State, Market, Speech

TikTok ticks right along

The Supreme Court recently handed down a ruling upholding the ban on the use of the controversial social media platform TikTok in the United States. Mere hours later, President Trump signed an executive order unbanning it for seventy-five more days. 

Despite the platform’s extraordinary popularity, ownership ties to China have made it a consistent point of political controversy, with supporters and opponents spanning the political spectrum. In 2020 Donald Trump ordered TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to divest from ownership as a precondition for allowing the platform access to U.S. users. Biden reversed Trump’s executive order in 2021, yet three years later signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, in affect renewing Trump’s earlier ban (although Trump has now, of course, changed his mind on the matter). Still, the Supreme Court’s ruling suggests the reason behind the bipartisan support that united congressional Democrats and Republicans against TikTok: Regardless of content, TikTok’s ownership ties to China make it a threat to national security. TikTok had invoked First Amendment rights to free speech. The court, along with many supporters of the ban across the political spectrum, argued that national security trumps free speech. 

Ahh: national security! It takes me back to the glory days of the Cold War, when the phrase served as an incantation, casting a spell of unity across political parties and justifying nearly any action on the part of the state. Then, as now, there were dissenters. As the court mulled over its ruling, pro-TikTok protesters took to the streets using an older form of social media: cardboard signs. The messaging ranged from the prosaic—“Keep TikTok,” “TikTok Helped Me Grow My Business”—to the existential: “TikTok Changed My Life for the Better,” “My Voice Thrives on TikTok.” Signs of the latter variety suggest a certain cultish dimension to TikTok users and indeed the attachment to TikTok is but one instance of a broader addiction to social media that has generated much anguished commentary in the last decade or so. 

As with earlier debates about once-new media such as film and television, critics weigh the promise of liberation against the threat of thought control. The winner, then as now, tends to be individual choice. The only exception: national security. Even the free-speech liberal Gail Collins is on board with this perennial argument stopper: “[I] hate censorship but I’ve been cowed by the possibility of China using TikTok to worm its way into the private lives of millions of Americans.”

I too fear China worming it way into the private lives of Americans. I also fear some future non-Chinese owner of TikTok worming its way into the private lives of Americans. I fear most that social media, regardless of ownership or regulation of data collection, has already accomplished what many commentators continue to present as some dangerous future possibility. The fact that so many people seem to depend on TikTok to “find their voice” is a symptom of a deep social alienation that debates over TikTok’s ownership obscure, at least for the moment. David French, a conservative Christian commentator, warns that “we cannot make it . . . this easy for a hostile foreign power to collect our data and manipulate our public debate,” yet affirms that “we can and should zealously defend the free speech rights of Americans, including their rights to dance, sing and meme away.” In the hands of a foreign government, TikTok is a threat to American freedom; in the hands of a private corporation, TikTok is American freedom.  

Such an understanding of freedom leaves me feeling, well, insecure. It is yet another instance of large-scale corporations successfully claiming the power to reshape public and private life, all in the name of individual freedom. In this, today’s tech moguls are no different from the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. 

In a recent interview with Ross Douthat, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explains his current support for Donald Trump after decades of supporting liberal Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama. Put simply, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s “new” Democrats gave big tech a free hand to make millions and reshape how most Americans communicate with each other, not simply in business and politics but in “private” life. Then, with the Great Awokening and the rise of Donald Trump, white male tech bros faced pressure both from their young Ivy League recruits and eventually from the Biden administration to make their work environment and social media platforms conform to woke orthodoxy. Andreessen had been just as proud to pay taxes for social services as Andrew Carnegie had been to spend money building libraries for his starving workers, but he would not have his property rights restricted where they mattered most: how he ran his business. Trump promises him the freedom tech had with Clinton and Obama. Thus, Andreessen supports Trump.   

The alliance between Andreessen and Trump is a match made in social media heaven, for Trump is nothing if not a creation of the media. From the New York tabloid press of the 1980s to The Apprentice of the early 2000s, the media has sold Donald Trump as someone who is important, and many Americans bought what the media was hawking. Trump became something of an independent producer in 2016, launching a new media product: his presidential campaign. The media elite that once praised Obama for his savvy use of social media now warned that Trump was using social media to corrupt politics and lie to Americans.

Yes, Trump is a liar in way that perhaps Obama was not. Still, there is a thin line between the hubris of “we make our own reality” and the cynicism of “we make up our own reality.” Can free speech liberals who support “trans” everything convincingly appeal to a stable truth against which to condemn Trump?  Do never-Trump conservatives think that social media really is just about harmless cat videos when it bears much of the responsibility for Trump himself? 

A libertarian conception of freedom seems destined to win the TikTok wars. We can then take comfort in knowing that the lies, disinformation, and just plain distraction undermining our common life are coming from decent, freedom-loving capitalist corporations, and not from those Commies in China!   

To avoid this seeming inevitability, I suggest we move away from the simplistic “free speech” model that continues to shape our thinking about social media. The ideal embodied in the First Amendment assumed both a narrow conception of free speech (mainly political) and a clearly visible and defined enemy of that freedom (the absolutist state). History, reflected in the shift from speech to expression in jurisprudence and the emergence of leviathan corporations whose power exceeds that of the early modern state, has rendered this model obsolete. 

As an alternative, I suggest that we take an environmental approach to speech and culture. The environment is one of the few areas of contemporary public culture where a significant portion of the electorate seems to recognize the need for language not rooted in eighteenth-century notions of individual rights. So how about this proposition: TikTok is a symptom of cultural climate change that must be addressed in holistic terms, similar to the language we use to address global warming? I’m not sure how far this will go, though. Denial of global warming has always been less about the science of climate than the politics of freedom.

Christopher Shannon is associate professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is the author of several works on U.S. cultural history and American Catholic history, including American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World (2022).