In the Odyssey there was a magic flower that whoever consumed it would be so addicted to it, they would think of nothing other than eating more Lotos (λωτός ).
“So delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home”
Historian Herodotus claimed that this plant still did exist in Libya, but none was found and yet others claim it was marijuana. In Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief the Lotos Eaters were reimagined to be patrons of a casino that would lure people inside with hedonistic pleasures of free food, drink, and unlimited gambling that they stay there until they die. Though today the real Lotos is the app TikTok.
Why do I claim this? TikTok has over 3 billion downloads and 800 million daily users (not including Douyin in China) and almost half of the population of the US are Daily Active Users. Any user of TikTok will know that it’s the Bachanel Buffet of Dopamine. Many people will relate to stories of meeting up with friends and the friends are zombified staring at a screen and swiping to the next video mere seconds after the first and giving apathetic “uh huhs” to whatever you say. It may have made your friends develop “ADHD” where they can’t watch any somewhat longform content (other than some fast paced movies) or read articles or books.
But is that reason enough to ban it? I don’t think so. My personal belief is very libertarian that all things that don’t hurt others should be legal, however, by choice we should be free to avoid dangerous or debaucherous pursuits, since if they were all banned, it wouldn’t be freedom nor a sign of moral upstanding. The lack of access is similar to a lack of freedom of speech—fundamentally unamerican and disastrous for a free society (though I don’t think we are a free society but that’s beside the point).
So why even consider banning it? If you ask ChatGPT, it will say 1. explicit material can be shown to children; 2. Chinese espionage; and 3. cyberbullying. But the truth is more insidious. If you ask US Senators: TikTok sends data about its American and other global users to the CCP and TikTok is probably subject to Chinese-directed censorship that tries to nudge U.S. users into supporting CCP goals.
TikTok starts with a simple value proposition: Do you want to not ever be bored again? Do you want an audience? Do you want to be famous? Do you want money? Do you want your opinon to matter? Do you want to not feel left out? It reels in millions with this but actually hides the greatest cyberthreat under a thinly vailed guise of a lip syncing app turned social media phenomenon. If it really is a cyberthreat, that is reason enough to ban it. India seems to think so.
So let’s try and prove that.
We start with a scrappy Beijing startup ByteDance. This company first created a news app called Headlines or [Jinri] Toutiao (今日头条). This was an AI based news curation agency that only had one editor: the CCP. It was the first AI genereated propaganda machine. AI has been used in China for control in many ways most prevalently with their social credit scores. Headlines and the many other AI tools allowed China totalitarian control over its own country, but how would it control other countries? As part of China’s 13th 5 year plan (20 5-year plans until 2049 the 100 year anniversary of the CCP where China was supposed to be the eminent superpower) China aimed to strengthen its soft power. China is also far behind the US (research shows that China’s economy is vastly overestimated by most estimates) so for them to surpass the US, they would need to not only grow, but also make the US decline. How would they do this? An app that would capture the hearts and souls of the world but could spread China’s message.
ByteDance tested this with Douyin. Functionally indentical to TikTok if you’re over 14 (at first) but for China (except there is a page that promotes Chinese values called positive energy but don’t be fooled by videos saying there’s no degeneracy on Douyin, there is plenty… the main difference at this point from TikTok is that the cute girls dancing and baiting simps are Chinese rather than multiracial and nothing that goes against party values stays up which does lead to slightly less degeneracy I guess). After Douyin succeeded, it was time for the West. (I want to preface this that 15 of ByteDance directors work for CCP Propaganda outlets) ByteDance spent over $3 million per day on advertising to get TikTok famous. It became an overnight sensation and became even bigger after purchasing musical.ly. TikTok uses many psychological tactics to make the addicition stronger. Why spend billions on advertising? Because they make billions from user data and the increase in China’s relative soft power is worth trillions.
