The Authoritarian Push to Ban TikTok
The legislative body that spies on and lies to Americans is attempting to control speech, not fight misinformation
Earlier this month, Congress demonstrated its efficiency as a productive and bipartisan legislative body with its overwhelming support for the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Americans have been sold a bill of goods about the inability of our elected officials to ever get anything done, but these roadblocks only seem to appear when it’s time to restructure an institutional problem congressional donors have no interest in fixing. Things generally move pretty slowly in Washington; for outcomes the Beltway actually wants to achieve, the red tape and bureaucracy magically vanish.
Such was the case when it came time to advance legislation to effectively ban the TikTok app for millions of Americans, with the bill threatening to eventually prohibit its use receiving a vote a mere week after being introduced. The slim balance of power that we’re always told limits the House’s effectiveness was a non-issue, as the bill passed 352-65.
The plan to force ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to either divest the social media app to non-Chinese owners or see it banned in the US faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but President Biden supports the measure and is ready to sign it into law.
The proposal’s supporters insist that this measure is necessary to combat the Chinese government’s desire to spy on Americans and propagandize them by manipulating their algorithms. As is the case with so many issues that have robust support from both parties, what Americans are being told about this bill is equal parts made-up or overblown and isn’t tethered to reality. What is most important is the fact that this lie is being cooked up by a government with its own history of exploiting social media to engineer a pre-packaged narrative.
Let’s explore what’s actually in this bill, what makes it so dangerous, and how the US government’s own actions mirror the accusations it’s throwing at Beijing.
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The passage and future implementation of HR 7521, according to Senator Marsha Blackburn, “is our opening to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party and say, ‘you are not going to be able to control what our young people see and say and think.’”
This is the stated intention behind the push to coerce ByteDance, the $120 billion-revenue Chinese tech company, to part ways with an application used by some 150 million Americans. If the company fails to find a buyer within six months of the bill being signed into law, Google and Apple would be forced to remove TikTok from its digital app stores and the site would be made inaccessible to internet users in the US.
This proposed law is the brainchild of Republican Mike Gallagher and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi, respectively the chairman and ranking member of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. Little more than a year old, the committee spends all of its time whipping up irrational public resentment towards China and is an absolute waste of resources.
Pictured below are Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi during a wargame early last year with think tank Center for a New American Security to imagine how a conflict with China would play out.
The two lawmakers introduced the aforementioned bill on March 5. Just two days later, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50-0 to advance the legislation to the House floor. For a legislative body that often allows bills to linger for months and sometimes years without a vote, this was the equivalent of running a three-minute mile, but it was somehow managed without breaking a sweat.
As noted by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during a briefing earlier this month, Representatives Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi were provided with “technical assistance” by the White House while they worked on the specifics of the bill.
As always, the rhetoric about what this bill purports to do is vastly different from what the text of the legislation actually says. Upon closer inspection, HR 7521 is, rather predictably, a broad and ambiguous proposition that would expand the US government’s power to control speech even further.
For starters, the bill proposes astonishingly high financial penalties for any organization found to be in violation of its parameters. If the bill does eventually become law, Section 2 (d) mandates that such a fine could reach $5,000 per user. Given TikTok’s massive audience in the US, this is a figure that would swiftly stretch into the billions of dollars.
According to our elected officials, the necessity of such a severe consequence stems from the need to prevent the CCP from manipulating online content being consumed by Americans. The first and perhaps most glaring sign that this is complete horseshit is the fact that the word “China” doesn’t appear anywhere in the bill.
The first line does note that the bill is intended to “protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications, such as TikTok and any successor application or service and any other application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Ltd. or an entity under the control of ByteDance Ltd.”
However, this is where the specificity ends, with the remainder of HR 7521 referring to threats emanating from any organization that is “controlled by a foreign adversary,” leaving much to the imagination.
wrote about the dangers of these open-ended classifications last week:A “foreign adversary controlled application,” in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone “subject to the direction” of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough?
The Racket News founder further noted the absurdity of attempting to remedy this manufactured crisis with a scenario any reasonable American should fear even more:
“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?
