Washington DC’s red herring on TikTok’s ‘digital fentanyl’

Capitol Hill on Wednesday finally reached consensus on something (anything!) when the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force China to sell TikTok. Thank God for bipartisanship, cried the Washington flame keepers. The two parties might disagree on Vladimir Putin, US democracy, border security, taxing billionaires, Israel and everything else, but at least they know a national security threat when they see one. Please colour me sceptical. In addition to the fact that bipartisan unity is heavily overrated — Iraq war anyone? — there is at best sketchy evidence that TikTok poses a remote national security threat. What the addictive app does represent is an easy, symbolic way of pretending to be serious. Even if there were revelations of TikTok’s plans to subvert US democracy — and to underline, there aren’t — the digital app would come about 45th on the list of things Congress should do.

As the parent of a teenager, any harm to TikTok is a cause for celebration. In the memorable phrase of the former vice-president, Mike Pence, TikTok is “digital fentanyl”. It is hard to overstate the degree to which the China-owned app has swallowed the time and mindshare of an entire generation. But this bill would do nothing to address that. Assuming the Senate agrees with the House, and with Joe Biden, who has urged its passage, and regardless of whether ByteDance would be permitted by Beijing to sell the app to a US owner, the fentanyl will keep coming. The same of course applies to social media apps owned by US companies like Alphabet, Meta and others, including their copycat versions of TikTok. Pence has no objections to fentanyl per se. He just doesn’t want it to come from China. So this bill is no cause for parental celebration.

Here is what a serious bill would look like. It would impose privacy regulations on the sale to third-parties of any data collected by any social media app, regardless of who owns it. Right now, China and Russia, and any other adversary, can buy all the personal data they like from owners like X, Instagram and YouTube. They can also manipulate those sites for their own causes. To be clear, there is no serious evidence China has yet attempted the kind of fake news operation along the lines of what Russia’s Internet Research Agency (owned by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin — remember him?) carried out through Facebook in the 2016 US election. That does not mean China won’t try it at some point. If Beijing wishes to mess with voters’ heads, however, digital America is an open door. Being forced to divest TikTok would not change that.

A serious bill would also protect America’s children from social media. The evidence of harm to America’s adolescents of spending an estimated seven to nine hours a day on the internet, most of which is swallowed by social media apps, is now beyond doubt. I would urge Swampians to read Jonathan Haidt’s summary of that evidence in The Atlantic. All the data shows a steep increase in the rates of teen depression, and suicides by girls in particular, since 2010, which is when a majority of Americans got a smartphone. Other research shows that teenagers use these apps because their peer groups do. They would happily give them up if their friends did. This is a classic collective action problem. Only government can reverse the negative externalities of teenage social media addiction.

Alas, Congress is no closer to such action than before. Indeed, the appearance of having taken a tough step on TikTok may even reduce the chances of the kind of privacy and child protection that America desperately needs. Wednesday was a bad day for China. I shed no tears for Beijing. It has banned virtually pretty much every single US-owned social media and search app. But it was also a good day for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and others. In that respect, nothing has been achieved for US national security, citizens’ privacy, or the mental wellbeing of its children. Brooke, am I being too cynical? If you add in Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s takeover of US Steel, it seems there is a lot of protectionism around in Washington nowadays masquerading as something else. Should the US pass a Europe-style digital privacy act?

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Recommended reading

• For further reflections on this subject, read Julia Angwin in The New York Times: “TikTok could disappear but the problems it poses will remain.”

• My column this week looks at the “banality of chaos” around Donald Trump. Steve Bannon called it flooding the zone with shit. I chronicle Trump’s previous five days to give an illustration on how it is impossible to keep up, or remain shocked.

• Finally, read the FT’s Martin Wolf on the future of “communist capitalism” in China. Things aren’t looking too good. 

Brooke Masters responds

Ed, I agree that there is a lot of cynicism built into the attacks on TikTok. It is much easier to complain about Beijing than address the time-sucking qualities and pernicious influence of all the big social media apps. I’m not convinced that the European digital privacy law has done much either.

Like you, I don’t think forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok would solve the societal problems, but as a financial reporter, I can’t help gaming out what would happen if the bill actually passed the Senate and was signed. The obvious buyer would be one of the existing Big Tech giants. But letting them snap TikTok up would only increase their power over the American psyche. Yet there is also something unseemly about former US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin’s manoeuvring to get control himself. He was a major player in the Trump administration when it was forcing TikTok to move its data to the US. But the government can’t just take TikTok without compensation — that will hurt not just China, but the 60 per cent of ByteDance shareholders who are international investors, including US pension funds. It’s hard to see how this whole mess is going to have a positive outcome for anyone.