The TikTok ‘Ban’ Continues To Be One Of The Biggest Turds In Tech Policy History

from the great-job-everybody dept

After four years of hyperventilation about TikTok’s impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, and a year after the app was to be banned from app stores via an act of Congress, TikTok remains widely available. The Trump administration insists they hashed out a deal with Bytedance to sell the app to Trump’s billionaire buddies (clearly his goal all along), though that too remains in mysterious limbo.

Meanwhile, backers of the ban in Congress, either duped into or willfully complicit with Trump’s effort to hijack the app, say are all either curiously silent or trying to play stupid:

“…after months of panic over the alleged dangers of TikTok, Congress has spent the year putting up relatively little fuss as Trump repeatedly extended TikTok’s sales timeline in clear violation of the divest-or-ban law.”

The Verge contacted a dozen current and former lawmakers, many of whom were previously incredibly vocal about the dire threat posed by the app, who suddenly don’t much want to talk about it. The only one that was even willing to give a statement, Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell, didn’t really say anything useful:

““Congress is still waiting to get briefed on how the TikTok sale would actually stop Chinese algorithms from causing harm to U.S. citizens, U.S. military, and U.S. interests,” she said. “The lack of transparency has caused concerns for both Democrats and Republicans who are still waiting for secure briefings on how to stop malign actions.”

You might recall that Biden championed the ban, then refused to enforce it on his way out the door. Trump followed this up by promising to fix everything with a deal in 75 days, then extended that deadline when China predictably balked. Repeatedly.

Last September, Trump finally announced that he’d struck a deal with ByteDance to offload 45 percent of the app to Oracle (Trump’s friend Larry Ellison), Silver Lake (Michael Dell is a top investor), and Abu Dhabi’s MGX — as well as possibly Rupert Murdoch.

Trump’s goal was always pretty clear (remember this whole thing started with first term Trump plan to offload TikTok to Oracle and Walmart); hijack TikTok’s fat revenues for his billionaire friends, and apply pressure to turn TikTok into an even safer space for far right wing ideology and propaganda.

It’s kind of the worst of all possible outcomes. The deal maintains the app’s supposedly problematic connections to China, but it adds a layer of domestic corruption as Trump offloads control of the app to his billionaire buddies. Including Larry Ellison, who (with the help of his nepobaby son David) is clearly making a play to dominate whatever’s left of establishment U.S. media.

It remains unclear if China actually supports — and will allow — such a deal. Trump has implied that President Xi Jinping has given approval, but there’s been little public forward momentum despite a meeting between Trump and Xi in both June and late October. And even then, it’s not clear such a deal would be aligned with the law, notes The Verge:

“Even if China accepts the deal, it’s not clear the agreement meets the legal requirements for divestiture. Licensing the TikTok algorithm could potentially constitute an ongoing operational relationship between the US entity and ByteDance, which is explicitly barred by the law.”

I’ve noted more times than I can count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for all companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data, be it TikTok or the myriad of super dodgy apps, telecoms, and hardware vendors monetizing your phone usage.

It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate. We’d push for media consolidation limits and education media literacy reforms common in countries like Finland.

Banning TikTok was never really about national security. If that were true, we wouldn’t be dismantling our cybersecurity regulators, accidentally hosting sensitive military chats over Signal with journalists, voting to cement utterly incompetent knobs in unaccountable roles across military intelligence, and letting dodgy data brokers sell sensitive personal info to global governments (including our own).

TikTok’s Chinese ownership did pose some very real legitimate security, privacy, and NatSec concerns, but the folks “fixing” the problem were never competent or good faith actors, and the push to ban hijack TikTok was always really about ego, money, information control, and protecting Facebook from competition from a foreign company it clearly couldn’t out-innovate.

And the Democrat decision to support a ban of a popular app during an election season when they were trying to desperately court young voters — despite little to no public support for such a move — continues to be one of the dumbest political tech policy blunders in recent memory.

Now all of the folks who were so breathless about the need for a ban — from Brendan Carr to large cross sections of Congress — are suddenly all weirdly mute as the proposal sits in policy limbo somewhere between Trump’s rank corruption and raw, blistering congressional incompetence.

Filed Under: china, donald trump, privacy, propaganda, social media, tiktok ban

Companies: bytedance, oracle, silver lake, tiktok