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As you probably noticed, the House just passed the controversial ban on TikTok, with 352 Representatives in favor, and 65 opposed. The bill is now likely to be slow-walked to the Senate where its chance of passing is murky, but possible. Biden (which has been using the purportedly “dangerous national security threat” to campaign with) has stated he’ll sign the bill should it survive the trip.
The ban (technically a forced divestment, followed by a ban after ByteDance inevitably refuses to sell) passed through the house with more than a little help from Democrats:
Not talked much about in press coverage is the fact that the majority of constituents don’t actually support a ban (you know, the whole representative democracy thing). Support for a ban has been dropping for months, even among Republicans, and especially among the younger voters Democrats have already been struggling to connect with in the wake of the bloody shitshow in Gaza:
As the underlying Pew data makes clear, a lot of Americans aren’t sure what to think about the hysteria surrounding TikTok. And they’re not sure what to think, in part, because the collapsing U.S. tech press has done a largely abysmal job covering the story, either by parroting bad faith politician claims about the proposal and app, or omitting key important context.
Context like the fact the U.S. has been too corrupt to pass an internet privacy law, resulting in years of repeated scandal (with TikTok being arguably among the least of them). Congress has been lobbied into apathy by a massive coalition of cross-industry lobbyists with unlimited budgets. But the U.S. government is also disincentivized to act because it abuses the dysfunction to avoid having to get traditional warrants.
The press has also been generally terrible at explaining to the public that the ban doesn’t actually do what it claims to do.
Banning TikTok, but refusing to pass a useful privacy law or regulate the data broker industry is entirely decorative. The data broker industry routinely collects all manner of sensitive U.S. consumer location, demographic, and behavior data from a massive array of apps, telecom networks, services, vehicles, smart doorbells and devices (many of them *gasp* built in China), then sells access to detailed data profiles to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together, including Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence.
Often without securing or encrypting the data. And routinely under the false pretense that this is all ok because the underlying data has been “anonymized” (a completely meaningless term). The harm of this regulation-optional surveillance free-for-all has been obvious for decades, but has been made even more obvious post-Roe. Congress has chosen, time and time again, to ignore all of this.
Banning TikTok, but doing absolutely nothing about the broader regulatory capture and corruption that fostered TikTok’s (and every other companies’) disdain for privacy or consumer rights, isn’t actually fixing the problem. In fact, as Mike has noted, the ban creates entirely new problems, from potential constitutional free speech violations, to its harmful impact on online academic research.
I’ve mentioned more than a few times that I think the ongoing quest to ban TikTok is mostly a flimsy attempt to transfer TikTok’s fat revenues to Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Oracle, or Facebook under the pretense of national security and privacy, two things our comically corrupt, do-nothing Congress has repeatedly demonstrated in vivid detail they don’t have any genuine interest in.
TikTok creators seem to understand this better than the gerontocracy or the U.S. tech press:
None of this is to say that TikTok doesn’t actually pose some privacy or national security problems.
But if Congress were really serious about privacy, they’d pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers.
If Congress were serious about national security, they’d meaningfully fight corruption, and certainly wouldn’t support a multi-indictment facing authoritarian NYC real estate con man with a fourth-grade reading level for fucking President.
If Congress were serious about combating propaganda (foreign, domestic, corporate, or otherwise) they’d impose more meaningful updated education standards, fight harmful consolidation in local TV broadcast “news,” and protect and finance academic and journalistic institutions under relentless assault by authoritarians, AI-wielding hedge fund bozos, and incompetent brunchlords.
So when Congress pops up to claim it’s taking aim at a single popular app because it’s suddenly super concerned about consumer privacy, propaganda, and national security, skeptics are right to steeply arch an eyebrow. You realize we can see your voting histories and policy priorities, right?
Xenophobia, Protectionism and Information Warfare
The GOP motivation for a TikTok ban has long been obvious: they believe TikTok’s growing ad revenues technically belong, by divine right, to white-owned U.S. companies. But the GOP also sees TikTok as an existential threat to their ever-evolving online propaganda efforts, which have become a strategic cornerstone of an increasingly extremist, authoritarian party whose policies are broadly unpopular.
The GOP is fine with rampant privacy abuses and propaganda — provided they’re the ones violating privacy or slinging political propaganda. You’ll recall Trump’s big original fix for the “TikTok problem” (before a right wing investor in TikTok recently changed his mind, for now) was a cronyistic transfer of ownership of TikTok to his Republican friends at Walmart and Oracle.
Former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his Saudi-funded Liberty Strategic Capital is already hard at work putting investors together to buy the app. If the GOP (or a proxy) manages to buy TikTok, they’ll engage in every last abuse they’ve accused the Chinese government of. TikTok will be converted, like Twitter, into a right wing surveillance and propaganda echoplex, where race-baiting authoritarian propaganda is not only unmoderated, but encouraged.
All under the pretense of “protecting free speech,” “antitrust reform,” or whatever latest flimsy pretense authoritarians are currently using to convince a gullible and lazy U.S. press that they’re operating in good faith.
Why Democrats would support any of this remains an open question. The ban would likely aid GOP propaganda efforts, piss off young voters, and advertise the party (which had actually been faster to embrace TikTok than the GOP) as woefully out of touch. All while not actually protecting consumer privacy or national security in any meaningful way. And creating entirely new problems.
Democratic support for a ban seems largely motivated by lobbying pressure from Facebook/Meta, which has been using the same knobs the GOP and telecom industry used to destroy net neutrality to seed little moral panics around DC for several years. Facebook/Meta is, if it’s not clear, exclusively interested in having the government destroy a competitor it hasn’t been able to out-innovate.
National security, consumer privacy, or good faith worries about propaganda don’t enter into it.
Some Democratic Reps, like Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sara Jacobs seem to understand the trap, keeping the focus on a need for a federal privacy law that reins in the privacy and surveillance abuses of all companies that do business in the U.S., foreign or domestic. Some senators, like Ron Wyden, have worked hard to ensure equal attention is paid toward rampant data broker abuses.
But 155 House Democrats voted for the ban, either because they’re corrupt, or they have absolutely no idea how any of this actually works. Pissing off your constituents by ruining an app used by 150+ million (mostly young) Americans during an election season is certainly a choice, especially given negligible constituent support–and growing evidence it likely creates more problems than it professes to solve.
A TikTok Ban Is A Pointless Political Turd For Democrats
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