Is Banning TikTok a Mistake? A Debate.

This episode focuses on the debate around a new bill that could force TikTok's sale by its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the U.S.

1. The bill is viewed as a protective measure against foreign influence and a step towards national security.
2. Critics label the move as an overreach of government power, likening it to historical McCarthyism.
3. The debate highlights the complexity of balancing national security with the preservation of free speech and civil liberties.
4. The episode underscores the broader societal impact of major social media platforms on privacy and data security.
5. The discussion also considers the potential for the bill to set a precedent for future regulation of foreign-owned media and tech companies.

1. Introduction and Bill Overview

Michael Moynihan introduces the episode, outlining the bill's implications for TikTok and its users. The segment sets the stage for a heated debate on national security versus free speech.

• Michael Moynihan: "The clock begins ticking down for TikTok after the Senate last night passed a bill giving the social media platform's Chinese parent company an ultimatum, sell the app or be banned."

2. The National Security Argument

Jeffrey Cain supports the bill, arguing that it's in line with historical U.S. practices to protect against foreign adversaries.

• Jeffrey Cain: "We've always had controls over ownership by foreign adversaries. It's just that we're updating this now for the age of social media."

3. The Free Speech Concern

Walter Kern expresses concerns about the bill's impact on free speech and views it as a government overreach.

• Walter Kern: "Is America's national security at risk from an Orwellian app ultimately controlled by a totalitarian government? Or is this just McCarthyism in digital form?"

4. Legal and Historical Precedents

The chapter dives into the historical and legal precedents that support the bill, discussing the broader implications of foreign ownership of U.S. companies.

• Jeffrey Cain: "Go back to the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, deeply concerned about foreign adversaries interfering in our political processes."

5. Conclusion and Reflections

The episode wraps up with final thoughts from the participants, summarizing the key arguments and leaving the audience with points to ponder.

• Michael Moynihan: "Thanks for listening. If you like this conversation, share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own."

1. Stay informed about the implications of social media on privacy and national security.
2. Advocate for comprehensive data privacy laws to protect individual rights.
3. Encourage open dialogue on the balance between national security and civil liberties.
4. Support initiatives that aim to make social media platforms more transparent in their data practices.
5. Participate in public discussions or forums to voice concerns about digital rights and freedoms.

President Biden just signed into law a bill forcing the sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent ByteDance—or else face an outright ban. The measure was included in a bill providing a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.

Proponents of the bill cite privacy and national security concerns. TikTok, like all social media giants, collects piles of user data—and if requested by the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance is obligated by law to share that user information. Critics also worry about political influence operations on the platform—a dictatorial foreign adversary turning our kids into little Manchurian candidates.

Opponents of the bill argue that forcing a TikTok sale under the threat of a ban is a blow to users’ free speech rights and represents an overreach of government authority. They insist that the government should not dictate which apps Americans can use, especially on opaque grounds of national security.

Today, a debate: Is American national security at risk from an Orwellian app ultimately controlled by a totalitarian regime? Or is this just McCarthyism in digital form, a government-created moral panic fueled by dubious threats of misinformation?

Arguing that the TikTok bill is a logical extension of our current laws—and a necessary countermeasure to authoritarian meddling—is Geoffrey Cain. Cain is the author of The Perfect Police State and senior fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University.

On the other side, arguing that the bill is a dangerous overreach justified by flimsy evidence of an alleged threat, is Walter Kirn. Kirn is a novelist, Free Press contributor, editor-at-large of County Highway, and co-host of the podcast America This Week.

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People

Michael Moynihan, Jeffrey Cain, Walter Kern

Companies

ByteDance

Books

The Perfect Police State

Guest Name(s):

Jeffrey Cain, Walter Kern

Content Warnings:

None

Michael Moynihan

I'm Michael Moynihan, and this is honestly this morning. The clock begins ticking down for TikTok after the Senate last night passed a bill giving the social media platform's chinese parent company an ultimatum, sell the app or be banned. In the US, President Biden just signed into law a bill forcing the sale of TikTok by its chinese parent company, ByteDance. Those in favor say aye or face an outright ban. TikTok is a major foreign threat.

Patrick Radden Keefe

The bill we are passing today puts. An end to that tipcock 170 million Americans a day, 90 minutes a day, right? That's frankly more than the power of eyes that your network reaches on a. Daily basis, and that information and many young people on TikTok get their news. The idea that we would give the Communist Party this much of a propaganda.

Michael Moynihan

Tool, as well as proponents of the bill cite privacy and national security concerns. TikTok, like all social media giants, collects piles of user data and, if requested by the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance is obligated by law to share user information. Critics also worry about political influence operations on the platform, a dictatorial foreign adversary turning our kids into little manchurian candidates. However, opponents of the bill argue that forcing a TikTok sale under the threat of a ban is a blow to users free speech rights. Censoring and trampling on the civil liberties of 150 million Americans who use TikTok every day isn't the answer and represent.

An overreach of government authority. They insist that the government should not dictate which apps Americans can use, especially on opaque grounds of national security. We need comprehensive data privacy legislation and thoughtful guardrails for social media platforms. Not another red scare, not a single thing that we heard in today's so. Is America's national security at risk from an orwellian app ultimately controlled by a totalitarian government?

Or is this just McCarthyism in digital form, a government created moral panic fueled by dubious threats of misinformation? Last month, as Congress was debating the bill, I was joined by journalists Jeff Cain and Walter Kern to try to answer these questions. Jeffrey Cain is the author of the Perfect Police State and senior fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University. He says the TikTok bill is a. Logical extension of our current laws and a necessary countermeasure to authoritarian meddling.

