The TikTok Ban is an Attack on Your Freedom

The Rush to Suppress the Popular App is Nothing but Censorship

“Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.”
- Montesquieu [The Spirit of the Laws, I.XI.4]

It is all just like this. Meme credit of Parker Molloy.

A bill to ban the popular social media app TikTok has passed the US House of Representatives. Biden has indicated he will sign it if it comes to his desk, and in fact his Administration helped to draft it. It is a terrible piece of legislation with far-reaching implications, all of which attack your freedom. Besides the possibility that the Supreme Court would overturn it on Constitutional grounds, our current best, dim, hope is that the Senate leadership simply decides to not schedule the bill for consideration. As with many of the worst laws, this has broad, bipartisan support. Finally everyone can agree on something, and it is that those sneaky Chinese pose a unique menace to our privacy and safety that our domestic tech giants do not. There is concern about everything from them stealing our data to propagandizing our children to rigging our elections. It seems as if the Yellow Peril is back. One wonders if anyone could possibly believe all of this, but I can assure you from personal experience that conservatives who spend 12 hours a day in Twitter Spaces getting their heads filled with all sorts of crazy ideas are extremely concerned that the youths will be propagandized by the TikToks.

This bill would force TikTok to shutdown in the United States in 6 months if its parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t either sell TikTok, or if Bytedance’s founder doesn’t sell his 20% stake. The real issue, of course, is that they don’t want people to get any unapproved ideas, including about Israel, where the IDF soldiers constantly filming themselves doing horrible things and posting it online has made that country unpopular among TikTok’s mostly young users. Their main excuse is data security, but I don’t care that much if the Chinese government has the information of Americans, I’m much more worried about our own government which rules us and is in a position to harm us. You are meant to believe that we must protect American values from the Chinese Communist Party by acting exactly like the Chinese Communist Party. No one can say what China would even do with the data of individual Americans. This attempt at banning TikTok is a terrible solution to a made up problem, and every man who loves liberty should stand in opposition.

I don’t need to tell anyone who lives in modern America what TikTok is, but will give some more neutral background anyway, in an effort to cut through the hype. TikTok is a Singapore-based video sharing app which is very popular among the young. Due to the fact that its parent company ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing and it was developed in China, there has been a great deal of concern about the communists poisoning our precious bodily fluids. However, though there is a separate, censored version of TikTok in China, TikTok itself is banned in China. I have never used the app, but the basic function is that you share short videos with a lot of easy editing options. It is known for having a strong algorithm, which can make people “go down a rabbit hole” rapidly. Things easily go “viral,” or at least seem to, as it automatically shows a user the next video and then they must watch it or swipe away or that sort of thing. The adults are very worried about the impact it has on “kids these days” due to an inability to compare it to always being on Twitter Spaces or Youtube or an elderly person watching CNN all day. The shorter nature of the videos makes it said to be more addictive and the algorithm can put the user in a “bubble,” which of course never happens on other social media. There is a huge variety of content such as you would see anywhere on the internet: cat videos, dances, political news, confused teenagers, home projects, ideological rants, history lessons, cooking, outfits, hot chicks, videogaming, or really anything else. There are periodic, or perhaps near constant, panics about what kids learn on the service, such as recently when young people saw a letter from Osama Bin Laden and were amazed to find some of his grievances broadly reasonable, because public schools don’t bother to properly explain 9/11.

I have talked to several people about the use of TikTok, both children and adults. For starters, I am a member of a fraternal organization which gives scholarships to local high school seniors, and at our scholarship dinner two years ago had a conversation with a young woman where I asked her some questions about teenagers and TikTok usage. She told me that it is fun to use and is fine if you have other things going on in life and are from a strong community, but that since it is highly personalized if someone is already isolated or struggling it can take them farther in that direction. This has always been true of the internet, since Usenet was popular in the 1980’s. There is a fair “the drugs are getting stronger” argument, similar to how the gnarly and easily available content on Pornhub is much worse for children than in my day when you waited a minute for a boob to load on dial-up. There was also a young man at this scholarship dinner who expressed his desire to become a contract lawyer, citing the complexity of user agreements on apps like TikTok and Instagram as a reason this is an important job, which perhaps shows we should give the kids some credit.

