(2024-03-13) ZviM On The Latest TikTok Bill

Zvi Mowshowitz On the Latest TikTok Bill. TikTok Might Get Banned Soon. This attempt is getting reasonably far rather quickly, passing the House with broad support.

It then passed the house 352-65, despite opposition from Donald Trump

The bill now goes on to the Senate. I see about a 43% chance it passes there within the month, and a 71% chance it will happen this year. Those numbers seem reasonable to me.

The main purpose of this post is to go over arguments for and against the bill, and also what the bill actually would and would not do.

I have long been in favor on principle of banning or forcing divestiture of TikTok. Then I saw the Restrict Act, and that was clearly a no-good, very-bad bill.

My view of the current bill, after a close reading, is that it is vastly better, and about as good as we could reasonably expect.

The good argument against the bill is the libertarian concern about expansion of government powers, and what else the government might do. I do not believe it should carry the day on this bill, but I definitely get why one might think so.

I continue to strongly be in favor, in principle, of banning or forcing divestiture of TikTok, if we could do exactly that and only that, without otherwise attacking free speech and free enterprise or expanding the power of the state.

TikTok continues to be Chinese spyware. It also continues to be an increasing point of vulnerability for China to put its thumb on American culture, politics and opinion

Is this bill a ban on TikTok, or merely a forced divestiture? A forced divestiture can still deny quite a lot of value, you were not previously planning to sell and now buyers have you over a barrel, but they are still very different things.

TikTok has been vehiment that this is an outright ban. They both keep calling it an outright ban, including when telling their users to call Congress, and also say that they would rather shut the app down than attempt to sell it.

Cato Institute’s Jennifer Huddleston looks at the constitutionality of the new bill, presumably with maximal skepticism. She points to provisions that would help the new bill pass muster, but says there are still severe first amendment concerns. Which there certainly should be.

The proposal requires the divestiture to be approved by the government, meaning that any proposed buyer would likely be open to significant regulatory scrutiny, particularly given the government’s current positioning towards acquisitions in the tech industry. (BigTech, anti-trust)

Even if the courts found the government’s interest to be compelling, they would then consider if there are less restrictive steps the government could take to resolve its national security concerns, such as the data localization steps proposed by TikTok’s Project Texas.

I would still be very surprised, although not utterly stunned, if the Supreme Court, which would inevitably rule on the matter, failed to uphold this law. These seem like obstacles that the government can comfortably clear.

AOC opposes the bill, she says on process grounds, note that she correctly calls it a ‘forced sale bill.’

This bill was incredibly rushed, from committee to vote in 4 days, with little explanation.

RTFB: Read The Bill

*So it needs to be some form of social media, of some kind: You need to have a million users, account creation and viewing and creation of user-generated content.

Would this, as some say, ‘apply to websites’? Certainly you can imagine websites that would qualify here. But most websites certainly would not qualify. This seems reasonably well drafted.*

Section 1.2g4 says ‘foreign adversary country’ is specified in section 4872d2 of title 10, US code, which currently I think says China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. I am curious about Cuba and Venezuela but it matters little in practice either way.

So what does this law do in practice? Is it a big power grab?

It lets the government shut down mobile apps, and to some extent websites, that are playing the role of social media, a messaging service or something similar , with a million or more users, while having substantial foreign involvement from our enemies list, right now mainly Russia and China, unless those apps are sold and control transferred, if the President determines the service is a danger to the national security of the United States.

As a practical matter, if ByteDance were to defy the United States, what would happen under this bill? We know the app stores would comply, but beyond that? If you already had the app installed, it might be difficult to get updates, but it would be hard for America to force you to uninstall. On Android you can side load. If you used a VPN, you could do whatever you wanted. If you were willing to navigate to the website, and they were willing to keep that website available, there it would be.

I think this is fine. An outlaw TikTok would presumably rapidly lose momentum in that world, while allowing current users to wind down more gradually. Alternatively, TikTok could divest.

How Popular is a TikTok Ban?

Nate Silver points us to Pew Research Center, which found it was very popular in March of 2023, and still popular in October 2023 but less so especially among Democrats.

One strong argument for banning TikTok is reciprocity. China has the Great Firewall. It completely bans Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. You can’t even access American TikTok.

