By Jack Butler
Thursday, January 09, 2025
Brain rot is not sufficient cause to force TikTok’s
parent company, ByteDance, to sell the popular video app. Oxford University
Press’s word of the year, brain rot is defined as “the supposed
deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as
the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content)
considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as
likely to lead to such deterioration.”
John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty argue in National Review today that the Supreme
Court should allow a bill to force the app’s sale to take effect. (The Court
will hear the case on Friday.) But not because of the app’s video-sharing
capabilities, which are at the root of its brain-rotting power. They observe
that “Facebook, Google, and other social media networks offer similar
capabilities, though none as smashingly popular with users.” They concur with National Review‘s editors, however,
in finding ample national security basis for the bill. “TikTok is a vehicle for
a foreign adversary, our greatest security threat since the Soviet Union, to
collect vast troves on millions of Americans and to manipulate American public
opinion,” they write.
It is not idle speculation to assert that TikTok is such
a vehicle. Chinese law demands that it be. As Tim Chapman, president of
Advancing American Freedom, explains today, “TikTok parent company ByteDance, like
every Chinese-based company, is bound by law to effectively serve as an intelligence arm of the CCP.
‘China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data
about US TikTok users,’ leaked audio of more than 80 internal TikTok meetings
has revealed.”
Some opponents of the bill on the right seem to be offering — or
suffering from — brain rot. Some are mistaken about the legislation, calling it
a ban. But a ban only comes into effect if ByteDance — and those who really control it — refuse a sale. An even
more rotten argument on offer is based solely on internecine negative
partisanship. One “GOP insider” claimed that “the fact that [Sen. Mitch]
McConnell and [former Vice President Mike] Pence want to ban this thing means
it needs to be saved.” This is nonsense. If the idea is that we must reject
McConnell and Pence because they’ve stood against Donald Trump, should we also
stand against Trump, who, as Chapman notes, supported divestment in his first
term?
Yes, Trump may have changed his mind. But he was right
the first time. Arguments are now being made that the platform is good for
conservatives and that Trump is popular, but these are based on trends that can
change quickly, especially given the app’s willingness to alter what is popular
for political reasons. This, too, is a product of its ties to the Chinese
government. Even those with serious cases of brain rot should be able to
understand the threat that government poses to us, and that the bill in question
is trying to do something about it.
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