The Great American TikTok Tantrum

A Tale of Digital Hypocrisy

This week, we are collaborating on a post with

Kris Litson

. Soon, you’ll be able to read more from him on his own Substack. Stay tuned and be sure to follow him for more content! Learn more about him below 👇🏼

Kris Litson

is a New Zealand born, Aussie raised, German resident that is actually a series of neuroses wearing a human suit. This has imbued him with a love for nature, a habit of swearing and a deep hatred of rules and bureaucracy.

He’s an intense sci-fi and fantasy nerd with a penchant for 4X and factory building games on PC. He also enjoys TCGs, board games, TTRPGs, minis and all that really geeky shit. Kris has lived a wildly intense life which has made him an inveterate story-topper and now a cultivator of middle-aged boredom.

Digital Disruption

And just like that TikTok is gone in the US. (Edit: It’s back for now). With a wave of the Wand of Law the US government has blacklisted one specific app and impacted millions of Americans. As of now it’s all over for TikTok with seemingly no way back for a ByteDance owned version for the app within US borders. But how and why did we get here? What about the creators who make a living there? Why is no other company being targeted? Join me as we explore the US government’s TikTok Hypoc(risy).

TikTok, aka Vines for Gen Z, is, at its core, simply a visual social media. Short (usually) videos are uploaded, most of them junk, that people stare at for a few seconds before scrolling to the next. It’s widely consumed, widely used for good (memes) and ill (basically everything else) and it’s widely viewed as addictive, but what on your phone isn’t? There are many, many things wrong with TikTok, from the opacity of its algorithm, its exploitation of human psychology, its willingness to allow mis- and disinformation, its inability to protect minors from harmful content and, of course, what it’s doing with everyone’s data.

All of this is true of every other big tech IP used in the US, so why pick on TikTok?

First we need to understand that…

Uncle Sam's Selective Memory

About profit at the expense of its people. An alarmingly large percentage of Americans seem not to have clued into the fact that the US is simply a giant system for extracting wealth from the poor and feeding it into its Elon Musks and Koch brothers. It's like a casino that never pays out. Different tax laws from state to state, no indication of the full price of goods, expensive healthcare, minimal social security, aggressive failure based marketing, political scare campaigns, and a rotten-to-the-core privatised media have left its people in a constant state of confusion, despair and anger while simultaneously draining their money.

Despite all this, now they care about you.

They didn’t during the Cambridge Analytica scandal (2018) when they said it was totally okay for Zuckerberg to be stealing your data and using it to make money. When it was the NSA (2013) they said it was in your interests that they were monitoring everything you said and did. Since then US tech giants (Meta, Google, Amazon and their ilk) have been tracking everything you’ve been doing, which is fine as long as American dollars are made from that data. As soon as the currency becomes Yuan though, that’s a problem.

What the What?

So is the motivation simply racism/money or should we be concerned about what TikTok is up to? Are the Chinese polluting people’s minds with propaganda? Is TikTok providing the Chinese government with American secrets, putting national security at stake?!

It certainly seems that racism and money are the driving forces here as the government is not seeking to stop TikTok from existing, but rather seeking to make it American. As long as it becomes American owned and then American data can be harvested by American companies to make American dollars.

It’s also hard to ignore the possible economic competition and geopolitical tension aspects of this discussion. Doubly so in the light of previous bans for Chinese tech companies, such as Huawei, ZTE, over security concerns. Though those were targeted at hardware that it was believed the Chinese government could use to directly monitor users of those companies' devices. It’s worth noting that the US is not alone here and the UK has already banned Huawei devices from its phone network and Germany will do the same starting in 2026.

But that’s not all there is to it…

ByteDance: Villain or Scapegoat

There’s little concrete evidence as to whether or not ByteDance is supplying data to the Chinese government, though there are certainly good reasons for caution here. China has repeatedly shown that it is willing to destabilise the US and understanding the habits and patterns of US citizens would certainly be a good way to do this. TikTok has already been criticised for being vague about how and where it stores US user data, though no more so than many other tech giants. With the launch of “Project Texas” (ByteDance’s plan to store US TikTok data on servers managed by Oracle), skepticism remains about ByteDance’s influence and connections to the Chinese government.

All that said, it remains hypocritical for the US government to start pretending now that it cares about the data of its citizens. Even now as it screeches about the privacy of those using TikTok, it makes no effort to pass a law equivalent to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

But the ultimate folly in all of this comes in the form of…

Plot Twist: Enter the Dragon

RedNote is a Chinese app that former TikTok users are now downloading en masse. As it’s in Chinese this has led to a truly bizarre situation that has even seen an influx of Americans learning Mandarin via Duolingo. Now that these ex-TikTokers, self-identifying as "TikTok refugees," have migrated, they're completely at the whim of Chinese policy. Their data is even less safe than before and the information they are assimilating is essentially Chinese propaganda.

