Why is the US Threatening to Ban TikTok?

Back in 2021, I called for a moratorium on children’s use of social media, citing its dangers — with a particular focus on Instagram. Three years on, not only do these concerns persist, you could argue that the situation is worse due to the rise of new platforms favoured by teens (Snapchat and TikTok).

On Tuesday 30 April, a French government commission's report proposed that children should be barred from social media before the age of 15. This is a welcome move, but the report lacks the force of law, and recommendations alone are unlikely to reverse a status quo where 99% of 14-year-olds already have a smartphone and 63% of children under 13 have at least one social media account, despite it already being forbidden.

Meanwhile, as expected, last week President Joe Biden signed a bill proposed by the House of Representatives that could eventually lead to TikTok being banned on US soil. So why have US legislators made this unprecedented move? And why are they focusing on TikTok in particular?

For the uninitiated, TikTok is an app-based social network that revolves around sharing short videos. Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, it has seen an incredible rise in popularity over the past two years; it now has over 1.5 billion users and is particularly successful with teenagers and influencers.

There is some anecdotal evidence that TikTok is not as damaging as Instagram to teenage girls’ body image, because it is less about filtered selfies and more about funny videos, but there are other aspects about how the platform’s algorithm works that make it uniquely dangerous.

First of all, the app design seems to make TikTok even more addictive than its rivals; some experts estimate it is twice as addictive as Instagram, and the algorithm needs only 10 minutes to learn about new users’ preferences and cater their feed to their tastes. In the age of the attention economy this gives TikTok a huge competitive advantage.

Facebook is still far and away the world’s most popular social networking site, but it seems to be losing ground fast. The latest generation of smartphone users, Zoomers (born between 1997 and 2012), never adopted it at all, preferring Instagram, Snapchat and in particular TikTok.

Until recently, TikTok was mainly known for its viral dance challenges, but more and more young people are using it as a news source, and a recent study by Ifop on French 11 to 24-year-olds shows that they are increasingly susceptible to conspiracy theories and sceptical about science. It is difficult to know with certainty that there is a causal link between social media use and belief in misinformation, but the study shows that 41% of young people who use TikTok as a search engine believe that influencers who have a lot of subscribers are a reliable source. Moreover, as with most such platforms, the algorithm promotes sensationalist content and then serves up similar content if you show an interest. This process, called algorithmic radicalisation, will tend to reinforce users’ credence in conspiracy theories through two well-known psychological phenomena: exposure bias and the illusory truth affect. Studies on exposure bias suggest that repeated exposure to a specific subject will make you more likely to believe it is true; this is exacerbated by the “illusory truth effect,” which describes the tendency for people to recall facts, and to believe them to be true, even if they learned about them in the context of their debunking. When you consider that up to 20% of videos on the platform feature misinformation, it is not hard to see why using TikTok as a search engine or news source is problematic.

In some respects, the diversification of media sources might be seen as a positive. Notwithstanding some social media influencers’ lack of journalistic training and integrity, social media potentially gives users access to a wider range of perspectives and allows faster dissemination of information on the ground as news unfolds. However, computer scientist Jaron Lanier has a useful metaphor that helps explain why TikTok poses a threat to our epistemology, and ultimately even democracy itself. Like mainstream media journalists, Wikipedia editors are not always right, and they have their own biases, but if you turn on the news or log on to Wikipedia, you will have access to the same information as everyone else. If Wikipedia worked like TikTok, each user logging on to a specific page would get a different article that confirmed their existing priors. The Balkanisation of our information space means that fellow citizens literally cannot understand why people on the other side on the of the political aisle believe something different, because they don’t have access to the same information.

So the impact of TikTok on our information ecosystem would be bad enough if the only issue was that it promotes conspiracy theories, but over the past year, there has been a low-key mood music implying that TikTok is a large-scale espionage tool. According to the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul of Texas, “TikTok is a modern-day Trojan horse of the Chinese Communist Party, used to surveil and exploit Americans' personal information."

This may seem like an outlandish claim, but US Senators, Canadian Parliamentarians and the European commission’s 33,000 employees are all forbidden from using the app — so various authorities seem to be taking the threat seriously. But maybe this just a fantasy of the US government because of its systemic rivalry around artificial intelligence technology — a similar brouhaha blew up around Huawei in 2020. Moreover, Facebook also collects your data, and it recently emerged that Meta (the company that owns Facebook, which itself has a patchy record in terms of data privacy and the spread of misinformation) financed a media campaign to denigrate TikTok. So, how is TikTok any worse?

Well, there is a subtle difference between Facebook and TikTok, in that TikTok’s parent company is literally owned by the Chinese government. Although TikTok’s executives claim to be independent from ByteDance, some former TikTok employees say that this independence is for public consumption and that their operations are closely tied to ByteDance.

So, Western governments may have some legitimate concerns over cyber-espionage, particularly as regards key national interests, but these concerns are mostly hypothetical. For me, the most damning indictment of TikTok is that it is not available in China. ByteDance has a different version of the app available for its domestic market. This app, called Douyin, features strict limits for under 14s, who can only view educational or patriotic videos and are limited to 40 minutes’ use per day. Considering the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has described the TikTok algorithm as a “strategic asset,” why doesn’t TikTok exist in China in the same form that it exists in Europe? Why don’t they export Douyin and why don’t they want TikTok in China?

According to Tristan Harris, “it’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.”

While Instagram and TikTok fight a battle for teenagers’ attention, could ByteDance’s actual motive be a new form of “soft power” — to create a modern version of the idiot box intended to hook kids to compelling yet intellectually unstimulating content that takes them away from their studies and atrophies critical thinking skills?

Whatever you may think about Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions and strategy, he clearly does not have an interest in lobotomising the next generation of American citizens. The same cannot be said about a foreign government that is a systemic rival.

However, while it may well be that TikTok is more damaging than other social media apps, if the US Congress ultimately gets its way and forces the sale of TikTok to a US-controlled company, they must not let it distract them from the deleterious effects of smart phones and social media writ large. These effects are well documented – the role of Instagram in the teen mental health crisis; the role of YouTube and Twitter in radicalisation; the role of Facebook in the 2016 US presidential elections, the Brexit referendum, and propping up dictatorships worldwide – and US-owned social media companies are hardly whiter than white in this respect.

Maybe the next step is for these tech giants to be broken up, but even if they are, we can’t count on a new, benevolent form of social media emerging spontaneously from silicon valley. In his new book, The Anxious Generation, psychologist Jonathan Haidt also makes several policy proposals that he claims would reverse the negative effects of social media on teen mental health, including banning smartphones for children under 10, and banning social media before 16.

There are also measures we can take on an individual level, and this is what the recent French government commission suggests. We should all interrogate our smartphone use and how we control children’s social media use in particular. Once again, theoretically under-13’s are not allowed to download social media apps, and it is possible for parents to control app downloads and add screen time limits to their children’s phones. Finally, the educational authorities can make schools phone-free spaces, as French Education Minister Nicole Belloubet suggested on 7 April 2024. If the CCP tries to prevent its young citizens from being corrupted by social media, then maybe so should we.