The TikTok war
India recently banned TikTok and there are increasingly loud calls for the US to follow. One opinion on TikTok in the US was recently penned by Ben Thompson at Stratechery. He published a scalding review of how TikTok is an affront to western liberal values and an important way for China to gather information and influence the actions of broad populations outside of its own borders. From Thompson: "TikTok's algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?" While China has resisted western social media platforms for years, the rapid success of a Chinese social media platform outside its own borders is cause for concern and, according to Thompson, something that calls for action: "It is time to take China seriously and literally: the Communist Party is not only ideologically opposed to liberalism, it believes that only one of liberalism or Marxism can prevail. To that end it has been taking action for over 20 years to control information within its borders and, over the last several years, to control information outside of its borders. It is time for the U.S. to respond, both on the government level and corporate level, and it should do so in a multi-faceted fashion."