Mahanth is Editor of usindiamonitor

Americans invented the Internet and its spinoff, social media. These are America’s gifts and curses to the world, and the world in various ways is returning the favor. It was only a matter of time before Americans became forced to confront the perils of wildly successful foreign companies and governments profiting off the powerful forces unleashed by these inventions that without exaggeration now threaten to destroy America as we know it.

There are legitimate arguments to perpetuate the status quo and allow TikTok to operate freely in an open society like America where consumers have the right to make their own choices to entertain themselves for better or worse. However there are much, much stronger arguments for a TikTok ban or divestiture from Chinese control on national security grounds as part of the US government’s sacred duty to protect these same consumers. To be fair to most consumers of TikTok there is no way they could possibly understand the grave dangers to themselves or their country.

When making seminal policy decisions with billions of dollars and billions of hours of people’s time watching videos they choose to watch at stake, it’s a good thing that there’s a raging debate in the halls of Congress and in our living rooms. That’s democracy. This is not an easy (Byte) dance. Before coming to a wise conclusion on which way the US government should turn in the coming weeks, let’s examine the facts.

China does not allow US social media companies like X and Meta to operate in China, which has effectively implemented a total ban on foreign social media. In fact China does not even allow TikTok within its borders! Only watered-down, heavily censored versions of social media by its parent company ByteDance and a few others are allowed. All are alternate worlds where inconvenient truths like the epic heroism of the Chinese patriots massacred on Tiananmen Square never even existed. Sure, nation-specific bans or divestures are an affront to free trade, but not if the other country imposed one first. There is a legitimate reciprocity argument to be made, and if China were to reverse its position to allow concerns like X or a Meta over the Great Firewall then the conversation would be different. For now China has no answer for the accusation of hypocrisy.

But I don’t blame the CCP for banning US tech giants one bit. In a way I admire their instincts for survival. The CCP would not survive with free information flow, and we all know it. Why doesn’t the US government covet its own survival at least as much???

India banned TikTok overnight after a deadly military border clash with China in 2020, kicking a whopping 200 million Indian consumers off the app abruptly. India is doing just fine since then and China has that much less easy access to the data of Indian citizens to the tune of trillions of lines of code, and the Modi government survived the backlash in bilateral relations with China just fine too. In the process, Indians also did Silicon Valley a massive, multi-trillion dollar favor America could be doing for arguably its most critical industry.

TikTok is highly addictive, especially to youth. Many Americans particularly the young and vulnerable are disturbingly addicted to the dopamine hits. They spend an unbelievable 91 minutes a day on average on TikTok. The evidence is clear when it comes to mental health damage, though this is not unique to this company. Still, like Fentanyl this addictive product is rotting kids’ brains in their own bedrooms right under the noses of their parents.

On the other hand, the argument can be made that this addiction will simply live on in alternate universes, potentially just as evil ones, gamely provided by Meta or Snapchat. Sure, they may be assholes but for Americans at least… they are our assholes. If we are going down shouldn’t we much prefer that it’s American companies that take us down?

Chinese national security law dictates that every Chinese company and citizen must spy on Americans if ordered to do so. In China’s masterful Orwellian plan, every single company in every single sector is under complete, total control of the CCP and must follow orders to stay in business. (contrast this with Apple’s disgusting blockade of the FBI desperately trying to investigate the San Bernardino terrorist!) If the government demands the data of Chinese tech companies, like TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, the data is always handed over. And TikTok has mountains of data on every American user. Whether the CCP has asked for it or used it for nefarious purposes is not the point; the CCP owns all this data anyway.

Critics of this view rightly argue that the CCP hoovers up all of our data anyway from data brokers and hackers providing everything American concerns like Meta and X have on us. But nobody could argue that banning TikTok would make their efforts that much harder and costlier.

Another thoughtful argument is that the US government might be doing the same thing to Chinese citizens, and all’s fair in love and war. However we don’t know the extent of what our national security agencies and Silicon Valley are up to, they are subject to oversight whether executive, legislative, or judicial, and unless such information is in the public domain this is all moot. Again, there might be assholes in all three branches of our government, but they are our assholes, and I much prefer that weapons in the fields of social media, AI, quantum computing, and nuclear are in the hands of democracies instead of dictators or terrorists. Sorry, I’m biased here.

