"Banning TikTok" Is Not a Normal Political Problem
The movement to ban TikTok is bipartisan...but so is its opposition. What are the pros and cons of this increasingly rare dynamic?
I’ve been hearing a lot of arguments this week about whether or not TikTok should be banned, all in relation to a bill that passed the House on Wednesday with huge bipartisan support.
The bill’s mechanism is pretty unusual: a foreign entity controlled application, wherein the foreign entity in question has been “determined by the President to be a national security threat” (which obviously means TikTok, but the bill also specifically identifies TikTok and ByteDance just in case it wasn’t clear), has to essentially be sold within 6 months. Failure to be sold but continuing to operate will net a fine $5,000 multiplied by its number of U.S. users. For TikTok, which is currently valued at $100 billion and has 170 million American users, this would mean a fine of $850,000,000,000. It would be fined into oblivion; hence the talk of a “ban.” (By the way, that $100 billion valuation is dependent on the inclusion of the app’s addicting algorithm, which the Chinese government has refused to allow; this would more than halve the app’s value. Additionally, it could be hard for tech giants like Microsoft or Google, which surely would want to buy the app, to do so, as this would likely be an anti-trust issue.)
The bill also adds a data protection clause that is rather interesting:
…the entity that owns or controls such application shall provide, upon request by a user of such application within the land or maritime borders of United States, to such user all the available data related to the account of such user with respect to such application. Such data shall be provided in a machine readable format and shall include any data maintained by such application with respect to the account of such user, including content (including posts, photos, and videos) and all other account information.
Failure to do that nets an additional fine of $500 per user, unless it is sold. For TikTok, that would be an additional $85 billion on top of the $850 billion, meaning that TikTok would face a civil penalty equivalent to nearly $1 trillion.
(This joke is nearly 30 years old, but already a trillion dollars isn’t a crazy number: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and NVIDIA are all valued at about that amount, and it’s 1/27th of the U.S. GDP from 2023. Says a lot about inflation. $20 in the mid nineties would be over $40 today).
It’s important to note a few things: the “nay” votes in the House also had significant bipartisan harmony, as well as those voting present or not voting at all. It ranges from far left progressives to the reactionary populist right, and it’s rare you see an issue these days that isn’t decided by strict party lines. Donald Trump’s recent waffling might change that — remember, he once issued an executive order that would have banned TikTok, but it got held up in Federal court — but if you also consider Chuck Schumer’s extreme caution and hesitancy in the Senate, it shows that the Democratic Party’s leadership is not remotely decided on storming on ahead with a ban.
The Senate is usually the more cautious, bovine and turgid of the two chambers anyway, but leaders from both parties show that this issue could get dragged out for months, and maybe longer. Per Reuters:
Senator Ron Wyden, a leading Democrat on tech issues, said he is still reviewing the House bill and has "serious concerns about any app that gives the Chinese government access to Americans' private data. I'll also say this: history teaches us that when lawmakers rush to legislate on tech and social media, mistakes get made."
Senator Ted Cruz, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, told Bloomberg News the bill should be open to a "full amendment process," which could significantly delay any action.
Senate bills open to a full amendment process sometimes take so long they are effectively killed simply because Congress ends session. Bills can also stagnate and die in committees, and one of the best ways to make that likely is to hold public hearings, which is exactly what Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell (D) said she wants to do. It’s difficult to overestimate how frequently bills languish and die in Congress. There’s even a song about it.
One of the things that has been bothering me about this conversation is that people are trying to make this partisan, when it demonstrably isn’t. Or that this is clearly a Biden versus Trump or an RNC versus DNC debate, as is the case with virtually everything else in politics these days. It isn’t.
I do think it’s important to embrace the more uncomfortable reality: neither side has a clear idea of what to do, but the majority agrees there is a massive problem requiring immediate attention, and no one else has any better ideas for now. Making this about partisan politics — and in an election year, no doubt — is liable to make this process more chaotic, inflammatory, and worst of all, unproductive. Mistakes will be made.
So let’s enjoy the fact that the Senate is moving slowely for once. It’s to all of our advantage.