But don’t all tech companies do that? Before addressing the specifics, at least our companies are punished for data breaches such as Facebook gettting fined $5 BILLION for a data breach much less consequential than a daily breach TikTok does every second people use it. TikTok’s digital fentanyl goes one step further. TikTok admitted to tracking journalists (physical location), faceprint, voice prints, browsing history, messages, contact list, circumvent Google and Apple privacy policy, and even keylog you in their very popular in-app browser (currently the number one most popular site in the world). The CEOs recent hearing revealed more proof it’s spyware. This Reddit post goes into more detail (though who knows how much of it is real, however, from the other examples I linked, it probably mostly true, the executing zipfiles on Android is incredibly scary and would make ~30% of teenager’s devices owned by China whenever they want) and concludes comparing the somewhat transparent but still incredibly intrusive surveillance of non-TikTok social media to TikTok is comparing a cup of water to an ocean. The security threat is so self-evident that the Pentagon told all members to have not just themselves but also their children uninstall TikTok on all devices.
How powerful is TikTok’s algorithm? TikTok posters (is that what you call them?) say the “For You” page is too accurate, closer to reading a mind than something they mentioned outlooud. Its accuracy is self-evident to anyone who has used it but its influence is also absurdly powerful. As Naval Ravikant said on JRE, “the day is coming that people realize these social media companies are picking the next politicians.” We are giving China the power to elect whoever they want (just like they have the power to turn off the UK’s lights). China is not just the place we send our trash (which they now reject) or manufacture our cheap goods (which increasingly other places are doing). They are a threat to US hegemony and other countries’ sovereignty. Russiagate (the WMD of this generation as likened by Matt Taibi) and to a lesser extent mail in ballots (though more legitimate) cast doubt on the integrity of our elections. Even if TikTok doesn’t affect it, the lingering doubt is itself a catalyst for further political schisms and discord. “Ceasar’s wife ought not even to be under suspicion.” But in reality it could be much worse. Without even engaging in information warfare, propaganda, and fake news, just by promoting pro China candidates and throttling anti-China candidates (like our less popular social media already does) that could affect elections immensely. More likely than not though, China could take a more active role in electing the next president actively censoring content the candidate they are colaborating with wants censored and spreading propaganda. They have already 5x their spending on influencing America and that’s without TikTok (and not counting sex spy honey pots, infiltration of academia, the corporate world unless you complain it’s racist, and more I won’t continue because that could be its own separate post and this author already did it well). Politics is often a game of favors and if the President is elected because of China, that’s a big favor to return.
Would China exercise this power? That’s a no brainer. They actively hack far less important databases in America. Criticize China, have your services dropped like when 76ers were no longer broadcast in China and it cost them $400M for their owner’s pro Hong Kong message. They tracked journalists (mentioned earlier), have a history of IP theft, they hacked hotels to know who stayed there, they hacked Equifax (why do they need this data?) and our second largest insurer Anthem. They have effectively created a dossier of every American from these hacks (yes even if you think you have nothing the Chinese government wants, they still want your data) and in tandem with data they get from TikTok can implement their social credit scores for those citizens (goodbye my social credit) which can only be good news for Zhong Xina.
Have they exercised this power? Nothing too overt, but they have. Buzzfeed (of all places) broke a story that US data has repeatedly been accessed from China. Even Anonymous mentioned the problems with TikTok data access. How many CCP members can access US data? Any of them. In his press conference, TikTok CEO Shouzi Chew said that the data is not in China, but where you put data does not matter. It doesn’t matter that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is almost entirely owned by Silicon Valley and Wall Street investor firms (which is why selling TikTok to a different company wouldn’t matter if there is still a single tie to China) like Sequoia and KKR. Who can access it does matter. Private companies are hardly private since every company is subject to China’s National Intelligence Law since 2017 which forces companies and individuals to turnover any data the government wants (while keeping cooperation with the government a secret). The TikTok CEO insists user data is private but in accordance with the aforementioned law, he must keep cooperation with the government a secret. Meanwhile, TikTok has openly censored things on the US app that goes contrary to China’s view of things whether you agree or not including the the Muslim cultural camps in Xinjiang, info about the day nothing interesting happened June 4th, 1989, and most problamatically for the US government, steer people away from content that promotes genuflecting to an actor turned money laundering extrordinaire and president of Ukraine. Rather they push pro-China messages.
