The Counter-Revolution Will Not Be TikTok’d

MAGA Against Itself, Again

I have never been on TikTok, though at this point I’ve probably seen thousands of videos from there that have been shared on other platforms. I’ve always found the affect typical of the app jarring and oddly alien, which has discouraged me from wanting to explore it any further. Hence, when I first came across the idea of banning it—I think it was when Donald Trump himself, who now opposes such a ban, proposed it in 2020—it was hard for me to get all that agitated about it one way or the other. But it’s become apparent to me that the proposed ban presents a novel test of how First Amendment rights are interpreted in the 21st century, so the arguments for and against are worth taking seriously.

Several recent installments of this newsletter have focused on the tensions internal to the MAGA movement, and the TikTok controversy presents another case in point, albeit with a somewhat different configuration. Obviously, Trump has been at odds with himself and his own prior views on this subject, by most accounts for venal motives—his reliance on the largesse of TikTok investor Jeff Yass—rather than any serious philosophical evolution. Indeed, Trump’s old guru Steve Bannon denounced his former boss for his reversal in these terms last year, suggesting he had been “bought.”

There are several complementary cases to be made for the ban in the terms of MAGA’s basic America-First ethos. The first is a national-security one, made for instance by Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Sen. Marco Rubio, who back in 2022 introduced legislation banning the app from government devices. TikTok is partly owned by the government of China, America’s main geopolitical adversary, and US law already prohibits broadcasters from being owned by foreign citizens, not to mention foreign governments. A social-media platform, unlike a radio or TV channel, also has the ability to gather data on and surveil Americans, making it an even greater potential national-security threat. There is also an apposite “trade hawk” case for banning a Chinese app, made by liberal commentator John Judis in Compact last year. Simply put, the Chinese government blocks all of TikTok’s US competitors from operating in China; hence, the logic for banning a Chinese app in America is the same as that of a retaliatory tariff.

There is also what we might call a “common-good” case for the ban—and perhaps for a far more total ban than the one passed in 2024. This was what Michael Toscano argued for in Compact all the way back in 2022, when Rubio was promoting the more limited ban. “TikTok,” Toscano argued, “causes problems that can’t be addressed by a change in management.” He explains: “Like other social-media platforms, TikTok is cleverly designed to track users and turn them into addicts. It can re-engineer their tastes, values, and identities.” In 2023, Compact columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon synthesized this case with the national-security one, describing the app as “a Chinese weapon exported to zombify our kids, undermine their safety, and lead to their deaths.” (As Batya notes, the Chinese government ironically seems to accept a version of the common-good critique, given that it “only permits its population access to a much less addictive, more educational version of [TikTok] called Douyin. This version kicks off kids after 40 minutes of use, and much of the content is taken up with educational videos.”)

Trump hasn’t made a particularly substantive case against the ban; indeed, when the legislation was being debated last year many of the strongest opponents in Congress were progressive Democrats like the recently unseated Rep. Jamaal Bowman. Their arguments were also rather flimsy, if consistent with their overall politics, basically amounting to the claim that young people and people of color make up much of the TikTok user base, so banning it is discriminatory and racist. It fell to libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie to make the civil-libertarian case against the ban, which has been echoed by organizations like the ACLU. (The latter, however, is not exactly known for its principled civil libertarianism in recent years, which makes one wonder how much this is a reversion to principles rather than a reflection its staffers’ alignment with Squad politicians like Bowman.)

Related to all of this is the fact that after Oct. 7, the TikTok debate became yet another proxy for views on Gaza, since the app is widely seen as favoring pro-Palestinian narratives, whether for algorithmic reasons or reasons having to do with the leanings of its youthful user base. It seems clear that many in Congress were galvanized to support or oppose the ban less because of their views on its First-Amendment implications than because of how they viewed the current war in the Middle East.

On the other hand, one can’t and shouldn’t separate First-Amendment questions entirely from foreign-policy ones, given that the two have been intertwined since the passage of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which enabled the prosecution of American citizens for criticizing the US government on the grounds that doing lent support to a foreign enemy (in that instance, France). Throughout US history, including during the War on Terror, clampdowns on free expression have often been justified on the grounds of protecting the nation from foreign threats. Hence, for anyone with civil-libertarian leanings, it’s important to be wary of such rationales.

