Well, this is weird. Through some strange confluence of events I find myself agreeing with members of the current Congress. Earlier this week the house advanced, with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, a bill that would force the parent company of TikTok, Bytedance, to sell their golden goose in the next six months or get bounced from U.S. app stores. Good.
The reasoning behind cracking down on TikTok is the fact that Bytedance is a Chinese company and in 2024 there is no such thing as a Chinese company free from the grip of the ruling Communist Party. For their part, TikTok says they have never and would never hand over data to China, an unfortunately worthless pledge.
Back in 2020, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and one of the richest men in the world, was planning an IPO for a new venture called Ant Financial. The second Ant Financial went public it would be one of the largest financial services companies on the planet. Jack Ma spent some time during the lead-up to his big launch criticizing the Chinese government and a few weeks before it was set to go public the IPO was canceled and Ma vanished. He eventually resurfaced a few months later and decided that rather than be a global business leader he’d like to take up painting. Ant Financial never went public. If the CCP can disappear one of the richest men on the planet, they can manipulate TikTok.
TikTok has 170,000,000 U.S. users who consume billions of hours of content every minute and second of every day. The amount of data they have is staggering. The ability of CCP leadership to even subtly manipulate the algorithm and put their finger on the scale affecting what your kids watch should scare the hell out of you. Forcing Bytedance to divest itself of Chinese ownership is absolutely a matter of national security.
It’s long past time to stop treating social media giants as some benign force merely here to kill time with silly dances and air fryer videos. We have studies detailing the devastating effects of social media on our children’s mental health coming out of our ears. We know what Instagram does to the body image of teen girls. We know what alpha male influencers are doing to our young men.
There’s no mystery surrounding Facebook and what it’s done to our democracy. We’ve had dozens of congressional hearings where Mark Zuckerberg awkwardly apologizes to grieving parents and precisely zero legislation regulating these giant corporations that now live in our pockets. Regulating TikTok should be the first step of many.
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