Not too long ago, Donald Trump was a big fan of banning TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app that went offline in the U.S. early Sunday under a controversial ban. On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the law, passed by bipartisan majorities last April, largely due to concerns that the Chinese government used the platform to spy on Americans. President Joe Biden signed that law, but only four years after Trump, while still president, tried and failed to ban the app through executive order. TikTok allows “the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” Trump said in the 2020 order.
There’s good reason to believe Trump’s personal reasons weren’t so noble. For one thing, he’s racist against Chinese people and apparently believes COVID-19 was somehow their fault, instead of seeing them as the first victims of a mutated virus. However, while U.S. intelligence services are frustratingly tight-lipped about the specific evidence, both common sense and the testimony of more trustworthy politicians who have seen the intel — including Biden — suggest that the accusation of foreign spying is almost certainly true. Nor is this a “free speech” issue. The right to speak out, even online, has not changed. The government’s authority here is to determine what foreign companies are allowed to operate within our borders, a nearly ironclad power.
TikTok is good for Trump, and for one simple reason: It is a maelstrom of disinformation so gargantuan that even Elon Musk-controlled Twitter fails to compete.
Trump, meanwhile, has changed his tune about TikTok, but not because he disbelieves the intelligence reports or because he is a free trade absolutist. (Hardly that, as his love of tariffs demonstrates.) No, it’s because he’s learned in the past four years that TikTok is a shockingly efficient disseminator of disinformation, which is Trump’s main stock-in-trade. “I’m now a big star on TikTok,” he bragged in September, vowing to protect the site from being banned. He’s also buddied up with the chief executive of the American division of TikTok, Shou Chew, inviting him to join the murder’s row of tech billionaires attending the inauguration.
“It’s been a great platform for him and his campaign to get his America first message out,” Mike Waltz, an incoming national security advisor to Trump, said Thursday. “We will put measures in place to keep TikTok from going dark.” Chew then took to TikTok to publicly credit Trump with working to save the platform.
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TikTok is good for Trump, and for one simple reason: It is a maelstrom of disinformation so gargantuan that even Elon Musk-controlled Twitter fails to compete. It’s a train wreck of B.S., from people claiming sunscreen and vaccines don’t work to bizarre videos claiming demons infect everything to old-fashioned authoritarian lies. The company claims to stand for “free speech,” but the Chinese government censors information that doesn’t serve its political goals. The algorithm is hidden from public view, but it’s easy to see it favors divisive, emotionally manipulative and misleading information. It ratchets up culture war tensions and stokes arguments while undermining people’s mental ability to focus on developing solutions. Hundreds of millions of people willingly plug into an app that feeds them the demoralizing propaganda authoritarians have been trying to shove down our throats forever. It’s a fascist’s dream.
The surveillance aspect of TikTok has received more political and legal attention than its efficiency at hijacking people’s thoughts and emotions. People don’t like to hear they’re being manipulated, especially when the manipulation is working. We all want to feel like we’re properly skeptical and careful media consumers. Unfortunately, TikTok algorithms expertly exploit that desire, by pumping videos that promise viewers the “real story” and information “they” don’t want you to hear. Conspiracy theorists love someone who thinks they’re a skeptic.
But even when people are rational enough to reject the constant drumbeat of disinformation, there are signs the site is undermining people in subtle ways that are bad for their mental health and the larger body politic. For Slate on Thursday, Scaachi Koul wrote about her attachment to TikTok, describing it as an app that “burned hours of my life” and echoing the refrain popular with users, “All I do on this app is cry for strangers.” I have to quote for length to give justice to what sounds frankly overwhelming, though she appears to mean it as praise for the site:
Soldiers coming home from service, teenagers being gifted their first car, babies being named after a late uncle. Bleaker, more gut-wrenching videos had this comment, too: videos of orphaned children in Gaza with their arms or legs missing, bodies shaking with a fear they’ll never lose. I read the same comment on TikToks featuring people who lost their homes in the Eaton fire, on that now-viral video of that L.A. resident finding his dog still alive in the rubble of his home. It’s on videos of people sitting alone at their birthday parties because no one came, clips of little kids doing their first somersaults, footage of an elderly woman returning to the house that she used to own, now bombed and decimated.
I liked feeling like I could walk into a stranger’s life and see them on the best day they ever had: a graduation, a birth, an engagement, successfully moving their ex-boyfriend out by throwing all his shit in the yard. Whatever a good day meant to these strangers, I got to witness a little piece of it, usually from the comfort of my own bed, late at night while I ran away from sleep. What was I hoping for in those moments? To borrow others’ feelings to amplify my own.
Koul defends an “algorithm [that] seemed to want to make me sob” for giving her “the brutality and the beauty of being a person in the world.” From my more jaundiced view, however, the experience sounds more like an emotional roller coaster designed to sap constructive energy. That’s a lot of people whose emotions she’s digesting in 15-second bursts. Those emotions are detached from the context that gives our feelings deeper meaning. Having one long conversation with a good friend almost certainly grounds you deeper into your humanity than a mile-a-minute drivebys of disassociated, ping-ponging emotions from strangers. What is all the feeling for, if you’re too drained to do anything about it?
I’m not the only skeptical of how the shallow manipulations of TikTok are dissuading people from having more meaningful, if more slow-moving, experiences in the real world. In a long and disturbing Atlantic article about how Americans are spending more time alone than ever before in recorded history, Derek Thompson writes, “A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house.” While he sympathizes with the occasional need to chill at home, he also notes it’s unsettling that it’s a wildly popular discourse. Apparently, a lot of folks feel seeing people in the real world is too taxing, and it’s easier to refract your urge for connection to an app that offers only an inch-deep simulacrum.
This, too, is an authoritarian’s dream: people who exhaust all their emotions on an endless hamster wheel of random strangers, while becoming further disconnected from investment in their real-world community. Koul writes, “I can’t think of a better use of all that time” than weeping over people whose names she doesn’t know. And not to be a fuddy-duddy, but I can think of many better uses, including using that desire to connect with people to motivate charity work, political organizing, or just throwing a dinner party. These connections give us energy and move us to do more than cry, but to take action.
I don’t want to pick on Koul, who is a lovely person and clearly has a lot of empathy. That’s why I’m so alarmed by TikTok. This isn’t Twitter, which is awash in trolls responding to incentives that encourage antisocial emotions like bullying, and is losing users for it. TikTok manipulates people by exploiting their better selves, and repurposing it to ugly ends. The algorithm feeds people endless videos to turn their emotions up high, exhausting their empathy, so they have less to offer those they can actually help. It appeals to people’s desire to think for themselves by redirecting that urge to disinformation. Places like Twitter mobilize the worst people, but TikTok does something even more sinister. It demobilizes, distracts, and depresses those who want to do better. No wonder Trump loves it.
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