TikTok is in trouble: In April, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation forcing ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the popular social media app, to sell a majority stake in it to a U.S. company. Failure to do so will result in the app being banned in the United States.
Various dubious arguments have been made against TikTok, but Congress says the main motivation for forcing the app to be divested is that the app’s Chinese owners are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and therefore have their technology installed in so many Americans’ Being on your cell phone is a terrible national security risk. Communist Party of China yes An authoritarian threat, evidence suggests the Chinese government pressured TikTok to censor content about Tiananmen Square and the religious sect Falun Gong, as well as criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Of course, the U.S. government also Pressure U.S. technology companies to censor content on social media. Thanks to the Twitter documents, Facebook documents, and other independent investigations, we know that multiple federal agencies directed social media platforms to remove content related to Hunter Biden, COVID-19, and other topics. When President Biden believed the companies were not sufficiently complying with his pandemic-related orders, he accused them of killing people and threatened to take action against them.
If Congress really wants to take action against government censorship of social media content, lawmakers could rein in the federal government. Instead, they have focused specifically on TikTok, which has responded with a lawsuit.
The legislation approved by Biden would apply to any social media company designated as an “application controlled by a foreign adversary.” U.S. law currently defines China, North Korea, Russia and Iran as foreign adversaries. The law further states that an app will be considered controlled by a foreign adversary if it meets at least one of three different criteria: Is based in one of these countries The government of one of those countries owns the app 20 % of the company’s shares, or the application is “directed or controlled” by one of its foreign counterparties.
The law sets out a blueprint for future actions against social media companies other than TikTok. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Democratic lawmakers, mainstream media pundits and national security advisers accused Facebook and Twitter of participating in various Russian schemes to foment election-related discord online. The thrust of that argument was that the companies’ CEOs allowed their platforms to be compromised by Russian misinformation — even though subsequent research showed that foreign social media influence campaigns had minimal impact on the election outcome.
Despite the passage of the bill, the federal government is unlikely to take direct action against Facebook or X tomorrow. But Biden’s rubber-stamping rhetoric — “direction and control” — is sly. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which vindictive bureaucrats accuse an unpopular app of promoting contrarian views, forging ties with “foreign adversaries” and punish it accordingly.
This article originally appeared in the print edition under the headline “TikTok’s landslide.”
