The Comfort of Noise
Understanding the protectionism surrounding TikTok
The United States Supreme Court has ruled to uphold a law in Congress that bans social media app TikTok if it is still owned by Chinese parent company Bytedance, and many users aren’t happy about it. Despite politician’s claims of national security being at risk due to its parent company, despite its status as a private organization based in China, being at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party and its ranking members, users profess foul play and have since taken on reactionary measures that further embrace Chinese-owned media.
Furthermore, hawkish conservatives insist this oversight has or will lead to TikTok becoming a mouthpiece for the CCP, turning ByteDance into a foot soldier for CCP officials and Xi Jinping, and indoctrinating Americans—especially TikTok’s very young, impressionable American audience— against the United States Government, or worse in favor of the Chinese.
Conservative paranoia about civil disobedience is one thing, but since the reality of the ban has become more pertinent for TikTokkers, many have begun performing incredible logical leaps, jumping to new, untested Chinese-based apps, signing away their rights and data to these apps. Ironically, the conservative backlash to TikTok may just create the national security threat they had hoped to prevent.
There are a few key issues to ask to better understand the contours of a TikTok ban and the internet “refugees” it is sending to arguably far less reliable apps. Of course, understanding whether or not the conservative paranoia is warranted. From that, understanding the backlash to the ban and the “refugee” movement from TikTok to other, explicitly Chinese apps will further allow us to ask the harder question that’s come to my mind during all of this: what, truly, is the cultural value of apps like TikTok? Just how far does the influence of our short form nuggets of information, art, or absurdist comedy truly span, if at all?
Dissidents to the ban have insisted that any data or security concerns over TikTok are overblown. They claim, correctly, that US brokers and platforms take the same personal data being used by sites like TikTok and sell it to the highest bidder, creating information environments that are deeply invasive and susceptible to exploitation at the hands of hackers, predators and other malicious actors online. In their eyes, the exploitation that might happen under Chinese based companies could not nearly be as bad or as morally wrong as what is already happening. Some users, in their infantile rage, have gone so far as to turn the situation around: to claim that the US is abjectly worse, and that the ban is plainly fascist.
But their logic is incredulous, founded more in a hatred of the ban and its conservative proponents than any real analysis regarding the safety of TikTok. Firstly, a private status means nothing in China under the rule of the CCP. This is an unavoidable reality. The forcible disappearing and “accidental” deaths of tech CEOs who so much as circumstantially sound as if they appose the CCP, its officers, or the “core socialist values” the party enforces through its police, rigged courts or security state is commonplace. What the hawks get right, unfortunately, is that the ambiguous nature of social media algorithms and the excessive oversight of the CCP on companies based in China does create an environment that could be cause for concern.
And yet, this concern is purely skeptical, isn’t it? Possibly not. In 2023, a former executive for TikTok claimed in a court filing that the company delegated a special “superuser” credential—a god credential, he claimed it was called—especially to a committee of CCP officers. He further claimed that these members could and had used this credential to track freedom protestors in Hong Kong and other civil rights activists. They had access to their locations and devices, information about their networks, identifications for SIM cards, IP addresses and communications between one another, all information that would be available through data collected by TikTok.
Yet even this claim lands on shaky grounds. The reality is the threat, if any, of Chinese interference on TikTok may not be entirely baseless. But it’s also hard to prove.
And yet, the popular discontent seems sure—far too sure to have given it any thought, for that matter—that the ban is bullshit. In their self righteous assurance, they have flocked to other, Chinese-owned social media to stick it to the hawks and show them they’d rather bridge cultural divides and defy the phony concerns of a few old white guys in order to affirm the value of these international economic and cultural engines. Most notably, they’ve fled to Xiaohongshu, or “RedNote,” to assert this righteousness.
On RedNote, many users have gleefully embraced the welcoming arms of existing users who have welcomed the TikTok refugees. A great cultural divide has begun to be bridged as a result of this melodramatic mass migration. And yet, the same oppressive data privacy laws, or lack thereof, in China apply to RedNote, if not moreso. These data laws further allow CCP officials to access data on you, as a user of the app.
It would be easy for there to just be one clear, moral answer here. But clear, moral answers are the claims of idiots and sycophants. The reality is that the technical nuts of a TikTok ban may be overblown, but the larger concerns about internationally based apps in countries that are political opposed to the United States, to freedom of speech when it opposes the ideological values of the state, and to civil rights activists and dissenters are very, very real. The Chinese Communist Party is not your friend, and even if TikTok and RedNote are, just handing away your data, your location, and your identity isn’t brave, cool, or clever.
