Young Americans love TikTok. Launched in 2016, the video-sharing app built a global audience with fun, visually stimulating and often musical clips especially popular among teens and 20-somethings. Many use it to promote businesses or pursue corporate sponsorships. Some also share news, analysis and first-hand accounts, with no vetting or filtering — a compelling alternative to mainstream media. But intelligence agencies call the app a threat to national security, a potent tool in the hands of its Chinese parent company for data harvesting and information warfare. A new law would ban TikTok unless ByteDance, which owns TikTok, sells the company. When national security collides with freedom of information, where do we draw the line?
Business as usual
TikTok is being singled out for behaving like a social media platform: collecting user data, selling or leveraging that data and using an algorithm to promote engagement on content that users respond to. Critics fret over its Chinese ownership and, more recently, the prevalence of pro-Palestine content amid the ongoing conflict with Israel in Gaza. These complaints should not invalidate the principles of the free market. But what’s truly at stake is the freedom of Americans to access information and the free flow of ideas protected by the First Amendment.
Social media companies don’t just use data to sell targeted ads. They also sell or license data to third parties. This system can be abused. In 2019, Facebook was fined $5 billion for privacy violations after it collected data on 87 million profiles without users’ consent and sold it to Cambridge Analytica; the British firm used the data to assist certain U.S. presidential campaigns. TikTok is no outlier. A 2021 analysis by the University of Toronto found that its data practices are unremarkable in this industry.
All platforms profit from engagement. Their algorithms prioritize content that keeps users plugged in, often leveraging outrage or alarm. Factual veracity is largely irrelevant here. Unlike magazines and newspapers, platforms under U.S. Code Section 230 cannot be sued for false information posted on their sites. This makes them all fertile ground for conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation. “A better solution,” as writer Julia Angwin argued in The New York Times, “would be to pass laws that force all of our tech to serve us better.”
Outlawing TikTok doesn’t only hurt ByteDance. It threatens American livelihoods and eliminates a venue for dissent, with a chilling effect on free expression. Thinkers from Noam Chomsky on the left to conservative stalwart George Will have warned us that this is simply censorship. “Government will, as usual, say that its steadily enlarged control of our lives is for our own good,” Will wrote in The Washington Post. “Regarding TikTok, the government says its control is to protect us from influences we cannot be trusted to properly assess.”
A loaded gun
there can be no freedoms if we can’t protect the country itself. And modern warfare is often waged on a digital front. Enemy states and terrorist groups can wreak more havoc through destabilization and influence campaigns than they ever could on a physical battlefield, at a fraction of the cost. This might have seemed unthinkable even 20 years ago, but technology — social media in particular — has changed the terrain of conflict. Americans need to realize that these changes require us to rethink the delicate balance between civil liberties and national security.
Many see social media as the new “town square,” a modern variation on the public commons, where they can be heard and hear new voices. But the marketplace of ideas cannot be free when it’s manipulated by nefarious powers. We’ve already seen Russia inserting itself into U.S. elections and even generating real-life conflict between Americans, organizing both a protest and its counterprotest from afar. TikTok has admitted that it stopped 15 covert influence campaigns in four months this year — including one from China. America has to defend itself.
The TikTok legislation fits alongside federal restrictions on microchip exports, limits on tech investment in China and earlier bans of companies like Huawei, ZTE and China Mobile. One reason: China has made its intentions clear, spending $280 million to influence American elections and sway our perceptions between 2016 and 2022 — more than any other country. TikTok could be a powerful weapon in China’s hands. “Where I’m concerned is the overall ability to do large-scale influence,” NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce told reporters last December. He compared TikTok not to a smoking gun, but a loaded one.
A loaded gun should be removed from hostile hands before it’s fired. China doesn’t just have access to TikTok; it can control the app through its power over ByteDance. In the tension between freedom and national security, governments often must lean one way or the other. It’s not censorship to protect citizens from being weaponized in the service of a foreign power. TikTok can persist, but it can’t be a tool for China’s influence and ambitions.
This story appears in the July/August 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.