Why TikTok Should Be Banned or Sold
Judd Baroff, “Why TikTok Should Be Banned or Sold,” The Vital Center 2, no. 1 (Winter 2023): 30–36.
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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,” Congress has the power to say it for them. And Congress should.
Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash.
To indulge the natural human inclination to ban our neighbors’ vices (those truly or those only imagined unhealthy) is to transform ourselves into an unfree people—and quickly. This is why calls for any “ban” deserve a heap of skepticism, and why we Americans have developed a thick bias against bans. As rules of thumb go, this bias against bans is not just understandable, it is 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 bias 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, threaten, and suppress the free speech of Americans.
In making the assumption that the CCP controls TikTok, I don’t mean to steal a base. Even most who argue against banning TikTok agree. In their article for Harvard’s Kennedy School, “Why the US 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 Paul 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.
THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY IS THE ENEMY OF AMERICA AND OF ALL FREE PEOPLE
Proving the CCP is America’s adversary seems at least as easy. Indeed, a proposed bill to the United States Senate specifically names the CCP 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 saying, “TikTok cannot safely operate in the U.S. while controlled by a foreign adversary.” To take us abroad, during the same speech quoted above, President von der Leyen said, “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’s 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.
Yet many have learnt since 2020 not to “trust the experts,” and we all know how much to trust the politicians. So let us look at the CCP’s words and at their deeds. Xi Jinping speaks openly about his aim to challenge and overthrow these United States. At the very beginning of his first term, circa 2012 but unpublished until 2019, he said the CCP’s goal is to “[lay] the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position [over these United States].” This foundation seems to have been completed by the 19th Party Congress in 2017, where Xi argued that it was time for the CCP to “cease to hide its strength and bide its time” and instead “dare to fight.” What does “dare to fight” mean? Well, less than three years after that speech, the CCP dissolved Hong Kong as an independent political unit, despite guarantees of independence until at least 2049.
And these United States cannot simply refuse to “fight” or withdraw our military. The CCP cares even less for our military than for our culture. From a leaked 2013 Communist Party directive, we learn that the party describes itself as fighting an intense, ideological struggle for survival with these United States. What ideas threaten the survival of the CCP? Concepts like “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” “universal human rights,” “Western freedom,” “economic liberalism,” “total privatization,” “freedom of the press,” and “free flow of information on the internet.” Their fear is that allowing the Chinese under their dominion to consider such ideas would “dismantle [our] party’s social foundation” and jeopardize if not destroy the party’s power. Even if we scoff at the idea that our society (with the FAA, SSA, FAFSA, etc.) is one of “total privatization,” most of these are indispensable, impossible to do away with except through societal murder. Indeed, the CCP considers the very concept of “civil society” threatening.
This is not just talk. Here are some other consequences of the CCP’s “dare to fight” politics, their “wolf-warrior diplomacy.” The CCP shut down all of Marriot’s websites and threatened to boot them entirely from CCP-controlled China. Marriot’s offense? They listed Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Macau as standalone countries; that same year, the CCP forced Delta, Zara, and Medtronic to make similar apologies for similar “slights.” More famously, the CCP threatened to ban a Fast and Furious movie unless John Cena apologized. His offense was saying, Taiwan is the first country which can watch the film.” Blink and you miss it. But the CCP demanded—and received—a downcast apology on Weibo (a CCP-controlled social media app), in Mandarin.
Their economic coercion sometimes targets whole nations. In 2010, Norway’s Nobel Committee gave Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo its Peace Prize. The CCP punished Norway “by freezing political and economic relations with Norway, [and] introducing sanctions against imports […] [which CMI’s Michelsen Institute found cost Norway] between 780 and 1300 million USD.” Likewise, when Swedish PEN announced in early November 2019 that it would give its annual award for persecuted literary figures to the Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, whom we’re about to meet, the CCP pressured Swedish PEN to retract the award. When they refused, the CCP banned many Swedish ministers from traveling to CCP-controlled territory and threatened trade action.
Now, speaking of Mr. Minhai: a Swedish citizen, he is an author of more than two hundred books on CCP politics and Chinese history who operated a bookstore in Hong Kong. In 2015, he was kidnapped from his home in Thailand. He appeared several weeks later in CCP-controlled territory, saying he had turned himself into the CCP to resolve an old traffic ticket. He also renounced all diplomatic protection from Sweden. In 2019 he was sentenced to ten years for“illegally providing intelligence overseas.” The CCP once also kidnapped four executives of an Anglo-Australian steel company with whom they were disputing. The CCP held the executives hostage (for almost ten years) while launching cyber-attacks at the company to get their way; now the company is more reliant on the CCP than ever before. Neither incident was the first or last time they have kidnapped people, in Vietnam, Hong Kong, or elsewhere around the world.
