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Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China Ari Paul ([link removed])


AP: TikTok content creators file lawsuit against Montana over first-in-nation law banning app

“Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” a lawsuit argues (AP, 5/18/23 ([link removed]) ).

There is an emerging consensus in US foreign policy circles that a US/China cold war is either imminent or already underway (Foreign Policy, 12/29/22 ([link removed]) ; New Yorker, 2/26/23 ([link removed]) ; New York Times, 3/23/23 ([link removed]) ; Fox News, 3/28/23 ([link removed]) ; Reuters, 3/30/23 ([link removed]) ). Domestically, the most recent and most intense iteration of this anti-China fervor is the move to ban the Chinese video app TikTok, which is both a sweeping assault on free speech movement and a dangerous sign that mere affiliation with China is grounds for vilification and loss of rights.

Several TikTok content creators are suing to overturn “Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights,” on the grounds “that the state doesn’t have any authority over matters of national security” (AP, 5/18/23 ([link removed]) ). TikTok followed up with a lawsuit of its own (New York Times, 5/22/23 ([link removed]) ). The app is banned on government devices at the federal level and in some states (CBS, 3/1/23 ([link removed]) ; AP, 3/1/23 ([link removed]) ), but the Montana law is the first to bar its use outright.


** Momentum for a wider ban
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USA Today: Lawmakers announces bipartisan legislation that would ban TikTok in the US

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R.-Wis.), a congressmember seeking to ban TikTok nationally, called the app "digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans" (USA Today, 12/13/22 ([link removed]) ).

Republicans see this as momentum to push other state bans. Lawmakers of both major parties are pushing legislation that “would block all transactions from any social media company in or under the influence of a ‘country of concern,’ like China and Russia,” a move that would ban TikTok in the US (USA Today, 12/13/22 ([link removed]) ). Such a sweeping ban is popular among voters, especially among Republicans (Pew, 3/31/23 ([link removed]) ; Wall Street Journal, 4/24/23 ([link removed]) ).

The reason for the swift action is the app’s Chinese ownership. Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) said, “Having TikTok on our phones is like having 80 million Chinese spy balloons flying over America” (Twitter, 2/28/23 ([link removed]) )—a reference to one of the most overblown news stories of 2023 (CounterPunch, 2/7/23 ([link removed]) ; FAIR.org, 2/10/23 ([link removed]) ). FBI Director Christopher Wray (CNBC, 11/15/22 ([link removed]) ) told Congress of his "national
security concerns" about TikTok, warning that

the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations.... Or to control software on millions of devices...to potentially technically compromise personal devices.

The New York Times (3/17/23 ([link removed]) ) reported that the

Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens, including several journalists who cover the tech industry, by the Chinese company that owns TikTok.


** Social spying hypocrisy
------------------------------------------------------------
Al Jazeera: US says China can spy with TikTok. It spies on world with Google

While US lawmakers railed against the possibility that TikTok might be used by China to spy on US users, Al Jazeera (3/28/23 ([link removed]) ) reported, the "US government itself uses US tech companies that effectively control the global internet to spy on everyone else."

The funny thing here is that if the US government is worried about social media being used for surveillance, it should look inward. The Brennan Center (8/18/22 ([link removed]) ), which is suing for Department of Homeland Security records on its use use of social media surveillance tools, notes that "social media has become a significant source of information for US law enforcement and intelligence agencies." The civil liberties organization notes that "there are ([link removed]) myriad ([link removed]) examples ([link removed]) of the FBI and DHS using social media to surveil
people speaking out on issues from racial justice to the treatment of immigrants."

Even as Congress mulls a ban on TikTok, Al Jazeera (3/28/23 ([link removed]) ) reported, the Biden administration is seeking "the renewal of powers that force firms like Google, Meta and Apple to facilitate untrammeled spying on non-US citizens located overseas." Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives Washington the power to snoop on the social media conversations of users both foreign and, through the use of so-called "backdoor searches," ([link removed]) domestic. While many governments spy, the Qatari news site pointed out, "Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet."

“They’re making a big stink about TikTok and the Chinese collecting data when the US is collecting a great deal of data itself,” Seton Hall constitutional law expert Jonathan Hafetz told Al Jazeera. "It is a little bit ironic for the US to sort of trumpet citizens’ privacy concerns or worries about surveillance. It’s OK for them to collect the data, but they don’t want China to collect it.”

Accordingly, the Biden administration is demanding the platform be sold to rid itself of Chinese ownership, insisting that failure to do so would result in a nationwide ban. The New York Times (3/15/23 ([link removed]) ) said this stance “harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.” In 2020, FAIR (8/5/20 ([link removed]) ) raised the possibility that Trump would leverage anti-Chinese sentiment to go after the app, but now a Democratic administration could finish what Trump started.

Don’t assume the president is bluffing, either; FAIR (7/1/21 ([link removed]) ) reported that the Biden administration, citing “disinformation” as a reason, “shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, including ones based in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine,” a list that included Iranian state broadcaster Press TV.


** An orchestrated campaign
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WaPo: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

Facebook parent company Meta paid a GOP consulting firm to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22 ([link removed]) ).

