The “ban TikTok from the US” movie looks like it’s reaching a climax soon.
Habitual flamethrower Ben Thompson dropped an extremely fire mixtape on the TikTok situation on Tuesday: The TikTok War.
The article lays out how TikTok arrived at its current predicament, why the Chinese-owned product is a threat to the West and how the endgame might play out.
The are a few threads to pull out here:
- Chinese and American ideologies are completely incompatible
The world’s two superpowers have fundamentally different ideological and political philosophies.
In particular, a leaked directive from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2013 lays out the ideological “threats” from the West (basically the entire foundation of Western thought 😂):- separation of powers
- independent judiciaries
- universal human rights
- Western freedom
- civil society
- economic liberalism
- total privatization
- freedom of the press
- free flow of information on the internet
For a view on what ideology Xi Jinping and the CCP are pushing, Andrew Batson has a useful (and short) read:
“Bougon perceptively argues that Xi’s ideology is ultimately an attempt to combine three distinct traditions: the socialist tradition originating with Mao; the heritage of Chinese traditional culture; and the prosperity-focused reformist tradition of Deng Xiaoping. All three traditions have appeal in today’s China, and attempting to combine them is not an original strategy. Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao also tried to merge invocations of traditional culture with appeals to both socialism and economic modernization. Xi’s political skill is demonstrated by how he can better command support from adherents of all three traditions, and by how he has more convincingly combined these threads into a ruling ideology.”
- China already bans Western social apps
China has privileged its internet companies by banning Western competitors including Google, YouTube, FB, Wikipedia, Reddit, IG, Snap, Twitter, Medium and Quora (not to mention other services such as Dropbox, NYT, Soundcloud, Vimeo, DuckDuckGo, Pinterest, Washington Post, Bloomberg).
(Larger list here: Censorship of Alexa Top 1000 Domains in China)
Anyone arguing that America is “splintering the internet” or “isn’t playing fair” needs to realize China’s been playing this game for more than two decades.
- China-owned TikTok is a surveillance machine
An engineer reversed engineered TikTok and concluded that it “is a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network.”
The engineer’s Reddit work was posted on Twitter, with this one tweet receiving 75k re-tweets.
- The CCP is not afraid to export its ideology…:
Exhibit A: The backlash the NBA received from the CCP when Houston Rockets’ GM Daryl Morey made a supportive Hong-Kong tweet.
- …and TikTok — with its incredibly power algorithm — is one way to do it
Per Thompson:
“After all, this certainly wasn’t the first time that TikTok has seemed to act politically: the service censored #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd, blocked a teenager discussing China’s genocide in Xinjiang, and blocked a video of Tank Man. The Guardian published TikTok guidelines that censored Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, and the Falun Gong, and I myself demonstrated that TikTok appeared to be censoring the Hong Kong protests and Houston Rockets basketball team.
The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?”
What can TikTok do?
With that set-up, Thompson sets out the following prescriptions:
- Bytedance sells TikTok to a non-Chinese company:
TikTok has built a credible competitor to Facebook and alternative platform for attention and advertisers. Thompson would like to see the company sold to a non-Chinese entity, as long as its not Facebook. - If Bytdance doesn’t sell, then the US government should take action:
Per Thompson: “One possible route is a review of ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), or invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which would require declaring a national emergency; I would prefer that Congress take the lead. What is notable is that because of the dominance of the iOS App Store and Google Play Store there is no need for an ISP-level firewall; Apple and Google can not only remove TikTok from the App Store, they could, if ordered, make already-installed apps unusable.”
Based on White House adviser Peter Navarro’s comments, it might not even matter if Tik Tok wants to sell:
“If TikTok separates as an American company, that doesn’t help us…because it’s going to be worse – we’re going to have to give China billions of dollars for the privilege of having TikTok operate on US soil.”
The Bigger Picture
From a 50,000 foot level, we’re clearly in the Second Cold War.
And, per innanet legend (billionaire investor) Chamath Palihapitiya, the new Cold War isn’t starting with TikTok…it “started when the United States basically embargoed [Chinese telecom giant] Huawei from getting 5G technology.”
As luck would have it, this week’s cover story for The Economist concerns the operating status for Huawei in global markets (it’s not looking great):
- The USA — from September — “will be seeking to stop companies around the world from using software or hardware that originally comes from America to manufacture components based on Huawei’s designs.”
- The UK will “ban mobile-network operators in Britain from buying Huawei equipment for their 5G networks, and told them to remove equipment already installed by 2027.”
- Australia banned Huawei’s 5G equipment in 2018.
- Germany — a bellwether for the rest of the EU — will make a decision in the fall. On the one hand, it recognizes the ideological differences between China and Western society. On the other hand, Germany does a lot of business with China and cutting ties with Huawei will slow Germany’s 5G rollout (a particular sore spot, as the country has Big Tech envy for all the internet giants the US has created).
- In France, telecom regulators have advised local network operator to not use Huawei equipment moving forward.
- Canada and Singapore both announced plans in June “for 5G networks built around equipment provided by Huawei’s main rivals, Ericsson (Sweden) and Nokia (Finland).”
- Firms in Japan (Rakuten Mobile) and India (Jio) will be building localized solutions.
Per its China 2025 plan, the CCP has laid out a clear roadmap for technological independence (particularly in 5G, AI, robotics, aerospace and semiconductors).
Cockblocking China’s national tech champions is certainly one way to hamper these plans.