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.
