The standoff between the U.S. government and Chinese video app TikTok conflates so many social media and free speech issues that it’s more like beef stew than an industrial dispute.
More than 170 million Americans use the global app, just as others have used fading Facebook, deranged X, irritating Instagram and other social media apps to drain their minds.
The idea that China’s authoritarian communist government — brutal president-for-life Xi Jinping — can use TikTok to edit, manipulate, and pry into so many private lives horrifies the U.S.
The U.S. House has passed a bill forcing TikTok’s Chinese-based owner, ByteDance, to sell its stake or be shut down in the U.S. TikTok swears it doesn’t bow to China, but let’s be candid, it doesn’t have a choice. It’s not clear if the bill will pass the Senate but U.S. President Joe Biden will sign it if it does.
China’s not happy. Is it ever? TikTok lobbies politicians by telling its social media influencers — sad-sack customers selling junk/personality/entertainment on TikTok — to complain, which they did, not that it matters.
As British-American journalism critic Emily Bell put it, “Is the TikTok ban a culture war or a trade war?” It’s a good business while it lasts. But TikTok will die and something else will pop up. It’s the nature of the beast.
Social media platforms always grovel to power. But the TikTok problem is worse. Guess who wants to buy it?
No. Worse than that. It’s greasy, maladroit Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary. He’s putting together a consortium.
Would Americans rather gift their private lives to Xi or to Mnuchin or the other way around? It doesn’t matter. One is not worse than the other. They’re both worse.
Americans are hooked on screens the way they were once hooked on cigarettes. I no longer smoke. But I cannot satiate my hunger for more, more, more, screen time. I cannot say no.
Whenever I wonder why rampant drug addiction in Western nations is blamed on cartels, criminals, the Sackler family’s stash, doctored fentanyl, and an uncaring public, rather than the refusal of relatively privileged citizens to say no to illegal drug use, I think of my own injectable candy: screens.
Returning to Bell’s question, I view China’s incursion into digital platforms as a new 19th century Opium War. China wanted to curb opium use; imperialist Britain wanted to force opium on the Chinese to retain huge profits. Chinese addicts couldn’t say no.
Now China, with malign intent, wants to force dangerous opiatelike TikTok on Americans to retain huge profits. Americans can’t say no to drugs; opioids are a shortcut to undeserved euphoria, very much the national jam.
A Mnuchin TikTok would enforce capitalist values and silence free speech, as do Meta, Google and X. In an undereducated U.S. careless of vanishing freedoms, this will get Trump elected, perhaps permanently.
Silencing isn’t always corporate. Canada’s Bill C-63 wants to allow citizens to complain to the Canadian Human Rights Commission about what they deem hate speech online. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal would decide if the words should be censored or the writers made to pay, just as in a libel action.
If the bill passes, journalists will resign. Who wants a full-time job dealing with complaints paperwork from Angry Pajamas? The tribunal would clog, I’d talk to lawyers all day, and would never again write an untrammelled word.
Free speech is dying. It has too many enemies. It gets watered down. It is evaporating.
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