The Republican Push To Ban TikTok Has Very Little (And Dwindling) Real World Support
from the you-are-not-serious-people dept
We’ve noted repeatedly how the Republican obsession with TikTok is a hollow performance. This is a party that refuses to pass a useful privacy law (or to regulate data brokers). This is a party that generally couldn’t care less about widespread corruption, or its impact on national security.
Yet over the last three years, the press narrative has been that the Republican party supports a TikTok ban because they’re just that concerned about privacy and national security. Time after time, folks like Marsha Blackburn or FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr have enjoyed being portrayed on cable TV news segments as good faith privacy reformers.
It’s absolute gibberish. In reality, the Republican motivation to ban TikTok is a multi-tendrilled, bad faith affair.
Some of it is driven by racism and a desire to animate the similarly xenophobic base. Some of it is anti-competitive nonsense ginned up by Facebook, which doesn’t want to compete with an app they clearly haven’t been able to out-compete or out-innovate.
And some of it is just worry that the increasingly-authoritarian GOP, which has long embraced propaganda in the absence of popular or cogent policies, can’t control TikTok (or bully them away from moderating race-baiting political propaganda like they did with Google and Facebook).
The real GOP motivation for banning TikTok is lousy, and the implementation has been lousier. Most of the GOP bans on TikTok (which require endless billable legal hours to craft) so far have been bypassed by children in all of thirty seconds. Many of the bans have proven unconstitutional. And several of the state AG lawsuits against TikTok have proven to be baseless and largely incoherent.
Regardless of motivation (and despite three years of breathless press coverage presenting the GOP efforts as good faith), actual support for such bans is small and shrinking. One Pew survey recently found that the percentage of American adults who support a ban dropped from 50% in March to 38% now. And of course support for a ban is far worse among those aged 13-17 (18%) that actually use the app.
Even Republican support for a TikTok ban could soon be a minority position within the party:
None of this means that TikTok isn’t a problem. Like most companies, it over-collects too much data, monetizes it, fails to adequately secure it, and wants to sell access to it to any nitwit with a nickel. It was caught spying on journalists. Just like most American companies, it loves the idea of stripping away your legal rights. And yes, there are valid concerns about exploitation by Chinese intelligence.
But again, if you actually care about privacy and national security, banning a single app (clumsily) and then declaring mission accomplished is an empty performance.
Actually fixing these things at any real scale means shaking off congressional corruption to pass a halfway decent privacy law. Actually addressing the problem requires regulating data brokers, which operate at much greater scale and routinely sell access to far more data to anybody with a few nickels to rub together (including Chinese intelligence). Shoring up national security requires attacking corruption.
As an increasingly corrupt, authoritarian party, the GOP supports none of these things, and it seems like after several years of hyperventilation, the message is getting through that their “reforms,” when it comes to TikTok, are largely just sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Filed Under: gop, national security, propaganda, republican, social media, tiktok, tiktok ban
Companies: tiktok
Comments on “The Republican Push To Ban TikTok Has Very Little (And Dwindling) Real World Support”
Don’t forget ignorance. The vast majority of the tech illiterate population has simply no concept of how the internet works. It might as well be a net made of magic held in place by pixies. Even though the percent of the population who understands things today is much higher than say 30 years ago, you’re still talking about a vast minority of people. This is exceptionally true among older generations, and in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of really old people in the Republican party, moreso than the other.
It would not surprise me in the least if the people advocating for this ban legitimately have no freaking clue just how insecure everything is, and moreover, that they wouldn’t believe it even if they were told (as they likely have been a lot at this point).
In my experience, even when I plead with immediate family to be more secure with their personal info online, they simply don’t actually think it matters when there’s any sort of inconvenience associated with it. And they justify ignoring my warnings by saying, essentially, “well nothing bad has happened to me, so I don’t think it’s a big risk really.”
I can’t imagine that’s any less the case with individuals like, say, Lindsay Graham, who famously hadn’t ever sent an email, ever. Maybe he has in the past 3 years, I don’t know.
So I think the reasons given for ‘why’ in this article are true– it’s a great excuse to propagandize things and enflame the base about outsiders— but I think it’s also a complete and utter failure to appreciate or even believe how insidious and pervasive the lack of privacy protections are. I’m sure some of them are in on the scheme, but most of them? And especially The leadership? Completely fucking ignorant.
It’s the same reason the federal civilian government’s IT people have repeatedly gone to Congress and begged for more funding so that critical infrastructure could be updated. And then Congress turns around and responds like, “But the Norton Antivirus icon on my windows 7 office PC has a green check, what do you mean I’m insecure? Can you please make it stop asking me to upgrade to Windows 10? I’ll just use my personal iPad to work from instead so please let me join it to the internal WiFi network. Also, we might need to furlough your support team, there’s just not enough in the budget to pay them. Better yet, you need to just fire half of them and have your security engineers focus on fielding end user tech support calls. Now please leave, we need to discuss the congressional pay raise bill.”
That’s only a very minor exaggeration.
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Ignorance explains a whole lot beyond the TikTok ban as well. I especially see this among supporters of mandatory age verification systems – they think that it’s simply akin to having a bouncer at the door. I’ve had to explain numerous times to one of my parents that it works completely differently. The real-life equivalent of an Internet age verification system would be making a copy of an ID and sending it through the mail, and the recipient gets to keep the copy forever and do whatever they want with it. That’s not to mention the other security nightmares created by mandatory age verification.
I have often seen government officials promoting the idea of turning over passwords, be they login credentials for a court order or parental controls on social media. Any business that takes security semi-seriously does not store passwords. Unfortunately, the tech-illiterate get to call the shots on tech, and that political trend is only becoming more apparent, where people who know less than nothing have the final say in so many areas of our lives like education and healthcare.
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The other big hole in age verification is the assumption that the person who proved their age is the same person using the computer 30 seconds latter. Without becoming very intrusive, age verification only proves that the person verifying is of the required age, it does not prove that they continue to use the device from which the verification came.
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You guys should set yourselves up as some kind of vanguard to guide the ignorant masses who don’t yet think the way you want them to.
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Running The Asylum
In other news, the latest polls have discovered that the majority of tweakers do not support the outlawing of methamphetamine.
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You make a good point. Even though it has been banned, tweakers have little trouble getting meth. Just like young people will have little trouble getting around age verification.
The problem with Tik-Toc is, since it is foreign owned, the US government has less influence on the company as it attempts to exercise “narrative control” on the discourse in this country.
They have the same problem with AI, which is programmed to output the truth. There are calls for “responsible AI” meaning, an AI that doesn’t contradict government narrative.
The political party of “individual responsibility” wants a nanny state controlling dialogue in this country. If the government controls what you see and hear, they control what you think and say.
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For the time being, private companies exert far greater control over what you see and hear.
It these performative bills were locks, they’d be picked in under a second and shown on YouTube…
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I mean, the biggest youtube lockpicker is named “Lock Picking Lawyer”. maybe he can do double duty!
Not mostly 13 to 17 using it
I just had to comment that it’s not mostly 13 to 17 year olds using the app. I have it running 10 hours a day and don’t get 1 video from the 13 – 17 crowd meaning there are enough users not of that age to fill 10 hours of new content every day at 1-10 minute intervals.
If you object to a ban but vote for those that support one...
Unfortunately whether or not it has support from younger republican voters matters a hell of a lot less than whether it’s enough to change which party they’ll be voting for come election time.
the rest of the story
GOP calls to ban tiktok began when people on it made mockery of their god DT
Never used the app.
Good point.