It's a mystery to me how anyone opposes getting TikTok from out of the CCP's control and indeed why it hasn't happened yet. Matt's CBS analogy is spot on.
The fact that the CCP was able to mobilize tens of thousands of people to protest our government on a false pretense here should scare the fuck out of us.
My position is simple. I want a button that shuts down CCP bullshit like this. I want an American engineer’s finger on that button. I want their paycheck signed by an American executive. I want that executive’s shareholders to hold their stock on an American exchange - stock that is NOT revocable merely for criticizing the company.
Also worth noting: The CCP bans our social media and internet companies — facebook/instagram/meta, google, twitter/x, reddit and even pinterest. Besides the reason Matt outlines, you can think of banning TikTok as a similar to a retaliatory tariff. Something we have no problem doing.
This piece features some of Matt’s most effective anti-Trump rhetoric to date. “Trump will sell you out” is provably true *and* could work with jaded moderates who don’t think “our norms” are worth defending. In fact, talking about our norms can comes off as something between officious and priggish— I long thought pre-Trump politics took decorum too far.
I appreciate the concern over Chinese control over TikTok and I'm not totally sure what I think about it. However, I think it's hard to be concerned about this and (coherently) not take worries about political bias of major social media companies more seriously than the left generally does. If the line that we don't know how much bias is present in the algorithm works for TikTok than it works for Facebook and Twitter too no?
Yes, as a big supporter of the first amendment I appreciate that the feds can't just go in and demand these companies change their messaging. But the left could at least publicly say it's bad and problematic when social media favors or disfavors political views that aren't (despite the fact you and I might wish they were) outside the Overton window of American political life. And the feds could investigate bills that reduce the power of network effects to create natural monopolies (eg various kinds of interoperability rules).
I certainly don't like the situation re CCP and TikTok but it also makes me uncomfortable for the government to move against a platform because of the viewpoint it might express so I don't really know what to think. However, it certainly feels to me there is a certain lack of consistency here -- or at least appreciation that people could have justified concerns here.
Remember the (likely to be successful) argument against the constitutionality of the TX and FL social media bills was exactly that choices made about what to favor or suppress are speech by the company.
I think that the thing I find most pernicious about TikTok as a propaganda organ is the fact that a: it isn’t obviously labeled as such and b: it promotes views by subtly increasing or decreasing how much exposure particular content gets rather than articulating a view.
I’m not worried about “Americans reading Pravda” type cases because Pravda was obviously Soviet government propaganda and most Americans were able to use that information to make judgments about the source. There just isn’t that sort of informed consent with TikTok.
I think I’d be okay with a remedy that forced TikTok to be much more transparent about how its content promotion algorithms worked, and allowed external observers to monitor it. I would also be okay with similar principles being applied to US adtech companies.
Before I push back yet again on Matt's take here, I do want to make clear some agreements that I have that I should have before. And that starts with saying that I hate TikTok with the heat of a thousand suns and think it's bad. The stop and go video format, the gaudy subtitles filled with emojis, the lack of full video controls and, of course, evil autoplay, it's all bad and I hate it. I don't particularly buy an argument of addiction when it comes to any information dissemination, but I certainly have no problem saying we'd be better off without this format. And while I haven't seen enough evidence yet to definitively say that the CCP is using it to spy and shoot off propaganda, it seems plausible to me, and being owned by the CCP is certainly another demerit against a social media platform I already hate.
However...banning TikTok (and let's get real, this is not merely requesting divestment--a ban has to be threatened to make the divestment request stick) is a major First Amendment breach, and it's really frustrating that Matt still hasn't engaged in this with his take. I'm sure srynerson will be here at some point to state once again the Supreme Court case that decided it, but people have the First Amendment right to read foreign propaganda from a hostile government. And defining what is propaganda and who is a hostile governmentis a subjective task, even if it's widely agreed by most that TikTok and the CCP qualifies. Stating otherwise gives future governments the ability to censor other foreign governments where the question of hostility and propaganda are much more questionable. And Matt's CBS analogy from the 1970s doesn't hold up at all, because the FCC had authority then over genuinely scarce public airwaves that needed government stewardship to avoid broadcasters interfering with each other's frequencies. There is no such scarcity with the internet, hence why the FCC has no such jurisdiction over it.
There's only one way to get rid of TikTok, and that's to beat them at their own game and build a better version of it here in America. I don't care how difficult it is with breaking network effects. We have multiple world class social media companies that are up for the task. Put together a federal initiative to get them to all unite and build one patriotic, American made platform if you have to.
