I support banning TikTok. Given the amount of time I used to spend on social media, I have no doubt a large portion of American teenagers and young adults are addicted to social media apps.
That is not to say I believe the app to be a pure force for evil. Beyond the relatively few influencers whose income outpaces their marketable skills manyfold, there are small business owners whose livelihoods depend on the app. If the app does get banned, I do not view the transition to different apps or websites lightly, since not all customers will follow.
Additionally, I am almost a free-speech absolutist (although I do not build my personality around it), so supporting the removal of a platform for expression makes me seem hypocritical. However, the “almost” part does not come lightly.
If you asked me if TikTok has given critical information or content controls to the Chinese government, I would say it’s possible they have not. The thing is, if Beijing asked ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company, headquartered in China) tomorrow for such information or control, would ByteDance be able to refuse? No.
Still, many TikTok users have questioned the value of their personal information. If no one has already taken advantage of this information for profit, then what is the harm? In their minds, any damage that could be done would have already been done; therefore, the situation cannot worsen. However, this view is grotesquely simplistic.
First, it is hard for the United States to independently verify there are no backdoors to TikTok’s security. The worst manifestation of this is Beijing could get access to the passwords of all its users — passwords whose variations may be shared across multiple accounts. Given the lack of cybersecurity awareness emanating from people engaging in this debate, I am willing to bet many of them have the exact same password across many of these applications.
That is scary for reasons beyond cyber theft or account ransom. If current events led to unusually high tensions around Taiwan or the Sea of Japan, a sudden flood of cybercrime would impact our ability to respond. Individual Americans’ capacities to care about critical allies would disappear once they lost access to money or accounts. Suddenly, sending a carrier strike group on a freedom of navigation patrol would seem less like a show of solidarity and more like a reckless waste of taxpayer dollars.
Furthermore, “legitimate” influence operations use no personal data but can slowly achieve similar results. Consider the filtering of some issues that may otherwise concern activists, like the Hong Kong Umbrella Protests or the Uighurs, combined with the amplification of certain issues like Gaza. This would help maintain TikTok users’ focus on issues that portray the American government in an unfavorable light (rightfully so) while smothering content on Beijing’s misconduct.
The less we know about Beijing’s misdeeds and the more we know about Washington’s misdeeds, the less likely the American public is to support any military or economic action in defense of Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea or any number of other allies who certainly have their own problems but are on the right trajectory when it comes to democracy, freedom and inclusivity.
Thus, it is infuriating when I hear some TikTok users rhetorically ask what is so bad about the Chinese government if groceries are so cheap there. If I had a nickel for every time a liberal or conservative asked why a dictatorship’s produce was so cheap (ahem, Tucker Carlson), I would have quit school. Now, as we see a wave of users move to the Beijing-affiliated Red Note while Trump considers revoking the ban since he thinks he won the youth vote, I question where our sanity has gone as we pursue 10-second highs at the cost of lasting security.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