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a for-profit tech company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. ByteDance disputes that it has the ability to track US citizens (CNBC, 10/21/22 ([link removed]) ), and the Chinese government denies that it pressures companies to engage in espionage (New York Times, 3/24/23 ([link removed]) ). But TikTok, like other for-profit social media platforms, routinely collects data on users to sell to advertisers (MarketWatch, 10/25/22 ([link removed]) ; CBC, 3/1/23 ([link removed]) ).

Global Times (3/24/23 ([link removed]) ), published by China’s Communist Party, declared that the “witch-hunting against TikTok portends US's technological innovation is going downhill.” “The political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility,” the paper added.

The party paper (3/1/23 ([link removed]) ) acknowledged that TikTok still has a profit “gap with Google, Facebook, etc.,” but maintained that “its growth momentum is rapid,” and thus “directly threatens the advertising revenue of several major social networks in the US.” The paper said that “if the US does not go after TikTok and curb its growth in the relevant market, several leading US high-tech and networking companies” would feel a competitive sting.

Chinese state and party media have hyperbolic tendencies, but this accusation of a financial motive for opposition to TikTok isn’t far-fetched. In fact, the Washington Post (3/30/22 ([link removed]) ) reported that

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.

Such a move might seem comically cynical, but it’s working. Corporate anti-competitive power has joined an alliance with Cold War fears about the Chinese to influence US policy, to the extent that the government is contemplating censoring media now available to 80 million Americans. (By comparison, CNN.com reportedly has 129 million unique monthly visitors ([link removed]) in the US, the New York Times brand has 99 million and FoxNews.com has 76 million.)


** Unprecedented silencing
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Pew: More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites

A growing share of TikTok users are regularly getting news from the site (Pew, 10/21/22 ([link removed]) )—"in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years."

A media silencing of that magnitude seems unprecedented; the Biden administration’s seizure of Middle Eastern media websites is troubling, but Press TV isn’t as central to US life as TikTok is. “In just two years, the share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022,” Pew Research (10/21/22 ([link removed]) ) reported, which stands “in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.” TikTok has announced plans to share its ad revenue with its content creators (Variety, 5/4/22 ([link removed]) ), and the platform played a role in the rebounding of US post-pandemic tourism markets (Wall Street Journal, 5/8/23
([link removed]) ).

TikTok has argued that bans would hurt the US economy (Axios, 3/21/23 ([link removed]) ), although the nation’s top lawmakers are unmoved by this (Newsweek, 3/14/23 ([link removed]) ).

The urge to cleanse the media landscape of anything related to China has been roiling at a smaller scale for some time. Rep. Brian Mast (R.-Fla.) wants to ban Chinese government and Communist Party officials from US social platforms (Mast press release, 3/22/23 ([link removed]) ; Fox News, 6/14/22 ([link removed]) ) because, as he said in a press statement, “Chinese officials lie through our social media.” Singling out the sinister duplicity of Chinese officials overlooks the reality that mendacity among politicians is a universal cross-cultural phenomenon.

The Trump administration required “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government, granting them a designation akin to diplomatic entities,” affecting “Xinhua News Agency; China Global Television Network, previously known as CCTV; China Radio International; the parent company of China Daily newspaper; and the parent company of the People’s Daily newspaper” (Politico, 2/18/20 ([link removed]) ).

In an effort to paint the Democratic Socialists of America-backed ([link removed]) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) as some sort of shadowy foreign agent, Fox News (2/2/23 ([link removed]) ) ran the headline, “AOC, Other Politicians Paid Thousands in Campaign Cash to Chinese Foreign Agent.” But buried in the clunky language of the news story is the fact Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians, including at least one Republican, simply ran campaign ads in Chinese-language newspapers owned by Sing Tao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper company. Candidates routinely buy ads in ethnic media to reach voters, but Fox offered this innocuous campaign act as evidence of Chinese treachery within our borders.


** Fear of an Asian menace
------------------------------------------------------------
Guardian: DeSantis signs bills banning Chinese citizens from buying land in Florida

Gov. Ron DeSantis presents Florida's discrimination against Chinese nationals as a move to counter "the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state of Florida” (Guardian, 5/9/23 ([link removed]) ).

It's worth remembering that fear of an Asian menace in the United States led to the nation’s first major immigration restrictions (CNN, 5/6/23 ([link removed]) ) and mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (NPR, 1/29/23 ([link removed]) ; FAIR.org, 2/16/23 ([link removed]) ). It continues to lead to racist murder (CNN, 6/23/22 ([link removed]) ) and other anti-Asian crimes (Guardian, 7/21/22 ([link removed]) ).

“Inflammatory rhetoric about China can exacerbate the sense that Asian Americans are ‘racialized outsiders,’” Asian-American advocates said during the Covid pandemic (Axios, 3/23/21 ([link removed]) ). Florida's recent ban on property ownership by Chinese nationals (Guardian, 5/9/23 ([link removed]) ) shows that the impulse to scapegoat is alive and well.

If official fears about TikTok collection of user data—which is central to the business model of all major US social media companies—can override First Amendment guarantees and deprive Americans of a major communication platform, then one has to ask what more the states and the federal government that are already frothing with anti-China hysteria are willing to do next.

In this sense, the people suing to keep TikTok available in Montana aren’t simply fighting for their access to a content platform, but are repelling a political impulse that in the past has led us to blacklists and McCarthyism ([link removed]) . Let’s hope these video makers are victorious.
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Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton
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