Metastasizing government, seeping into every crevice of life, cannot get out of its own way. It justifies punitive action against Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok as crucial to “national security.” Simultaneously, however, the government claims that a Japanese steel corporation’s purchase of U.S. Steel would threaten “national security”: Federal officials feign alarm (this is too risible to be other than political theater) about a corporation from an allied nation purchasing the third-largest U.S. steelmaker, from which the Defense Department currently buys none of the merely 3 percent of domestic steel production it needs.
Under a new law, TikTok, which says it has 170 million U.S. users (2 billon worldwide), would be banned from U.S. app stores unless its Chinese ownership is terminated within 270 days, with a possible 90-day extension. Perhaps this ownership has serious national security implications. Recently retired congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), an exemplary legislator who chaired the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, was a prime mover of the anti-TikTok legislation. He rightly regards the CCP as TikTok’s ultimate master in China’s Leninist party-state, and he correctly considers the CCP evil and dangerous. But those judgments do not suffice to dispel doubts about the national security facts, and the wisdom and constitutionality of the law.
Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the temperate senator who chairs the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, voted for the law and says of people who doubt the necessity and fear the precedent of the forced-divestiture-or-ban: “They’ve not seen what Congress has seen.” Well.
Nowadays, a “trust us” response from government intensifies rather than allays suspicions. So, Congress should share much of what it has seen that supposedly justifies forcing divestiture or the banning of TikTok. And it should explain what intelligence sources and methods would be compromised by sharing everything.
Regarding the postulated danger from TikTok siphoning up users’ data: What data? How is this dangerous? How is it different from what Facebook and others do? And cannot China get oceans of such data from private sellers of data?
Another question: In Cold War 1965, the Supreme Court (BEG ITAL)unanimously(END ITAL) overturned a federal law burdening citizens’ “right to receive” mailed communist propaganda from a foreign adversary. Do not Americans therefore have a fundamental First Amendment right to access social media platforms of their choice, even ones delivering, inter alia, a wicked regime’s content?
Although the obvious target is TikTok, the new law also applies to other social media platforms “controlled by a foreign adversary.” This provision might suffice to protect the law from violating the Constitution’s prohibition of bills of attainder: laws punishing a person or entity without a trial. But the provision seems merely cosmetic.
TikTok successfully incited its U.S. users, who an independent monitor says spend much more time on it than people do on Instagram or Snapchat, to inundate Congress with pleas on the app’s behalf. Legislators considered this evidence of how manipulable Americans (especially but not only young ones) are, and why they need protection from TikTok. So, the argument for the ban-or-divest law rests on the idea that people should trust their government, which does not trust them to furnish their own minds.
Some Americans, oblivious of their cognitive dissonance, are warning about the imminent arrival of domestic authoritarianism, while hoping for the incarceration of the incumbent president’s principal opponent. One way our nation could minimize the self-inflicted damage to its reputation would be to not retreat from its defense of an open internet.
Today’s TikTok panic — the legislation against it sped through the House in 47 days — is occurring in an America whose commitment to free speech has withered in recent decades. Many progressives, especially, believe free speech is often harmful, so the First Amendment is, to use the mincing adjective progressives adore, “problematic.” Progressivism is inherently paternalistic — government knows best; eat your spinach — and hence infantilizing. Many conservatives are making this a bipartisan temptation.
But respect for the First Amendment has collapsed, and government has a propensity for claiming that every novel exercise of power legitimates the next extension of its pretensions. It is prudent to assume this: TikTok will not be the last target of government’s desire to control the internet and the rest of society’s information and opinion ecosystem.
Government will, as usual, say that its steadily enlarged control of our lives is for our own good. Regarding TikTok, the government says its control is to protect us from influences we cannot be trusted to properly assess. And, of course, to enhance “national security.”
Reach George Will at georgewill@washpost.com
