News that Chinese goverment officials and state-backed media have taken to Twitter in the United States to defeat governmental and legislative efforts to ban TikTok is just stunning. It proves several things:
–The Chinese government recognizes that TikTok is a strategic weapon and must be defended. The arguments that TikTok is not controlled by ByteDance and that ByteDance is independent of government/party control are just lies. Total propaganda.
–The Chinese government often says it does not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations, which is complete nonsense because it tries to shape the policies of governments everywhere China is present and China is now a global presence. But this example shows the Chinese trying to directly intervene in an American policy debate.
–Twitter and other social media platforms have completely abdicated their responsibility to avoid becoming tools of the Chinese government. It’s time that the United States rewrites or revises Section 230, or else starts enforcing existing laws against foreign propaganda. Imagine if China is willing to be this obvious regarding TikTok, what might it do in an American (or Taiwanese) election? Twitter and Facebook are banned in China, meaning Chinese government campaigns on social media are one-way influence operations.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy, which was the source of the New York Times story, said it is difficult to tell whether trends on social media are authentic American arguments or are derived from “autocratic propaganda.”
“Should geopolitical debates occur on Chinese-owned platforms like TikTok going forward, it could become even more difficult to differentiate between organic (i.e. American) arguments and propaganda,” the alliance said.
The time to act is now, as my co-author, Michael McLaughlin, and I argue in our new book, “Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia are Undermining our Democracy and National Security.” Pre-order on Amazon here.
