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“The U.S. House of Representatives will fast-track a vote [this] week on legislation that would give China's ByteDance six months to divest from short video app TikTok or face a U.S. ban after a committee unanimously approved the measure [last] Thursday… White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre [last] Wednesday praised the proposal, saying the administration wants ‘to see this bill get done so it can get to the president's desk.’” Reuters
“U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Monday that TikTok was a national security threat but also said that a ban on the popular app would hurt some kids and only strengthen Meta Platforms' Facebook, which the Republican has harshly criticized… ‘If you ban TikTok, (then) Facebook and others, but mostly Facebook, will be a big beneficiary. And I think Facebook has been very dishonest.’” Reuters
The right supports the bill, arguing that TikTok is a propaganda tool for the Chinese government.
“Reams of evidence show how the Chinese government can use the platform for cyber-espionage and political influence campaigns in the U.S. Numerous reports have found that posts about Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang province, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protests, Tibet and other politically sensitive content in China are suppressed on TikTok…
“The site also appears to amplify content that sows discord and ignorance in America. Pro-Hamas videos trend more than pro-Israel ones. Videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 ‘letter to America’ went viral on TikTok last autumn. How has TikTok responded to allegations that its algorithms are controlled by the Chinese government? In January it restricted researcher access to its hashtag data to make it harder to study.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Congressional offices were inundated with tens of thousands of phone calls [last] Thursday from panicked young adults who had received a notification from TikTok warning that the app could be shut down… Some users reported that they had to make the call in order to use the app…
“This should be a major scandal. A company directly tied to and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party is pushing American children into direct political action. At best, this is political interference by the U.S.’s top adversary. At worst, it’s a deliberate effort to weaponize the mental health of American children and divide the country internally — all to force the U.S. government to abandon its national security objectives.”
Kaylee McGhee White, Washington Examiner
“Just as the FDA would never allow a drug manufactured in China to be given to millions of Americans without knowing its ingredients and manufacturing process, any adversary-controlled, digitally curated news source reaching millions of Americans should not be allowed if sufficient controls and reviews are not possible. TikTok has steadfastly refused access to American review of its algorithms, and the company has been caught on numerous occasions spying on its users…
“It’s unimaginable that, during the first Cold War, America would ever have let the Soviet Union own a major broadcast network in the United States… The TikTok question for policymakers should not be whether to take action, but how quickly they can move the legislation forward. (President Biden has said that he will sign it.) They should put it into effect well before the very contentious election Americans face this fall; they should not let the Chinese Communist Party subvert or discredit the results.”
Michael A. Kaufman, City Journal
The left is skeptical of the bill, arguing that there is insufficient evidence to justify such a drastic measure.
The left is skeptical of the bill, arguing that there is insufficient evidence to justify such a drastic measure.
“Maybe I lack imagination. But on the surveillance concern, is even the worst case that big a deal? Suppose the CCP is harvesting every bit of user data from every teenager in America. What could they do with it that's a genuine national security threat?…
“And on the propaganda front, does it really matter if TikTok is Chinese? Countries like Russia have no problem producing tons of bot-driven propaganda on American-owned social media like Facebook and Twitter. China does the same… What am I missing?”
Kevin Drum, Jabberwocking
“As Evan Greer, the director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization, points out, all social media companies, regardless of where they’re based, need to be scrutinized for their capacity to inappropriately surveil Americans and use algorithms to influence American politics. The real solution, people in this camp argue, is not select bans but strict limitations on data that any company can collect on people online. In addition to all this, some civil liberties experts doubt a TikTok ban will survive a First Amendment challenge.”
Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC
“Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, [a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University] said…
“A former employee of ByteDance has alleged in court that the [Chinese] government had [accessed user data] on a widespread basis for political purposes during the 2018 protests in Hong Kong. And in December, TikTok parent company ByteDance acknowledged it had fired four employees who accessed the data of two journalists while trying to track down an internal leaker. But so far, members of Congress have not provided concrete proof for their claims about Chinese digital espionage.”
Nicole Narea, Vox
“Earlier this month, Trump spoke at a conference of the influential conservative organization Club for Growth, after a request by its main benefactor and Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, and announced an end to his feud with the group. Yass’s firm, notably, has a stake in ByteDance worth more than $20 billion… [Trump’s] sudden reversal on restricting TikTok after mending ties with a top GOP donor and TikTok investor suggests there is no foreign policy issue on which Trump can’t be moved by a high bidder.”
Josh Rogin, Washington Post
A libertarian's take
“This bill — should it pass and should TikTok refuse to divest — would result in the largest removal of speech in US history, and by several orders of magnitude. Other notorious instances of government infringement affected far fewer people, from the two dozen writers sanctioned under the Alien and Sedition Acts to the several thousand readers who lost access to Communist newspapers because of postal service restrictions during the Second Red Scare. There is simply no precedent for the sheer quantity of speech involved…
“Given the immense potential consequences, one would think that the bill’s authors would have proffered some hard evidence of Chinese government surveillance using American TikTok data. They have not.”
Paul Matzko, Cato Institute