Walter Kern is a novelist, free press contributor, editor at large of County highway, and co host of the podcast America. This week. He argues the bill is a dangerous overreach justified by flimsy evidence of an alleged threat. We'll be right back. Why don't we start in a Broadway?

Walter Kern

So this bill passes banning TikTok, which is not entirely accurate, but people know what we mean when we say banning TikTok. Forcing ByteDance to divest from the company. You support this bill? Tell me broadly why you support this bill. Well, I do support the bill, and I've always supported this kind of bill.

Geoffrey Cain

This goes back five years back, when we first started noticing that TikTok was a serious threat. But even going further back, this is something that Americans have always done. We've always had controls over ownership by foreign adversaries. It's just that we're updating this now for the age of social media. Go back to the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, deeply concerned about foreign adversaries interfering in our political processes.

Go forward a bit. So we have the Radio act about 100 years ago, we have the Communications act. There are all kinds of laws that have been in place that have been challenged in the courts, that have been accepted as a tradition of our democratic system, that we place limits on ownership by foreign adversaries over communications networks, broadcast media, tv, also infrastructure such as railroads. Even Rupert Murdoch had to get american citizenship in the 1980s so that he could purchase news media in America. This is something that we've always done.

And, you know, it's not an affront to our civil liberties or to the first Amendment to simply place a cap on what foreign adversaries can do in America. You know, we are a free market. We are an open market. But foreign adversaries who are authoritarian, who are dictators, people like Xi Jinping, you know, China, a country that I had spent many years in, I was kicked out of for my investigative reporting, looking at chinese tech companies, looking at the uyghur genocide booted, because, you know, I had unearthed stuff there that the chinese communist party doesn't like. These are the thugs who are trying to meddle in our democracy.

Walter Kern

Walter, you kind of look at this as a speech issue in a way, and correct me, I'm wrong about this. I mean, and this is a kind of a horseshoe theory thing where you see a lot of people on the left from the squad and bro Khanna, Cory Bush, et cetera, and people on the right and people like Rand Paul, who also opposed this. It did pass overwhelmingly in the house. But when you see this kind of legislation, what gives you pause about it? What makes you think this is the wrong way forward?

Patrick Radden Keefe

Well, I'm going to wait to say that for a moment. He just asserted a threat, but gave no evidence of one. And that's common in this debate. You talk about the Uyghurs or how bad China is, and you suggest or imply that there's some specific threat, but we never hear about what it is exactly, only that it's a deep, dark boogeyman. And for that, we should surrender our ability to speak.

Because though he talked about Rupert Murdoch, this isn't a publisher. Remember section 230? These aren't publishers. Right? We've seen a absolute trend, an almost unbroken trend, in which foreign threats are reconstrued as quasi domestic threats.

And we just had a story in the New York Times the other day about how some of these laws that were used to censor or catch foreign misinformation have evolved, quote unquote, to catch domestic information which is somehow influenced by them. And in the text of this bill, as written, it is only necessary for the president, by fiat, with some review, to ban these things or require their divestiture or whatever it might be, to show that they are directed by a foreign, often an individual. That's the text of the bill. This is a huge, scattershot attempt to solve a problem which has not even been specified. What exactly is this algorithmic mindwashing or brainwashing that's going on?

No one can tell me. Does it have to do with the dance videos? Does it have to do with pro palestinian sentiment? Does it have to do with what? It's Americans producing this content, and they're producing it en masse, and their speech is being restricted en masse.

Geoffrey Cain

If the Chinese Communist Party, if the iranian government tells a company, hey, you gotta do this, you have to gather this intel. You have to partake in spying. Operation China has this thing called the national intelligence law, which coerces citizens to do exactly that. They have access to that data. We're talking about the world's biggest police state.

We're not just talking about a democracy or a country. You know, that's maybe somewhere in between. This is the world's most sophisticated and largest police state, where 1.8 million people are in concentration camps. And they have access to that data. They know how to manipulate it.

Xi Jinping, the president of China, has said on the record in many speeches that technology is the sharp weapon of the state, and they don't have the same checks and balances that we do in America. That's the threat, and that's what we've got to be careful about. It's a well documented threat, and it's not something that people are making up. Nothing that you've described as something we don't do here. Nothing.

Walter Kern

But, Walter, isn't there a difference between the chinese communist party doing this and the american government through courts accessing data? A slightly different thing, right? Through courts. Yeah. Well, we have a Supreme Court case right now that had a hearing on Monday in which there were no courts involved except the Supreme Court.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Now, quite a bit later. That has to do with the direct censorship of COVID information from accredited experts on Twitter at the direction of the executive branch. It didn't go through any courts. There were no warrants. As for spyware, it is the very business model of social media.

And Jeff knows that if our propaganda and our censorship apparatus isn't competing successfully with China's, well, that's a problem. But it's a problem that has to do with the very nature of this electronic web in which we all find ourselves. China has many ways to access data on Americans. It can actually buy that data. If this bill was about the expropriation of american data in general, then it would be another bill.

But it's not. It's a structure for the banning or the restriction or the divestiture of any number of hypothetical websites, applications, et cetera. It has a strange carve out for companies that deal with product reviews. I don't know which company got in there and called their senator and said, hey, you're stepping on our toes here, and got this exclusion. But none of what he's said is anything but business as usual for the Internet, social media and so on.

Geoffrey Cain

The chinese government runs a surveillance system called Skynet. That's literally what the communist party named it, like they were watching Terminator. They run an AI system called the IJOP, the integrated joint operations platform. It sucks up data on every single citizen and sends it straight to the government. It's not the same as the decentralized system.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Why aren't we banning that, Jeff? Well, I do agree that we banning the track. Why aren't we banning the practice rather than this particular. Well, we have courts, we have checks and balances. We have different ways of challenging this, of writing bills.