The CCP’s attacks against free people living abroad is nigh impossible to exaggerate. In a couple hours’ search, I covered five Word pages with bullet points. Here are only some of those I found. The CCP regularly engages in bribery of foreign politicians and institutions (the United Nations, Australia, these United States, Britain, and these United States again). They also intimidate broadcasters, newspapers, and activists, for example in these United States and New Zealand. The New Zealand case gives us perhaps the most haunting line in this investigation: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.” The CCP is especially cruel to Chinese abroad, often kidnapping their families back home as punishment (for example, at Purdue University, Brandeis University, University of Georgia, McMaster University, Georgetown, Harvard, University of Calgary, a teacher, activist, and American citizen living in California, a refugee living in Montreal, another refugee living in the Netherlands, at St. John’s University in Queens, and, nowhere near finally, at least six students of one particular professor who has taught from these United States to Australia). They even ran an illegal police station in Manhattan to harass and in some cases even attack Chinese living abroad.
Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, testifies during the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing entitled “TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms” at the Rayburn Building on March 23, 2023.
(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
One of the most appalling is the story of Mark Horton. He suffered comparatively little, but he has no connection to the CCP, is an Australian and an Olympian, and yet neither he nor Australia could do much when, after outing his Chinese competitor as a drug cheat, the CCP sent gangs to systematically burgle, threaten, and harass both him and his parents. This intimidation included cyber-attacks on his father’s business, glass placed in his parents’ pool which lacerated his mother, and roving bands of youths banging pots and pans outside their house in the middle of the night. Not that it would excuse their actions, but one might have less sympathy for Mr. Horton if he had been lying. But no—it has now been proven, and his competitor is disqualified from competing in the Tokyo Olympics.
With these examples in mind, I find it avails the (to coin a phrase) anti-anti-TikTokers nothing at all 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 politicians, harass students, kidnap family members of activists, kidnap activists themselves, run illegal police stations in Manhattan, and place glass in the swimming pools of the parents of a foreign Olympian who spoke the truth, just how willing would they be to collect any teenage indiscretion so they could harass, intimidate, and blackmail future CEOs, judges, and senators?
We are tying a noose around our own necks. If nothing else, this evidence 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. Let us tack-le those now.
ADDRESSING FURTHER 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 shutting out American businesses, threatening American residences and citizens, and running outlaw police stations do not jeopardize US-CCP trade. Yet that trade seems also 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, who writes in Bloomberg, also worry about possible economic retaliation against American companies. Mr. Kim writes, “The list of potential targets […] is long.” Perhaps the CCP could step up its geopolitical offenses and even retaliate against American companies, but perhaps also Mr. Gerstell and Mr. Kim could talk with Marriot and Medtronic, Apple and Google, the NBA and Hollywood. Reading so many words of caution not to antagonize the CCP 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 independence in Taiwan, not only will those who rely on TikTok suffer more, not only will more people (those who 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 constitutional black and white. That is the argument behind an ACLU press release, which quotes their senior policy counsel: “we 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 these arguments also fail, for our concern is not with what Americans may say. Our concern is not even with what foreigners may say; foreigners can write in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, or, more realistically, on Twitter and Facebook, as readily as any American (that is, not the Chinese under CCP control). Our concern is not even with what CCP officials may say on the unedited Twitter accounts they use, which their subjects cannot read. If our concern were CCP speech, we would debate whether it were acceptable for the CCP to own much of Chinese-language media across these United States (and in Australia and around the world). But that is not our concern. We are indeed talking about speech only indirectly; we are talking about what control the CCP may have over the private information of Americans, what power we will allow the CCP to have, in America, to surveil, blackmail, harass, threaten, 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 that led directly to the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons; 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 know TikTok can easily be converted to that purpose. These United States (and other countries besides) regularly expel CCP spies; we should likewise expel TikTok.
Any reliance on the courts blocking former President Trump’s ban of TikTok in 2020 simply confuses that issue. That case was not decided on First Amendment grounds. Former President Trump attempted to ban TikTok by executive order through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Yet the IEEPA explicitly prohibits the regulation of any “information or informational materials.” Mr. Trump’s failure would be in no way analogous to any law passed by Congress, which would target the CCP, a foreign adversary, on grounds of espionage. As Jennifer Huddleston reminds us in USA Today, these United States have banned Huawei on espionage grounds, 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,” Congress has the power to say it for them. And Congress should.
Ban TikTok, or at least force its sale away from CCP control.
