Who owns the narrative? If American lawmakers are to be believed, it is currently at risk of being hijacked by China, spread via de facto spyware by impressionable young people who slip short videos into their bedrooms.
The official dissing of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, is nothing new. The prospect of a ban has been looming for some time. In March, US senators introduced the Restriction Act, a bipartisan attempt to give the president powers to expel US cyberspace on national security grounds.
Israel’s war on Gaza has reignited the debate, with Republican presidential contenders accusing the platform of not only pushing pro-Palestinian content but actively converting the country’s youth into Hamas supporters. Every 30 minutes spent watching Tiktok makes people “17 percent more anti-Semitic, more pro-Hamas,” Nikki Haley said in a presidential primary earlier this month, misinterpreting polling data.
Some other countries have already banned TikTok, led by India, which banned the app in 2020 after border clashes with China. But the debate in the world’s leading media market, which has unparalleled global reach, to banish one of the only non-Silicon Valley tech giants in the midst of a global information war raises crucial questions about how the narratives, experts say.
Who does the censorship?
The push to ban TikTok was fueled by an echo from the relatively distant past. After Israel launched its war on Gaza on October 7, young American TikTokers seeking to understand America’s involvement in the Middle East appear to have unearthed Osama Bin Laden’s post-9/11 letter to the American people. It had been gathering dust on the Guardian website and now sparked a decontextualized discussion. memeathon about American imperialism.
The furor over Bin Laden’s resurrected pamphlet, which repeats classic anti-Jewish tropes about Jews controlling “his policies, media and economy,” only served to increase interest in his strident criticism of American foreign policy. Shocked to discover episodes such as the 12 years of deadly sanctions imposed by the United States on Iraq before its 2003 invasion as part of the disastrous “War on Terror,” young Americans now saw their country’s support for Israel’s war against Gaza in a new light. .
TikTok responded quickly, “aggressively” removing the content.
The Guardian removed Bin Laden’s letter after it became its top trending article.
TikTok’s motives were likely to maintain its presence in the lucrative U.S. market, says Michael Kwet, a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. As a foreign entity, it has come under intense pressure from lawmakers, and its CEO faced a grilling in Congress earlier this year, which accused the app of being a “Trojan horse” for Chinese influence.
“TikTok wants to keep the gravy train rolling,” Kwet says. “There is no reason to believe that TikTok will offer substantially more diverse views on the global media landscape… When faced with content moderation decisions, TikTok will do what all large social media companies do: remove content on request of entities with power, as long as it is too costly to disobey.”
The problem, in his opinion, is the corporate ownership of platforms beholden to the governments that regulate the markets.
How is the flow of information controlled?
The ability of governments, corporations and powerful interests to direct the flow of information has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. The publication last year of the so-called “Twitter Files” attracted the interest of those seeking to understand the infiltration of the engine rooms of social networks.
However, the findings came with a caveat. Billionaire Elon Musk, who at the time positioned himself as a champion of free speech after his acquisition of Twitter (now known as previous owner Jack Dorsey.
Much of the story, told by carefully selected journalists, focused on the insular dynamics of American politics. And while the revelation was only partial, it was nonetheless damning, as it demonstrated how the US government and security services systematically pressured the platform to suppress, moderate and amplify.
But when it comes to the power of the United States to distort the narrative beyond its borders, the smoking gun was provided by communications from CENTCOM, the Pentagon’s central command unit, which repeatedly got Twitter to promote certain accounts to increase its influence abroad, infecting the flow of information in places as far away as Yemen and Syria.
If, as the Twitter archives have shown, Silicon Valley giants like Meta, Instagram and even X are already working with the US government, the TikTok affair illustrates how easily foreign contenders who theoretically have the potential to expand global discourse is brought to its knees when the profit motive is wielded, analysts say.
“At the end of the day, it’s a little bit worse because TikTok was being more docile than it needed to be,” says Nadim Nashif, director of 7amleh, a nonprofit that promotes Palestinian digital rights and has highlighted cases of “shadow ban.” ”of pro-Palestinian content on the platforms.
What impact is this having on the world?
The country of the First Amendment is not the only one erecting digital walls, even if its capacity to build global tunnels of influence is greater. Having repeatedly rebuked countries like China, Russia and Iran in their attempts to suppress uncomfortable narratives to serve supposed national security interests, the United States is accused of applying double standards.
But virtue signaling aside – from all sides – a much larger tit-for-tat geopolitical battle is being waged in the corporate arena. That battle begins at home. America’s intolerance toward TikTok is based on ensuring that technology platforms that do not respond to its dictates do not gain a foothold in a domestic market with global reach. China, its biggest economic rival and home of TikTok, has done the same, creating a controlled space by blocking Google and Facebook.
When it comes to privacy, there’s not much to choose from, experts say.
“This is all spyware. When you install X, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok on your phone, it is spyware, whether American or Chinese. That’s all. Pure and simple,” says Dina Ibrahim, professor of broadcasting and electronic communications arts at San Francisco State University.
Amid all this, it is the vulnerable who suffer, says Nashif. “You can see it very clearly when we talk about weaker indigenous communities in the Global South. We can see it in Kashmir because, obviously, [social media platforms] We will think twice before attacking the Indian government. We can see it when we talk about the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. You can see it when we talk about the Palestinians.
“We can see it in these communities that don’t have enough power, that they don’t have anyone behind them and putting pressure on them.”
When it comes to Palestine, there is no shortage of examples. Whether it’s Meta-owned Instagram’s machine translation tool, which adds the word “terrorist” to Palestinian users’ bios (an issue it later apologized for) or Meta-owned WhatsApp, which answers questions about Palestine with illustrations of children with weapons.
Digital rights groups, including 7amleh, have accused the world’s largest digital platforms of removing content, restricting accounts and suppressing hashtags.
Is this simply an algorithmic glitch, inadvertently fanning the flames of a violent conflict that has sparked global passions, or is it part of something larger?
Can balance be restored?
In this asymmetric information war, experts say the poorest and most dispossessed suffer. So is there a way to correct the imbalance?
“That’s the billion-dollar question,” Nashif says.
The question, it seems, must be addressed to the greatest digital power of all. But, Kwet says, opinion-forming elites are looking the other way. “Imperialism is ingrained in the minds of the American-European intelligentsia. When the topic of digital colonialism is discussed, it is on the margins, and in abstract terms, a way of virtue signaling to show that you are up to ‘decolonization,’” she says.
When it comes to vulnerable communities in the Global South, only people on the ground can break the paradigm, he thinks.
“Genuine opposition to digital colonialism seeks to end digital capitalism and build a technological economy by and for the people. There would be no single, centralized network for those with the power to influence and control. The technology needed to make it a reality already exists, but it will take a global solidarity campaign to scale it up.”
For now we have X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. “They are designed to misinform. They are designed so that you, the reader or viewer seeking information, deliberately receive what you already believe,” says Ibrahim.