Chinese mandatory reading 杜骗新书 and 孙子兵法 famously state 兵者, 詭道也 or in english, all warfare is based on deception (and America knows how much China values this). They want TikTok to seem like an innocuous app. China is not targeted the same as Russia or North Korea since it has maintained appearances and played nice with global superpowers. Until 2018, China had a positive opinion in the US. The soft power global take over is disgused well and the problem is much worse than people thought, even back when Trump was trying to ban TikTok and people called him xenophobic, Chinese people in America were warning of the threat. Now TikTok is pulling out all the stops to try and not get TikTok banned. TikTok influencers are sent to the Capitol and they are hiring politically connected PR firm SKDK founded by Biden administration people.
There are also far smaller issues but still substantial problems with TikTok that would be reason enough to ban it. In 2019, ByteDance paid a $5.7 million fine to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for illegally collecting personal information from kids under 13, a violation of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Stupid TikTok trends are also pushed to people who are below the age limit since TikTok has no age verification, so much so recently Italy pushed to limit TikTok after a 10 year old girl died. (Douyin does and doesn’t have these stupid trends to my knowledge though this could just be the Chinese people aren’t as stupid since I’ve never heard of these trends in South Korea or Japan and they don’t have age verification). TikTok algorithms are amoral and promote sex and drugs to minors (“Kinktok” mentioned here is also banned in China. TikTok (and not Douyin) promotes depression, eating disorders, anxiety, incels, suicidal thoughts, and more things that kill the society from the inside. Oh, and there’s also the cyberbullying ChatGPT mentioned but that’s non-unique to TikTok. 不戰而屈人之兵,善之善者也。Win the war without firing a shot (like covid? but this is worse). This promotion of values that passify China’s enemies has only increased over time. While TikTok started as the same as Douyin, slowly it becomes the ultimate weapon of the CCP. They want to disrupt our society.
However if we ban it, we must think of the consequence. I argued that our actions in Russia would only push them to create a system without us (which I was right about), so shouldn’t we think the same here? That would be a great argument if US media was not already banned in China… We are finally on parity with our closest geopolitical rival in the most important arena in digital war: data. When data is the currency to create powerful AIs and make informed decisions, having information assymetry is a fool’s errand. Mike Solana writes a great post (top half) about this and how this isn’t a free speech issue.
What’s the problem if we ban it? Nothing. Another company (maybe Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or Twitter revives Vine) can fill in the shoes and you’re back to watching cute girls dancing and those cute girls are back to making their millions with no marketable skills. Our regulation of the algorithms wouldn’t be any easier as AI is a blackbox that we have no clue how it makes (most of its) decisions. We only know somethings are censored (as ChatGPT users may have found out) but not how the backpropogation in a Neural Network comes to a decisions of what it’s doing. We can only steer it somewhat by putting in rails of where it can or cannot go, but not where it will go.
Let’s go over some counterarguments to banning TikTok. The simple argument against it is if the government can ban TikTok, they can ban CNN (would probably be good but I’m against it) or Fox News or even InfoWars (which is already mostly banned). I think this is a flawed argument since things already can be banned (the InfoWars example) but more importantly, no matter how bad American propaganda is, at worst, it is funded by a foreign government, not directly controlled by a foreign government. I don’t think we should ban Xinhua or RT, but RT and Xinhua doesn’t influence a vast majority of our population and push them into destructive tendencies and brainwashing them. The spying is not a valid reason for banning TikTok even with their egregious overstepping since that is possible to solve via the App Store and Play Store and even if not, our data is at risk in a billion ways and our own government does that. The real reason to ban it is the influence China has in destroying our culture and deciding our policies through algorithms. Some idiots compare this to Facebook trying to control minds. Facebook (or should I say Meta) does not have a vested interest in the downfall of America. While American society is mentally miserable and many horrific trends are not manufactured by TikTok but rather just broadcasted by TikTok, if horrific trends happened on YouTube or the algorithm heavily promoted society destructing principles, we could at least force them to change it or slap them with a fine. We’ve also already banned many media in the form of the Espionage Act censoring, banning, and imprisoning whistleblowers or restricted media by not taking questions from specific outlets, or retroactively changing data/not releasing data to the public. We are fine with executing Julian Assange but not executing TikTok which even if you did belive Assange was the ultimate criminal, TikTok could do what he did (humiliate the US) times a billion. The NYT claimed “the government can’t just ban free speech or expression without very strong and tailored grounds to do so and it’s just not clear that we have that yet.” I didn’t know when the founder penned the 1st ammendment they meant protecting the right of a hostile foreign government that doesn’t believe in any of those freedoms to brainwash our population en masse. Why don’t we just solve the data harvesting of all social media instead of banning TikTok? The harvesting is not the main problem, also we can ban it and also solve the data harvesting problem later. The final argument is that kids like this app so we shouldn’t ban it. Ok, if you give kids fentanyl they’ll love it as well. This digital fentanyl that spies on you. Also, ban it and you can just remake this app and get the benefits for the US. People claim that the brainwashing is not a problem since 15 year olds are mature enough to make their own decisions and we shouldn’t be coddling them. No one is mature enough to discern the truth or know information is hidden from them in an information warfare and kids or even young adults are not equipped to deal with algorithms manufactured to make them addicted and waste away their lives. Your child or you are fighting against multibillion to multitrillion dollar information war and psychological experts hellbent on getting you addicted and pushing destructive content. This destructive content does not exist in China (since they are authoritarian and censor a lot of things) but if it were a US company it’d be reigned in. This is not asking other people to raise your kids. I would personally not let my kids anywhere near social media, but when the carrot TikTok dangles is too delicious for most to resist and the pains of social isolation for not using it can also cause severe strife. The Lotos eaters were of all ages and varieties.
