Banning TikTok is Not about Foreign Espionage

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

Only for factual correctness, I’m going to point out that President Trump (the little punch line who could) signed some executive orders going after TikTok and some other things. I think that “PT Harm ‘Em” isn’t who we should be focused on though. It’s all of those Washington DC fuckers we should be worried about, because there is a lot of support from Congress about banning TikTok, as well. And that other guy, Joe “I’d like to drop the Vice” Biden has it out for Facebook. They keep talking about national security, spying, and election interference… because the voters are apparently too dumb in their eyes to vote for who they want to be president. This must be how they think it works:

 

PROSPECTIVE VOTER: You know who I like for President? Joe Biden!

(Signs into Facebook and sees a Russian paid ad.)

PROSPECTIVE VOTER: You know who I like for President? Donald Trump!

(Signs into TikTok. Watches some video talking smack about Trump promising, still to this day, that COVID-19 is going to just disappear soon.)

PROSPECTIVE VOTER: You know what I should do? Print a hundred thousand false ballots and mail them all in just to screw over Trump, even though we don’t vote for the president, the Electoral College does, which is why Clinton had more votes and Trump is our president.

CHINESE GOVERNMENT: Now we know that this prospective voter does all his social media browsing while pooping. The world will be ours!

 

The Destro Effect – The biggest flaw in the plan to ban TikTok is that the world isn’t a thirty minute cartoon series. What I mean by this is that Cobra Commander would come up with some amazing plans to take over the world, and his plans would be on the verge of working brilliantly. Then he’d realize that most of us actually wanted a Destro action figure, but felt that Cobra Commander was kind of necessary after we already had Destro. He would get jealous, betray Destro in some odd way, and it would cause the otherwise flawless plan to fail. Why not just implement the same plan again, and this time don’t betray Destro because his action figure was so much cooler? The reason is that the audience doesn’t want to watch Cobra Commander do the same plan every episode until it works. We want new, inventive plans each episode.

Banning TikTok isn’t like stopping the M.A.S.S. Device though. If China is using TikTok to spy on the US, and it gets banned, the Chinese government isn’t going to go, “Well, we need a new, inventive plan. There’s no way we can just release thousands of games and productivity apps, all with some thin explanation as to why it needs permissions to everything that your phone (likely made in China) has that can be used to spy.” Why would they revisit a plan that was working? Stupid meddling kids.

 

The Hillary Email Effect – What this comes down to is that too many people who are high up are playing fast and loose with national security. It’s not the fault of the tweens who are pouring orange juice all over the kitchen floor while their horrified mother wonders how she gave birth to such a moron. It’s not the fault of the common people. We can only really repeat what the news has told us, and China already knows what our news told us. It’s people like Hillary Clinton and Ivanka Trump using insecure servers for emailing. It’s people in the military putting questionable apps on their cell phones and getting tracked when they go to work. China doesn’t care about what I do at work or with my free time. It seems to me that I can have a mindless entertainment app that I mostly used to watch a talking dog (Yep!) without China learning our deepest secrets.

This is the problem with having a bunch of people in office who don’t understand technology. Why are we presuming that TikTok is spying on us? It has something to do with their ability to access our phones clipboards. Once again, I ask is it just TikTok that is doing this. If it took us this long to figure out what TikTok was doing, what about all the other stuff we download by the millions? And again, it doesn’t matter to national security what I download. I don’t have that interesting of a life. In fact, almost none of us have interesting lives.

 

What Are They Afraid Of? – All this didn’t even start with TikTok. It started with Trump flipping out about Twitter fact checking him and calling to repeal Section 230, and it started with Joe Biden also calling for repealing Section 230 because of Facebook selling ads to the Russians. It’s actually really interesting that we have two major parties who can’t seem to agree on some seemingly easy things to agree on, like black lives mattering and that we don’t want people getting sick. We might disagree on some of the detail specifics of these things, but the overarching themes should be nearly unanimous. But in the interest of election and/or reelection, our two major parties are staunchly holding the narrative that they will never see eye to eye on anything, except that Destro is clearly the cooler action figure.