Geoffrey Cain

In China, it's a dictatorship. It's a totalitarian dictatorship. So you're saying we have no other method but this? This is the method that we need. Now.

This is what we need because it's taken five. Because the CFIUS. So CFiUS has been reviewing this for five years. Tick tock has been sending in lobbyists into congressional offices. They literally repeat chinese communist party talking points.

So, Michael Beckerman, this has been reported widely. The top lobbyist for TikTok, he's literally saying that Uyghurs are terrorists, that we need to. We need to follow this line of censorship. He's parroting these lines in these offices. That's censorship.

Patrick Radden Keefe

That's propaganda. That's not censorship. That's the point of view of the Chinese Communist Party, which is pushing its line, much as we push our line all around the world through radio stations. Yeah, let me ask you about that, because one of the arguments being made, and I've seen made pretty frequently, is that, you know, in. In opposition to this bill, TikTok was kind of pushing things out to users, saying, hey, go contact your congressman, congresswoman, to vote against this.

Walter Kern

And then, of course, people having conversations and, you know, I don't know how true these are, that the response to this is because a lot of this stuff is pro palestinian and the pro israeli stuff is not really evident on TikTok. Would you be concerned if the sort of chinese government was actively manipulating algorithms to make sure Americans were getting stuff that was pro China, that was minimizing chinese human rights abuses? Would that be something that bothered you? And you say, well, you know, we do stuff like that, too. TikTok has a pretty big reach.

Would that be something that you would be opposed to? Is that its problem, its reach? Is it a question of quantity rather than quality? Am I not able to get RT Russia today? Is that not adversary supported website service?

Patrick Radden Keefe

What about one of them? But this would be. If RT owned CNN or a substantial stake in any news media, this would be a fake because they were. America is in a sad state. It's gotten to the point where it can't compete, and so it's going to expropriate those who can.

It's a lot like nationalizing a railroad if you're in another, smaller country. The fact is that TikTok has not injected that. I can see any single issue into the american conversation that could not have been there by other means. I challenge you to tell me which point of view, which idea sweeping the land TikTok is responsible for. And you can't just say TikTok's responsible for it.

You have to say that it would not be an issue otherwise. Well, wait. You said that TikTok is competing and american firms are not. But the way that TikTok first entered the market might have been illegal. In 2017, there was an acquisition by ByteDance of a company called Musiclead, and this was an acquisition under us law, they might have been required to flag this for CFIUS, for the committee that reviews these foreign investments under the national security rules, and they did not.

Walter Kern

So why did. They did not. They bypassed it. So you're telling me on the one hand that we have all these court protections here in the United States that make us good, but you're also telling me that they've failed. No, I'm not saying that.

Patrick Radden Keefe

That they've failed with tick tock. Well, then why not restart that question? Or has it been settled? Well, that's what the government has been reviewing. That's what's been going on for the last five years.

Geoffrey Cain

TikTok has been a bad faith actor. They've been lying, they've been obstructing, they're not being honest about what's been happening in China. And the fact that they've been. Their parent company has been involved in serious human rights abuses in China. They've been spreading propaganda.

We can't have that in a democracy. I know we have our problems. Oh, yes, we can. In fact, we need that. In fact, the competition between different sorts of propaganda is exactly what Americans, with their free speech rights and their free press rights are allowed to scrutinize and need to scrutinize.

Walter Kern

Would you support banning RT, which is controlled by the russian government, or press tv, which is controlled by the iranian government? Two major abusers of human rights. I mean, those are available to anybody that has cable access or an Internet connection. Is it, as Walter suggests, something that is due mostly to TikTok's phenomenal success? I mean, because a lot of these other people are pushing out stuff that, you know, is trapping.

When RT first started, a lot of that stuff that was on YouTube, very conspiratorial and very, very well trafficked millions of views for these videos in the UK ofcom, the regulator in the UK has booted RT and booted press tv off the airplane. Would you suggest something like that should happen in the US too? I think in the US we don't need to boot RT completely. The fact of the matter is that if you've got a YouTube account, you can access RT. That's not the question.

What do you mean by not completely? I think that there should be restrictions on ownership. I mean, I don't think that RT should be, at least if they're opening a subsidiary in America, have full ownership by the russian government, which is controlled by one of the world's biggest thugs, who's actively threatening war, who might start world War three. That's becoming a real possibility. And that's going back to TikTok.

Geoffrey Cain

I wouldn't support Xi Jinping or one of his cronies or Putin or one of his cronies having some kind of ownership over CNN or MSNBC or Fox News. Like, yeah, the press in America does have our problems. There have been challenges in our democracy. But that doesn't change the point that these are totalitarian, authoritarian regimes that exist on a different level from what exists in America. I repeat, tick tock is not the press.

Patrick Radden Keefe

That is the very essence of this. It is not a publisher. If you know about section 230, you. Know I know about section 30. You're comparing apples to oranges.

Tick tock is not a cable news channel. The content on TikTok is not produced by the chinese government. I'm sorry to tell you, it's produced by american Yamaha. It's a major. It's a major communications network.

Geoffrey Cain

We regulate this for tv, for radio, section 230. There's a lot that we can do with section 230 that would be separate from the TikTok bill. But this is comparable to a major outlet in which most people get all of their news. It fulfills that role. And whether or not it's a platform or a publisher is becoming less and less relevant as time go.

But time goes by. There have been calls to change section 230. You know, one proposal is to make it so that companies that use algorithms as the main source of sending out their news will lose their protections under section 230. That would have all of them using algorithms. What.

