TikTok Chaos: Congress Should Broaden the Law Against All CCP Propaganda

Icons for the smartphone apps Xiaohongshu and TikTok are seen on a smartphone screen in Beijing, on Jan. 14, 2025. AP Photo/Andy Wong

Commentary

Millions of TikTokers are biting their well-polished nails, wondering whether President Donald Trump will really be able to work a deal so they can maintain access to the app. They do not seem to care much about TikTok being controlled by ByteDance, a company based in communist China.

TikTok lost its supposedly final legal defense on Jan. 17 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or see it banned. Jan. 19 was the deadline, after which app stores like Google and Apple were forbidden from allowing new TikTok downloads or updates for 170 million TikTokers in the United States. Failure to do so could result in a fine of $5,000 per download levied against the app stores. The plan is that, over time, the app would become buggy. As TikTokers upgrade to new phones, they will not be able to bring their addiction with them.

But then-President Joe Biden declined to enforce the law on his final full day in office. TikTok preempted the long slide into digital extinction by preemptively going dark except for mentioning that perhaps Trump would work a deal to save the app. That woke up its users and put the spotlight and tremendous political pressure on the president-elect. He then said he would try to save the app by giving it an extension to sell itself to a U.S. purchaser, which he said could, in part, be the U.S. government. He did not mention whether the all-important algorithm, which is how Beijing influences Americans, would come under the control of the United States. TikTok then turned the app back on and engineered a thank you for Trump directly into the app that all users would see.

All of this drama one day before Trump’s inauguration could be considered the exact kind of political manipulation that the law tried to stop. On Inauguration Day, Trump used an executive order to give TikTok a 75-day extension after suggesting a 50 percent U.S. stake in the company. However, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) brought up the balance of power between the U.S. government branches and questioned whether an executive order could hold legal weight against a law made in Congress, signed by Biden, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) addressed the big tech companies directly on social media, saying they need to comply with the law or be hit with “ruinous” fines.

In the bigger picture of the U.S.–China rivalry, the law makes perfect sense as a necessary step in decoupling the U.S. public from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence. TikTok’s argument that the ban violates TikTokers’ free speech is spurious. The law does not technically ban their speech, rather only banning the app’s ownership in China that algorithmically controls that speech under the thumb of the CCP.

Congress should actually go further than the Supreme Court and pass a law that paid authoritarian propaganda is not a form of free speech, should never be protected, and, like yelling fire in a movie theater, should instead be banned. CCP propaganda is not free because it is paid for by taxpayers in China who have no vote, no press freedom, and no freedom of speech. So they have no way to truly consent to how their tax money is used. Chinese taxes are not freely given, so the propaganda it buys is not a form of free speech. Neither is an algorithm like TikTok that reshuffles the free speech of Americans into something akin to propaganda that benefits the CCP.

TikTok fries the brains of users as young as 13 years old in the United States on meaningless and dangerous content like “challenges” while biasing that content away from educational material. One of the worst TikTok trends was the “choking challenge” that could lead to blackouts, brain damage, or death within five minutes. This content is censored in China but was served on a golden platter to kids in the United States. Anything seen as harmful to the CCP—like information about the Uyghur genocide and Taiwan’s independence—can be downgraded to the bottom of feeds where they are unlikely to be watched.

U.S. media and social media are critical to an educated American public. This public is critical to the workings of our democracy. Without educated voters, our nation will become rudderless. TikTok propagandizes voters with CCP-biased material and fails to sell in accordance with the law, which strongly indicates that it is under the control of the CCP.

But a law banning TikTok alone is not enough. As the ban approached, millions of TikTokers signed up with other social media apps and called themselves “TikTok refugees.” The most downloaded app between Jan. 14 and Jan. 18 was Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote. Xiaohongshu is based in Shanghai, China. Its name translates to “Little Red Book” (LRB), a reference to Mao Zedong’s book of quotations.

LRB is authoritarian, communist, and violent. Perhaps its most notable quote is: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” This quote is immediately followed in the LRB by another equally dangerous quote: “The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution. This Marxist-Leninist principle of revolution holds good universally, for China and for all other countries.”

Any app that promotes the LRB is not good for young people in the United States or anywhere else. It is arguably worse than TikTok, though both should be banned. In RedNote, the fig leaf of TikTok’s private ownership and short dance videos is gone, and what remains is far more explicit propaganda and censorship from the CCP.

TikTokers demonstrated with their migration that the whack-a-mole tactic of the U.S. Congress against CCP influence operations is too weak. So was the offer to allow the purchase of TikTok for its full market value, which is up to $200 billion, including the algorithm. Without it—and we should never allow such a destructive algorithm in the United States—the app is worth as little as $40 billion.

The CCP steals up to $600 billion annually from the United States in the form of intellectual property. So the United States would owe China nothing if we nationalized TikTok as partial recompense for years of theft. If the United States nationalized TikTok, the algorithm should be changed to something more educational for our youth, yet still entertaining. If TikTok is to be banned, it should not be a single ban, but a ban on all such vehicles of CCP influence, including RedNote and all other CCP-linked apps. The sooner we do this, the better.

To this author’s knowledge, the first article that demonstrated empirically that the TikTok algorithm was biased in favor of the CCP was published in 2021 by a tech journalist. A child of 15 who downloaded TikTok that year likely filled his head for three years with far worse than its famous dance videos. This child likely neglected his studies as a result and is now 18 and angry that his addiction is being taken away. Perhaps he—like many TikTok refugees—is turning to RedNote as a rebellion. Unconsciously influenced by the CCP for years, he and millions of other teen American rebels could, in the worst-case scenario, subscribe to Mao’s ideas and become an internal security threat to American democracy.

Three years was too long to wait for such a weak law against TikTok. Now is the time for Congress to take more decisive and comprehensive action against CCP influence in the United States. Start with TikTok and RedNote, but do not end there—not by a long shot.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.