TikTok Holds America Hostage

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 11, 2024

 

There’s nothing remarkable about a commercial interest resisting the prospect of congressional regulation by using its influence to lean on legislators. For all the populist hostility toward the practice, lobbying is a constitutionally protected activity for good reason. But the way in which the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok went about trying to convince lawmakers to leave it alone was unique. It sicced its youthful users on Washington in a campaign of intimidation and emotional blackmail, confirming that the air of menace the app has cultivated for itself is no accident.

 

As Jimmy Quinn chronicled, TikTok users resisted a proposal in Congress that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest its holdings in the user-generated video content company. If it did not, the bill would compel American app stores to restrict access to TikTok. When the company mobilized its users to resist that legislation, they did so with all the vigor of an addict about to be cut off.

 

Members of Congress reported receiving threatening calls from incensed TikTok fans, some of whom threatened to kill themselves if the proposed bill advanced out of committee. Some promised to mete out violence against sitting members of Congress. Many sounded as though they were in their preadolescence — indeed, the sound of school bells could be heard in the background as they sought to cajole their representatives.

 

The campaign was a disaster. It presented tangible evidence to lawmakers not only that TikTok’s capacity to track the data and locations of their users was quite robust but also that those users were in the throes of a deep dependency. The application’s users made the case against TikTok better than its detractors ever could. That surely contributed to a rare consensus verdict of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which sent the bill to the House floor by a unanimous vote of 50 to 0.

 

But it would seem that TikTok only has one mode, and it is not nimble enough to deviate from the disastrous course on which it has set itself. Even today, members of Congress are still receiving threats on TikTok’s behalf. “One lawmaker told Semafor they’d been personally threatened that a ‘yes’ vote could result in political retaliation: ‘They said that it would be bad for your future — you will get millions of dollars dropped on your head,’” Semafor’s Kadia Goba reported.

 

Indeed, legislators can see the manifestations of this well-funded effort on TikTok’s behalf all around them. Backed by the Club for Growth, longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill attempting to allay fears of the social-media application. Over the weekend, Donald Trump and his acolytes sang TikTok’s praises and warned the MAGA movement that the real threat to America’s domestic freedoms wasn’t the Chinese Communist Party’s Trojan horse but Facebook and its American owner, Mark Zuckerberg.

 

It’s a rare instance in which the far Left has found common cause with the MAGA Right. Congressman Jamaal Bowman, for example, has long insisted that the “scapegoating” of TikTok is a species of Luddism. James Goodale, the former vice chairman of the New York Times, agrees. “A better approach might be achieved with legislation covering ownership provisions as to foreign-owned websites which keep the ownership in the hands of Chinese,” he advised.

 

Democrats have long warned that curtailing young people’s access to the application would be seen as a “slap in the face” to young people, threatening the party’s bottom line with this crucial demographic come November. Yet, the panic induced by bipartisan legislation that threatens China’s control over the application has exposed the commercial incentives at the root of this campaign. There is a lot of money at stake in this venture — an incentive to which Democrats and Republicans alike are duly sensitive. The starkness of the choice before them has, however, never been clearer.

 

If TikTok survives as a CCP-controlled entity despite the clear evidence of not just the psychological damage it is doing to the American public but the peril it presents to American national security, we will know why. It will be the culmination of this intimidation campaign, in which a well-funded effort to hold America’s children hostage succeeded. If that is the ultimate outcome, it won’t be the last time Beijing puts a gun to Washington’s head.