Yet the two major parties agree on a couple of things very clearly. They agree about repealing Section 230 and they agree about banning TikTok. What’s interesting to me is that neither of these moves will stop the companies from doing what they do. Facebook will still sell ads to Russians, Twitter will still fact check Trump, and if TikTok is spying on us the Chinese government will still be spying on us. It’s not about these platforms.

The politicians in the US hate the fact that the common person has a voice, because they can’t control the narrative. There are millions of people in many, many countries fact checking Trump every day. If Twitter was just a news outlet, their fact checking would be limited, but with millions of users on neighbourhood watch, shit doesn’t get by.

Joe Biden doesn’t give a shit about Russian ads. He knows that he’s likely to win as long as the election is fair. Joe Biden doesn’t like the fact that he couldn’t control the Tara Reade narrative. It was highly hypocritical for Anderson Cooper who accused Trump of sexual assault during a debate based on a stupid recording to then turn around and not ask Biden about actual allegations. Most people don’t really believe Tara Reade, but also most people weren’t going to let the media sweep it under the rug after the Brett Kavanaugh stuff.

 

That’s what they’re afraid of. They don’t like that we have an informed public. Yeah, I get there are a lot of dummies out there saying some really dumb stuff, but there are also people on all sides of the political landscape calling out bad behaviours. I think this attack on social media is a hugely important issue that has nothing to do with party politics. It’s a major free speech issue.

I keep going back to George Orwell. Between “Animal Farm” and “1984” there are a lot of things we should be aware of. I’ve noted that while we were initially worried about the surveillance aspect of “1984” that recently it’s been more about the newspeak. Newspeak is a method of reporting that is used in “1984” to give the illusion of being informed while not really giving any real information. A good example of this is “Hillary’s Emails.” You can say those two words, and it will cause some to be angry and some to be defensive; and yet, most of them couldn’t tell you a whole lot about what the scandal was. It’s shorthand to create talking points that lack any real information. Orwell couldn’t know what social media would be, much less how it would work politically. Many people do just spout the newspeak rhetoric of their party, but all it takes is enough people to be paying attention and have enough time to post for the politicians to lose control of the narrative.

I think the oddest thing to me is that we have a free flow of information in the US. Anything that the general public knows, the entire world knows. We also have spoken out against dictatorships that ban information about democracy and other things we agree with. The next logical step would seem to be that we would be happy for other countries to be part of the overall discussion of our world. We’re not trying to stop the BBC news from giving their thoughts on the election, so who cares if the Russians run some ads? We’re not behind the Iron Curtain trying to protect our people from the propaganda of the world. We believe, ostensibly, in freedom of information.

It’s not the elections. It’s not foreign opinions. It’s fear of an informed public calling for real change rather than repeating talking points. It’s the fear of losing control of the talking points. I picked on Biden earlier about not being able to control the narrative of the sexual assault allegations. Well, if we’re being honest, the only thing that keeps Trump’s presidency going is because everyone has to be in lockstep with his narrative. If you break ranks, then Trump’s lackeys will pile on you the way that progressive Twitter will pile on you if you don’t apologize at least once a day for the pain you’ve inflicted on the world by being white. Trump can’t stand that people call him on his bullshit constantly.

And if you really watch many of the politicians that currently hold office in the three branches, you’ll notice that they can’t stand it either. We have to be careful, because these very same people mostly agree on destroying social media, and opening up any website that isn’t reporting “state sanctioned” news to litigation for misinformation. The very same people who we excuse every day by saying, “Well, politicians have to lie to get reelected,” are the people who want websites to get sued out of existence if someone posts misinformation.

Chris McGinty is a blogger… for now. The moment that Blogger can be sued for something that Chris McGinty might one day write, Chris McGinty will no longer be a blogger, and Blogger will be a news website, as long as they stick with the narrative.