My Take | Why Washington wants to kill TikTok
- Twitter files released by Elon Musk implicating US government agencies in censorship, disinformation, private data breaches and psychological warfare show a level of compliance by the social media giant and its American peers that could not be relied on with the Chinese-owned TikTok
Elon Musk and his big mouth have been terrible for his once-worshipful investors. But thanks to the owner and chief executive of Twitter, the company has released a treasure trove of confidential files detailing routine interference, censorship and influence operations by an alphabet soup of US security, military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the CIA, which incidentally, isn’t supposed to operate domestically.
Those clandestine and under-the-table operations essentially aim to monitor, control and censor social media platforms to filter information and influence public opinion. They are, in other words, precisely the accusations that US politicians and senior security and intelligence officials have levelled against TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
TikTok has to go
It has always looked ridiculous that the world’s most powerful government is going after a media platform used mainly by young Americans to record amusing encounters and funny shenanigans. It is now identified by both leading US political parties as a direct threat to national security.
If you go through some of the Twitter files – whose significance has been compared by one investigative journalist to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the official “secret” history of the Vietnam war – you would have a much better understanding as to why that is so.
Quite simply, US security, intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies can access confidential data and control its flow not only with Twitter, but also with all the other big social media platforms and telecoms companies. This government practice is nothing new, but dates back to the telegram and telephone operators as well as rail and postal delivery services of the past two centuries, and then of course, the wireless telecoms and internet companies in recent decades, as Edward Snowden has shown.
The problem with TikTok is that it is a Chinese-owned company even though many of its executives in the United States are Americans. As TikTok has become as big and popular as Instagram and Twitter, it has been negotiating with US officials since the Donald Trump presidency to satisfy their security demands. Ironically, this means the US government has to do everything by the book. While officials can be sure that US media companies will be discreet, the same is not true of TikTok, especially when it comes to interference and influence operations.