TikTok's Gonna Eat Your Babies*

In trouble with the regulators? Followers jumping ship? Platform looking old school? Profits down? Innovation in short supply?

Quick solution! Paint your “Asian” competitor as evil, galvanizing an already present anti-Asian racism. Add a touch of parental fear. And oh yeah! Throw in the big whammy — national security!

Do you remember the article in the Washington Post about how Meta, Facebook parent company? In 2022, Meta paid Target Victory, to spread rumors including: “portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.”

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, What’s App, and Messenger (among a lot of other stuff such as MetaQuest).

In saner times we might celebrate the relentless creativity that ByteDance kicked off when it combined Musical.ly and Douyin into a brilliantly easy to use music video platform: TikTok. (Kind of like MTV back in the day.) Technology pioneers — mostly young folks — recognized the disruption of the world of words and photos. And jumped on TikTok.

Technology evolution has moved us from communication via town criers, newspapers, books, radio, television , internet and taken us from listener, to reader, to viewer, to maker.

TikTok is not a panacea — there are trolls, plenty of marketing, addictive behavior techniques, and so on. But it’s not much different than all the other social media platforms in its intent. and so it should undergo the same scrutiny as all social media platforms.

However.

The Brookings Institute suggests that it may be corporate competitors rather than nation security issues that are driving the anti-TikTok debate: “…If corporate competition rather than national security is the problem, part of the solution may be for these firms to cultivate and foster innovation that effectively competes with TikTok in the marketplace, especially around consumer engagement.

As for spying— A report this year by the Governance Project at Georgia Tach agrees that there may be a security risk with TikTok: “However, this same concern extends to every social media platform.” Milton Mueller, emphasizes: "The only data of espionage or national security value on TikTok would be placed there by a very small number of people with close connections to U.S. national security activities…Those users should not be romping around on Instagram, YouTube or TikTok."