We’ve noted how the GOP’s obsession with TikTok is… weird and superficial. Guys like Ted Cruz or Brendan Carr will suffer absolute embolisms about TikTok (and TikTok only) to get on cable news where they’ll be portrayed as good faith privacy reformers. While simultaneously refusing to pass a privacy law or regulate dodgy data brokers (who routinely sell consumer data to everyone, including Chinese intelligence).
At the same time, the GOP’s “solution” to TikTok is somehow even more superficial and stupid: a blanket ban that doesn’t work. You’ll recall how it took college kids all of forty seconds to realize they could bypass the Montana TikTok University ban by simply switching their phone from Wi-Fi to cellular, something the GOP brain trust still hasn’t gotten its collective noggin’ around.
Case in point: Senator Ted Cruz and friends recently proposed a new law that would cut schools off from FCC broadband funding if they refuse to ban social media platforms:
“Led by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the bill would require that schools prohibit youths from using social media on their networks to be eligible to for the E-Rate program, which provides lower prices for internet access.”
The E-Rate program is an essential cornerstone of ensuring affordable broadband access to schools, and tethering it to your weird, half-assed obsession with TikTok is just kind of gross and inane. As is the assumption that modern social media networks don’t provide any educational or research value.
Again, there’s no thought or realization that such bans are trivial to bypass by simply switching a phone from the school Wi-Fi network to cellular. There’s no real coherent understanding that these folks are wasting legislative time and resources on a plan that won’t work, for a problem they don’t understand.
That’s not to say that TikTok doesn’t play fast and loose with consumer privacy in hugely problematic ways. But you could ban TikTok nationally, immediately in a fireworks of patriotic splendor, and still not fix the actual underlying problems that create and embolden TikTok.
Without meaningful privacy laws, there’s no shortage of companies that are every bit as dodgy on privacy as TikTok. Without data broker regulation, there’s a massive industry of barely regulated dodgy data middlemen selling elaborate profiles of your daily habits — that in many instances go well beyond the kind of data TikTok is collecting — to any idiot with a nickel. The government’s apathy stems from, in part, its abuse of this lax oversight to help it avoid having to get warrants.
The GOP pretends to be concerned that TikTok is being exploited to spread propaganda, but the party very clearly supports propaganda (if it’s theirs). The GOP pretends to be concerned about consumer privacy, but opposes even the most basic internet privacy law or efforts to regulate data brokers, who are every bit as compromised, far reaching, and ethically dubious as TikTok ever was.
I maintain a lion’s share of the GOP obsession with TikTok is rank xenophobia (“it’s simply outrageous that non-white people from overseas created a popular alternative to U.S. social media networks, sending money we’re owed by divine decree overseas!). Another big chunk is Facebook lobbyists seeding TikTok hysteria among gullible GOP natsec rubes for anti-competitive reasons.
The end result is, as usual for the GOP, a kind of simulacrum of competent governance that wastes time and money creating impractical non-solutions for problems legislators don’t understand. Or do understand, but don’t want to actually fix it (obstructionism) — and want to distract you.
