The Power of the Bogeyman

The “TikTok ban” and how to use a foil to mobilize for action.

Should TikTok be banned? Maybe, but not only because a foreign adversary country owns it, but because they are harming people and, in that, they are not alone.

DALL-E gives us its interpretation of the tension between control and the collective action for freedom in the digital age.

I normally stay away from supporting bans or prohibitions - other than in the most egregious or criminal situations. The provocation from the opening question, however, is appropriate in the context of this week’s US Congress bipartisan bill that, if approved in the Senate, will require the Chinese-owned company ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell their US operation or be banned from all U.S. devices. The bill first passed the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party with a 50-0 vote and then was approved in the House 352-65 in a rare show of unanimity and bipartisanship. The subject’s fate is still uncertain and, before it gets to the president’s desk, it still needs to pass a Senate vote.

How? Enters the bogeyman: the control by foreign adversaries, currently defined as these six countries or regimes: China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Maduro Regime in Venezuela. I don’t want to be dismissive of possible classified briefings that the Select Committee may have had access to leading to the 50-0 vote, and nor do I want to minimize the potential threat of foreign ownership of an app being used by a third of US adults as of January of 2024 and the associated data access. Controlling and regulating this environment is neither a bad idea nor a novelty - just look at how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restricts foreign ownership of broadcast or common carriers. This is an example of how using the Chinese Communist Party and foreign adversaries as foils led to action.

However, there are other mechanisms through which both foreign adversaries as well as our government are accessing our data, notably via data brokers as spyware. The current discussion about TikTok should shed light on these additional ways in which our data is being collected and our privacy is being challenged.

There at other reasons why we should consider restrictions to TikTok and, while we are at it, reflect on how domestic-owned companies should be subject to similar guidelines. The authors of an article in the Frontiers of Psychiatry Journal, did a bibliometric analysis of 501 publications in the field from 2013 to 2022 concluding that “Social media addiction may lead to negative consequences for adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships. In addition, social media addiction may also lead to other risks such as sexting, social media stalking, cyber-bullying, privacy breaches, and improper use of technology.” A recent 2023 article, in the Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine Journal, examined the association between social media use and loneliness during COVID-19 isolation, researching 1649 adults in Norway, the UK, the US, and Australia. The “study showed that more time spent on social media was associated with higher levels of loneliness” and “that people whose motive for using social media is for maintaining their relationships with other people feel lonelier than those who spend the same amount of time on social media, but who do it for other reasons.”

Addiction’s negative consequences and aggravated loneliness are not unique to TikTok. Neither are the techniques for data surveillance and appropriation. As we look into how to regulate, drive a sale, or ban TikTok we should also look at how the US owned internet platforms today are not regulated nor made liable even in the most extreme cases. Moreover, we need to enact federal privacy regulation to protect our citizens’ rights from external or internal threats.

On the evening the bill “to protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications” was voted, a friend of mine texted me asking me if I agreed with Congress. He only gave me a yes or no response. I answered “no”, primarily motivated by thinking we could do better than the CCP. We should not be banning Chinese products for reciprocity, we are better than that, was my knee-jerk reaction.

This article is a more nuanced and extended response. It is a yes, I agree, but with caveats. First, refine the language to avoid creating undue State capacity and learning from the mistakes from the Patriot Act. Second, my answer continues to be that we need to create a regulatory environment that will prevent abuses and hold the abusers liable. We should acknowledge the issues beyond national security and design the appropriate safeguards. Above all, we need to continue to educate our children so that they are ready to live in a world dominated by these technologies.

I have recently read Sherry Turkle’s memoir, “The Empathy Diaries.” Towards the end of the book, she reflects on what she calls a “psychoanalytic first principle: If you do not teach your children to be alone, they’ll only know how to be lonely.” Our generation has a lot to do before we pass the baton to the next one. Let’s do it.