The New York Times front-paged an article on Saturday which means it won’t receive as much attention as it would during the week. It was headlined “TikTok Videos Show Despair Over Economy” and here is the electronic version, which had a stronger headline: “Want to Know What’s Bedeviling Biden? TikTok Economics May Hold Clues.”
The article analyzed how themes that resonate with younger Americans dominate the platform. “The term ‘Silent Depression’ recently spawned a spate of viral videos,” it said. Clips critical of capitalism are common. Jokes about poor housing availability are prominent. All of which runs against the objective indicators–the American economy is still the largest and strongest in the world. And Biden has taken dramatic steps to secure the semiconductor industry’s presence, as well as offering incentives for solar and wind energy. His administration is spending on infrastructure after many years of gridlock.
But Biden is obviously not getting rave reviews and the wave of pessimism could cost him the election. Could this be part of cognitive warfare from China and a blatant effort to interfere in the American election? The Times article, incomprehensibly, failed to note that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which is subject to the dictates of the Chinese Communist Party. More than 100 million Americans use TikTok. The party-state is fueling enormous disinformation campaigns in social media and through other means around the world. Could it be that souring younger American voters on re-electing President Biden is just one piece of that strategy?
What if the algorithms that manage TikTok’s content flows were tweaked just a bit? Let’s say ByteDance’s AI systems can differentiate positive postings from negative ones. And what if ByteDance, acting under the control of the Communist Party, promotes the negative posts more than it does the positive ones? We don’t know if they are doing that but it is certainly within the realm of their capabilities. That would represent manipulation of American political sentiment and we can’t control it or even understand what impact it is having on our nation. There’s only one solution: BanTikTok.