One father I know said his children use TikTok and he made an account to see what it is like. He reported that the algorithm does not manipulate but works well at providing content the user wants; his young teenage son frequently comes to him to ask about doing woodworking projects he has seen on the service. Another friend who is a childless adult started using it just to look into the things which were said to be going viral, and determined that most scare stories in the media come nowhere near TikTok’s standards of virality, which would be millions of views. The reality is that the internet has just become more powerful, and we all need to live with it. Parents should certainly pay attention to what their kids see on TikTok, and perhaps test and modify the algorithm periodically by rating videos [such as telling it “don’t show more content like this.”] Fearing foreign influence on children is ancient, common, and usually ridiculous. TikTok isn’t actually different from other services like Instagram videos or Facebook reels, it just works better and the government fears that they can’t control it.

Anyone who uses social media, even if not on TikTok, will see that it isn’t all anti-semitism or left-wing teachers exposing themselves as freaks. There is a lot of amazing content on TikTok, such as this video I recently saw on Twitter:

After years of panics over the kids sharing videos that might give them dangerous ideas, the forces of our government have came together to say that this time China has gone too far. Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Senator Rand Paul on this topic, and Tucker points out that government couldn’t come to any agreement about countering Chinese influence in our country- including their building infrastructure or being our sole source of vital supplies- until it came time to limit the speech of Americans. That should make it obvious what this is, especially as many or most people supporting the TikTok ban have explicitly complained about which ideas are shared on the app. Perhaps it only takes one image for us to see the real problem:

In reality, the parties had already mostly coalesced around attacking TikTok before 10/7, but we can be sure this sped up the process.

All of the worst people [and some who are usually decent] are out for TikTok. One can see the irrationality of this discourse from a short video of Senator Tom Cotton questioning TikTok CEO Shou Chew, a citizen of Singapore, about if he has ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Testifying in front of the US Congress should be a solemn and intimidating occurrence, but I usually end up feeling bad for people brought in because it is a clown show that insults the dignity of the person testifying. Tom Cotton is sure that Chew looks Chinese-y, but can’t quite seem to make the connection that Singapore is an independent state that is majority ethnic Chinese.

Though the US takes offense if other countries limit foreign capital, apparently TikTok having some Chinese ownership is a big problem. In reality, ByteDance is 60% owned by global capital, 20% owned by employees, and 20% owned by its founder who, yes, is a Chinese national. The Chinese government has a 1% “golden share” in the subsidiary that operates within China, but not in the parent company. There were some valid concerns about TikTok, Chinese influence, and data safety, but Trump targeted them over this, and the US company Oracle took over data storage, and they have spent over a billion dollars complying. The US is already increasingly bad for investing in due to labor and production costs, but if Bytedance is forced to sell TikTok at fire sale prices- possibly to a former government Secretary!- the jig will really be up, US corruption will again be exposed, and there will be all the more reason to not do business here.

The basic way in this bill would function is that if an app or website is said to be controlled by a “foreign adversary,” as determined by the President, they would have 180 days to be divested of that country or be banned from app stores, web hosting, or any kind of maintenance within the United States. The definition of “controlled by a foreign adversary” is broad, and could be anything from disliking one investor to targeting a CEO with dual citizenship. The implications are clear. The international nature of the internet makes this a threat to the internet itself. I don’t want to go into the technical aspects of this bill and how it was passed here, but Michael Tracey has done a good job covering it, and the short story is that my own Representative, Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, quietly planned things in advance to get this through in under 2 weeks, in a Congress that can barely fund the government. You can read Tracey’s description here:

The frenzy to ban TikTok is another National Security State scam

Though the bill passed with overwhelming support, many have shown concern about its broadness, but this has mostly been limited to traditional defenders of civil liberties. The ACLU took a break from annoying Democrat Party activism to get back to its original mission, and released a strong statement on the matter. Matt Gaetz said that he supports banning TikTok but this bill wasn’t done right. As mentioned above, Tucker Carlson, who is a China alarmist in general, sees through what they are doing. Further, we can be sure that this is meant to benefit American companies such as Google and Meta, who we know give our information to the government. If the data issue is such a concern, the Biden Administration wouldn’t be lobbying against data protection provisions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a major internet rights group, is opposing the TikTok ban while promoting legislation that does protect our data. This bill is a big and oppressive racket.

The story here is that as ever, when they do something “bi-partisan” it is because they have agreed it is time to screw you. This is censorship, pure and simple. They want to control your speech and how you interact with other people, both Americans and across the world. I shouldn’t have to make a slippery slope argument, because we are well down that slope, but this could obviously be used to target other websites they don’t like. Currently, there are four countries listed as constituting adversarial foreign powers, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, but that definition is independent of this bill and could be expanded at any time. I know that people believe the Chinese are terribly sneaky and we have been told to fear them, but I will stick to being jealous of my freedom towards my own government, not towards a foreign power that happens to be home to a video sharing app’s parent company.

Moreso than usual, absolutely everything they accuse TikTok and China of doing are exactly what our government and tech corporations do all the time, including in foreign countries whom our government criticizes if they restrict American tech companies. Congress’s resident cringe pirate Dan Crenshaw went so far as to say, “How would we feel if China put up a radio tower in Washington DC and broadcast propaganda 24 hours a day” which is a strange thing to say because Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty does literally that exact thing and we say any government which bans them is an evil and totalitarian regime. The US criticizes other countries for suppressing the internet all the time. In this instance, the premise of “every accusation is a confession” is stronger than usual. To wit, Reuters just reported that the CIA under Trump ran an anti-China social media conspiracy. Reuters describes the operation,

“A small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets…The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas…The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet.”

This is exactly, their “nightmare scenario” for how China could use TikTok to undermine our country. They got the idea from themselves. The US government does suck up all of our data and does God knows what with it. The US government caused social media to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story which could have potentially swung an election. The Twitter Files showed how thorough they have been. Our government colluded with big tech in an unprecedented mind control and propaganda effort. All of the worst things they claim China could theoretically do with TikTok would just bring global competition to social media and by doing so make the internet a more free place to access information by making it harder to uniformly censor.

Are we adults capable of deciding what to view and think, or aren’t we? The best counter to lies is the truth, and if the truth will kill something let it die. The real issue here is obviously that our government will do anything to try and convince us that we only think they are doing a bad job because of nefarious foreign governments. They want to control our communications because their narratives are failing all over, TikTok is just where they have found scary foreigners to use to convince people who usually don’t trust the government that we really need more government control over our communications. You can’t blame them for trying to make a move, their situation is dire, and they have many usually skeptical people onside this time. It all comes together in banning TikTok: election interference, “kids these days,” the scary ChiComs and their [real and perceived] role in the covid experience, opposition to Israel and imperialism generally, and failing Western economies that need to loot foreign capital and innovation. This is why our usually-paralytic Congress can suddenly move at lightning speed. This is why Republicans are promoting a bill the Biden Administration helped write. This is why people who have been harmed by internet censorship are suddenly in favor of it. There is nothing to the attempt to ban TikTok or bring it under US government control but the obsessive desire to control what you think and to remain in power without being troubled by keeping the public happy. Perhaps there is nothing we can do to stop this, but at least don’t bring shame upon yourself by having cheered on this egregious violation of your own freedom.

They are coming after legally protected speech and that is all there is to know. China is not threatening your freedom, the US government is.

Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.