The information market made available in the US—to domestic and foreign buyers—is also, simultaneously to this first problem, real and problematic. However, it is also known. I happened across a post on Instagram about the TikTok ban, and one commenter mentioned the fact that his information was already being sold off to the highest bidder by Meta, and proudly (I could imagine the gleaming face of a man who imagined he had figured it all out) outed Facebook for four separate suits he had won money from because of improper use of his data by the company. And yet, it is precisely because of that event that giving it to a Chinese-based company is worse, not the same. In the US, we can sue the companies buying and selling our personal data, especially when its misused. Those protections are enshrined in our legal system, they codify our discontent with this invasion of our privacy, and open the floodgates for us to challenge it as we rightfully should.
This, under the CCP, will never be the case. Misuse of data is the whole point. The CCP has a set of ideological values that must always be the case, and the legal system is meant to enforce that reality on users, domestic or foreign. American users of RedNote have begun to see and feel Chinese restrictions, truly, for the first time on RedNote as well, finding content about being nonbinary or posting one’s upper body harassed by Chinese users or removed altogether. These strict rules apply to political and social commentary as well, enforcing the state’s narrative over any free or honest investigation into these issues in any meaningful way. Chinese users have had to remind Americans they are not allowed to criticize the CCP, its history, or China’s imposition over Taiwan, the independently democratic island nation south of the mainland.
The melodrama posed by TikTok dissenters to the ban is not based in an honest assessment of its particulars or the nature of Chinese censorship over social media based in the country. The raw, absolute good and evil these actors need to reinforce their hatred of conservative hawks is simply unavailable, and they have chosen, incredulously, to overlook important facts that do leave room for concern about flocking to Chinese applications in order to prove a moot point about the enduring evil of the United States. This moral fallacy is a fairy tale. The more Americans cling to it, the more they will, in fact, become complacent in the CCP’s oppression of its people, and the normalization of those oppressive, authoritarian tendencies around the world. Which would be a richly dramatic irony, being that these users are fleeing exactly to put a middle finger up to “fascism” at home.
Of course, then, what does this say about the cultural value of TikTok, of short form content in general? Edits upon edits drop daily capitalizing on the emotional trauma of seeing TikTok go. New fake updates claiming the app is going to go dark any day now arrive and send users into a frenzy, despite the fact that the Trump administration has vowed to protect the app, and senators have introduced legislation to extend the deadline to allow congress to reconsider. But, my question for users becomes this: is this really worth protecting as a cultural icon?
It has become well established just how bad short-form content and social media is for our mental health. There is a direct link between a consumption of short-form videos online and risk for depression in adolescents. The ability for social media to build community has instead become a breeding ground for small, concentrated deluded echo chambers, where stratified classes of online users live in alternate realities from one another based on the beliefs and experiences of their members, and their members alone. Rather than access to information allowing us the opportunity to see the “truth,” and get an objective worldview, we actively reject it and choose information and social hubs attuned to our interests, experiences and beliefs. Especially regarding politics, we not only ignore the world if it doesn’t confirm our biases, but we’re meaner about it, too.
When you combine these obviously negative effects with data concerns, why should we suddenly clamor to protect our temporary cultural icons? Why should we cling to content that is making us less open minded, less kind, less informed than we could be?
This is what makes the concern for complacency with Chinese authoritarianism on other, less reliable apps so real. Because despite all the negative effects we’re fully aware of on our existing apps, we just don’t give a shit. The comforting cacophony of noise that comes from TikTok gave us a sense of purpose—the delusion of truth it spoonfed to us gave an illusion of understanding and connectedness to the world and the truth. We don’t want any truth outside of it. The reality is, even if there is absolutely no qualifiable connection between TikTok and the CCP, its value as a cultural development is more sad and harmful than it is some righteous step into a glorious future. Like all tools, short form content can be used to introduce and integrate more complex and beautiful worlds of art, education and entertainment together. It can, and should, be used as a stepping stone into new music, videos, film, debates, and academic discussions.
The problem is that isn’t how it’s being used. It is becoming the end-all-be-all, and its literally melting users’ brains. The future of TikTok, in spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling, is not set in stone. But perhaps this is an opportunity for us to reevaluate our relationship to short-form content as a cultural device and as a personal daily tool. Perhaps we can build it into a better, more constructive one. If we can take the time to do it.