The ticking hands of censorship and spying

Image courtesy of Roly Williams and Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump’s executive order to ban the video-sharing site, TikTok, in the United States illustrates the dangers of the rule of whim, coming as it does shortly after teenagers with accounts organized fake reservations for tickets to his Tulsa rally. It sends the message that if you attack the dictator, you will be punished. But his action also damages the cause of reasonable concerns about what the Chinese corporation is collecting — about what social media companies generally are sweeping up in their efforts to monetize every datum they can acquire.

The reality is that TikTok is a structurally risky site, open to easy manipulation to alter or sweep up data for whatever purposes hackers may have. And as an entity that is based in China, TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, will always be under a cloud of suspicion as a business that is subject to the country’s Communist Party and its ideological controls. I say this with full recognition that American social media and search engine corporations also operate in an environment of political pressure. This is not to say that the two systems, Chinese and American, are the same in degree, but the latter nation, my country, has a long history that goes back at least to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 of working to silence the voices of opposition. And following the 9/11 attacks, the ability of the government to…