In Defense of TikTok

“Like most members of Generation X, I had never used TikTok, but when the political push to ban it intensified in 2023, I pulled out an old smartphone and installed TikTok to see what the fuss was all about.”

I teach a class called “Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics” all around the world, and one of the main messages in the class is to encourage everyone to think critically for themselves and not believe something just because “everyone knows that.” As Confucius wrote, “If everybody hates something, you’d better check into it. If everybody loves something, you’d better check into it.” I usually follow this up with an analogy that rings true for most Americans: In our politically divided country, sometimes Democrats are right, and sometimes Republicans are right, but when the two parties agree, we are almost always in big trouble. To wit, a wide bipartisan majority of the House of Representatives recently passed a bill banning TikTok (or at least forcing Chinese investors to divest their ownership of TikTok), which, for me, immediately raised a number of red flags.

One of the main arguments for banning TikTok is that TikTok, Inc is a subsidiary of Beijing-based company ByteDance operating in the United States. As such, there is the concern that Beijing might use TikTok to spread its views via an influence operation. Then, there is also the risk that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) might engage in data harvesting regarding the social media activities of American citizens. This has also been raised to defend the proposed ban. In this essay, I will focus on the first of these issues, which I find to be more worrying as a pro-free-speech Libertarian and will then deal briefly with the data privacy and national security concerns as well.

Like most members of Generation X, I had never used TikTok, but when the political push to ban it intensified in 2023, I pulled out an old smartphone and installed TikTok to see what the fuss was all about. Why did so many people want this app discontinued? When I posted a short video on TikTok about why I joined (and what I was trying to understand about the “dangers of TikTok”), the responses I received were mostly of the flavor of “On TikTok, I can say ‘F— Joe Biden’ or ‘Vaccines don’t work’” or “TikTok allows me to talk about Hunter Biden’s Laptop” without being censored. Personally, I think the Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines performed surprisingly well, and I have no personal animus toward the Biden family, but it was clear to me from these comments that the federal government has less control over content moderation on TikTok than it has on Facebook, YouTube and X.