As someone who is on TikTok more then I would like and vicariously through my wife, the propaganda is very subtle but very effective.
The search about Uyghurs is a bit of a red herring, because no one uses TikTok's (terrible) search feature. TikTok's superpower is its algorithm, which is incredible. We joke that it is listening to our conversations, or maybe it's just untethered from some of the ethical restrictions that western companies put on the AI, but it is absolutely incredible at delivering exactly the content that you would enjoy. But it's not something that I may have expressed an interest in by likes, like mock-sad musical remixes about the anime Attack On Titan, but also on things that I never thought I would've liked but do (like videos of Maine fisherman cleaning barnacles off crabs).
All of that is to set up how good the algorithm is. And yet, both my wife and I were delivered many videos about the CEO of TikTok's testimony before congress, edited in ways to insinuate he was the victim of a McCarthyesque attack. There are other very subtle things the algorithm pushes on people, like Gen Zers talking about how Actually Osama Bin Laden Is Good. The algorithm delivers exactly what you want but then puts its fingers on the scale to slip things in.
This is very different from banning Pravda or whatever. The problem with TikTok is how it is just pure entertainment, with propaganda subtly mixed in.
1. I think allowing the US government to ban speech it calls 'propaganda' is an extremely bad precedent. Living in a free society with a 1st Amendment is a good thing, actually
2. The reason the Soviet Union/CBS analogy doesn't work is that China built TikTok and didn't acquire it
3. The other reason the natsec infrastructure laws argument doesn't work is that TikTok is an offshore company- their servers are physically located on mainland China. Americans point their web browsers or phones towards it. I agree China shouldn't own critical industries that are physically located on the continental US, but if they build a media platform hosted in Beijing that happens to be popular with Americans, what are you going to do about that? Assert that the US can nationalize or block any media platform located anywhere on planet Earth, that enough Americans happen to go to? Or, block Americans at the ISP level from visiting it?
4. Yes you could get them out of the app store, but TikTok could build a web interface just like how Facebook and Instagram have one. Again- are you going to literally block Americans from going to a website?
5. Are we nationalizing or blocking, say, the Russia Today news channel? Way more overt propaganda than TikTok, and definitely held by a real foreign adversary. How about Iranian newspapers? Venezuelan newspapers? Where does the censorship stop, exactly?
Hearing about Trump’s flip-flop on TikTok is the first time I’ve considered voting for Trump. The hysteria against TikTok is unreasonable and uninformed.
TikTok is probably the least political social media site with the least amount of propaganda. You had to actively search out Uighurs; normally I get no politics in my recommendations unless I search it out. If you’re really concerned with propaganda, the site to go after is Twitter/X. I made a completely new account, and had to pick one person to start following so I picked the default choice of Elon Musk and was immediately bombarded with right-wing propaganda and influencers. Nothing like that happens on TikTok. And ironically, to the extent there is any censorship on TikTok, it is probably pro-US censorship; this was noticeable in how all the pro-Palestinian videos completely disappeared from recommended feeds after Congress grilled TikTok about it. I think their algorithm now just deemphasized anything political, which I think is a good thing compared to the Twitter rage machine.
The analogy to Russia buying CBS doesn’t hold water because TikTok never bought any US company. A better analogy would be Al Jazeera organically becoming the US’s most popular news source because of its great content. Do you think we could ban Al Jazeera in that context because it might be Qatari propaganda or would that be a blatant violation of free speech?
I unfortunately have too much work to do today to write a comprehensive response, but a lot of other folks are doing a good job on addressing key points, so I'll limit myself to a meta viewpoint on the whole thing:
This is truly a subject where Matt's general attitude of, "LOL, who cares what the courts have said, we'll figure out the specifics later," doesn't work because "The Law" and "The Policy" are completely inseparable in this context. It is not an exaggeration to say that the First Amendment is literally the most absolute part of American constitutional law. Unlike the Commerce Clause, which there are a million ways to engineer around, SCOTUS has spent the last century eradicating virtually every "One Weird Trick to Regulate Speech" that federal, state, and local government officials have devoted their efforts to coming up with outside of some very specific contexts (e.g., the broadcast regulations that make Matt's 1975 CBS example irrelevant) and SCOTUS has put a lot of effort in the last few decades to spelling out that those specific contexts are, indeed *specific*, and that it isn't looking to expand them.