Patrick Radden Keefe

I mean, if we're going to demonize algorithms, we've just thrown out the entire model for the distribution of Internet information, including on Google. Google uses algorithms. What are you talking about? Well, what I'm talking about is the fact that communication networks cannot be controlled by foreign adversaries. I think that you're really splitting hairs by trying to make it look like a social media network like TikTok does not fold, fulfill a similar role to CNN and our society today, traditional journalism.

Well, according to the law, it doesn't. And the protection that they're offered that allows them to do all sorts of things comes from a very specific definition that separates them from the press. And that's why the government, where the executive branch can reach down and use this fig leaf, that it's not censoring because they aren't actually considered publishers. Do you fear that this is a kind of a backdoor type of legislation for more kind of executive control over what we consume in America? Is that kind of your overriding concern about this bill or is it something specifically about TikTok?

There are two components to the legislation. One refers specifically to TikTok, and so far, we've been addressing that primarily. But the second, the B section, refers to a website desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application, which can be controlled or directed by a foreign adversary. And as I've pointed out, we've seen in the last few years that everyone from the president of the United States to my podcast partner, Matt Taibbi, to people tweeting about COVID in ways that are inconvenient to the regime, have been construed as somehow directed or influenced by foreign adversaries. This is not a back door.

It's a front door. They're coming through the front door with all guns blazing. And as in every case in which a foreign threat is used as the pretext for a restriction of american liberties, we're being assured that nothing bad can happen. It's only this one case. It's only this emergency.

But if we have any view of history, we know that these exact sorts of legislation and sort of legal precedents have been bent out of all recognition consistently. And we could, in fact, postulate that they exist in order to be broadened. And this one is ready for that primetime broadening as it stands right now. It could be used in so many ways, but of course, we're assured it won't be, because TikTok is kind of. It's the missile gap.

If we're going to look back in history, there's some sort of social media missile gap between us and China, just as there was a supposed missile gap between us and Russia once. And we've got to catch up or we've got to stop them, whatever it is. And I'm personally tired of these emergencies becoming so called emergencies, because despite what we've already talked about, no one has convinced me that anything terrible is happening at all. Jeff, I think there's probably dozen things you'd probably want to respond to there. But can I ask you one thing about the idea of foreign adversaries?

Walter Kern

There was a story in the Wall Street Journal the other day about who could potentially assist in the divesting of TikTok from Bytedance and from China. And one of those people was Steve Mnuchin and a group of people that were investing or bringing money to the table who are Saudis. I mean, if you look back to 911, Saudis are, seem to be american adversaries, but at the same time, they're America's allies in the Middle east. Were you in any way that this would change hands from somebody who's an american adversary to somebody else who is not an american adversary, but seems to be an american adversary in certain places in certain times? Absolutely.

Geoffrey Cain

I would not want something like this to end up in majority saudi hands. I'm not sure that Saudi Arabia meets the definition of a foreign adversary, since they actually have been an ally, regardless of the human rights abuses. But, yes, that is a concern. But we also have to look at what's going on around the world elsewhere, not just with saudi arabian investors, but the countries that have been divesting and getting this thing out. Indonesia, another major democracy, put restrictions on TikTok, and it's been great for them.

I mean, you know, it's. It's like, you know, countries are waking up to the fact that these. That big foreign adversaries, like countries that are neighboring them, places like China, like Russia, that are using this stuff to actually threaten them, to actually infiltrate them. They have taken action and they've done it fine without serious blowback. It's been pretty good.

Walter Kern

But so when you say foreign adversaries and you say that, well, you know, kind of, I would want the Saudis to be not involved in this, but at the same time, they have been allies to America despite their human rights record. I mean, I have you right in saying that. Does that just essentially mean that provided you support America's foreign policy goals, then you can own TikTok? So actually, I think that would go to Congress if they wanted to rewrite that. So the four adversaries are not actually listed in the bill, but it references another bill that lists these adversaries.

Geoffrey Cain

And, yeah, if Congress wanted to go in and say, we are going to name Saudi Arabia foreign adversary, I would support that, because I think that issues of civil liberties and human rights, they should extend around the world, they're not something that we as Americans are especially entitled to in some way. I think that we should do what we can to ensure that people everywhere enjoy these freedoms of what we have. So, yes, do I think Congress is gonna do that? No. I think that the realities of the world, of geopolitics means that the US government isn't gonna take that stand.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Let's get real for a second. We allow this uyghur persecuting foreign, chinese communist government to buy the american debt of our us treasury. And we actually rely on it to do that. We rely on that chinese money to fund institutes of research across the american academy from the Penn Biden center at University of Pennsylvania to whatever we allow them to buy farmland adjacent or nearly adjacent to us military bases. But for some reason, I was the.

Geoffrey Cain

One who told that story, by the way. But for some reason, TikTok is where we're going to leverage our anti chinese campaign of the future. It makes me wonder if that's really what this is about. What is it that makes us different, then, than North Korea? Who requires that the dread foreign influence that might corrupt their society be kept out?

Patrick Radden Keefe

How thick are we going to build this dome over the United States in which our propaganda is allowed to run free? Theirs is somehow restricted, I guess, though it's unclear that that would even really be the result of this. Is that how scared, insecure, threatened, and weak we are? That foreign propaganda now is a mind virus that will turn us into manchurian candidates? Walter, I think you got it reversed.

Geoffrey Cain

Their propaganda is running free all over the world. Our stuff is blocked. Our apps are not available in China. You can't access Google there. You can't get on Facebook.

