy of American society has been a notable contrast to many other countries over time and one of the hallmarks of a democracy that has allowed individuals to say and do what they choose.
That has, in turn, been the fuel for a rich culture of innovation and creativity, scientifically and artistically, including the invention and commercialization of the cyber world that we all now inhabit. TikTok may be a Chinese app, but it is built on American innovation.
But if TikTok as a social media app par excellence is in essence a manifestation of American strength, banning TikTok is in essence a mimicking of Chinese policy. China has created its own internal intraweb and erected its “Great Fire Wall” to keep unwelcome information out of the public sphere. The Chinese government, with its legion of censors, polices what can be said and how, and punishes those who deviate too far from accepted parameters. That has only increased after the country’s “zero-Covid” policies that relied on mass surveillance of smart phones to control the movement of Chinese citizens. The efforts to control 1.5 billion people, what they say and how they say it publicly, are one way that the party retains control in China. It is a source of their strength.
The United States will never be able to compete with China in censoring information, nor should it. But it could undermine its own vitality as an open society if it heads down the path of trying to ban apps in the name of national security. The wave of blacklists and McCarthy era crackdowns on Americans who professed Communist and even socialist beliefs and sympathies did not make the United States more secure in the early days of the Cold War; it made the country more paranoid and brittle, undermined creativity and the free flow of scientific information and briefly threatened to undermine the stability of the very government agencies such as the State Department and the Defense Department that were tasked with preserving national security.
America does not do suppression of free speech particularly well, which is a good thing. And we should not optimize for a future where we do it better by making a new go at censorship. For the United States, the risks of TikTok are far outweighed by the risks of banning TikTok.
Perhaps the only silver lining in a possible ban is that it might energize tens of millions of passionate TikTok users in the U.S. — most of them under the age of 30 — to use their political power, to use their voices and speech, to vote out those who support it. It should be no surprise that Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, one of the political icons of that set, immediately came out against a ban, while also calling on Congress to enact more rigorous data privacy laws designed to protect Americans from all data harvesting, most of which is done by American companies. Of course, it would be its own irony that in attempting to silence speech, those who institute a ban end up unleashing more speech in a segment of the population that has often been accused of being politically apathetic. But that possible upside is still not worth the cost.
China may represent a 21st century challenge to the United States and to a certain free world order. Meeting the challenge will require doubling down on the strengths of an open society. Banning TikTok is an act of weakness that will do nothing to make America more secure, and will in fact make it less so.