Nonetheless, it’s striking that opponents of the TikTok ban mostly steer clear of a full-throated endorsement of the app itself as a vital presence in American public discourse. For instance, journalist and vociferous free-speech advocate Matt Taibbi rested his case against last year’s legislation on the claim that the bill is “at best tangentially about TikTok.” Instead, he argues, the problem is that it accords the president broad power to shut down anything he designates a “foreign adversary controlled application,” which “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.” As Taibbi notes, this same sort of sweeping logic was used by the national-security establishment during the War on Terror to classify individuals as “enemy combatants” who could be deprived of basic rights and protections.

I imagine Taibbi skirts making a direct First Amendment case against the bill’s more immediate effect—forcing TikTok to be sold to an American owner or shut down—because such a case is harder to make. It would require claiming that ByteDance’s Chinese owners enjoy free-speech rights in the United States, which would be at odds with the aforementioned well-established ban on foreign ownership of broadcasters. It also seems hard to sustain the claim that TikTok users’ rights are meaningfully affected by a state-mandated change of ownership of the app. Instead, the more compelling claim is that there is a dangerous general precedent in according the state too much control over the operations of any online platform that facilitates speech.

This gets to the more substantive source of internal MAGA opposition to the ban, but also hints at a certain confusion around what is at stake in the broader issue of Big Tech censorship. From MAGA’s origins as a political movement propelled by digital platforms but especially after the clear collusion of elements of the government with tech platforms to tilt the political playing field against Trump—the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and Trump’s banishment from all the major platforms in particular—protecting online speech has been a core value. That value is clearly in some sense at odds with any legislation that allows the president to shut down an entire platform at will, although to what extent that concern will persist once Trump himself is back in the White House is unclear.

But there is a deeper question at issue here that is worth confronting more directly than most of the participants in the debate have done so far. The First Amendment was designed to limit the power of the state over citizens’ speech. However, the authors of the Bill of Rights couldn’t really envision the emergence of entities like a Big Tech corporations, some of which exert a power comparable in some ways to that of the state itself, and also operate in concert with the state in any number of ways—and in the case of TikTok, with a foreign adversary state. Do we conceive of these corporations as entities whose power American citizens must be protected from, or conversely, as entities that themselves enjoy rights that the state mustn’t infringe on?

Within the right-wing critique of Big Tech, there is considerable confusion about this question. Sometimes, the problem seems to be Big Tech’s power to stifle political opposition in collusion with the state—which offers the most straightforward First-Amendment case. But sometimes, the biggest concern seems to be Big Tech’s private control over public political speech, a control that is inflected by the biases of the platform’s owners and operators. The first critique implies the need for a reduction of government oversight of the platforms, but the second—ensuring platform neutrality—would require greater state intervention and oversight. One saw this conflict at play in the Supreme Court’s NetChoice decision, in which two red states’ legislation to mandate neutrality on online platforms was set against the First-Amendment rights enjoyed by the platform’s operators to curate content.

Although I find Taibbi’s concerns about the broad language of the TikTok bill compelling, I’m ultimately with the legal scholar Tim Wu—who has defended, at least on broad principles, both a ban on TikTok and the red states’ efforts to require platforms to be politically neutral—when he writes:

In our era, the power of private entities has grown to rival that of nation-states. Most powerful are the Big Tech platforms, which in their cocoonlike encompassing of humanity have grown to control commerce and speech in ways that would make totalitarian states jealous. In a democracy, the people ought to have the right to react to and control such private power, as long as it does not trample on the rights of individuals.

This week at Compact

After publishing Mark Krikorian’s widely discussed intervention on the intra-MAGA H-1B debate last week, we continued to cover this crucial schism this week. On Monday, Helen Andrews argued that high-skilled immigration threatens the American middle class in much the same way offshoring and globalization damaged the working class in decades past, and today, emeritus UC Davis professor Norman Matloff explains why the supposed distinction between “good” and “bad” H-1B visas falls apart on closer scrutiny.

Beyond that, we’ve closed out 2024 and kicked off 2025 with our usual variety:

• Stephen Adubato did a deep dive on why teachers are leaving the classroom en masse, and what the exodus says about the decline of genuine authority in American culture.

• Christian Parenti made “the left case for Kash Patel.” Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, he points out, is a former public defender whose criticisms of the deep state echo longstanding, if lately mostly forgotten, arguments coming from the left.

• Doug Lain examined the failure of the Amazon Christmas strike, and what it says about the broader decline of civil society in America.

• Matthew Gasda considered the contemporary relevance of a new translation of Elias Canetti’s Book Against Death.

Thanks as always for reading, and please consider subscribing not to Compact to keep up with everything we publish if you don’t already.