It’s an app. It’s an algorithm. It’s a purveyor of propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a collector of personal data for the Chinese Communist Party. It’s an organizer of children’s crusades.
It may also have the power to turn your mind into mush if you stare at it too long.
Digital dementia
A lengthy post by a guy named Gurwinder, “TikTok Is a Time Bomb: The ultimate weapon of mass distraction,” argues that a major purpose of the app is to “turn the West’s youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.”
Although much of the argument seems murky, the concern is reasonable enough. But the hazard is not a new one. Staring at soap operas, talk shows, and game shows all day and getting all your news from the Comedy Channel can also rot your brain. Perhaps TikTok does so more efficiently.
“In the long term,” concludes Gurwinder, “the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps like TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies.” On the other hand, we still seem to have the soap operas, talk shows, and game shows.
Since the power to rot our brains is not the only bad feature of CCP weapon TikTok, opponents of giving China ammunition to use against us wonder whether a shorter-term solution is also possible. Like federally banning the app within the United States or forcing ByteDance to turn the app over to a non-CCP-controlled company.
Such a fix is worth considering if it can be accomplished without simultaneously banning non-TikTok speech that happens to annoy government officials. In April 2023, a Wall Street Journal piece by Philip Hamburger concluded that an anti-TikTok bill then extant was a “Sneak Attack on Free Speech.”
Children’s crusade
Whether a stop-TikTok bill is good or bad, TikTok, i.e., the Chinese Communist Party, routinely uses the app to recruit lobbyists for TikTok to stop the legislation. These inductees are often children and teenagers, some of whom do not seem to be schooled in the fine art of diplomacy. The Spectator reports that in response to a current effort to force the divestiture of TikTok, “Members of Congress were flooded with calls from teenagers threatening assassination and suicide” (March 9, 2024).
“I will kill you if you fucking shut down TikTok,” a teenage boy warned to a member of Congress in a voicemail reviewed by The Spectator. “I will really really fuck you up. So don’t shut down TikTok. Bye bye!”
This week, Capitol Hill was inundated with a series of unusual callers—children, some as young as six years old. They had been enlisted by TikTok to forcibly push back against a bill that’s on track to sail through the House next week which forces the divestiture of a series of companies owned by foreign adversaries, like China in the case of the globally popular video app. TikTok is regularly accused of everything from feeding eating disorder content to girls to spying on journalists to extensively tracking user data—at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party, no less.
The aforementioned assassination threat was far from an isolated incident. That office received around a dozen; at least one other House office confirmed that they too received a threat to murder the member. “It turns out threatening to kill members is not an effective or persuasive tool,” a staffer for one of the offices noted. “In fact, it really seemed to backfire here.”
Beyond the assassination threats, offices of both parties were flooded with tens of thousands of calls, directed in part by TikTok itself, when it urged users to “stop a TikTok shutdown.” Countless kids took time out of their school days to tell their representatives that they will kill themselves if the government bans TikTok.
The bill in question would not impose a ban, though. It’s about forcing ByteDance to give up TikTok and other apps.
“TikTok deployed a strategy to feed users, particularly children, disinformation about the bill,” says Representative Tim Walberg. “Doing this incidentally proved critics right and provided a real-time illustration as to why we should be concerned.”
Also see:
Wall Street Journal: “Biden Backs Effort to Force Sale of TikTok by Chinese Owners”
“Full House set to vote on bill next week as effort by TikTok to pressure Congress appears to backfire….
“Supporters of the bill say it isn’t an attempt to ban TikTok, but to separate the app from ByteDance. If the legislation were to become law, ByteDance would have to sell TikTok to an owner that the U.S. government deems acceptable, or the app would essentially become inaccessible in the U.S.”
The Federalist: “Why The ‘#StopWillow’ Movement On TikTok May Be A CCP Influence Campaign”
“I made a spreadsheet of 64 TikTok accounts with viral videos opposing the Willow Project. As of last Friday [March 24, 2023], each of the accounts, with videos garnering anywhere from 65,000-7.6 million views, had posted exclusively anti-Willow Project content and began first posting on Feb. 28 at the earliest. None of the videos include people’s faces. All of them use AI-generated voices or trending sounds and feature many of the same videos.”
StopTheChinazis.org: “TikTok Is Pretty Much a Chinese Communist Party App, Study Confirms”
“The study can’t be considered in isolation, though; the ‘strong possibility’ that TikTok obeys the CCP propaganda-wise is really a virtual certainty.”