Already people from TikTok are buying the idea that life in China is grand. Everything is cheap and high quality. There are no social problems. Everyone is happy all the time because it’s actually candy land, not China. It’s so on the nose that it evokes memories of Tucker Carlson’s propaganda trip to Russia where he had the opportunity to grill Putin for being an aging egomaniac with no real friends who needs to swing his dick around, and instead gave us the line “The groceries are so cheap!”.

“Content moderation” on RedNote is essentially government censorship and ensures that posts align with the Community Party line. These include such gems as the government can do no wrong, Taiwan is part of China, Premier Xi definitely doesn’t look like Winnie the Pooh, there are no Uigher labour or reeducation camps, Tibet is the happiest place on earth, the Tian’anmen Square massacre never happened and Mao totally didn’t plunge the country into famine and kill millions of Chinese with some of the dumbest policies instituted by a leader in the modern age. I’m sure nothing bad could come from a generation of Americans growing up with these ideals. I bet Taiwan is stoked.

Rednote also enforces Chinese social norms due to being subject to Chinese censorship. There are reports that RedNote has removed “sensitive” posts, particularly on LGBTQI+ topics meaning that a formerly reasonably safe space for the community has now been removed.

Wont Somebody Think of the Children?!

Social Media panic isn’t new and the US isn’t the only country responding. Australia recently also instituted a social media ban for anyone under 16. A knee-jerk reaction to several real problems such as cyberbullying, grooming, intensified peer pressure and impossible to meet physical and life standards are all possible issues for children using social media. We already know for a fact that it impacts attention spans and mental health and that the younger you are the more intense these impacts. This doesn’t even touch on how difficult it will be to enforce this. Teens are increasingly tech-savvy and there will be more than enough who are willing and able to find workarounds here, not to mention plenty of parents that will be willing to let that happen.

But banning social media and requiring ID is unlikely to resolve these issues and also ignores the many good things that social media can do for children. Social media is where society happens now for a lot of people. As mentioned before it can be a safe space to connect for people that do not have such spaces in the real world. It can be a force for change allowing the young to band together to fit for political change as they have done so with climate change policy.

All of this aside from the fact that adults are also vulnerable online and are frequent targets and distributors of mis- and disinformation. Russian propaganda farms and right-wing conspiracy theorists post whatever garbage they want, and there are your grandparents screeching about immigrants as if this is gospel truth because they read it on Facebook. Are we also going to enforce an online safety license for adults? Will they be required to pass a test to indicate that they understand that celebrities are not asking them for money and there actually is no Nigerian prince? Perhaps taking aim at the people who distribute damaging material rather than taking aim at children is the better way to go. Just sayin’.

Creators Left on Read

While Gen Z not being able to use TikTok for information as opposed to Wikipedia is absolutely a good thing, cutting tens of thousands of creators off from their audience and, for some, their primary source of income is what we call in the biz ‘a dick move’. While there may be valid reasons for the banning of TikTok to have no structures or policies in place to cushion the impact on those that rely on the service, whether for cash or community, is frankly abhorrent. Imagine if someone just came into your place of work and said that your entire industry was disappearing at the end of the month!

This loss of community has, for some, caused a profound sense of loss, as if thousands of friends were instantly stripped away from them. Combined with the loss of income and the uncertain future of the app, anxiety has spiked among creators. What will they do now? Where will they go? Many will be forced to migrate and adapt to new platforms which could mean rebuilding communities of thousands to millions of followers using an unfamiliar format and a new, unknowable algorithm. RedNote hardly seems like a solution, but it’s happening regardless.

Spoiler Alert: We’re Screwed

The answers to these problems are not easy, but that’s what happens when you let business go absolutely crazy and put no limits on their behaviour in place. Most of the world lacks the legal structures to handle the modern technological landscape, but some, like the EU, are trying. Others, like Australia, are reacting rather than solving problems. And then there’s America, which has basically just wiped its hands of the whole issue of uncontrolled corporations and data theft, as long as they are American. It’s focus on economic and political dominance warping its views of its own citizens.

What needs to happen now is that countries need to take a good long look at the science behind social media, the impacts of it and the unchecked power of the companies that control it. They need to invest in strong data and consumer protection laws, break down monopolies, support the growth of their citizens, and start taxing the shit out of these bastards so they can use that money to undo some of the damage that they have wrought.

How does this happen? Well that’s up to the Americans. Given they just ended one of the most ineffectual governments of US history and then elected a rapist that they think is Jesus 2.0 and who will institute a kleptocracy, I’m not optimistic. But if they do manage to elect someone who gives a damn and start making the changes needed to most of their policies, this could be set right.

For now, at least let's not steal spaces from people who need them for comfort, currency and content without really figuring out what we want to solve.