Nikki Haley Reinvigorates The GOP’s Breathless TikTok Hysteria… For The Children

We’ve noted many times how the GOP’s obsession with TikTok is stupid, performative, and utterly hollow. For example, the party desperately wants to ban TikTok for “privacy reasons,” yet consistently opposes passing privacy laws, or regulating data brokers that traffic in far more data — at a far greater international scale — than TikTok executives could ever dream of.

The GOP’s TikTok hysteria seemed to have waned for a few months, but seems to have been rekindled after the media-constructed firestorm about a few kids sharing an old letter by Osama Bin Laden. Enter GOP Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, who has reiterated her call for a national TikTok ban. Why? Because she’s just so dreadfully concerned about U.S. consumer privacy, of course!

“I think what we need to do is we need to be honest with them, you know, you don’t tell them this is what we’re going to do and not explain why,” she said on Fox News. “The reason we want to ban TikTok — and yes, I think we need to ban it — is because it’s an app that actually goes and has access to your contacts, to your financial information, to your camera, to your recorder, to everything. It’s infiltration; we know that.

In reality, most young adults have realized the GOP is preposterously full of shit and that its solutions to a highly hyperbolized TikTok problem don’t actually do a damn thing.

This is the same party that utterly refuses to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law, or hold privacy violators of any kind account. It also opposes the regulation of the data broker industry, which consistently collects far more, and far more sensitive data, than TikTok. An industry that turns around and sells access to that data to everyone (including *gasp* Chinese intelligence).

So you’ve banned TikTok, but because you’ve done absolutely nothing about the broader privacy rot across apps, data brokers, telecoms, utilities, and other chain participants, China can still routinely purchase no limit of sensitive U.S. consumer data tracking them in exquisite detail. And the U.S. government can simply buy data to avoid having to get warrants. Great job! Much freedom!

There are numerous reasons the GOP wants to ban TikTok, and none of them have anything to do with kids’ privacy or national security. Much of the GOP’s animosity to TikTok is simply driven by rank xenophobia, and the idea that an overseas company run by darker skinned human beings is hoovering up ad money the U.S. right wing believes Americans are inherently owed by divine right.

A big chunk of the hysteria is also originating over at Facebook, whose lobbyists routinely seed TikTok moral panics in DC and the press for anticompetitive reasons. Some of it is just plain old anti-China saber rattling that their military contractor constituent friends appreciate the endless stoking of. And some is just chum for a base that believes it would be a hoot to go to war with China.

But a not insubstantial part of the GOP’s fear about TikTok is it’s an information exchange and communications platform they simply don’t control. After all, you don’t want kids doing stuff like tanking Trump rally attendance on TikTok. Haley insists that if the GOP just sits down with the kids they’ll understand that they’re banning a super popular video app for their own good:

“This is a truth that needs to be told to the American people, no matter what age they are. I think the younger generation is smart. I think they will understand this when we explain it to them,” Haley said Monday. “And yes, we’re on social media too. We put videos out there, we’re doing all those things, but we’re doing on platforms that we know that we can trust, and TikTok’s one we don’t trust.”

The GOP wants platforms (like Facebook) that can be easily scared away from moderating hate speech and race-baiting political propaganda through vague threats (like pretending the GOP suddenly and uncharacteristically supports antitrust reform). They want platforms full of gibberish and hate speech and right wing propaganda like Gab, X, or Truth Social. They don’t want platforms they can’t control.

Of course there’s plenty that TikTok has done that warrants severe criticism. At the same time, nothing about the GOP’s opposition to TikTok is genuine. None of their solutions (like a ban of a single app that can be bypassed by kids simply by switching from Wi-Fi to cellular) are serious policy. But that hasn’t stopped most press outlets from portraying the GOP’s theatrics as good faith reform all the same.