In the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt—literally minutes after the bullet grazed flesh—social media networks dumped a polluted sewer of misinformation and conspiracy theories into the minds of the American public. The worst offender was TikTok. Whether the misinformation and conspiracy theories came from the left or right didn’t matter: The assassination was all a Republican false flag operation, or the work of transgender activists, or an intervention from the deep state, or whatever. America’s adversaries don’t care who says what, after all, so long as the fury rises.
That day, they must have been as surprised as they were pleased. By allowing TikTok, an entity controlled by the Chinese government, to operate in the run-up to the 2024 election the US has given its largest geopolitical rival a pipeline to pump polarization right into the mass of its citizenry. It could shut off that pipeline. It cannot find the will to do it.
The idea that shutting down a social media network is incompatible with American values and the First Amendment will not survive a passing glance at history. In 2022, I published a book called “The Next Civil War,” analyzing various undercurrents churning amid the current political turmoil: The hyper-partisanship of its politics, the spiking inequality, and the decline in collective trust in its institutions. They have numerous causes. But if I were forced to pick a single point of origin for the collapse of American political sanity, that moment would be the Reagan Administration’s 1987 decision to overturn the Fairness Doctrine, a regulation that had required broadcasters to give equal time to contrasting views on controversial subjects. This was the beginning of the great fracture: Of Americans siloing themselves into ever smaller intellectual and spiritual worlds, the slow erosion of the power of the fact, the death of a common language by which American citizens could discuss their differences.