You can't get on Snapchat. It's all blocked. It's all removed. And this is one of the bills that's been sold to us by our elites over the last 30 years. In this age of globalization, it's this idea that we can go over there, we can go to China and Russia, we can go to Iran, and we can invest and sell and spread our technologies and spread our capitalism, our way of life.

And if we just keep doing that, the governments there will realize that this liberal dream of the world, this globalist dream, is something that's great for them. And, you know, the people will rise up. The middle class, the bourgeoisie will rise up and create a new liberal government that will resemble America's. The reason our elites sold us this idea is because they were making money from it. They knew that China, they knew that all these places are massive markets, and.

Patrick Radden Keefe

They will continue to make money off their americanized TikTok, believe me. Okay, but here. But what's happened is the reverse. They become more authoritarian. I mean, what's happened in China is a travesty.

Geoffrey Cain

China used to be on the rise. China is just so. I mean, it's like you can't go around there anywhere without being spied on, watched, harassed. It has become so totalitarian in the last ten years. And that's because the government there has been emboldened and empowered.

The communist party, they see themselves as the next leaders of the world. Meanwhile, we've opened our markets to everybody, anybody who's got some money. Who has an investment idea? They can come here, they can buy land, buy military bases, as you mentioned, they can come here, they can set up a giant social media network. We're open to business.

They are not. And that's the weakness. We've been sucking up all of their stuff. But we can't go over there and influence things in our direction. Jeff, are you saying a bit Trumpian here, interestingly enough, that are you saying we should sort of shut down trade with China because you consider.

No, no, I'm not. Well, american trade with China has made China quite rich. Without globalism and without western trade, China would not have had the economic boom and the ability to create the technology that it has to spy on its own people. So by our interactions with China, economic and otherwise, are we not enabling that? I mean, at what point, the question I'm asking is, at what point does american influence on China?

Walter Kern

Do we have to completely divest? Do we have to pull back entirely? Because everything that we do might kind of help shore up or strengthen a totalitarian regime. It's kind of a hard thing to go around the world saying, well, I don't think we can interact with these people. They can't do business here because of a human rights record.

And who's going to decide that? So I just wonder, at what point does american influence american trade, allowing the Chinese to buy farmland, as the things that Walter pointed out? At what point do we stop all of that? Because we say, well, it's a bad government in Beijing, which I would agree with you, it absolutely is one of the worst. But at what point do we say, because trade people like Milton Friedman said, the more capitalism, the more freedom that didn't end up happening in China.

So do we pull back entirely? Is that what you're suggesting? No, no, I'm not saying we pull back entirely. And by the way, I would object to the term Trumpian. So I'm just a guy who lived there.

Geoffrey Cain

I experienced how bad things are, and I saw this story happen as it was happening. I mean, you know, back in the day, Bush, Obama administration, that was the height of globalization. A lot of the stuff that we were reporting over there, journalists in China, journalists in Russia, in all these places, it was being ignored. I mean, we saw the writing on the wall. We saw where this was going.

And the US government, us elites just didn't want to listen. So to answer your question, we don't pull back completely. I think that the age that we're moving into is not one where 100% of our iPhones are made in China, but it might be 70% or 80%. It's not as if we're entering an autarky in which every nation is just given to its own whims and can go off in its own way. Do we want that number from 70% to go down?

Walter Kern

And if so, why? We do want it to go down, and the reason is because. Well, I mean, Apple's a great example of a company that has been courting the chinese communist party over the last 30 years. Apple was one of the largest first investors. That was their decision, because they had to save the company from bankruptcy in the late 1990s.

Geoffrey Cain

Cheap labor will do that. So, yeah, it did help China. It did help Apple. But after Apple courting China all these years, trying to bend over and make sure that Xi Jinping would do great things for them, the Chinese Communist Party turned on them. They banned iPhones in government use there.

They favored local companies. I mean, they engage in economic nationalism at a level that is not common at all, whereas our markets are open. I'm willing to stipulate that they're awful. I'm even willing to stipulate that we're better and that we have protections for behaviors that they don't have protections against. But what I'm not willing to concede is that this threat, that this TikTok, that this social media, out of all the technologies that you've listed and out of all the instruments of influence that they wield, is so unique that we use to.

Patrick Radden Keefe

That we need to use it as the pretext for a broad law which will allow the president of the United States maybe showing his work or maybe not. Maybe just saying, intel has told me this, to start banning websites and apps and so on at his own discretion. So, no fan of China, a fan of the United States, where we agree, is that I know we're in an international competition, which it's important that we succeed in, but by degrading our own culture, our own constitutional system, and by identifying our interests with a kind of restrictive information regime that we need, because somehow, somehow we're not immune to contagion from these places, is to lose the fight in another fashion, is to lose it, in a sense, without fighting it, because we're becoming our enemy. I mean, it's some kind of a Bob Dylan song here where, you know, you don't want to become the monster as you fight the monster. And I'm very confident that the United States today is not succumbing to chinese propaganda or spying or such things at a level that is existential.

No one has shown me any evidence of it. Oh, there's all these shenanigans they pull. And, you know, there are maybe more people who support the palestinian cause than there might have been otherwise if TikTok had not existed, allegedly. But the threat just isn't there. But the threat from a bill like this is one that we can see vividly because our rights have been steadily eroded.

We can't go into a new red scare. And that's all this is. And culturally, I mean, I'm a writer and a novelist and publisher. This is reminiscent of the early 1950s panic over chinese brainwashing, that somehow they have this secret sauce with which they're going to enter the minds of America, and especially its youth. And the TikTok debate is often centered around the porous nature of America's youth, because you and I are confident that we're immune to its blandishments and seductions.

