I’m going to be fairly brief, cause I have other things on my mind, and the story is moving fast, but the Biden Administration approved a law passed by Congress that says the social app TikTok has to either close in the United States or allow its Chinese proprietor, ByteDance, to sell to an American company by this Sunday, January 19. On Friday January 17, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the ban, notably by a unanimous vote.
My impressions:
I’ve never used TikTok and find most of social media, especially X, to be a giant waste of time that drags the intellect to low levels by focusing on the superficial. In many ways, I’m in favor of the ban given that China specifically uses its media for government purposes and entities do not have the same independence that Western media entities do. In particular, the justices said that their decision was not based on free speech but rather the capacity of the Chinese government to use the medium to gather Western users’ data. The fact that ByteDance is unwilling to sell regardless of how much money is offered seems to confirm this.
Yes, but-
The fact that lawmakers are willing to raise this valid point in the one case while not targeting rather extensive Russian government penetration of our media, not to mention the fact that Elon Musk was able to buy Twitter in order to turn it into a “Dark Web” haven and then an outright Trump support base means that much of the outrage is selective. Indeed, Donald Trump had supported the law banning TikTok, which is one reason it got passed, but has since changed his mind, likely because the owners know how to appeal to his ulterior motives. Indeed, the company CEO is scheduled to attend Trump’s inaugural with Musk, Jeff Bezos and the other tech oligarchs.
In his opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch stated, “Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us,” also noting that China could simply use another app in the US that is not banned to achieve the same results. In fact it already has.
The app is referred to as “RedNote” in the US but is a mainly Chinese-language app intended for the home country, where in Mandarin it is called Xiaohongshu, which actually means “Little Red Book.” The American fans of TikTok, who tend to be young, are flocking to RedNote largely in protest of the government’s decision, even though the site, unlike TikTok, is not designed for English speakers, and as a domestic app is full of its own censorship including any mention of homosexuality or related social issues. But the information exchange has some interesting effects in that it is both ways. A lot of Americans are specifically intending to reach out to Chinese speakers, and that undermines China’s own attempts to control social media. “Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Weibo and currently a U.S.-based editor with China Digital Times, told Rest of World. “The fact that Americans are using Xiaohongshu is already [stepping] on the red line,” Liu said. “This is something that will not be able to last because Americans don’t practice self-censorship.” To comply with Chinese law, the app may need to create a wall between domestic and foreign users, as ByteDance has done with TikTok and Douyin, he added.”
In the process Chinese people are learning more about the dark side of America because Americans discuss issues that Chinese are not allowed to mention in their own media. One Chinese poster commented: “Xiaohongshu is filled with American stories of how they had to drop out of university due to financial issues, how they could hardly afford a nice meal at a restaurant for their children’s birthday and how they had given up hope and saw no way out of their agony.” Of course the Chinese government will tell their people stories about how American culture and capitalism are inferior to theirs, but they are now seeing actual Americans tell their own experiences, which in some cases are worse than what their government is telling them.
And this is something a lot of Americans had not been aware of, nor were they aware that in other countries (not just communist tyrannies) government covers higher education and health care. A lot of Americans on RedNote were not any more aware that we have school shootings than the Chinese, nor were they aware that you have to pay for ambulance service. None of these things are censored in American media, but neither are they emphasized. To learn about them, you have to be one of us oldthinkers who still refer to regular news media instead of having your information given to you by social media algorithms.
In this way, the attempt to cut off contact with the Chinese viewpoint is actually encouraging Americans to look beyond their established system and realize its problems. And again, it’s working both ways. There is one article about how some Americans are joining RedNote in order to show Chinese how to 3-D print guns.
So even if TikTok IS a Goddamn communist front, banning it is just as counterproductive from a libertarian standpoint as any other kind of censorship, not to mention making us closer to being the very government we here claim to oppose. And this also reveals the corruption in our system, especially given how many elected officials who voted to ban TikTok still use it.