TikTok, Trump, Capitalism, and the Facts of Life
TikTok, Trump, Capitalism, and the Facts of Life
How China pulled off one of the most successful intelligence operations since the Trojan Horse.
1. TikTok
This week Congress will vote on a bill that would require a Chinese-owned company, ByteDance, to sell the app TikTok.
The story of TikTok is instructive about a lot of things: the social web; how the Chinese Communist Party works; the nature of information warfare; and the lengths to which capitalists will go to sell rope to the people who want to hang them.
Let’s delve in.
First: Why is TikTok dangerous?1
Three reasons:
Because ByteDance (and hence TikTok) are owned by a company incorporated and based in China, it is subject to total and complete control by the Chinese government, irrespective of any “laws.”
Meaning that in America, TikTok can be used as a tool of information warfare by the Chinese in two ways. The trivial way is as an ongoing data-breach: Any information TikTok collects about you can be accessed by the CCP.
The more important threat is that TikTok is a propaganda WMD. When you use TikTok, content is surfaced to you by the app’s algorithm. At any moment, the CCP can force TikTok to surface whatever content it prefers.
Giving our adversary the ability to pipe disinformation and propaganda onto the phones of 150 million Americans is an intolerable national security risk.2
The U.S. government should have forced this sale years ago.
As it happens, President Trump nearly did force the sale of TikTok during the summer of 2020. This was one of the few helpful ideas he had as president, yet he cocked it up because he was trying to play at being a gangster.
Trump attempted to force the sale via executive order and he further intervened to make Microsoft the buyer. And then, Trump said that the U.S. should get a taste of the action: He told Microsoft that the company should pay the government a “finder’s fee” for brokering the deal.3
Because Trump was bad at governing, the TikTok sale never happened. And now, just like with Infrastructure Week, it’s Joe Biden who’s getting the job done.
But there is a hitch: Trump has now turned against forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok. Here’s Josh Rogin explaining:
Earlier this month, Trump spoke at a conference of the influential conservative organization Club for Growth, after a request by its main benefactor and Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, and announced an end to his feud with the [Club for Growth].
Yass’s firm, notably, has a stake in ByteDance worth more than $20 billion. Yass’s offer of a détente is of direct benefit to Trump and his campaign, as the Club for Growth is now expected to spend millions in the 2024 cycle in support of Trump. That could relieve the financial burden on the former president, who owes more than $400 million in legal penalties.
This is how politics works: Jeff Yass has a financial stake in ByteDance. If ByteDance is forced to sell TikTok, it will harm Yass’s financial prospects. Yass gives a lot of money to the Club for Growth, which has opposed Trump. So Yass has the Club for Growth repair its relationship with Trump. And then Trump turns against the sale of TikTok.
Everyone gets their backs scratched.
But this is also how capitalism works: Jeff Yass is a useful idiot.
2. Spies Like Us
Yass’s hedge fund thinks it owns a $20 billion stake in ByteDance. It does not.