And Congress doesn't seem to be influenced by them either, since it's turning against it. But somewhere out there is this zombie like population of people who are being influenced, and we're going to protect them from themselves. It's so familiar, it's such an old story, that we're falling for it again as some sort of generational amnesia. Jeff, let me ask you to speak to that. And who's the Angela Lansbury here?

Walter Kern

Who's the person controlling the manchurian candidate? I know that you mentioned journalists. I think it was Forbes that broke the story that some journalists were tracked who were reporting negatively on TikTok, their GPS data that was kind of farmed out of these servers. I know about that bytedance. TikTok says they were fired.

They were independent actors. They did that on their own. It's not institutional policy. I have no way of knowing if that's true. But to Walter's point, are there examples of this?

Because to go to a point where the United States government is citing a particular company, one company, in a bill, and then saying, we're going to force you to divest and sell it to whoever we please, I mean, that would imagine would require some rather extraordinary evidence. What is the evidence? Because they tell me that, look, we have the intelligence. Just trust us. There's 350 of us.

Trust us. That's enough that you should be reassured here. Those numbers don't really reassure me. So what is it that you know as somebody who's reported on this, that Bytedance that TikTok is doing, that we know for a fact not speculation for a fact. That is the most pernicious thing that you can think of that would justify a measure like this.

Geoffrey Cain

There is a leaked document from TikTok which shows executives saying that they cannot guarantee that the statements that their employees are making publicly are accurate, that they might come under serious scrutiny from law enforcement, because they can't guarantee that when they go out there and say that we're separate from China, we're separate from the Chinese Communist Party, that this is something that we can guarantee to the american public. I've interviewed dozens of Bytedance and TikTok employees over the years, executives, people who have recently departed. What they say is, look, China holds the strings. They're saying, like, they update the algorithm so frequently that we can't even keep up with it. We don't even know what's in that algorithm.

And they're over in China, and they're looking at the data of Americans. They say that that is a fact. They say it universally. Now, the problem here, to what ends. I mean, the average person who doesn't follow this stuff closely, he says, well, the people that I know that are on TikTok are 13, 1415 year old girls and boys.

Walter Kern

What does China want to do with their data? I mean, explain that to me. A little bit of why that should terrify us so much that they would have access to the data. What is the data? I'm sorry, there's a bit of a Brian Lamb C SPAN question of, like, be very clear about what is the data and why does that matter?

Geoffrey Cain

So the critics of this bill get really hung up on the data, and they're saying, look, it's videos of my cat, it's videos of celebrities. It's like Keanu Reed dancing to techno music, whatever, okay? That's low quality data. Like, it's not the data. That's the most important part here.

It's not the fact that the data is like, you know, is being sucked up necessarily by some foreign company. It's the algorithmic power. And the fact that the chinese government, this extremely totalitarian state, says that, one, they will stop a divestment of TikTok. Why do they want to stop it so badly? I thought TikTok said that this is not a chinese company.

TikToks keep saying that they're american. So I guess the Chinese Communist Party does have control over them. And then two, the fact that President Xi Jinping, one of the most powerful dictators of the 21st century so far, says that this AI, that this algorithmic power is core to national power while he's threatening Taiwan, his neighbors, the Philippines, threatening american allies with outright war, threatening them with invasions. It's the fact that, you know where we're headed, possibly towards a war. I would say that war is likely maybe within the next decade.

Obviously, it's hard to predict, but the fact of the matter is that it's not America here. That's the guilty party. It is China. It is what the Chinese Communist Party has done to its people and turn themselves into this fascistic police state. And the fact that this company that is run by people who have publicly said that they want to use TikTok to impose their core values, they call them, quote, socialist core values.

They put this in writing. They published it in Chinese. This was stated directly by the founder. It was stated by the editor in chief. There was a scandal in China one time.

He apologized to the Communist Party. He said that, we're going to use ByteDance, we're going to use TikTok to spread socialist core values. That's the threat. So it's not that, you know, it's not like a communist party bureaucrat is sitting right now in China watching people's cat videos thinking that, oh, you know, oh, look at. Look at these Americans.

You know, let's send them propaganda right now. It's the algorithmic power, the potential to use a service that millions upon millions of Americans are using as their sole source of news in the event of a war, to really, you know, to really infiltrate and to mess with our democracy. So in the event of a. So we're going to start, pat, we're going to start passing bills in America in anticipating. We already have those bills.

We already have those bills. We have. We limit. Well, we limit ownership on all kinds of new services, all sorts of agencies, foreign adversaries. Like I said before, they can't buy CNN.

Why can they buy tick tock? You're going to mention section 230, but that's not. That's not the relevant point here for. Listeners who haven't used TikTok. The chinese government does not produce the content on TikTok.

No, it doesn't. The algorithm you're talking about is the thing that makes it addictive or sticky, the thing that keeps people swiping and watching. That algorithm by some alchemy that no one has yet described to me is advancing chinese interests. How? By preferring certain kinds of american content over others?

Patrick Radden Keefe

I would advance this notion. When the East Palestine train derailment happened and the toxic plume went over that town, a lot of the reporting that people saw of dead fish and toxic spills into the river and so on came from TikTok. TikTok is a short video platform in which there's really no text. It's very little. It's short videos of things.

It's used in America for all sorts of citizen journalism, a lot of which is not convenient for any regime. It would not be under Trump, and it is not under Biden. This algorithm, this word that keeps being invoked, does only one thing, which is give people what they're interested in and or addict them to the app. But it does not somehow advance communist propaganda or somehow secretly insert dialectical materialism into the minds of the youth. So it's just another boogeyman.