Call Your Congressman

TikTok responded to accusations it was exercising undue influence over its users and our democracy on behalf of China and getting them addicted in unhealthy ways and trapped in bad equilibria where they cannot quit by directing its users to call into their congressman’s office and explain this was a ‘ban on TikTok’ and how much they relied on and spent infinite time on TikTok.

Anyway, at this point the calls flooded in, some to explain how desperately people needed TikTok, some because they would click whatever button the app told them to?

Alec Stapp: “The Chinese Communist Party can send push notifications to 170 million Americans from their favorite app” really should be the end of the debate

It has been known for some time that a voter calling their congressperson’s office, or writing a letter to their congressperson, has an oversized impact

At some point, it was inevitable that a tech company was going to weaponize this.

This instead predictably backfired. It misrepresented the bill. It drove home to everyone exactly what they were up against, and why they needed to take action, and also in a very practical sense made their lives worse, scared them and pissed them off. How would you react in this spot?

Congress reacted by having the TikTok bill, H.R. 7521, pass 50-0 out of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

TikTok Data Sharing

In the past, everyone agrees TikTok had a data sharing problem, where its user information was given to and used by ByteDance.

Then TikTok claimed it would silo all the American user data, which has been code named Project Texas (which, contrary to some claims, was developed by ByteDance during the Biden administration). ByteDance says it has successfully walled the data off. The Wall Street Journal report on this is highly skeptical

TikTok has said Texas-based Oracle—the inspiration for the unit’s name—is monitoring all the data that leaves Project Texas

But Oracle doesn’t monitor the data employees share with each other over TikTok’s internal messaging tools, according to people familiar with the data-sharing.

Project Texas started to informally roll back some of the data-sharing rules last spring.

Among the factors that are said to have spurred this latest outburst of legislative activity was a secret briefing last week by the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

Also via community notes we have this from June 21, 2023, that after ByteDance said under oath to Congress that Americans data has always been stored outside China, that this (at least at that time) continued not to be the case, and that ByteDance was forced to admit this

TikTok Promoting Chinese Interests

There is little doubt that China has total leverage over ByteDance if and when it wants to exercise that leverage. When the CCP cares about something, it happens

Jimmy Quinn: This needs to be pointed out more: ByteDance is part of the CCP’s military-civil fusion system. It’s possibly the most compelling reason to crack down on ByteDance/ TikTok

TikTok claims that in terms of presenting content they will ever and always be neutral. Even if that is their preference, they are lying, because the decision is not ultimately up to them. Regardless of how many orders have or have not yet come down from the CPP, ByteDance’s claims that they would never do as the CCP orders are not credible.

So for the obvious first example that reignited calls for the ban, it is known that TikTok is heavily anti-Israel, very differently from other platforms and from the American public.

Nate Silver: TikTok’s users are young, and young people are comparatively more sympathetic to Palestine than older ones — but not by the roughly 80:1 ratio that you see in the hashtag distribution. I

Timothy Lee: A study last year found that topics that aligned with the interests of the Chinese government receive wildly disproportionate attention on TikTok, while topics Beijing considers sensitive tend not to go viral on the platform

After this study was published, ByteDance reduced data transparency.

*even if you’re skeptical of circumstantial evidence like this, there are leaked documents that prove the company has done exactly the kind of censoring that the study found:

TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.*

Robin Hanson: Because we all trust the US government so much?
I would say to Robin Hanson and Justin Wolfers, fully trust absolutely not, obviously that would be crazy, and we have to be careful about exactly what powers we entrust USG and also the others with as well, but yes I trust USG or Musk or Zuckerberg to look out for Americans a lot more than CCP.

Tyler Cowen Opposes the Bill
His response struck me as remarkably similar to his position against taking government action on AI

Trump Opposes the Bill

Donald Trump met with billionaire investor and Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass, who holds a 15% stake in ByteDance. Shortly after, Trump started opposing the ban, despite having previously actually issued an order requiring divestiture back in August 2020, which Biden reversed while it was stalled under legal challenges.

To Be Clear You Can Absolutely Go Too Far

For example, here is Senator Tom Cotton saying “sitting down with TikTok’s CEO is ‘no better than meeting with Hamas or the Taliban.”

Conclusion

I see the case for forcing divestiture of TikTok as overdetermined. It is functionally Chinese spyware, with a history of lying about it and doing things like tracking journalists. China does the same to similar American companies. China seems to very clearly be using its influence to move public opinion

Is it perfect? No, the actual bills never are. But based on my reading of it, this is a bill I can support.