You can say that those decisions by SCOTUS should be *overturned* (any level of government is free to try to do something unconstitutional and then convince the courts to overturn past precedents), but you should be honest about what you are advocating for.
I hadn't heard of the idea of a progressive tax on digital ads as a way to incentivize social media diversification. I actually think that is a really good idea.
Guys, let me put it in terms you'll all understand: if you let them ban TikTok, next they'll require age verification on porn sites. Don't forget that MindGeek is a Canadian company!
I would like to see more in depth reporting on the underlying legal questions and authorities surrounding the TikTok matter.
For instance, the rule against foreign broadcast network and broadcast station ownership is based upon two distinct factors to avoid 1st amendment bars - 1) broadcast television spectrum is inherently limited in capacity and must be utilized so as to maximize benefit of a scare resource for the general public. (This same theory is what underpins the no adult content, no vulgar language, etc. during kid friendly hours.) 2) these examples involve foreign investment into domestic companies and resources, which we can definitely restrict as a matter of commerce policy.
The TikTok issue is different. If it fully divested of US operations, it could remain a foreign entity entirely with its app still available in the US Apple & Google stores. I believe US citizens have a 1st amendment right to any published content they wish to access, including explicitly foreign propaganda. Is there actually a law that says I can't phone up a CCP office and ask to subscribe to their newsletter? Does the 1st amendment contemplate a mechanism for the US government to interfere should I do so?
When has a social media platform ever been sold and it worked out okay for the existing community. The only big examples I can think of were disastrous or tiny. I picture tt divestment going about as well as Tumblr’s adult content ban which it never was really the same fun place afterwards where you could have cool erotic art next to someone’s queer breakup story and a book review.
Are we just going to say like no fun things from China ever even though they seem to be where all the new entertainment will be coming from on a because we say so basis? Tencent owns a huge proportion of the other thing I’m likely to do if I’m not on TikTok which is play video games. Like what standards and are we forcing people to give up their work by and for? I’m really uncomfortable with your life as an American must get worse on an arbitrary we say so basis.
It's a mystery to me how anyone opposes getting TikTok from out of the CCP's control and indeed why it hasn't happened yet. Matt's CBS analogy is spot on.
The fact that the CCP was able to mobilize tens of thousands of people to protest our government on a false pretense here should scare the fuck out of us.
My position is simple. I want a button that shuts down CCP bullshit like this. I want an American engineer’s finger on that button. I want their paycheck signed by an American executive. I want that executive’s shareholders to hold their stock on an American exchange - stock that is NOT revocable merely for criticizing the company.
I think that’s a fair ask.
I'm quite the advocate for free trade but I wholeheartedly support the following proposals:
-if American social media companies are banned in a given country, then that country's social media companies can't operate in America
-Exporting movies to China is illegal
Also worth noting: The CCP bans our social media and internet companies — facebook/instagram/meta, google, twitter/x, reddit and even pinterest. Besides the reason Matt outlines, you can think of banning TikTok as a similar to a retaliatory tariff. Something we have no problem doing.
This piece features some of Matt’s most effective anti-Trump rhetoric to date. “Trump will sell you out” is provably true *and* could work with jaded moderates who don’t think “our norms” are worth defending. In fact, talking about our norms can comes off as something between officious and priggish— I long thought pre-Trump politics took decorum too far.
I appreciate the concern over Chinese control over TikTok and I'm not totally sure what I think about it. However, I think it's hard to be concerned about this and (coherently) not take worries about political bias of major social media companies more seriously than the left generally does. If the line that we don't know how much bias is present in the algorithm works for TikTok than it works for Facebook and Twitter too no?
Yes, as a big supporter of the first amendment I appreciate that the feds can't just go in and demand these companies change their messaging. But the left could at least publicly say it's bad and problematic when social media favors or disfavors political views that aren't (despite the fact you and I might wish they were) outside the Overton window of American political life. And the feds could investigate bills that reduce the power of network effects to create natural monopolies (eg various kinds of interoperability rules).
I certainly don't like the situation re CCP and TikTok but it also makes me uncomfortable for the government to move against a platform because of the viewpoint it might express so I don't really know what to think. However, it certainly feels to me there is a certain lack of consistency here -- or at least appreciation that people could have justified concerns here.
Remember the (likely to be successful) argument against the constitutionality of the TX and FL social media bills was exactly that choices made about what to favor or suppress are speech by the company.