If we do not ban TikTok, China will control the narrative about any conflicts in the future. Just as Chomsky pointed out about MSM as puppets for billionaires “bending facts..capitalizing off of fear and creating villains and strawman” pushing fake news, TikTok is that same puppet for the CCP. It seems like a jump that videos of girls dancing or comedy sketches would brainwash you into supporting China in the war with Taiwan but they only have to drip that content in once in a while and subconsciously you’ll start to believe it and it will be normalized. When people’s livelihoods depend on this app and its algorithm, and they see pro Taiwan content gets no views, they might think this isn’t popular with their audience and/or no one thinks like them. Though it would not be this overt. China no longer needs to buy social media companies, the own the biggest one. This will create millions of Zhong Xinas. The Trojan Horse does not reveal its danger until years later. Think of it how a monopolist will have loss leaders for years until all competitors are pushed out and then price gouge. Be concerned about what they can do not what they are doing. The most likely scenario is that China pushes anti-war (not pro China or anti-Taiwan) messages online. They could slow push misinformation. They can set up the same astroturfed movements during the Vietnam War that had the world’s hyperpower lose to farmers because the people back home were protesting the war. China silenced Hong Kong and Tibet so this is no stretch. They could easily get a few celebrities and influencers to say “no war with China.”
Yet, despite all this, I’m against the RESTRICT act. It is the Patriot Act 2.0. From the text I can see that the bill would allow the government to ban or takeover any online communication platform that is (pardon the vague term) “harmful to national security” and that even includes transactions? (probably crypto but I’ll talk about crypto in a different post).
This could be a Trojan Horse to go against anything they don’t like (such as Elon’s Twitter?). But what happens if you’re designated a “national security threat”?
Yeah that’s right, everything you own can be searched and accessed, probably including a police raid to obtain the information. But there’s no way they can do this without getting a near unanious vote from Congress on who is a threat, right? Wrong again.
And if you are confirmed a threat after a probably fake court proceeding? 20 years in jail and $1,000,000 fine.
This bill is the Fenrir wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Thus, the Ministry of Truth is born. This is worse than TikTok and our MSM promotes this and it has bipartisan support. Bipartisan support and consensus does not mean good.
Politician: "how can we destroy the 1st amendment?"
Lawyer: "find speech that the people are upset about, then make a big show of passing a law that stops that one thing, and we'll make sure the fine print covers all speech"
Paranoia about the RESTRICT Act is not unique to me and a few stragglers online. LTT (admittedly a blog) and Louis Rossman are even mentioning it. I'm not sure about the fine and jailtime for VPNs but it might be possible. The phrasing is so vague, but if it's true, China's great firewall will look like a picket fence by comparison. I've used a VPN in China and so have my friends. Every day the freeest country seems a bit less free. Russia and China (while still worse) feel better every day.
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1497307-the-restrict-act-supposedly-to-ban-tik-tok-will-probably-not-put-you-in-jail-for-using-a-vpn-it-mentions-even-very-futuristic-technologies/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xudlYSLFls8