What’s really at stake in the US moves to target TikTok?
Al Jazeera
US lawmakers’ determination to limit the digital space raises crucial questions about who gets to tell the story
Who owns the narrative? If United States lawmakers are to be believed, it is currently at risk of being hijacked by China, disseminated on de-facto spyware by impressionable youth swiping short-form videos in their bedrooms.
Official tutting at TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, is nothing new. The prospect of a ban has been looming for a while. In March, US senators introduced the Restrict Act, a bipartisan bid to give the president powers to boot it out of US cyberspace on national security grounds.
Israel’s war on Gaza has reignited the debate, with Republican presidential contenders accusing the platform not only of boosting pro-Palestinian content but of actively turning the nation’s youth into Hamas supporters. Every 30 minutes spent watching Tiktok makes people “17 percent more anti-Semitic, more pro-Hamas”, said Nikki Haley at a presidential primary earlier this month, misinterpreting survey data.
Some other countries have already banned TikTok, led by India, which barred 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 tech behemoths that is not from Silicon Valley in the midst of a global infowar raises crucial questions about how narratives are managed, say experts.
The drive to ban TikTok was turbo-charged by an echo from the relatively distant past. After Israel launched its war on Gaza on October 7, young American TikTokers looking to understand US 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’s website – now it sparked a decontextualised memeathon on US imperialism.
