Shut up and Obey
Six Days Till the TikTok Ban
“Never before has Congress taken the extraordinary step of effectively banning a platform for communication, let alone one used by half the country,” says a statement by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Adds the journalist and tireless civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald: “We're facing the very real prospect [that] one of the most popular social media apps in the United States, the most popular social media app among young Americans by far, can just disappear from the United States because the government decided it didn't like it.”
Maybe you don’t use it. But someone in your family or your social circle almost certainly does.
TikTok — a platform used by 170 million Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights — faces a death sentence next Sunday.
Under a law passed by Congress and signed by Joe Biden last year, that’s the deadline by which TikTok’s Chinese owners must sell their U.S. operations.
If they do not, Apple will be required to remove TikTok from the App Store… Google will be required to remove TikTok from its Play Store… and TikTok’s web-hosting providers like Amazon Web Services will be required to pull the plug.
The hypocrisy on all sides has been thick. Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok by executive order in 2020, only to be smacked down in the courts. He now opposes the ban — perhaps because one of his megadonors owns a stake in TikTok. Meanwhile, Joe Biden campaigned on TikTok even after signing the law last year — and Kamala Harris’ campaign also had a TikTok presence.
Whatever your own politics, “If you believe in free speech on the internet, no matter what you think of technology, no matter how much you hate it, no matter what you think of China, this is a law that ought to deeply concern you,” Greenwald says.
On Friday, lawyers for TikTok and some of TikTok’s users tried to get a last-minute reprieve before the U.S. Supreme Court. It did not go well.
The government’s lawyers invoked the magic words “national security,” along with the specter of the Chinese boogeyman — and that seemed to be enough for most of the justices no matter where they fall on the political spectrum.
Greenwald again: “The Biden Justice Department claims that the ban on TikTok is necessary to protect American national security from the Chinese and rather than delve into whether that's true or not — and the reality is it's not for a variety of reasons — the court has simply accepted the arguments of the U.S. government and said when the government invokes national security, we're going to defer [to] that.”
At one point, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh spun a fanciful scenario in which TikTok users would be recruited as Chinese “spies” who might later infiltrate the FBI and the CIA. He called it a “huge concern.”
“You’d think if this were a real ‘concern,’” writes independent reporter Michael Tracey, “there’d be a single scintilla of evidence presented of anything like it ever happening.”
But no such evidence exists — for that outlandish claim or any other. Certainly nothing that’s ever been made public.
The stated rationale for the law is that TikTok is a Chinese Communist Party cutout that either spies on or propagandizes vulnerable young Americans — or both.
But just like Justice Kavanaugh, every “intelligence community” official who plays up the alleged threat from TikTok speaks only in hypotheticals.
In 2022, FBI Director Chistopher Wray said TikTok’s parent firm “is controlled by the Chinese government, and it gives them the potential to leverage the app in ways that I think should concern us.” [Emphasis ours]
Asked last spring if TikTok was influencing the 2024 elections, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said, “We cannot rule out that the CCP could use it.” [Emphasis ours]
“I've been trying for years to find any links to the Chinese state,” journalist Chris Stokel-Walker wrote for BuzzFeed in 2023. He’s done plenty of reporting over the years critical of TikTok, by the way.
“I've spoken to scores of TikTok employees, past and present, in pursuit of such a connection. But I haven't discovered it.
“Yet to hear politicians on both sides of the aisle talk about it, it's verifiable fact. And they want the app banned because of it.”
The vote in the House to ban TikTok was overwhelming — 352-65, with one present. In the Senate, it was 79-18.
Small-Business Impact
It’s not just a free speech thing. The moral panic over TikTok in D.C. will throw a wrench in the works for millions of small-business owners across the land.
“TikTok is the best social media platform for small businesses without a doubt,” says Kimberly Ochsenbein, owner of Akron Lights Candle Co. “The viral potential and the expanded reach that you get from TikTok, you can’t get that from any other social media platform,” she told the Ohio Capital Journal last year.