On his own Substack, independent journalist
noted that a source familiar with the process explained to him that the specifics of the legislation were a closely guarded secret prior to the bill being introduced. In the March 15 post, Tracey writes:before introducing the bill, the key sponsors “wanted to keep it quiet all around,” as they correctly surmised that once the details of the bill gained wider public exposure, opposition would mount — just as happened in March 2023 when a precursor bill got derailed after public awareness grew of provisions delegating enormous new powers to the President to control speech online.
The ambiguity of the bill’s language should lead any honest observer to only one logical conclusion: the latest panic about harmful social media content is merely the next step in Washington’s yearslong quest to tighten control over the range of viewpoints Americans are allowed to consume.
This latest push over the past few years by the US government to monitor and control speech has been anything but subtle. What began as a desire to regulate the type of content people were allowed to read about Covid quickly melted into acceptable and unacceptable posts about the outcome of the 2020 election. Just a few months later, “misinformation” about the war in Ukraine was used as an excuse to censor content that deviated from the establishment’s preferred framing of the conflict. It now appears that the government doesn’t trust its own citizens to think critically about the devastation in Gaza either.
That the US government feigns outrage over “fake news” produced by foreign outlets while amplifying misleading reporting by American publications isn’t a secret. For the purposes of this article, what is much more noteworthy than how government officials feed bogus leads to mainstream newspapers is how the US intelligence community operates behind the scenes in ways the public never sees.
The US government is accusing Beijing of manipulating the information Americans consume without acknowledging its own history of covert operations that are calibrated to do the same.
In September 2022, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was planning to examine how it conducts what the paper referred to as “clandestine information warfare” following the removal by social media firms of numerous accounts they said were linked to the US military. Citing government officials speaking on background, the article said that Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, at that time requested an audit by the military of how various US agencies use the internet to manipulate audiences in other countries.
This news followed a report released just a few weeks prior by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. That investigation disclosed that sites like Twitter and Facebook took down more than 150 sham accounts that were disseminating content pushing narratives that aligned with the Pentagon’s long-term goals. Although the researchers did not explicitly tie these accounts to the US military, two officials familiar with the matter told the Post that US Central Command was among the entities involved.
The Post noted that this report uncovered, among other things, posts “that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin’s “imperialist” war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact on Central Asian countries.”
The Post article also noted:
With the rise of Russia and China as strategic competitors, military commanders have wanted to fight back, including online. And Congress supported that. Frustrated with perceived legal obstacles to the Defense Department’s ability to conduct clandestine activities in cyberspace, Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the United States and to push back against foreign disinformation aimed at undermining its interests. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows the military to carry out clandestine psychological operations without crossing what the CIA has claimed as its covert authority, alleviating some of the friction that had hindered such operations previously.
The implication here is that the US government would only deploy such tactics to fight against untruthful information, without spreading its own falsehoods. Such a believe ignores the West’s extensive history of manipulation and deception.
A year later, the Post followed up on the matter. The results of the “investigation” – a process in which the US security state scrutinized itself – were underwhelming. After its secretive operations were exposed, the military essentially just promised to act more responsibly going forward. According to the Post’s December 2023 article, not a single individual was disciplined for the aforementioned activities, and there was no mechanism to ensure that such abuses would not happen again.
According to the article, the military “eliminated dozens of false online personas it created in recent years and has curtailed the use of such operations overseas, according to senior defense officials.” The write-up further noted that senior Pentagon officials, the CIA, and the State Department would now be required to sign-off on these types of operations. Problem solved.
The article continued to say that:
Combatant commands continue to undertake information operations online using identifiable U.S. military accounts. But the practice of deploying sham accounts to attempt to influence overseas audiences has been dramatically reduced, senior Pentagon officials said. “It’s nowhere near the volume it was previously now that there’s oversight and greater scrutiny given to all of them,” said one official.
These findings alone are more than enough to render HR 7521, along with any moaning and groaning about foreign disinformation and social media manipulation completely meaningless, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg.