They all have algorithms, and all their algorithms have one purpose and one purpose only, to keep you on the app. Okay. Do you really think that what the Chinese Communist Party has done in China, you think they don't want to do it here under their laws? They see this as a part of the state, as a part of their national objective to overtake american power. It's not like, you know, they don't look at it and they don't see, oh, this is just a funny cat video app.

Geoffrey Cain

They see, this is a peg in american society. This is something that we can use. This is how they think, and this is their philosophy. It's something that Mao Zedong talked about back when he was alive, talked about the importance of controlling the propaganda, of spreading the revolution. It's something that the government talks about today, ensuring that chinese tech companies have supremacy around the world for military purposes.

Walter Kern

You quoted some chinese officials, which are worrying quotes. People say, well, Bytedance and TikTok should be advancing socialist principles. Do we have any evidence that that's happening? Not speculation, not saying, it seems like there's a little more pro palestinian stuff or there's a little more this stuff that's kind of broadly anti american. Do we actually have evidence?

We have leaks from that you've pointed out there are leaks about journalists being tracked. Are there leaks that suggest that there is a brain trust of people in China making sure that an algorithm is not keeping stickier, funnier, interesting cat videos so people stay on the platform, but are actually trying to inject pro CCP, pro communist propaganda? I bow to nobody in my loathing of the CCP and the Chinese Communist Party, but I am an anti commune all the way. But I just wonder. I mean, I get the concern, but I want to see the evidence, right?

I mean, it can't be the instinct because as people say, 60% of the company is owned by foreigners or non chinese, 20% is owned by people. Yeah, okay, fine. But within that, you would imagine that the mechanisms of the market, if it started to become an app that was really becoming a chinese propaganda megaphone, I think the investors would be pretty alarmed by this, wouldn't they? And the users, too. You have to keep that sort of blend of people.

Is there evidence that there's a lot of chinese propaganda or anti american propaganda or the stuff with the Uyghurs isn't happening? Propaganda within the algorithm that we know about, that we have leaks about that we're sure of? Or is it just speculation? So, numerous Bytedance employees have gone on the record saying that they've been under pressure by the company controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to put pro chinese views on both, but on both the chinese version, Douyin and TikTok in America. So Bytedance had a contract, possibly still has a contract, with the Ministry of Public security in China.

Geoffrey Cain

This is China's totalitarian policing body, to spread propaganda on the Uyghurs. Now, it wouldn't be a surprise there that a uyghur refugee in America was silenced for posting material about the uyghur genocide there. Ennis Kantor was banned by TikTok. He's a major critic of the Chinese Communist Party, posts regularly on it. TikTok came out and admitted that he had been banned.

He had been reinstated after there's also internal documentation which has been published and leaked, which shows that back when TikTok was coming into America in 2017, they were actively spreading chinese views. They were not putting up these kinds of political barriers. And it was after a number of these scandals of censoring people, of spreading chinese propaganda, that people said, like, look, you've got to lay low. You can't do this in America right now. So it's not a question of whether they are or aren't.

We know they've done it. The fact of the matter is that they know they can't do it because they're going to get busted if they continue to do it. So, yeah, it's cat videos right now. I mean, if they're going to get busted when they know they're doing it, why do we have to have the government involved? Ene's Cantor, who is banned from TikTok, as you said, in the next breath, was reinstated.

Walter Kern

And that's reinstated because Ene's cantor lives in a free country. The man's name is freedom now. Ennis Freedom Cantor, where you complain about this, and under the pressure of a public campaign, they have to immediately reverse course on that. I'm not sure why he was banned. I can't speak to that.

But I'm going to trust you on this, that that's why. But if that is the case, I mean, isn't the system kind of working in the sense that they try to do that, they try to interfere, and the response is so negative, whether it's from users or investors or the news media, that they have to kind of back off from that. So, yes, the system has worked in getting them to back off right now, but the fact remains that China's national intelligence law, which was passed about eight years ago under Xi Jinping, as the country became more and more authoritarian, says that that might not continue if the government says that it wants that propaganda going out. When the government says that, tick tock employees, Bytedance employees have to partake in intelligence operations. That is going to happen because they have no choice.

Geoffrey Cain

I've talked to so many people in Bytedance, they've all said that if this divestment happens, here's why tick tock is so opposed. Because to, under chinese law, if they cooperate with the Americans, if they follow american laws, the CCP can go after them hard. They can be put under arrest. If American TikTok employees travel to China, they can be put under arrest. The question is, why does the chinese communist party see this as such a sensitive topic?

Other companies have divested without a problem. It was speedy, it was quick. Nobody noticed a difference. There was no freedom of speech violation. People were still using the apps.

It was just an american hand. In China, they don't want this divestment to happen because the algorithm is so powerful. They see this as something that they can place right in the center of american society, right under our noses. While ownership is restricted of so many other industries, they can't buy up our railroads. They can't, you know, as I mentioned before, buy up our CNN networks, they can't buy up that kind of thing.

But they have TikTok right here, and they know it's popular and they know it's growing. So they're going to kill this divestment. I think they're going to kill TikTok. They're going to try to kill TikTok. If this goes through.

And that's on them, that's because they know what this is. This is a tool that they can call upon when they need it. Walter, the Biden administration, somebody american government tries to lean on a company to censor material to get material taken off of a platform. Jeff just outlined the chinese government doing that in America leaning on their own company or partially owned or company they can influence on people like Ene's cantor. I mean, doesn't that bother you if the Biden administration is doing that in America?

Walter Kern

What about the Chinese Communist Party doing. That in America because China does what the US does? I'm supposed to be outraged at China and not in particular? No, I'm wondering if you're outraged at China. I don't like it in either case, but that's the way of the world right now.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Maybe my argument is a little too sophisticated for people. It's a two parter. Number. One is tick tock. The worst case scenario, which is being used as the excuse for this bill, isn't presenting a threat.

