Picture It: A TikTok Full of Steve Mnuchin ASMR Eyeshadow Tutorials
Good job everybody on voting for that terrible bill!
This week, the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that could ban TikTok in the United States of America unless ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, agrees to sell it. Why? Nonspecific national security reasons, fears that the company could be secretly controlled by the Chinese government and that they will use it to disseminate propaganda to the children, and the belief that China is using TikTok to make American children into stupid wannabe influencers while using it to encourage their own children to do science experiments and want to be astronauts.
Fifty Democratic representatives had the good sense to vote against the bill (along with 15 Republicans who likely did a good vote for bad reasons), which Republican leaders fast-tracked through the House.
I’m actually a little bit surprised by a few of those. The progressives you’d expect because it’s both a free speech issue and an antitrust issue, but there are a fair number of moderates on there as well. Good on them, because this is a really, really bad bill and there has not been anywhere near enough time for public comment to pass it.
Luckily, while it passed the House with ease and President Joe Biden has already said he will sign it if it gets to his desk, it’s likely to face a lot more opposition in the Senate, as The New York Times reports that “Senator Chuck Schumer […] has been noncommittal about bringing it to the floor for a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it.”
I don’t want to say I’m psychic, but I do (like Ms. Barbara Lee, who voted against the bill) have a tendency to be prematurely correct — and my first reaction to the “The Chinese government could use it to spread propaganda” claim was “So could anyone else! Governments don’t have a monopoly on propaganda and right-wing nutjobs are desperate to control social media!”
In less than a day after that House vote, not one, not two, but three (at least) right-wing nutjobs expressed an interest in buying it, including Steven Mnuchin, a name you perhaps thought you’d never have to hear again.
Via MSNBC:
Steven Mnuchin, the scandal-plagued treasury secretary from the Trump administration, announced Thursday that he’s forming an investor group to try to acquire TikTok. (I’ll note here that Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital reportedly has received $1 billion from Saudi Arabia’s government.) Kevin O’Leary, the Trump-loving conservative investor known for appearing on “Shark Tank,” is interested, too. And controversial former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, a right-wing megadonor, has reportedly discussed putting in a bid as well.
Whoops!
Admittedly, I have racked my brain all week to complete the sentence “The Chinese government brainwashes the TikTok tweens to believe ________ and then ______ happens and it’s really bad,” and I’ve got nothing. Are they going to accidentally share state secrets while lip syncing to K-Pop or acting weirdly shocked by foundation doing what foundation is supposed to do?
But what I do know for sure is that right-wing nutjobs owning social media sites is not a thing that works out very well for anyone, and that they absolutely will use those sites to disseminate harmful propaganda. We’re watching that movie right now, with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. I truly don’t think China or any other country could come up with something that bad if they tried. Personally, I’m a whole lot more worried by that site and by Rumble (Nazi YouTube).
They want this bad. They want control over all of the social media sites and if this bill does convince ByteDance to sell, they will have control over another one.
As silly as TikTok can be, it’s also been an incredibly effective tool for awareness and social change (and not just from Latte Girl aesthetic to Strawberry Girl aesthetic to Mob Wife Aesthetic). A good example of this would be the Idaho woman who documented her 19-day miscarriage and inability to get treatment, videos documenting racism or police brutality and other things that people might not actively seek out themselves, but which might pop up on their For You Page in a quick and easily digestible form. Maybe you might see a headline about something like that happening, but to actually see someone go through it is very different.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no bad shit there, because of course there is, but I do think the good outweighs the bad — and that what we will get with a Steve Mnuchin TikTok will be far, far worse in that respect.
PREVIOUSLY:
I think it’s probably naïve to assume that the Chinese will hold back at all when it comes to abusing TikTok user data as it suits them. They likely already have. At the same time, I’d rather have things as they are than handing yet another social media platform over to a right winger because, they won’t even be subtle about the abuse or algorithm manipulation. This whole thing just makes me sad.
I did read, however, that Dotard has done a complete 180 on his position. If Biden is for restrictions, he’s suddenly against them. This might be enough to sway the R cultists into killing the bill. 🤷♀️
I guess I was misinformed about this. I thought the worrisome thing about TikTok was not what comes through it to kids (propaganda, misinformation) - I thought the (potential?) problem was in the *other* direction - gathering information on its users (location, financial, personal) that could be exploited through scams, blackmail, greenmail, etc.