Should the U.S. Ban TikTok?

Derek shares his thoughts on the question of the moment in tech and tech politics.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

In the following excerpt, Derek explains why he’s diving into the potential TikTok ban and what his current thoughts on it are.

Derek Thompson: Today, the question of the moment in tech and tech politics: Should the U.S. ban TikTok over fears of Chinese influence? Last week, the House voted to pass a new piece of legislation that would prohibit TikTok from being available for download in the U.S. unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divested by selling TikTok to a government-approved buyer within six months. Obviously, this legislation still needs to be passed by the Senate, signed by the president in order to become a law. But for longtime listeners of the show, you might remember that a bold tech prediction of mine last year, 2023, was that a divided Congress would unite around TikTok fears and pass legislation just like this. Now, depending on how nice you want to be about my skills of prognostication, I was either completely wrong here—after all, it did not happen in 2023, when I thought it would—or perhaps just off by six months.

One of the meta things that some people are confused by, including, apparently, TikTok, is that the goal of banning the app sort of went nowhere for 18 months and then just suddenly sprang into view. Now, I was not going to do a show about this topic this week. I think it’s snuck up on all of us. But I think I’ve received more direct requests for a TikTok episode than I’ve received requests for any particular thing in a long time. So today, you’re going to get my thoughts, all of them, about TikTok and at length. We’re going to talk about the best and worst arguments for and against the ban. I’m going to tell you where I tentatively stand on this issue, even as I’m looking forward to talking to more experts in the coming weeks, especially, of course, if this legislation gains momentum in the Senate.

Let’s start for the moment on the question most people seem to be focused on, which is the motivation. How strong is the case for prohibiting Chinese ownership of TikTok? I think the most provocative analogy that I have found persuasive was best articulated by the Substack writer Matt Yglesias. Matt said, “Imagine the year is 1975. We’re in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and a state-owned Soviet firm asks to buy the TV channel CBS. What would happen? Well, what would happen is we’d say, ‘Go kick rocks.’ That’s what would happen. A Soviet media company with plausible ties to the government of a geopolitical adversary should not have control or veto power over American news and information.”

Now, is that a persuasive metaphor? Is it a useful metaphor for thinking about the U.S. today, its relationship with China, TikTok, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), and its relationship to China? Well, I thought about this for a long time. And without taking the analogy at faith, I think we should say that for it to hold up, for the analogy to be useful, we should have to prove three distinct things. Number one, that TikTok is indeed, among other things, a source of news. Number two, that the Chinese state has a history of directly influencing some of its largest companies. And number three, that the Chinese state has a demonstrable interest in controlling speech around the world. And I think if we look at this situation clearly, we see that all three things are true.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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