One could believe that the TikTok CEO came to Washington with as much optimism as the fictional Senator played by Jimmy Stewart in the Frank Capra classic. Stewart’s character, Jefferson Smith, is disabused of his earnestness as he discovers that the exercise of power depends more on alliances and legerdemain than a good story. After the release of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington in 1939, Senators weighed in: they didn’t care for the depiction of ‘the more deliberative body’ as mean spirited and transactional.
Politicians are but instruments of power. TikTok’s major US investors, Sequoia Capital, KKR, Fidelity, (not unlike those actual Senators expressing displeasure over the exposure of their own institutional corruption) likely concluded that their profit engine would need something other than Project Texas and a Congressional drubbing to keep it viable. Enter the Restrict Act. It is at best fraught with unintended consequences, and, at worst, legislation so broadly written that it is all but impassable. Maybe that’s the point.
The Restrict Act invests the Commerce Department and the President with the power to disable any entity that presents an undue or unacceptable risk to U.S. national security. The “any entity” is debatable given the bill’s sponsors’ Op Ed that tries to walk back this mis-perception.
Not to quibble with Senators Thune & Warner, but is the language in the bill perhaps purposefully ambiguous? With ambiguity comes the possibility of mis-interpretation and de-platforming for political purposes. Center left politicians would like to weave broader privacy rights into the legislation restricting all surveillance capitalists (not just TikTok) from the large-scale behavioral rendition upon which all their business models depend. Center Right politicians favor targeting ByteDance and the CCP specifically as it plays into a broader anti-China narrative, and states are passing bans on their own in the face of Congressional incapacity. Democracies are ill-equipped to provide legislative answers at speed with which the technological world changes … which is why the tech industry supports the current reading of Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act exempting platform operators from the liability burdens publications have. It was amended in 1996 before content moderation and dis-information were everyday topics — platforms are not liable for users false or misleading statements. In addition to tech firms lobbying against changes in the lightly regulated technology space, the business community gives little credence to the threat of pending legislation. 2023 Ad Spend on TikTok is estimated at 15.2 billion — a 2 billion increase from 2022 — according to the World Advertising Research Center. All that bloviating was “a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Democratic operatives with their eyes firmly on the 2024 election are loath to dissuade legions of young voters; so, Project Texas will go forward, the data security fallacy will become fact and The Restrict Act will fade into irrelevancy. A few ‘Red’ states will ban the app, and we’ll see how successful an administrative state is at banning something that’s as easy to access as a dime in the cup holder of the average American car.
The Chinese don’t need to spread harmful content on TikTok to weaken us. Americans themselves are driving the country toward the entropic decline of our institutions, beliefs and mores — we care more about HOW we are doing things than WHAT we are doing. China can carry on bolstering their mercantilist operations all over the globe, flexing their near orbit influence over Taiwan in the South China Sea and bleeding the West with a proxy war in Ukraine. The irony of the potential threat from the CCP via TikTok (which is real) is that we are incapable of doing anything about it. As bi-lateral relations become more strained, military action becomes a legitimate off ramp in both Washington & Beijing. The inevitable-ism prompted Berkshire Hathaway to unload its holdings of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in mid-April because the spectre of imminent conflict is bad for business. Follow the money.
If Congress drafted a narrowly focused bill limiting ByteDance and the extractive apps it owns, it would be the 1st time a government entity checked the ‘exceptionalism’ that has allowed technologists to appropriate our data for commercial purposes for the last 25 years. The fact that the CCP could access data or spread ‘disinformation’ through ByteDance owned apps is beside the point. This ‘exceptionalism’ is the primary theft upon which all the rest of behavioral rendition depends. The failure of the Restrict Act will be the result of legislative overreach, and the sheer force of rendition capitalism. If the Commerce Department and the President have the power to de-platform any app or technology, how could it not be used as a political cudgel? Only the states with majoritarian representation can pass bans that will provide some insights into how pervasive the apps are and how difficult it is to de-platform populations within states. What about people who reside on borders where the pass from state to state on a daily basis? What about turning off location data so the IP addresses aren’t tracked? I’m not a IT security specialist, but it seems that effective restriction is an all or nothing proposition. That’s what the Chinese did.
US Foreign & Industrial Policy enabled the asymmetry of market access to take root when
“…the Chinese government blocked U.S. internet companies like YouTube, Facebook and others more than a decade ago. That set the stage for the rapid growth of companies like WeChat, Alibaba and TikTok. (A. Swanson, NYT, 032323)
Engagement with China was supposed to encourage the emerging communist centrally planned economy to be more market oriented (i.e. democratic). What actually happened was that multinational supply chains became embedded in ‘China Inc.’ generating decades of profits. The West sold its future for the imperative of shareholder return & profitability with retail, food, manufacturing, electronics, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, solar, et. al. industries jumping in to take advantage of light regulations, cheap and skilled labor, infrastructure, capacity and the ephemeral promise of access to the 1.2 billion strong Chinese consumer market. Now, ByteDance joins its Western competitors, Google, Meta & Twitter in the behavioral prediction game.
Let’s play down some of the accusations made against Mr Shou Xi Chew as the face of public social media enemy #1. His contention that “we’re leading the industry” in data privacy protections and content moderation is standard technologists’ propaganda … even if TikTok IS, in fact, better than our domestic tech monopolists. Never mind that surveillance capitalism functions the same whether it’s google, meta, X or TikTok. The delusion on display — not exclusively, but predominantly — is that it’s ok for OUR companies to profit from society’s unwitting surrender to the wholesale rendition of human experience while tens of millions of lobbying dollars wash through Congress, the Pentagon and both political parties, but not for companies domiciled in China.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, can ‘tune & herd’ over a hundred fifty million users for more than ad revenue. The Chinese Security Apparatus could control our narrative because they certainly control theirs. It’s cold comfort that we don’t have evidence of messaging manipulation coming from the Chinese State as the ‘not so fast’ crowd likes to point out, but is one to conclude that the examples of teen suicide, political cancellation and hate speech on the platform are unfortunate outliers of TikTok’s user profile content algorithm?
The Art Of War couldn’t prescribe a better means for China to weaken the United States:
“.. if he is in harmony, sow dissension. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected (Attack by Stratagem, Art of War).”
An app used by 150 million Americans seems like a pretty good strategy — even if nothing nefarious has happened.
The author is indebted to the ideas in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff.