I think that the thing I find most pernicious about TikTok as a propaganda organ is the fact that a: it isn’t obviously labeled as such and b: it promotes views by subtly increasing or decreasing how much exposure particular content gets rather than articulating a view.
I’m not worried about “Americans reading Pravda” type cases because Pravda was obviously Soviet government propaganda and most Americans were able to use that information to make judgments about the source. There just isn’t that sort of informed consent with TikTok.
I think I’d be okay with a remedy that forced TikTok to be much more transparent about how its content promotion algorithms worked, and allowed external observers to monitor it. I would also be okay with similar principles being applied to US adtech companies.
Before I push back yet again on Matt's take here, I do want to make clear some agreements that I have that I should have before. And that starts with saying that I hate TikTok with the heat of a thousand suns and think it's bad. The stop and go video format, the gaudy subtitles filled with emojis, the lack of full video controls and, of course, evil autoplay, it's all bad and I hate it. I don't particularly buy an argument of addiction when it comes to any information dissemination, but I certainly have no problem saying we'd be better off without this format. And while I haven't seen enough evidence yet to definitively say that the CCP is using it to spy and shoot off propaganda, it seems plausible to me, and being owned by the CCP is certainly another demerit against a social media platform I already hate.
However...banning TikTok (and let's get real, this is not merely requesting divestment--a ban has to be threatened to make the divestment request stick) is a major First Amendment breach, and it's really frustrating that Matt still hasn't engaged in this with his take. I'm sure srynerson will be here at some point to state once again the Supreme Court case that decided it, but people have the First Amendment right to read foreign propaganda from a hostile government. And defining what is propaganda and who is a hostile governmentis a subjective task, even if it's widely agreed by most that TikTok and the CCP qualifies. Stating otherwise gives future governments the ability to censor other foreign governments where the question of hostility and propaganda are much more questionable. And Matt's CBS analogy from the 1970s doesn't hold up at all, because the FCC had authority then over genuinely scarce public airwaves that needed government stewardship to avoid broadcasters interfering with each other's frequencies. There is no such scarcity with the internet, hence why the FCC has no such jurisdiction over it.
There's only one way to get rid of TikTok, and that's to beat them at their own game and build a better version of it here in America. I don't care how difficult it is with breaking network effects. We have multiple world class social media companies that are up for the task. Put together a federal initiative to get them to all unite and build one patriotic, American made platform if you have to.
As someone who is on TikTok more then I would like and vicariously through my wife, the propaganda is very subtle but very effective.
The search about Uyghurs is a bit of a red herring, because no one uses TikTok's (terrible) search feature. TikTok's superpower is its algorithm, which is incredible. We joke that it is listening to our conversations, or maybe it's just untethered from some of the ethical restrictions that western companies put on the AI, but it is absolutely incredible at delivering exactly the content that you would enjoy. But it's not something that I may have expressed an interest in by likes, like mock-sad musical remixes about the anime Attack On Titan, but also on things that I never thought I would've liked but do (like videos of Maine fisherman cleaning barnacles off crabs).
All of that is to set up how good the algorithm is. And yet, both my wife and I were delivered many videos about the CEO of TikTok's testimony before congress, edited in ways to insinuate he was the victim of a McCarthyesque attack. There are other very subtle things the algorithm pushes on people, like Gen Zers talking about how Actually Osama Bin Laden Is Good. The algorithm delivers exactly what you want but then puts its fingers on the scale to slip things in.
This is very different from banning Pravda or whatever. The problem with TikTok is how it is just pure entertainment, with propaganda subtly mixed in.
1. I think allowing the US government to ban speech it calls 'propaganda' is an extremely bad precedent. Living in a free society with a 1st Amendment is a good thing, actually
2. The reason the Soviet Union/CBS analogy doesn't work is that China built TikTok and didn't acquire it
3. The other reason the natsec infrastructure laws argument doesn't work is that TikTok is an offshore company- their servers are physically located on mainland China. Americans point their web browsers or phones towards it. I agree China shouldn't own critical industries that are physically located on the continental US, but if they build a media platform hosted in Beijing that happens to be popular with Americans, what are you going to do about that? Assert that the US can nationalize or block any media platform located anywhere on planet Earth, that enough Americans happen to go to? Or, block Americans at the ISP level from visiting it?
