Why TikTok Should Be Banned or Sold
TikTok is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, designed and legally obligated to spy on Americans. If one hundred million Americans have not the honor to stand up and say, “no more,” our government has the power to say it for them. And Congress should.
To indulge the natural human inclination to ban our neighbors’ vices (those unhealthy or those only imagined so) is to transform ourselves into an unfree people—and quickly. In this vein, calls for any “ban” deserve a heap of skepticism, and consequently we Americans have developed thick biases against bans. As rules of thumb go, our aversion to bans is not just understandable, it’s laudable. But as a builder plans by rule of thumb yet builds with square and measuring-tape, so we too should let this rule of thumb guide our biases but not our policy. Most argue our bias when discussing TikTok because we imagine ByteDance (its parent company) as a company like any other, but TikTok is a creature of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—a tool used by that adversarial (indeed enemy) government to surveil, blackmail, harass, and suppress the free speech of Americans.
In making the assumptions that the CCP controls TikTok, I am not trying to steal a base. Even most who argue against banning TikTok agree. In their article for Harvard’s Kennedy School, “Why the U.S. Should Not Ban TikTok,” Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan write, “There’s no doubt that TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns it, are shady. They, like most large corporations in China, operate at the pleasure of the Chinese government. They collect extreme levels of information about users.” The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, said much the same thing in a March 30, 2023 speech: “All companies in China … are already obliged by law to assist state intelligence-gathering operations and to keep it secret.” In his Slate article “What Just About Everyone Is Getting Wrong About Banning TikTok,” Justin Sherman writes, “[The CCP] has made clear its ability to coerce technology firms in China to hand over data, manipulate content, and otherwise assist with the state’s objectives.” And Pual Matzko, writing “No, the US Shouldn’t Ban TikTok” for the Cato Institute admits, “[T]he Chinese government could require TikTok to hand over data about any of its US users. And if it were to pressure TikTok’s content moderation team to algorithmically downgrade videos that didn’t toe the (literal) party line, we would have no way of knowing other than leaked documents and whistleblowers.” So we have scholars published by an establishment university in these United States, an establishment politician in Europe, a left-liberal American magazine, and a right-libertarian American think tank all admitting the CCP controls TikTok.
And the case that the CCP is America’s adversary is at least as easy to make. Indeed, a proposed bill to the United States Senate specifically names the CCP in China as America’s “adversary.” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) introduced the bill, and twenty-five senators from both parties cosponsored it. Meanwhile Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote a letter to the Commerce Secretary in which they said, “TikTok cannot safely operate in the U.S. while controlled by a foreign adversary.” To take us abroad, President von der Leyen said, in the same speech quoted above, “the Chinese Communist Party’s clear goal is a systemic change of the international order with China at its centre,” a line later repeated by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Or, to quote China expert Tanner Greer and his 2020 Tablet Magazine article “China’s Plan to Win Control of the Global Order,” “The stakes of this struggle could not be higher: [The CCP] believe[s] that the future of the global order and the survival of their regime is at stake. Americans should not be surprised when they act like it.” With TikTok, they are acting like it.
It avails (to coin a phrase) the anti-anti-TikTok people nothing to argue, as Glenn S. Gerstell does in the New York Times, that “if it wanted to collect information on Americans, China could … purchase almost limitless amounts of information from data brokers.” Purchasing previously collected information is not just “a little more effort,” it is a whole different ballgame. Owning TikTok, the CCP not only owns companies’ and politicians’ access to one hundred million Americans, it not only owns all demographic data, it also owns all archived posts, all deleted posts, all private messages, any calls made on the app, as well as real-time access to the algorithm, sensitive financial information, and, on top of all that, the very code itself, which could be modified surreptitiously for espionage. Already the Federal Government and many States have banned TikTok on their employees’ phones. Indeed, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recently wrote, “as of late 2020, ByteDance maintained a regularly updated internal list identifying people who were likely blocked or restricted from all ByteDance platforms, including TikTok, for reasons such as advocating for Uyghur independence.” If the CCP is willing to bribe foreign elites, run illegal police stations in Manhattan, and use Chinese Student Scholars Associations to protest, surveil, and harass students on US Campuses, how much more willing would they be to collect teenage indiscretions to harass, intimidate, and blackmail future CEOs, judges, and senators?
“Owning TikTok, the CCP not only owns companies’ and politicians’ access to one hundred million Americans, it not only owns all demographic data, it also owns all archived posts, all deleted posts, all private messages, any calls made on the app, as well as real-time access to the algorithm, sensitive financial information, and, on top of all that, the very code itself, which could be modified surreptitiously for espionage.”
For a China hawk this may be more proof than necessary that we are tying a noose around our own necks. Certainly, it dissipates any loose talk of “xenophobia” and “China-bashing,” which hangs in the air around anti-anti-TikTok arguments like the odor of three-day-old fish. Mr. Matzko admits as much: “If you think, as the Sinophobes do, that armed conflict with China is inevitable and imminent, then taking down TikTok is merely a logical preparation for what is to come.” Yet Mr. Matzko also proves that awareness does not remove all objections.
