Izglasovanje zakona o prepovedi TikToka v ameriškem Kongresu ta teden je bila podprta s številnimi norimi razlogi (da je TikTok antisemitsko pristran, da služi kot sredstvo za povečevanje podpore Hamasu med mladimi Američani) in manj norimi razlogi (da je TikTok konkurenca Meti (Facebooku) in da če Kitajska ne dovoli Facebooku delovanja na njenem ozemlju, lahko Američani naredijo enako glede TikToka).

No, meni se zdi še najbolj plavzibilen razlog, zakaj so se v Kongresu odločili za prepoved TikToka, političen – in to je paranoja. Ta teden je Reuters poročal, da je med Trumpovo administracijo CIA začela skrivno kampanjo na kitajskih socialnih medijih, katere cilj je bil obrniti javno mnenje na Kitajskem proti njeni vladi. Program je bil med drugim zasnovan tako, da “neti paranojo med tamkajšnjimi najvišjimi voditelji.” Torej, ob vsem proizraelskem in korporativnem lobiranju, je dejanski in najbolj logičen argument za prepoved TikToka potem naslednji: “če mi Američani uporabljamo socialne medije, da politično vplivamo na kitajsko javnost, najbrž tudi Kitajci delajo enako, zato prepovejmo delovanje njihovih socialnih medijev v ZDA”.

Spodaj je dober komentar Roberta Wrighta na to temo.

Senator Marco Rubio is pretty sure that the Chinese government is using the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to undermine Israel. “TikTok is a tool China uses to spread propaganda to Americans, now it’s being used to downplay Hamas terrorism,” he tweeted in November. Rubio is also sure about how to handle a problem like this: “TikTok needs to be shut down. Now.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League and as reliable a supporter of Israeli policies as Rubio (which is saying something), agrees that Congress must find a way of “holding [TikTok] accountable.” But Greenblatt may have a more nuanced grasp of the challenge TikTok poses than Rubio. In a leaked audio from a November conference call, Greenblatt said, “We have a major, major, major generational problem. All the polling I’ve seen… suggests this is not a left-right gap, folks. The issue of United States support for Israel is not left and right. It is young and old. The numbers of young people who think that Hamas’s massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high. And so we really have a Tik Tok problem, a Gen Z problem.”

Though Greenblatt’s remarks leave some room for interpretation, he seems to be acknowledging that TikTok isn’t manufacturing anti-Israel sentiment so much as reflecting the views of its overwhelmingly young (and international) user base.

At any rate, there’s no good evidence that, on the issue of Israel-Palestine, TikTok is doing more than that—conveying the sentiments of its demographic (and automatically amplifying whatever sentiment prevails in its demographic at any given moment, as social media algorithms, for better or worse, tend to do).

The absence of good evidence is a recurring theme in arguments against TikTok. The foundational premise of many of these arguments is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, does the bidding of the Chinese government—in which case Beijing could use TikTok to sway American opinion or siphon data from Americans. Yet, as Ken Klippenstein noted this week in the Intercept, “US intelligence has produced no evidence that the popular social media site has ever coordinated with Beijing.”

Notwithstanding this shortage of evidence, the House has now passed—and the Senate will eventually take up—a bill that would ban TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sells it to a non-Chinese entity within six months.

There are non-crazy arguments in favor of this bill. For example: Beijing doesn’t let the big US-based social media companies do business in China, so why should the US let ByteDance do business here? But there are non-crazy replies to some of these arguments. Like: Because the US, unlike China, is a liberal democracy that professes to champion the free flow of information (even when the information comes from Gen Zers and Millennials and doesn’t sit well with Marco Rubio or Jonathan Greenblatt).

Another non-crazy argument in favor of the bill is that China’s government has more control over Chinese companies than the US has over American companies and so might at this very moment be using TikTok as a tool of influence or espionage. Here, too, there are non-crazy replies. Like: The word “might” is doing a lot of work here! If Beijing is indeed using TikTok nefariously, shouldn’t America’s vast and powerful intelligence apparatus be able to find at least some evidence of that? And surely if there were such evidence, it would be leaked to the media any day now, as the national security establishment puts its shoulder behind the TikTok bill?

Again, you wouldn’t have to be crazy to support the anti-TikTok legislation. You could be a sane person whose motto is “always err on the side of caution.” Still, when legislation this intrusive, based on scenarios this hypothetical, not only passes the House but passes by a vote of 352 to 65, you have to conclude that there’s a lot of not-very-firmly-grounded fear floating around in this country.

No surprise there. After all, the previous Cold War featured lots of unhinged fears—hence the Hollywood blacklists and other McCarthyite repression, the FBI’s attempt to blackmail suspected Communist Martin Luther King into committing suicide, and so on. The current Cold War hasn’t fully ramped up, but we are already seeing the kind of threat inflation that led to the insanity of the 1950s and 1960s.

Cold War II itself, in its current inchoate form, might not have been enough to get the TikTok bill off the ground. But synergy between China hawks and pro-Israel hawks, like Rubio and Greenblatt, was enough to provide critical mass. The Wall Street Journal, recounting the efforts of a congressional staffer who was trying to organize a coalition that would back anti-Tik-Tok legislation, reports that, “It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok.”

One difference between this Cold War and the last one is that these days a bigger portion of international commerce involves products that feature lots of information processing—so a bigger portion of trade can be restricted out of fear of spying or foreign influence. This month the Chinese electronics company Xiaomi will start selling, in China, an EV that could eventually be a serious rival to Tesla. But how do we know the car won’t eavesdrop on us—and then, if we speak ill of China, drive us off a cliff? You may laugh, but some version of Chinese EV paranoia is probably around the corner.  

This kind of atmosphere makes it easier for American companies—Tesla in the case of Xiaomi, Meta in the case of TikTok—to lobby for protection from foreign competition. Which is a shame, because economic engagement can temper some of the dangers of a Cold war.

Again, it’s not crazy to think that a powerful country might use social media to meddle in the internal affairs of a rival power. For example: This week Reuters reported that during the Trump administration the CIA began “a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government.” The program was designed to, among other things, “foment paranoia among top leaders there.”

So why wouldn’t China do likewise, and try to foment paranoia among Americans? On the other hand, why would it bother when Americans are already doing such a good job of that?

Vir: Robert Wright, Nonzero