No, of course we shouldn't ban TikTok

The recent move to ban TikTok is driven by bad faith, ignorance, and paranoia.

Efforts in Washington to “ban” TikTok are gaining steam. The scuttlebutt is that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) housed at the Treasury Department, which has been investigating TikTok for over three years now, will soon recommend a forced sale to a non-Chinese buyer. The Biden administration has also given its blessing to the Restrict Act, a congressional bill that would empower the Secretary of Commerce to ban foreign ownership of companies like TikTok. This is utterly unsurprising; what president hasn’t welcomed a sweeping extension of executive branch power delivered up on a silver platter by Congress?

There are legitimate concerns about the access the Chinese government has to TikTok’s algorithm and user data. In theory, the 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. As I’ve written before, shadowbanning and other secretive content moderation practices are a major concern given how important algorithmic discovery is to the future of culture and politics.

However, this ban is a hamfisted mistake that could destroy the very real value that TikTok has for its users, and do so in service of bad faith actors who could not care less about the potential downsides.

The faction that has been banging the drum for a TikTok ban the loudest and longest are the Sinophobes who will support any action that would strike a blow at Chinese geopolitical power; a TikTok ban merely happens to be the latest tool at hand. 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.

But the idea that China will “subtly indoctrinate American citizens”—as Marco Rubio has argued—is neo-Cold War paranoia. Bear in mind that the only concrete examples of pro-regime content moderation that the critics can point to come from 2019 or earlier, before TikTok’s explosion in the US. Since then, the company has hired localized moderators as part of what it calls “Project Texas” in an attempt to assuage policymakers that there is a firewall of sorts between the US and China.

Regardless of the extent to which that is true, TikTok knows perfectly well that overt pro-regime tampering in the US market would be a public relations disaster with existential consequences for the platform in its most profitable global market. They have an incentive to play by our rules and speech norms just as US companies had an incentive to play along with Chinese censorship during the “Great Firewall” controversies of the 2000s.

If it comes out that TikTok really is systematically manipulating the algorithm to punish anti-CCP or reward pro-regime speech in the American market, I’ll be among the first to ditch the platform. But I will not take the word of congressional chickenhawks that we should preemptively ban TikTok simply because they’re worried that it could someday, somehow, in some ill-defined manner, advance Chinese geopolitical aspirations.

The other constituency that favors a TikTok ban are TikTok’s competitors, especially Facebook. Facebook’s user base and engagement metrics in the US have been in steady decline for years and its attempts to create a TikTok clone failed miserably and efforts to tweak Instagram to be more TikTok like have alienated creators. What to do when you can’t compete effectively in the market? Turn to government.

Thus Facebook funded a campaign by Republican consulting megafirm Targeted Victory to seed astroturfed letters to the editor and op-eds in hundreds of news outlets (and did not disclose their origin). They especially focused on hyping up parental fear of TikTok trends brainwashing teenagers; as one operative put it, the “dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger.’”

It was targeted misinformation on a massive scale. And Congress has all but ignored it, even while scouring for any shred of evidence of TikTok “indoctrinating” Americans. Irony is not a congressional strong suit. It shouldn’t have to be said, but bailing out Facebook by banning TikTok is not a proper use of government power. If you dig through the financials of more than a few of the lobbying firms currently advocating for a TikTok ban, you’ll find TikTok competitors as major donors.

The Sinophobes and rent-seekers are joined by the partisans. Given that the median TikTok user is a 20-something, the audience naturally skews progressive. The largest politics focused accounts mostly range from left-of-center to openly socialist. Which means that TikTok is an increasingly important key platform for energizing progressive youth in elections. And although nobody has yet measured the effect of TikTok on the 2022 midterms, it’s at least plausible that it was a factor in an election cycle with higher than ordinary youth turnout.

Joe Biden understands this, or at least his campaign team does. That’s why he hosted a TikToker briefing at the White House last year to create broader support for US subsidies to Ukraine.

The handful of early TikTok adopters in Congress skew Democratic as well. Jeff Jackson has made waves using TikTok to give weekly updates to his constituents. His videos routinely amass millions of views and it has given him a rare degree of visibility for a moderate, non-fireworks-throwing first termer in Congress. It wouldn’t surprise me if Jackson ends up in the conversation for presidential or vice-presidential candidate in 2028 based on his success communicating on TikTok.

For Republicans, shutting down TikTok removes a medium of communication that disproportionately benefits Democrats. I actually think Marco Rubio was right when he said on Fox Radio that “democratic political operatives believed that TikTok is politically advantageous for them. And so they kind of want to look tough on China, but they don’t want to crack down on this website.”

This makes sense of Joe Biden’s ambiguous stance on TikTok. Biden, who was a longstanding China trade hawk in the Senate, has been ratcheting up economic pressure on China more generally on semiconductors and with visa restrictions for researchers. Threatening a TikTok ban 1) allows him to continue that game, 2) could win him new powers from the Restrict Act, and 3) doesn’t commit him to actually banning the app and thus alienating fans from the TikTok creator community. Indeed, the shrug from TikTokers over the recent ban talk relative to the outrage they felt in 2020 when Trump tried the very same thing is a sign that Biden might be able to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to tough but empty posturing on TikTok.

Regardless, banning TikTok to either hinder or advance the interests of the Democratic or Republican parties is not a proper use of government. A pox on both their houses.

I don’t trust the motives of any of these groups, nor do I think they truly have the best interests of the public in mind. But it’s worth noting that supporters of an outright ban on TikTok are still few and far between. Far more support the mandated sale of TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese buyer. And I’m sure Instagram or Apple or any number of major firms would salivate at snapping the assets up at firesale prices.

But the danger is that a forced sale could be the functional end of TikTok. You see, TikTok isn’t a very good corollary to tech companies broken up by the government in the past. TikTok isn’t “Ma Bell,” a company whose primary asset was millions of miles of telephone wires connecting almost every household in America. With a few strokes of a pen, it could be broken up into more-or-less interchangeable “baby Bells,” each with its own little geographical bailiwick.

TikTok, by contrast, has no real physical assets. Rather it’s a complex algorithm, a massive dataset, and a pool of users. The only part of that which is easily transferable are the users. With the stroke of Joe Biden’s pen, TikTok users in the US could be sold off to the highest bidder. But there is no way of compelling TikTok to share its full algorithm or datasets. And we’d be attempting to compel a foreign company—which would no longer have much left to lose—to help startup a new competitor in what was once its most profitable region.

And that means that a post-sale TikTok (let’s call it TexTok) might be only a pale shadow of the platform that TikTok once was. Those who actually use TikTok know just how magical the algorithm can feel as it reliably surfaces content that interests each individual user. If it no longer does that as well, or if it has to ramp up monetization to compensate for the sale, or if it is otherwise burdened with a clunky transition to new owners and a new platform, TexTok could go into a terminal decline. In other words, a forced TikTok sale could functionally end up creating the same result as a TikTok ban.

Final Note: You may have noticed that my title is a play on Noah Smith’s latest post, “Yes, of course we should ban TikTok.” In my next post I’ll dig into the ways that TikTok’s critics, like Smith and Mike Solana and most of Congress, show they simply don’t grok the platform—like saying it's just “cute dance videos”—which makes them apathetic about the downsides of destroying TikTok and which callouses them to the dangerous precedents it would create for online free speech and individual liberty.