TikTok is a weapon inside our kids’ bedrooms and heads. And make no mistake, TikTok is fully weaponized already with its machine learning and algorithms telling people what to think and how to feel towards nefarious ends. This is not up for debate. In a massive flex that backfired, TikTok encouraged users to influence their Congressional representatives on the bill we are debating today. This was actually an admirable gambit that showed the unbelievable power TikTok has to control US politics. I hope that this preview of how TikTok could be used as a Chinese tool to meddle in or even destroy US elections, already crippled by the winds of corruption, distrust and misinformation, might help prevent America from falling into autocracy for just a little while longer.

When the Chinese government demands that TikTok meddle in US politics and policy to benefit China and bring America to its knees, what do you think TikTok executives will do?

When Donald Trump uses TikTok in his active campaign to destroy US democracy, what do you think TikTok executives will do?

In both cases, TikTok will make gobs of money along the way which is just an added bonus. The decision would not be a hard one.

TikTok Benefits Many Americans. I have never touched this app but many people close to me are users, and no doubt they all get joy and valuable information from the cat videos on TikTok. And I am trying to check my own hypocrisies here, as usindiamonitor itself would not exist as a forum without social media. I am well aware this site could receive far more views and probably advertising dollars if using TikTok. And we know that US politicians and US investors are heavily dependent on the company to prosper. These interests would get hurt if we do the right thing, and this is all collateral damage, and India already went through this phase.

Here, I’d like to admire TikTok and what they’ve done. Through praiseworthy technical innovation and hard work, they have built a platform whose popularity spread like wildfire very fast across many borders. They did it by walking the tightrope of taking advantage of Western capitalism, competing against the far more established industry players with a huge head start, all while simultaneously operating under the thumb of the CCP dutifully. And to be fair to the CCP its love for TikTok is not entirely malicious. TikTok is a global champion operating in many countries and helping the Chinese economy, entrepreneurs, and workers, most of whom we can assume have done nothing wrong.

In the end though, this is a story about existential conflict and survival in a dangerous world and we should approach it with rationality. Let’s assume for now that TikTok has the best intentions for its customers. Even so, don’t we want an insurance policy against potential future threats even if they haven’t yet manifested?

Everyone here is acting completely rationally, and let’s remove the good guy and bad guy narratives and instead examine these cold, hard facts. US teens only think they can survive by spending 91 minutes a day on TikTok. Donald Trump is plotting how to use TikTok to regain power after previously trying to ban it himself. US billionaires are being rewarded handsomely for investing in ByteDance. Chinese tech titans famously can only survive by taking orders from the CCP bosses because in China the public sector and private sector are merged as ONE CHINA. The CCP will only survive using asymmetric tactics like hacking from and spying on Americans as they do ruthlessly to their own people and companies, while preparing to do things like destroy US naval carriers or shut down our power grid if things get hot. The CCP will only survive if Chinese citizens don’t use Facebook. The CCP is using TikTok as a weapon of mass destruction before our eyes by either operating within our current laws or covertly breaking them without detection because our government is unable to find their fingerprints or won’t publish them.

The CCP is f***ing brilliant and f***ing rational, TikTok’s great power as a tool and a weapon is just another example of this, and we should be learning certain lessons from them and how they govern, for it would do us a lot of good. China is protecting its youth in a way through restrictions on video games and social media, while keeping the vast majority of its citizens’ online data on lockdown behind the Great Firewall. These actions will pay dividends for decades to come.

These are complex matters. Thank goodness the answer to this question is simple. If America cares about its own survival into the future, if it cares about democracy here or in any country striving for free and fair elections, America will act. As this technology will only get bigger and better by the day thanks to AI and quantum computing, areas where we are in real danger of falling behind, let’s at least create a little friction for our worthy and wily adversaries and extend our little experiment in turbulent democracy just a little longer by banning TikTok entirely if China refuses to divest.