TikTok is in crisis. In April, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill that would force the Chinese parent company of popular social media app ByteDance to sell a majority stake to an American company. Failure to do so will result in your app being banned in the United States.
A number of dubious claims have been made about TikTok, but the main motivation for Congress to force a sale of TikTok is that the app's Chinese owners are tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), so having their technology on many Americans' phones would be a serious national threat. It is a security risk. CCP is It’s an authoritarian threat, and there’s evidence that the Chinese government has pressured TikTok to censor content about Tiananmen Square, the religious sect Falun Gong, and criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Of course, the U.S. government also Pressured US tech companies to censor social media content. Thanks to Twitter files, Facebook files, and other independent investigations, we know that multiple federal agencies have ordered social media platforms to remove content related to Hunter Biden, COVID-19, and other topics. President Biden has accused companies of killing people and threatened to take action against them when he believes they have not paid enough attention to his pandemic-related tyranny.
If Congress really wanted to do something about government censorship of social media content, lawmakers could take control of the federal government. Instead, they're focusing solely on TikTok, which responded with a lawsuit.
The bill approved by Biden would apply to all social media companies designated as “foreign adversary control applications.” Current U.S. law defines China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran as foreign adversaries. The law also stipulates that an app is considered controlled by a foreign adversary if it meets one or more of three criteria. Either it is headquartered in one of those countries, the government of one of those countries owns a 20% stake in the app, or the app is “directed or controlled” by one of the foreign adversaries.
The law creates a blueprint for future action against social media companies beyond TikTok. Since the 2016 election, Democratic lawmakers, mainstream media pundits and national security advisers have accused Facebook and Twitter of being complicit in a variety of Russian schemes to sow election-related discord online. The crux of the claim is that the company's CEOs allowed their platforms to be compromised by Russian misinformation. Subsequent studies have shown that foreign social media influence campaigns have little effect on election results.
Despite the passage of this bill, the federal government is unlikely to take direct action against Facebook or X tomorrow. But Biden is sticking to very vague language of “direction and control.” It is not difficult to imagine a future where vengeful bureaucrats accuse us of promoting dissent, associating with “foreign enemies,” and punishing us accordingly.
This article originally appeared in print under the following title: “TikTok's slippery slope.”