In Georgia, “90% of our sales are on TikTok Shop,” added Paul Truong, who owns a skincare company with his wife called Love & Pebble. A ban “would be catastrophic,” he told the Rough Draft Atlanta site.
In Texas, Jordan Smith owns an online clothing store catering to tall women. “It would really devastate me if this platform went away, just because it has been so helpful,” she told KXAN-TV in Austin.
And for many of these entrepreneurs, there’s no real substitute: “This platform is my primary source of traffic, and it’s not for lack of trying on the other sites,” says Callie Goodwin, who runs an online card shop in South Carolina.
As she wrote in Columbia’s newspaper The State, “When you think about the 7 million small businesses on TikTok across the country, the extent of that financial impact can’t be ignored.”
Meanwhile, as we mentioned last year, the free market is already solving the “problem” that has the Beltway class wringing its hands. Young people are walking away from TikTok.
The number of new users has reached a plateau. And most of those new users are folks in their 30s and 40s.
Thus, as the cool kids often mistype it, TikTok is being taken over by “teh olds” — in other words, exactly what happened to Facebook a few years back.
No matter. As you’ll see shortly, the TikTok ban isn’t entirely about TikTok…
Why Congress Passed the Ban (Not China)
While the effort to ban TikTok goes back several years, it wasn’t until 2024 that it got traction and succeeded. And the catalyst wasn’t China.
Instead, in the eyes of many congressmembers, TikTok was hosting too many young people who were airing too much criticism about U.S. support for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Or as The Economist put it, “The proposal gained momentum partly as a consequence of disquiet over the app’s handling of misinformation and anti-Semitic content following Hamas’ attack on Israel in October [2023].” The Wall Street Journal corroborated this account, with some additional detail.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) left no doubt last May: "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature,” he said during a forum at the McCain Institute.
“If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
Beyond China and Israel, the subtext for the TikTok ban is this: It’s the one platform that’s not under the thumb of the FBI, CIA, DHS, etc.
We saw it time and time again in recent years. Whenever the Biden administration said, “Jump!”... YouTube and Facebook and the rest said, “How high?”
It’s plain as day from both the “Twitter Files” as well as the emails and other correspondence that emerged from the Murthy v. Missouri censorship case. (And the Supreme Court didn’t do the First Amendment any favors there, either.)
It wasn’t just COVID, either. As Murthy plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty wrote in 2023, “Documents we have reviewed on discovery demonstrate that government censorship was far more wide-ranging than previously known, from election integrity and the Hunter Biden laptop story to gender ideology, abortion, monetary policy, the U.S. banking system, the war in Ukraine, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and more.
“There is hardly a topic of recent public discussion and debate that the U.S. government has not targeted for censorship.”
And it wasn’t just under Biden; recall how the “deep state” brought pressure to bear in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Nowadays the mainstream acknowledges the laptop was authentic and there were potentially newsworthy things on it.
Sanctions by Another Name
Then there’s the whole shoe-on-the-other foot problem.
Washington accuses Beijing of the same acts Washington has carried out in other countries for years.
“Though it is common for governments to spy abroad,” wrote Erin Hale for Al Jazeera in 2023, “Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet, including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.
“For billions of internet users outside the U.S., the lack of privacy mirrors the alleged threat that U.S. officials say TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, poses to Americans.”
And the complaint that Beijing might use TikTok to spread “disinformation” to an American audience? Isn’t that the reason Beijing either banned or severely limited Google and Facebook within China’s borders?
Oh, that’s right: When they do it, it’s authoritarianism but when we do it it’s “saving democracy.” Got it.
In many ways, the TikTok ban is analogous to Washington’s freeze of the dollar-denominated assets held by Russia’s central bank.
It’s sanctions by another name — indeed another unprecedented act of economic warfare that won’t go unnoticed by leaders of other countries around the world.
It doesn’t bode well for the U.S. firms operating overseas: “Other countries will fling this ruling in our face when our diplomats protest a foreign government’s hostile state action taken against X, Meta or YouTube,” tweets former State Department aide Mike Benz.