4. Yes you could get them out of the app store, but TikTok could build a web interface just like how Facebook and Instagram have one. Again- are you going to literally block Americans from going to a website?
5. Are we nationalizing or blocking, say, the Russia Today news channel? Way more overt propaganda than TikTok, and definitely held by a real foreign adversary. How about Iranian newspapers? Venezuelan newspapers? Where does the censorship stop, exactly?
Hearing about Trump’s flip-flop on TikTok is the first time I’ve considered voting for Trump. The hysteria against TikTok is unreasonable and uninformed.
TikTok is probably the least political social media site with the least amount of propaganda. You had to actively search out Uighurs; normally I get no politics in my recommendations unless I search it out. If you’re really concerned with propaganda, the site to go after is Twitter/X. I made a completely new account, and had to pick one person to start following so I picked the default choice of Elon Musk and was immediately bombarded with right-wing propaganda and influencers. Nothing like that happens on TikTok. And ironically, to the extent there is any censorship on TikTok, it is probably pro-US censorship; this was noticeable in how all the pro-Palestinian videos completely disappeared from recommended feeds after Congress grilled TikTok about it. I think their algorithm now just deemphasized anything political, which I think is a good thing compared to the Twitter rage machine.
The analogy to Russia buying CBS doesn’t hold water because TikTok never bought any US company. A better analogy would be Al Jazeera organically becoming the US’s most popular news source because of its great content. Do you think we could ban Al Jazeera in that context because it might be Qatari propaganda or would that be a blatant violation of free speech?
I unfortunately have too much work to do today to write a comprehensive response, but a lot of other folks are doing a good job on addressing key points, so I'll limit myself to a meta viewpoint on the whole thing:
This is truly a subject where Matt's general attitude of, "LOL, who cares what the courts have said, we'll figure out the specifics later," doesn't work because "The Law" and "The Policy" are completely inseparable in this context. It is not an exaggeration to say that the First Amendment is literally the most absolute part of American constitutional law. Unlike the Commerce Clause, which there are a million ways to engineer around, SCOTUS has spent the last century eradicating virtually every "One Weird Trick to Regulate Speech" that federal, state, and local government officials have devoted their efforts to coming up with outside of some very specific contexts (e.g., the broadcast regulations that make Matt's 1975 CBS example irrelevant) and SCOTUS has put a lot of effort in the last few decades to spelling out that those specific contexts are, indeed *specific*, and that it isn't looking to expand them.
You can say that those decisions by SCOTUS should be *overturned* (any level of government is free to try to do something unconstitutional and then convince the courts to overturn past precedents), but you should be honest about what you are advocating for.
I hadn't heard of the idea of a progressive tax on digital ads as a way to incentivize social media diversification. I actually think that is a really good idea.
Guys, let me put it in terms you'll all understand: if you let them ban TikTok, next they'll require age verification on porn sites. Don't forget that MindGeek is a Canadian company!
I would like to see more in depth reporting on the underlying legal questions and authorities surrounding the TikTok matter.
For instance, the rule against foreign broadcast network and broadcast station ownership is based upon two distinct factors to avoid 1st amendment bars - 1) broadcast television spectrum is inherently limited in capacity and must be utilized so as to maximize benefit of a scare resource for the general public. (This same theory is what underpins the no adult content, no vulgar language, etc. during kid friendly hours.) 2) these examples involve foreign investment into domestic companies and resources, which we can definitely restrict as a matter of commerce policy.
The TikTok issue is different. If it fully divested of US operations, it could remain a foreign entity entirely with its app still available in the US Apple & Google stores. I believe US citizens have a 1st amendment right to any published content they wish to access, including explicitly foreign propaganda. Is there actually a law that says I can't phone up a CCP office and ask to subscribe to their newsletter? Does the 1st amendment contemplate a mechanism for the US government to interfere should I do so?
When has a social media platform ever been sold and it worked out okay for the existing community. The only big examples I can think of were disastrous or tiny. I picture tt divestment going about as well as Tumblr’s adult content ban which it never was really the same fun place afterwards where you could have cool erotic art next to someone’s queer breakup story and a book review.
Are we just going to say like no fun things from China ever even though they seem to be where all the new entertainment will be coming from on a because we say so basis? Tencent owns a huge proportion of the other thing I’m likely to do if I’m not on TikTok which is play video games. Like what standards and are we forcing people to give up their work by and for? I’m really uncomfortable with your life as an American must get worse on an arbitrary we say so basis.