Banning TikTok Would Make America More Like China

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 specifically, 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, the Trump administration 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. The Biden administration has not only continued its predecessor’s policies toward China but escalated them, using trade and commerce powers to halt the export of advanced semiconductor chips and equipment to China and also banning 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 the director of the FBI 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 is that the Chinese government could then use TikTok’s algorithms to barrage American users with disinformation and propaganda to create domestic havoc in the United States.

These issues can’t be dismissed outright, but they are likely overdrawn. The data of TikTok users — age, region, buying habits — is no different than that collected by countless on-line merchants and other social media sites. While that data is secure and encrypted in all cases, much of it can either be scrapped anonymously (and often is for use in the vast and profitable commercial data market) or accessed by cyber spy agencies. User data isn’t particularly safe anywhere. Whatever the Chinese government wanted to glean from TikTok users it likely can glean anyway, regardless of where that data is stored.

As for the chaos engine theory — that TikTok on instructions from the Chinese government could sow confusion in domestic politics in the United States, that is akin to the Russian meddling in the 2016 issue. Yes, a foreign government can try to use social media to spread disinformation and spur division, but 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 assumes full and total control of TikTok by Beijing, which is something hardly anyone currently believes or alleges.

But let’s say 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 an incredibly creative and often incredibly banal content that reached 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 banned TikTok. The government of Narendra Modi in India has been tightening its control over information in multiple spheres, and its moves against TikTok and other Chinese apps are part of a broader attempt to control information. But unlike India, the United States 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 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 zero-Covid policies that relied on mass surveillance of smartphones 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, 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 American 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, undercut 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 go of censorship by banning TikTok.

So for the United States, the risks of TikTok are far outweighed by the risks of banning TikTok. Doing so would start down a path of information policing, and it is hard to see that ending well for an open society, especially if government agencies able to use force to silence speech become involved. Those powers granted to government can be difficult to curtail.

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 a ban. That is one reason why Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, one of the political icons of that set, immediately came out against a ban, 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.

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By: Zachary Karabell
Title: Opinion | Banning TikTok Would Make America More Like China
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/02/tiktok-ban-free-speech-00089760
Published Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2023 06:00:00 EST

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