TikTok’s double dystopia

In 1985, cultural critic Neil Postman warned that we were terrified by the wrong dystopia. We were so scared of the spectre of the police state in George Orwell’s 1984 that we overlooked the perils of pleasure in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Today, we are confronted by something even worse. Ever since the release of the social media app TikTok, we’ve been facing both Huxley and Orwell’s dystopias developing simultaneously.

In Amusing Ourselves To Death, Postman made the stakes of each novelist’s nightmares clear: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

For several decades, Postman’s Huxleyan prediction proved correct. We gladly turned our books over to the metaphorical bonfire: Encyclopedias were replaced with Wikipedia; yearbooks with Facebook; postcards and letters with Instagram and Snapchat. We were happier for it, even if less tethered to reality.

We even turned over our traditional news programming: Print, radio, and broadcast television were replaced with infotainment like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Tucker Carlson Tonight. These snarky shows have been replaced in turn by something even more ephemeral … and sinister.

In 2017, TikTok was released in the United States. While most social media apps bear certain Huxleyan similarities, TikTok is uniquely Orwellian, since it’s owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite TikTok’s claims that user data is kept safe and stays outside of China, former employees have testified that no such protections exist. In a legal filing, the former head of ByteDance’s U.S. engineering operations alleged that Chinese Communist Party officials have “supreme access” to the app.

What was alleged in court has been confirmed in independent analysis of TikTok’s algorithm. A report from Rutgers University found that it’s highly likely that content on the app is being boosted or suppressed with the Chinese Communist Party’s interests in mind. The American Foreign Policy Council noted extreme discrepancies in content not aligned with those interests, such as posts supporting the Hong Kong protests against mainland China.

The case for taking action against TikTok has been building for years. While the Trump-Pence administration changed the consensus on China, the path to meaningful change has been anything but straightforward. In 2020, President Donald Trump attempted to force TikTok to separate itself from China. That Executive Order was stymied in court and then rescinded by President Joe Biden in June 2021. However, by the end of 2022, the U.S. government enacted a law banning TikTok on government devices.

TikTok’s incredible popularity has proven to be a challenge for the adoption of more aggressive policies. Not only does the platform boast nearly half of America among its regular users, but many of the elected officials banned from using the app on their government device are nevertheless using TikTok on the campaign side.

GOP megadonor Jeffrey Yass (who holds a large stake in ByteDance) has certainly helped some Republican candidates find it easier to downplay national security considerations regarding TikTok. Indeed, even President Trump seems to have changed his tune after a meeting with Yass, now arguing that the TikTok legislation would only make Facebook bigger.

Still, momentum continues to grow for forcing TikTok to divest itself from the Chinese Communist Party. Congressman Mike Gallagher’s Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (H.R. 7521) advanced unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee (50-0) and is scheduled for a vote on the House floor, where it is expected to pass.

TikTok overplayed its hand recently when it turned its users, including young children, into a makeshift army of lobbyists. The app prompted users to call their representative in Congress in opposition to Gallagher’s bill, providing a live demonstration of just the kind of political deployment that TikTok’s critics have been warning the country about for years. And now, even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the Chinese government is using TikTok to meddle in U.S. elections. If that’s not the stuff of Orwell, nothing is.

In 1985, when Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, he argued that we were dealing with only one dystopia. Today, we’re struggling to face down two. Freeing social media from CCP influence could help change that.

So, let’s protect our nation and its citizens—confronting one dystopia at a time.