OPINION: TikTok’s alarm clock is set to go off

With regard to social media, I’m basically homeless. I have a Facebook account that by now is covered in cobwebs and my use of LinkedIn tells the story of a person precariously clinging to a shaky career ladder — on the way down. And TikTok? I couldn’t spell the word until last week, when then-President-elect Donald Trump said, “I guess I have a warm spot for TikTok.”

Warm? If anything, that is an understated form of affection; over the last year of his presidential campaign, he acquired 15 million young followers (subjects to be more precise) to his platform. The very same Trump who had favored banning the platform altogether. Oh, how warm political breezes can seduce. On his first day back in the White House, the now-President Trump signed an executive order that permits TikTok to continue to operate for at least 75 days.

TikTok, along with its 170 million U.S. social media zealots, is in desperate need of a lifebuoy. True to form, Trump favors those who submit and supplicate, and TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew has done just that. The problem though is that CEO Shou has another boss: the Chinese Communist Party.

TikTok is wholly owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, and so ultimately answers to Xi Jinping. However tenuous, there are millions upon million of strings that lead back to an ear-splitting megaphone in Beijing. That won’t do at all, especially when we have a Congress teaming with mostly wealthy, greying, fear-based, male crusaders in search of threats to America’s basic freedoms, and who know little more than I do about social media.

A kind of digitized “Red Scare” raised hairs and Congress took rare bipartisan action in passing the U.S. Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April of 2024. (The provision was conveniently tucked into a $95 billion armaments measure destined for the killing fields of Ukraine.) The law essentially requires that TikTok must divest from ByteDance or shut down operations in the U.S. completely.

Why? Because the looming red menace of China has the capability and intent to “acquire, harvest, and manipulate TikTok’s content.” And to that accusation, with the benefit of documented evidence and having lived in China, I concur without reservation. At the same time, I would say that the threat of TikTok to our national security is overblown and largely misdirected, as I expect its most prominent subscriber, President Trump, well appreciates.

TikTok’s business model is to earn revenue from advertisers (politicians for example) and it hauled in $13.2 billion in 2023. I’ll go out on a limb and assume that Xi Jinping has little interest in what brand of facial cream Jolene is endorsing on TikTok from her second-floor boudoir in Skokie, Ill.

No, it is not the secrets to clean, smooth skin that the CCP is after. The congressional committee authoring the bill claim TikTok is dangerous because the social media platform can be used to recruit young, supple, American minds, indoctrinate them, fashion them into spies who will eventually make their way into the halls of U.S. power. Think Chelsea Manning — or don’t. In a test of the bill’s constitutionality before SCOTUS, Judge Alito was more direct: Foreign governments such as China pose a threat to “fostering democratic self-government and furthering the truth — the search for truth.” The U.S. does not grant free speech rights to foreign governments on American soil.

While well-argued, stirring up a frenzy of fear-mongering does serve another very important purpose. It diverts attention away from the fact that for nearly a century, the U.S. has been the most powerful propogandist in history. Russia has had far more political influence than China, yet even they cannot hold to candle to the efficiency of CENTCOM, the CIA, and a host of other covert operatives in toppling a long list of governments who refused to take orders from the Pentagon. CENTCOM’s “Operation Earnest Voice” is a fairly recent example of its manipulation of foreign social media.

Far more troubling for me though, is not the external threat of TikTok or social media in general, it is the internal threat. This is the age of social media addiction, the age of digital meth, and it is effectively tearing us apart from the inside out. And therein lies the pathetic irony of free speech — it fragments and confines us.

Rather than obsess over China, Congress would do much better to heed Cicero’s warning about “the enemy within.”

After years of globetrotting, Todd J. Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Resist News: https://www.usresistnews.org.