That's all that bad that anyone can articulate and has articulated. I just articulated it well. It's not that bad then, because you haven't shown one way in which it's influenced american public opinion in any way that would not have happened otherwise through other media. And you've only shown that they have various scandals and government influence, which is pretty much the way of the world in tech right now. I mean, I do a podcast with Matt Taibbi.

When you looked into X or Twitter after Elon took it over, you saw an almost incredible interpenetration of the law enforcement and intelligence and defense capabilities of this country and this allegedly private corporation. That that happens in China, too. Well, surprise, surprise. Am I for it in either case? No.

But by the same token, we're not talking about China really. We're talking about the United States and all these arguments about whether, you know, I said I'd willing to stipulate that they're bad. We could have moved on from that, but we won't. We're just beating this drum. How awful China is.

You know, what? If America couldn't see that China was bad when their tanks rolled over people and turned them, squashed them in Tiananmen Square, then I guess it never will. The fact is, we've done total business with China, and we will continue to do it at all levels, despite all of the horrors that we've seen from their government. And we do it for commercial reasons and because we want to stay in a kind of relationship, a dynamic relationship that we hope doesn't lead to war and so on. And that's fine with me.

But China TikTok, everything aside, foreign adversary directed websites, applications and so on, is a broad net. That's just. It's like we're sitting here arguing about Pearl harbor. Yeah, it's bad. But.

But at the same time, and there hasn't been a Pearl harbor, by the way. There hasn't been a 911. These are all speculative threats. You're saying someday we're going to go to war and we're not going to want tick tock around when we do? What else?

Geoffrey Cain

It's not speculative because they're threatening war. They're saying that they want war. They're saying they're going to invade Taiwan. They're saying that's. No, we're saying we're going to go to war with them.

Patrick Radden Keefe

If they go into Taiwan, we've got to defend them. Well, no, no, but they're threatening us. They're saying, don't come into Taiwan. They're saying, this is a part of China. Of the Taiwanese say, no, we're not a part of China.

Geoffrey Cain

We're a democracy. We're separate, and we got to defend our allies if they're attacked. So now we're going to start, now we're going to start passing espionage acts and interruption acts. No, no, it's not espionage in the. Case of pending wars.

No, no, no. Hypothetical war. No, no, no. It's a twelve page bill. It's restricted to four adversaries.

It's 20% ownership. It's not a broad bill. I don't care how long it is. Okay. It's got one paragraph in it that's awful.

Patrick Radden Keefe

And then open the door for. Okay, let's go back to Twitter. You talked about Elon Musk. Okay? Elon Musk took it over Twitter files.

Geoffrey Cain

Great reporting. Showed the nexus of, you know, stuff going on between the government and the social media outlet. Okay. Elon does not have to cooperate with that. Elon can resist law enforcement.

He can resist intelligence. He can, you know, sue people, sue the government in court if they try to come in and take his private information about Twitter. Like, he. He can protect civil liberties here if he wants to, and he has the ability, the legal ability to do that. In China, that does not exist.

In TikTok, that doesn't exist. If the government says, you hand over the intelligence, you become our spy, they do it, or else they're going to prison for a very long time. There's no due process there. Will you humor me and talk about the consequences and potential consequences of the non tick tock part of this bill, or are we just going to keep going? China bad.

The bill is about much more than tick tock, and it's much more than China bad. It's about ownership by hostile foreign authoritarian powers that want to undermine our country. We have to. But it's not about ownership. Where did you get the word ownership?

Patrick Radden Keefe

That's not in the business. It's about ownership and control. It's about ownership and control and direction. What is direction? It's direct or indirect control.

Geoffrey Cain

That's what the bill says. And the reason, and it also can. Be of an individual, an individual association. It's written that way because hostile governments set up shell companies to try to separate themselves from the source, from the people who actually owns it. And this is the same.

You could find so many companies like this. Another one, WeChat, which is used worldwide. It's been used, and I know this because I interviewed the ministry of state security guy who gave me the data, leaked a bunch of data. He's one of the spies in the chinese government who was in Turkey. And he showed that WeChat, another app, was being used to spy on people all over the world, just scooping up everything they were saying and sending it back to an authoritarian regime.

I mean, this is what these governments do. They don't see it as just an app that's out there that people can play with and will make money on it. It's a part of a national project for them. It's not like America, where we're just trying to make a profit from Twitter, Elon buying it, wanting to have a hand in the public square. We literally have movies celebrating our ability to get into cell phones and track people so that we can then assassinate them.

Like I said, we got problems. The Patriot act, the FISA courts absolutely should be repealed. I think it was a horrible idea, but this is not that. This is a much narrower bill. And it goes after four countries, people who are in four countries that are openly hostile to us and that who want to do us great harm.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Four countries with a population of about 1 billion individuals, any of whom can be construed as directing things. I want to interrupt here and just say one final thing, is that when you are moderating a debate, one of the best things is when you can go and make a sandwich and go to the bathroom and come back and you guys are going at it because it's so fun that way. It makes my job so easy. And I want to say thank you to both Walter and Jeff, because I think we resolved it, and we'll let. Did we?

Walter Kern

Yes, we did. I'll send you a text later, which will clearly be intercepted by the Chinese and the CIA. But I think we solved it. And I want to thank both of you guys for coming on and slugging this out with us at the free press.

Thanks for listening. If you like this conversation, if there are parts that challenged you, angered you, or maybe something that made you change your mind, that's all great. Share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support honestly, you can do that@thefp.com. And become a subscriber.

I'm Michael Moynihan. Thanks for listening. Until next time.