On to the issues themselves. There are actually quite considerable problems related to TikTok, such as egregious disinformation, highly negative impacts on mental health (such as its propensity to push content related to suicide and eating disorders, for example, let alone its deleterious effect on attention spans and cognitive capacity), and on top of all of it, there has been an absolute inability to protect user data from the Chinese government.
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think TikTok is uniquely dangerous when it comes to disinformation, negative mental health impacts, eroding attention spans, loneliness, and on and on and on. I think all social media companies are guilty of these problems, and the American-owned companies are no better at protecting American users from disinformation originating in foreign countries that have been identified as national security threats. We all remember 2016 and 2020, don’t we?
I think it’s a mistake to isolate these problems to TikTok. I’ve written before about how I think that social media is a public health issue that merits regulation, but hyper-specific bans are not likely to solve anything. I hate to sound like Donald Trump, but I actually think he’s right to say that banning TikTok only makes Facebook stronger, and though while I disagree with him as to why, I still nevertheless think Facebook is dangerous. And if we ban all current platforms, new ones will crop up in their place without solving any of the underlying problems.
TikTok and data protection is, however, an important problem to solve. If the Chinese government has access to really sensitive data about Americans — and man, does TikTok have a scary accurate picture of who you are as a person — the potential issues that derive from this are far worse than propaganda or fomenting anger.
Consider this: the U.S. government has already forced the sale of a social media app that was owned by a Chinese investor because it was found to be a national security risk. It was Grindr, the dating app for gay and bisexual men and transgender people.
I think it’s really quite an interesting omission in this conversation, specifically on the left. The Republican party is already pretty loud about its (yes, frequently xenophobic) anti-China stances, but I do seriously wonder why the left is not more worried about this problem, considering that it is increasingly dangerous to be queer under Xi Jinping’s government.
For example, a 2017 lawsuit in China over a textbook that identified homosexuality as one of four “psychosexual disorders” (alongside “transvestism, fetishism and voyeurism”) was thrown out in 2020, even though the Classification and Diagnostic Criteria of Mental Disorders in China “formally deleted homosexuality from the psychosis category” in 2001. The tossing out of the 2017 lawsuit sparked unusually “fierce” reactions on Weibo, indicating that the Chinese people are out of step on this issue with the CCP (and it’s also worth mentioning that the largest LGBTQ community on the planet is in China), but that hasn’t stopped the government from clamping down on pro-LGBTQ rights. Last year, one of the largest LGBTQ rights organizations in China abruptly shut down operations without explanation, censorship of gay plotlines is ongoing, and gender stereotypes are enforced by law.
Of course, as with American social media companies struggling with disinformation and mental health erosion, this country has more than its fair share of problems with LGBTQ stigma and persecution. But unlike the Chinese government, the American government has explicitely enshrined marriage equality into law.
The politics of gay marriage were absolutely partisan. SCOTUS ruled it unconstitutional to ban gay marriage in 2015, but the repeal of Roe v. Wade (by a SCOTUS recently turned far right by Donald Trump getting three judicial nominations in one term) and the explicit targeting of that 2015 ruling by conservative justice Clarence Thomas spurred Congress to act. The law formalizing gay marriage was signed by Joe Biden in 2022.
This is quite a dilemma for the left, particularly the young, queer-friendly left, who are heavy users of TikTok. Joe Biden has said he would sign this ban, but he also formalized the protection of gay marriage and has an overtly protectionist policy platform related to LGBTQ issues. If you’re in any way pro-LGBTQ rights, even if you don’t think Biden’s platforms are perfect, the alternative is Donald Trump, who continues to openly court the Christian Nationalist movement, which is…not exactly known for a protectionist policy platform. And then in the background, you must consider that even if you are currently getting safe spaces on TikTok for LGBTQ communities now, an overtly anti-LGBTQ government is also currently collecting your data — and a lot more than you might think. What that means is not yet obvious, but it doesn’t exactly scream “don’t panic” to me.
There’s obviously far more to this issue — first and foremost being how TikTok has become a way to make a living for a LOT of people — but I think this particular dynamic of LGTBQ rights cuts right to the core of the debate: this is not a simple, partisan problem that can be easily solved at the ballot box. It requires a lot more consideration than it’s probably going to get.