In 2010, the US Air Force used a now defunct website called FedBizOpps.gov to solicit the capability to impersonate regular people on social media in an effort to propagandize the American public.
HBGary would later make headlines when thousands of internal company emails revealed that the Maryland-headquartered cybersecurity firm had, among other things, responded to this proposal and was eager to provide the government with the technology to make this a reality.
A 2011 article in The Atlantic linking to a write-up in InformationWeek detailed the following:
The fake-personal social media contract would allow the government to "friend" real people on Facebook as a way to show support for pro-government messages, according to information revealed during the hack.
The software could cross-reference all available social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other services to collect data on real individuals, and then use this to gain access to users' social circles, according to the emails...
By using information -- such as their high schools, colleges, and home towns -- that users freely share on social networking sites, the Air Force could gain access to individual's social circles, creating a Classmates.com account at the same school and within the same graduating class, and then creating a Facebook account in the name of a real person who does not have a Facebook account, the email exchanges said. By friending someone with 300 to 500 friends, a fake persona easily can develop mutual friends before sending a friend request to the targeted individual, the emails said.
Last fall, the Brennan Center for Justice reported that it had obtained more than 3,000 pages of documents via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which showed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had a long history of using fake social media accounts for a variety of internal activities.
In the September 2023 article documenting its findings about this DHS practice, the nonprofit law and public policy institute wrote:
We obtained 35 Social Media Operational Use Templates, which are forms that DHS agencies submit to the department’s privacy office to obtain approval for proposed uses of social media. Of these, at least 14 allow officers to use accounts that do not “indicate an official DHS affiliation” or are not registered using a DHS email. Twelve of these explicitly permit the use of fake accounts, primarily by ICE and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. (This number may be higher, since CBP redacted this information in seven of its nine templates.)
Just this month, Reuters documented the existence of a covert campaign by the CIA authorized in 2019 by President Trump to influence the Chinese public’s opinion about its government. Citing former US officials with direct knowledge of the operation, the publication reported that this effort was executed by secretly infiltrating social media websites in China.
The Reuters piece featured several noteworthy revelations, which follow below:
Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters.
Kate Waters, a spokesperson for the Biden administration’s National Security Council, declined to comment on the program’s existence or whether it remains active. Two intelligence historians told Reuters that when the White House grants the CIA covert action authority, through an order known as a presidential finding, it often remains in place across administrations.
Sources described the 2019 authorization uncovered by Reuters as a more ambitious operation. It enabled the CIA to take action not only in China but also in countries around the world where the United States and China are competing for influence. Four former officials said the operation targeted public opinion in Southeast Asia, Africa and the South Pacific.
These examples of the US government’s clandestine tactics detail only a tiny slice of its covert influence operations overseas. Social media has provided the American intelligence community with more tools to shape and mold foreign public opinion, but campaigns of this nature are nothing new for the West. CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy, for instance, has spent decades helping to orchestrate regime change all around the world by sponsoring foreign media outlets in an effort to undermine governments the US was looking to overthrow.
These international propaganda vehicles are further aided by organizations such as State Department mouthpiece Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the US government-funded media outlet. A New York Times article all the way back in 1977 featured this organization in an article aptly titled “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA”.
In that 1977 Times article, the paper of record wrote that “a decade ago, when the agency’s communications empire was at its peak, it embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals. According to one CIA official, they ranged in importance “from Radio Free Europe to a third-string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper.”
The December Washington Post follow-up detailing how the US military “fixed” its approach to clandestine online operations noted that:
Some of the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. [emphasis added]
The modern-day global reach of the US intelligence community isn’t known because most members of the corporate media allow the government to investigate itself and then report its findings. The one certainty, however, is that this influence ecosystem still exists and continues to operate in the dark.
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The best evidence that the bill to force a divestiture of TikTok is absolutely not being pursued for the reasons we’ve been given is that the lawmakers pretending to care about Chinese misinformation are either ignoring the US government’s own misinformation tactics, both at home and abroad, or helping lie to the American people themselves.
This is a dangerous bill to control free speech and should be fiercely resisted.