President Biden just signed into law a bill forcing the sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent ByteDance—or else face an outright ban. The measure was included in a bill providing a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Proponents of the bill cite privacy and national security concerns. TikTok, like all social media giants, collects piles of user data—and if requested by the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance is obligated by law to share that user information. Critics also worry about political influence operations on the platform—a dictatorial foreign adversary turning our kids into little Manchurian candidates.
Opponents of the bill argue that forcing a TikTok sale under the threat of a ban is a blow to users’ free speech rights and represents an overreach of government authority. They insist that the government should not dictate which apps Americans can use, especially on opaque grounds of national security.
Today, a debate: Is American national security at risk from an Orwellian app ultimately controlled by a totalitarian regime? Or is this just McCarthyism in digital form, a government-created moral panic fueled by dubious threats of misinformation?
Arguing that the TikTok bill is a logical extension of our current laws—and a necessary countermeasure to authoritarian meddling—is Geoffrey Cain. Cain is the author of The Perfect Police State and senior fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University.
On the other side, arguing that the bill is a dangerous overreach justified by flimsy evidence of an alleged threat, is Walter Kirn. Kirn is a novelist, Free Press contributor, editor-at-large of County Highway, and co-host of the podcast America This Week.
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The 'For' side mentioned TikTok's logarithm repeatedly, but repeatedly failed to make the real case as to the opportunities TikTok presents to the CCP. Specifically, the threat is not from content creation by China... instead it is by using the logarithm to amplify content that is: pro-China, and pro other adversaries of the US (Russia, Iran etc), while starving content that is unfriendly to China, Russia, Iran etc. Further, it is well known that that key strategy in overcoming a powerful enemy such as the US is to weaken it within, thus depleting its strength / power. The CCP achieves such aim by exerting its undeniable power over TikTok's logarithm to amplify content to achieve the objective of weakening the US. by amplifying content that is divisive (politically, racially, religiously, etc) while at the same time choking content that is counter to its desired messaging. And we must remember that while the predominant TikTok users are young now - they are very impressionable, and will in the future, as they reach maturity, be impacted by the CCP's propagandist content served up to them via the logarithm on the platform. It is for this reason that in absence of capability to ensure that TikTok is not a tool of the CCP - that TikTok should be banned.
I think we would make more impact if we stopped using the term "communist" and call it what it is: dictatorship. You also said Totalitarian which I like. Or when you say "communist", make it a joke and call it "so-called communist"?