Twenty years ago, my day job was researching Internet censorship, and my side job was advising activist organizations on Internet security. It tried to help journalists in China access the unfiltered web, and helped protesters in the Middle East avoid having their online content removed.
At the time, unfiltered Internet meant “Internet accessed from the United States,” and most censorship circumvention strategies focused on giving someone in a censored country access to an Internet connection in the United States. The easiest way to keep sensitive content online – protest footage, for example – was to upload it to a US-based service like YouTube. In early 2008, I gave a talk to digital activists called “The Cute Cat Theory.” The theory was that American platforms used to host images and videos of cat memes were the best tools for activists because if censorious governments banned activist content, they would alienate their own citizens by banning a lot of harmless content as well.
It was a simpler time. Elon Musk was just a millionaire, only a few years away from overstaying his student visa in the US (and he denied working here illegally). Mark Zuckerberg was mocked for wearing anonymous T-shirts, not a $900,000 wristwatch. The United States was seen as the home of free, uncensored Internet.
This era is now over. When Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20th, videos of his presidential oath will flood YouTube and Instagram. But these clips likely won't circulate on TikTok, at least none will be posted by American users. In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill, the Protecting Americans from Apps Censored by Foreign Adversaries Act, designed to force TikTok to sell the Chinese-owned app to a US company or shut down its US operations by January 19, 2025. The court upheld Supreme Council unanimously passed the law yesterday. Media reported that Trump was considering issuing an executive order to postpone the ban, leading to speculation that Chinese officials might sell the platform to “number one friend” Musk. (Bytedance, TikTok's owner, has rejected such speculation.)
Whether that happens or not, this is a frustrating moment for anyone who values American protections of expression and access to information. In 1965, as the Cold War shaped America's national security environment, the Supreme Court decided, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, that the post office had to send people leaflets that the government claimed were “communist political propaganda,” not force. Recipients must first declare in writing that they want to receive this mail. The decision was made unanimously, and established the idea that Americans had the right to discover what they wanted within the “marketplace of ideas.” As lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Center argued in an amicus brief supporting TikTok, the level of suppression of expression that the US government is now demanding is far more dangerous, because it would deny American citizens access to information in its entirety, not just ask them to get it. Permission to access that information.
According to the Biden administration and its bipartisan supporters, TikTok is simply too dangerous for impressionable Americans to access. The national security argument advanced by Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar in defense of the ban was that “ByteDance's ownership and control of TikTok poses an unacceptable national security threat because this relationship could allow a hostile foreign government to gather intelligence and manipulate content received by the U.S. TikTok service.” users,” although it acknowledged that “those harms have not yet been achieved.” The Supreme Court’s decision explicitly confirms these concerns: “Congress has determined that divestment is necessary to address well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.” “.
We don't know yet how TikTok users in the US will react to a ban on a platform used by 170 million Americans, but what happened in India may offer some insights.
My lab at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst studies content on TikTok and YouTube, and a few months ago, we found some interesting data. In 2016, Hindi-language videos represented less than 1 percent of all videos uploaded that year on YouTube. By 2022, more than 10 percent of new videos on YouTube were in Hindi. We believe this massive increase is due not only to improved broadband and mobile adoption in India, but also to the Indian government's ban on TikTok in June 2020. When we examined Indian videos uploaded in 2020, we saw clear evidence of an influx of refugees. Tik Tok on YouTube. Many of the newly posted videos were exactly 15 seconds long, which was the limit TikTok set for video recordings until 2017. Others featured TikTok branding at the beginning or end of the video.
Like the United States, India cited national security reasons to justify the ban, and it had a more defensible justification: India and China were then in a military clash along their shared border. But TikTok was more important for India than for the United States. We estimate that when India banned TikTok in mid-2020, more than 5 billion videos were uploaded to the service by Indian users. (By examining some of these videos, we see evidence that TikTok in South Asia may be used more as a video chat service to keep in touch with family and friends than as a platform for aspiring influencers.) Even now, after more than four years of ban. The only countries with more videos uploaded on TikTok than India are Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States; We estimate that more than a quarter of TikTok video uploads come from South Asia, while just over 7% come from the United States.
When Indian TikTok creators were forced off the platform, new Indian short video apps like Moj and Chingari were hoping to attract a wave of users. They have been largely unsuccessful, and none of these small startups have been able to achieve visibility in India to compete with YouTube and Instagram, both of which are well-funded US-based companies. In fact, the ban imposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on TikTok was a boost to the American companies Google and Meta. It was also correctly seen as evidence of the Modi government's retreat from universal democratic values and towards a less open society.
Until recently, I expected a TikTok ban to have the same result in the US: effectively creating a national subsidy to protect local tech providers (who, oddly, were lining up to donate to the inaugural parties of the incoming administration). But American TikTok users are a creative bunch, and in the past week, enough of them have taken to the Chinese social media network Xiaohongshu — which often translates as “Red Book” or “Red Note” in English — that the app is now leading social media. -Download charts on Android and iPhone operating systems. Xiaohongshu, initially created as a video travel guide to Hong Kong for mainland Chinese tourists, has a familiar interface to TikTok users, and Chinese users welcome American newcomers with a charming stream of invitations to teach conversational Mandarin or Chinese cooking, and tips on how to avoid censorship on the network. .
Chinese and American users are unlikely to share space on Xiaohongshu for long. The Chinese government has generally required providers whose tools have become popular outside China to segment their product offerings for Chinese and other users. Weixin, the popular messaging and microblogging app in China, is a separate platform — WeChat — in the rest of the world. TikTok itself has branched out from the local Chinese network Douyin. Even if Beijing senses a huge PR opportunity and allows TikTok refugees to remain in Xiao Hongshu, the same logic that allowed Congress to ban TikTok would presumably apply to any other Chinese-owned company with the ability to “collect intelligence on and manipulate American users.” “. ' content.
Although I do not believe this particular rebellion can continue, I am encouraged that American TikTok users recognize that banning the popular platform is in direct conflict with American values. If only America's leaders were so wise.
When I advised Internet activists on how to avoid censorship in 2008, I included a section in my presentation titled “The China Corollary.” Although most countries could not easily censor social media platforms without antagonizing their citizens, China was large enough to create its own parallel social media system that catered to most users' needs for entertainment while banning activists. What I did not expect was that Americans would find themselves fleeing their censorious government to a Chinese video platform that imposed strict controls on content.
Trump may decide to circumvent the TikTok ban by issuing an executive order stating that the platform no longer poses a threat to national security. Or the Trump administration may choose not to enforce the law. Musk, Zuckerberg, or another Trump friend might buy the platform. But for millions of Americans, the damage has been done: The idea of America as a champion of free speech is forever shattered by this shameful ban.