U.S. Press Starts To Figure Out College TikTok Bans Are A Dumb Performance

We’ve noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is a dumb performance designed to do several things, none of which have to do anything with consumer privacy and security. We’ve also noted how college bans of TikTok are a dumb extension of that dumb performance, and don’t accomplish anything of meaningful significance.

It took a little while, but the press and some schools appear to finally be figuring this out.

The Washington Post, for example, penned a piece last Friday highlighting how the evidence justifying banning TikTok on college campuses is largely nonexistent. There’s no evidence that China is using TikTok for influence at any scale, and TikTok’s just one of thousands of international companies and services exploiting our consistent lack of meaningful privacy oversight in the U.S.

Then there’s the problem of the ban literally not doing much. For most students, bypassing such bans is as simple as switching their phone from Wi-Fi to cellular:

But Gamble’s students quickly figured out that they could still scroll TikTok all they wanted just by hopping onto their phones’ data plans. “They’re rolling their eyes, basically,” she said. “I had a couple students who were like, ‘What? I didn’t know it was banned. I’ve been on it all day.’”

Academics also note how the bans are counterproductive to education, especially if you’re a media studies professor. They’re also quick to point out that such bans run counter to many of the values Americans profess to hold about open markets and free expression:

“This is the U.S. adopting a Chinese attitude toward the internet: We’re going to block things we don’t want you to see because everything’s a national security threat,” said Milton Mueller, a Georgia Institute of Technology professor and co-founder of the Internet Governance Project. “It’s really a dangerous attitude — not just for American values of free expression but for this whole idea of an open and interconnected internet.”

Some universities, like the University of Oklahoma, have also started to figure out that these bans are a zero-calorie performance by unserious people, as highlighted by Karl Herchenroeder at Communications Daily.

It’s nice to see WAPO figure this out, but in general overall press coverage of TikTok has been terrible. Claims of dangers are repeated un-skeptically to feed this moral panic for clicks, while allowing the GOP — a party with a forty-year track record of opposing privacy legislation and competent regulatory oversight — to pretend this is about consumer privacy and national security.

So what is actually motivating the GOP to ban TikTok?

One, the bans are generally designed to agitate a xenophobic base and give the impression the GOP is “doing something about China.” But the party that couldn’t care less about rampant corruption or privacy violations isn’t doing much of anything meaningful to thwart China. In fact, letting adtech, telecom, and app companies run rampant with little oversight runs contrary to any such goal.

Two, the bans distract the public and press from our ongoing failure on consumer privacy and security issues. Banning TikTok, but doing nothing about the accountability optional free for all that is the adtech and data-hoovering space, doesn’t actually fix anything. China can just obtain the same data from a universe of other international companies facing little real oversight on data collection.

Three, the ban is really just about money. Trump gave the game away with his proposal that TikTok be chopped up and sold to Oracle and Walmart. That cronyistic deal fell through, but it’s pretty clear that this moral panic is designed to either help TikTok’s competitors (Facebook lobbyists are very active on this front), or force the sale of the most popular app in modern history to GOP-allies. At which point they’ll engage in all the surveillance and influence efforts they pretend to be mad about.

Most of this really comes down to folks seeing the immense money being made by the most popular app in America, and wanting that money for themselves. They’ve successfully exploited national security concerns to make inroads toward this goal, and I’d suspect they’re only getting warmed up. Usually with the help of “both sides” press coverage that has a hard time differentiating performance from adult policy.