“We’re gearing up for a diplomatic showdown with the EU over internet censorship,” he points out, “& our diplomats will be saying ‘you can’t do that to X’ & they will fling back ‘the US took even more drastic action, you banned TikTok entirely!’”
To be sure, the Supreme Court hasn’t issued its ruling yet.
But the clock’s ticking with that Sunday deadline written into the law. And as noted above, the justices were more than sympathetic to the government’s arguments.
You might have already deduced that the Sunday deadline comes one day before Donald Trump becomes the 47th president.
We mentioned at the start of the year that Trump filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices not to overturn the law, but to put its implementation on pause.
Trump “takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute,” says the brief. Rather he asked the court to take its time deliberating the case so that once he takes office his administration can “pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in this case.”
What that resolution looks like is hard to say. Presumably it entails a sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets to an American buyer.
To date, no one has stepped forward with a credible offer. TikTok parent ByteDance has made clear that even if it sells, it will retain the algorithm that makes TikTok so valuable.
The justices might well end up punting — put the ban on hold long enough to send the case back to lower courts for further review. Then we can see what sort of “political resolution,” if any, takes shape.
Shut up and Obey
A couple of final thoughts — first about the paternalistic attitude of every decision-maker in this process.
I first noticed it when Trump tried to ban TikTok with a stroke of the pen in 2020. If there were a genuine threat, he could have used his bully pulpit to rally young Americans around the necessary sacrifice of their silly dance videos, right?
But he made no such effort. And in the following years, no one involved in the Uniparty endeavor to ban TikTok did so either.
No one in Congress or the Biden administration tried to sell the American people. No persuasion, no cajoling, no imploring the people to perform their civic duty.
Astonishing, really. Evidently, your only duty is to shut up and obey.
In arguing the government’s case before the Supreme Court on Friday, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said as much — that the feds are entitled to shield you and me from certain viewpoints because we might fall for foreign propaganda.
What condescending claptrap.
“The First Amendment recognizes Americans are adults and capable of making determinations for themselves about what to believe,” tweets the civil liberties litigator Jenin Younes. “Government doesn’t have the right to act as a guardian and determine we must be protected from certain ideas.”
Whatever the outcome for TikTok, danger looms as long as this law remains on the books.
That’s because the law doesn’t target only TikTok. It gives the president — Biden, Trump, whoever — the authority to impose the same ban on any website or app at his discretion if it is owned by a person or company in a “foreign adversary country.”
In other words, it starts with TikTok — but it definitely won’t end there.
For whatever it’s worth, Trump’s incoming AI-and-crypto “czar” David Sacks understands that — as he tweeted last spring…
We give the final word to Glenn Greenwald: “Embracing a precedent that will allow the government to ban social media apps every time there's some claim that something going on there is threatening to national security is a precedent that I promise you that anyone who supports, in this case, will end up regretting.”
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets
P.S. Thanks for indulging us one of our single-topic editions today. As for markets, the big story is oil — up nearly 3.5% and over $79 for the first time since August.
The mainstream narrative is that oil’s rally starting on Friday is the result of new U.S. sanctions targeting Moscow. But that just doesn’t add up. Washington has already sanctioned Russia’s oil industry to a fare-thee-well; there’s nothing new that can truly move the needle. We’ll see if some clarity emerges by tomorrow.
The major U.S. stock indexes are a very mixed bag — the Dow up a half percent, the Nasdaq down more than three-quarters of a percent.
The S&P 500 is splitting the difference, down a quarter percent, still holding the line on 5,800 but sitting at a two-month low.
Treasury yields continue their climb higher, the 10-year note now 4.78%.
“Mr. Slammy” is showing up for the precious metals today — gold down more than $30 to $2,659 and silver down 76 cents to $29.59. No love for crypto, either — Bitcoin is below $92,000 for the first time since mid-November.
To some extent, the weakness in stocks and precious metals can once more be chalked up to dollar strength — the U.S. dollar index knocking on the door of 110 for the first time since late 2022.
We’ll unpack it all as we get back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow…