Mr. Gerstell worries that action against TikTok risks further escalation with the CCP: “Keeping Chinese enterprises invested in the U.S. economy” will “[dampen] China’s willingness to antagonize the United States. President Xi Jinping would surely think twice before” jeopardizing US-CCP trade. Apparently outlaw police stations do not jeopardize US-CCP trade. Yet this trade also seems to have paid no “indirect but powerful geopolitical dividends” in the CCP’s “no limits” alliance with Russia, in their extirpation of Hong Kong, in their support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, or in their disdain for Israeli self-defense. As recently as early October, the CCP harassed Philippine vessels on islands off the coast of the Philippines that a 2016 international tribunal had adjudged Philippine.
Mr. Gerstell and Tae Kim writing in Bloomberg also worry about possible economic retaliation against American companies. Mr. Kim writes, “The list of potential targets … is long—including Apple Inc., Starbucks Corp. and Intel Corp.” Perhaps the CCP could step up its geopolitical offenses and even retaliate against American companies, but the CCP has already banned or massively curtailed the activity of, among others, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and, in their own way, the NBA and Hollywood writ large. Reading so many words of caution not to antagonize them, then, feels like hearing bystanders call upon a pummeled man not to strike back against his bully lest it incite violence.
There are other economic concerns less contingent on the CCP’s good behavior. Not only, as Caitlin Chin-Rothmann notes, do many Americans make their living directly or indirectly from TikTok, but, as Mr. Kim in his Bloomberg piece has it, “Over the long run, the domestic technology industry is far better served having vigorous competition.” I think this is the anti-anti-TikTok crowd’s strongest argument, yet it only avails if we see the trees and ignore the forest.
If, as we propose, TikTok is an arm to exert CCP influence in these United States, what is the social damage and economic peril of refusing to suppress the CCP’s control over TikTok? In the short term, we extend the CCP’s economic control from Hollywood and the NBA to perhaps hundreds of thousands who now owe their livelihood to a creature of the CCP. Worse, when we do face the inevitable decoupling years down the road, perhaps during a conflict over the Republic of China’s practical independence in Taiwan, not only will those who rely on TikTok suffer more, not only will more people (those who have come to rely on TikTok in the interim) suffer, but their personal hardship will come at a time of the general economic disaster likely to follow any sudden dissolution of Chimerica. We should not be hard-hearted to the real consequences for people who rely on TikTok, and, indeed, this is reason enough to prefer a forced sale over an outright ban, but CCP control of TikTok must end, and it will end later if it does not end now. Better to jump into the pool than be pushed in.
If we do not ignore the economic liberties of Americans, even less may we ignore their rights protected in black and white by the First Amendment. That is the argument behind an ACLU press release, which quotes their senior policy counsel, “[W]e have a right to use TikTok and other platforms to exchange our thoughts, ideas, and opinions with people around the country and around the world.” And of course Americans do have rights to speak publicly, to publish what they will on whatever platforms will have them. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the First Amendment arguments are often the first raised and the most facially plausible. Yet they fail, because we are not talking about what Americans can say (or even foreigners can say, even CCP officials can say through unedited Twitter accounts), we are talking about what access the CCP may have to the private information of Americans, what power we will allow the CCP to have, in America, to surveil, blackmail, harass, and suppress the free speech of Americans.
In the 1940s, a young couple spoke and privately distributed the documents of other people. As far as raw physical facts go, that is all they did: activities entirely protected by the First Amendment—no murders, no bribes, no assaults, not even threats. Yet that couple, the Rosenbergs, were convicted of spying for the USSR and sentenced to death. Now, the Rosenbergs stole secrets which led directly to the Soviet acquisition of nukes; I am not suggesting we execute Shou Zi Chew for running TikTok. But these United States suspect that TikTok is currently engaged in espionage, and we all know TikTok can easily be converted to that purpose. These United States (and other countries besides) regularly expel Chinese spies; we should likewise expel TikTok.
Any reliance on the courts blocking former President Trump’s ban of TikTok in 2020 is unavailing as well. That case was not decided on First Amendment grounds. Former President Trump attempted to use a fake emergency and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to ban TikTok by executive order. Yet the IEEPA is explicitly powerless to regulate “information or informational materials.” Any action on the part of Congress would be just that, congressional action specifically targeting the CCP, a foreign adversary. As Jennifer Huddleston reminds us in USA Today, these United States have banned Huawei, and that ban stands. If these United States have the power to chase from our markets hardware only because it might be compromised, how much more power do we have to ban or force the sale of a CCP company designed to spy on Americans and legally obliged to do so?
Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” A free people is right to be vigilant against restriction of its freedom. Indeed, I wish we Americans were rather more vigilant, for I could whip up a pretty packed list of both petty and potent threats to our liberty that we regularly ignore. But vigilance is not naïveté, and a man shows no virtue when he fences phantoms. TikTok is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, designed and legally obligated to spy on Americans. If one hundred million Americans have not the honor to stand up and say, “no more,” our government has the power to say it for them. And Congress should.
Ban TikTok, or at least force its sale away from CCP control.
