Twenty years ago, my day job was researching internet censorship, and my side job was advising activist groups on internet security. I try to help journalists in China access the unfiltered internet and help demonstrators in the Middle East avoid having their online content removed.
At that time, unfiltered internet Meaning "internet accessed from the United States," most censorship circumvention strategies focus on giving someone in a censored country access to a U.S. internet connection. The easiest way to keep sensitive content, such as protest videos, online is to upload it to a US service like YouTube. In early 2008, I gave a lecture to digital activists called “Cute Cat Theory.” The theory goes that US platforms used to host cat meme images and videos are the best tools for activists because if finicky governments block activist content, they will also alienate their citizens by banning large amounts of harmless content.
It was a simpler time. Elon Musk is just a millionaire who reportedly overstayed his U.S. student visa by just a few years (he denies working here illegally). Mark Zuckerberg was mocked for wearing an anonymous sweatshirt instead of a $900,000 watch. The United States is seen as the home of the free, uncensored Internet.
That era is now over. When Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, his swearing-in video will flood YouTube and Instagram. But those clips likely won't spread on TikTok, at least not any clips posted by U.S. users. In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill, the Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act, aimed at forcing TikTok to remove the app by January 19, 2025. Chinese-owned apps are sold to U.S. companies or close their U.S. operations. Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. News outlets reported that Trump was considering issuing an executive order to delay the ban, fueling speculation that Chinese officials could sell the platform to Musk. (TikTok owner ByteDance has denied this speculation.)
Whether or not that happens, this is a frustrating moment for anyone who values protections for speech and access to information in the United States. In 1965, while the Cold War shaped the U.S. national security environment, the Supreme Court Lamont v. Postmaster General Generaldetermined that the post office must send people publications the government claims are "communist political propaganda" without forcing recipients to first state in writing that they want to receive the mail. The decision was unanimous and established the idea that Americans have the right to discover whatever they want in the "marketplace of ideas." As attorneys for the Knight First Amendment Center pointed out in an amicus brief supporting TikTok, the level of speech suppression the U.S. government is now requesting is far more severe because it would completely prevent U.S. citizens from accessing information, not just Ask them for permission to access the information.
The Biden administration and its supporters on both sides of the aisle say TikTok is too dangerous for impressionable Americans to access. Deputy Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar's national security argument in defending the ban was: "ByteDance's ownership and control of TikTok poses an unacceptable threat to national security because the relationship could allow Hostile foreign governments collect intelligence and manipulate content received by TikTok U.S. companies, though she acknowledged that "these harms have not yet been realized." "The Supreme Court's ruling clearly confirms these concerns: "Congress has determined that the divestment is necessary to address its national security concerns about TikTok's data collection practices and relationships with foreign adversaries, and that concern is well supported. "
We don't yet know how TikTok users in the United States will respond to a ban on the platform used by 170 million Americans, but what's happening in India may provide some clues.
I study content on TikTok and YouTube in my lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a few months ago we stumbled across some interesting data. In 2016, Hindi videos accounted for less than 1% of all videos uploaded to YouTube that year. By 2022, more than 10% of new YouTube videos will be in Hindi. We believe this huge growth is not only due to improved broadband and mobile phone penetration in India, but also to the Indian government's ban on TikTok in June 2020. When we examined Hindi videos uploaded in 2020, we saw clear evidence of a massive influx of TikTok refugees to YouTube. Many of the newly posted videos are exactly 15 seconds long, which was the limit TikTok set for video recording before 2017. Other videos feature TikTok branding at the beginning or end of the video.
Like the United States, India's ban was motivated by national security reasons, but there was also a more tenable reason: India and China were engaged in a military conflict on their shared border. But TikTok is far more important to India than to the United States. We estimate that when India banned TikTok in mid-2020, Indian users had uploaded more than 5 billion videos to the service. (By examining some of these videos, we found evidence that TikTok in South Asia may be used more as a video chat service to stay in touch with family and friends rather than as a platform for wannabe influencers.) Even now, distance More than four years after the ban, the only countries with more videos uploaded to TikTok than India are Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States; we estimate that more than a quarter of TikTok video uploads originate from South Asia, while just over 7% originate from the United States.
As these Indian TikTok creators are forced off the platform, new Indian short video apps like Moj and Chingari hope to capture the wave of users. They were largely unsuccessful—none of these small startups gained the visibility in India to compete with YouTube and Instagram, both well-funded American companies. In fact, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's TikTok ban is a subsidy to American companies Google and Meta. It is also rightly seen as evidence that the Modi government is abandoning global democratic values and moving towards a less open society.
Until recently, I expected a TikTok ban to have the same result in the United States: effectively creating nationalist subsidies that protect domestic technology providers (who, oddly enough, have been lining up to donate to the incoming administration’s inaugural party). But TikTok users in the United States are a creative bunch, and over the past week enough of them have migrated to the Chinese social network Xiaohongshu — often translated in English as “Red Book” or “Red Notes” — —The app is now among the top on social media. - Download charts on Android and iPhone operating systems. Originally built as a video travel guide to Hong Kong for mainland Chinese tourists, Xiaohongshu's interface will be familiar to TikTok users, with Chinese users welcoming American newcomers with a series of charming invitations to teach them conversational Mandarin or Chinese cooking. , and offers tips on how to avoid online censorship.
Chinese and American users are unlikely to share space on Xiaohongshu for long. The Chinese government generally requires service providers whose tools are popular outside China to separate their products into two categories, one for Chinese users and one for other users. WeChat is a popular messaging and microblogging app in China, but is a separate platform in the rest of the world - WeChat. TikTok itself is a spinoff from the Chinese domestic network Douyin. Even if Beijing realizes it's a huge PR opportunity by allowing TikTok refugees to stay on Little Red Book, the same logic that allows Congress to ban TikTok could also apply to any other Chinese-owned company that has the potential to "collect and manipulate" intelligence on U.S. users . ' content.
While I don’t think this particular rebellion will last, I’m encouraged that American TikTok users recognize that banning this popular platform goes directly against American values. If only America's leaders were so wise.
In 2008, when I was advising Internet activists on how to avoid censorship, I included a section in my presentation called "The China Corollary." While most countries cannot easily censor social media platforms without angering their own citizens, China is powerful enough to create its own parallel social media system that serves the entertainment needs of most users while blocking activists. What I couldn’t have predicted was that Americans would find themselves fleeing their own picky government for a Chinese video platform with strict content controls.
Trump may decide to get around the TikTok ban with an executive order stating that the platform no longer poses a threat to national security. Or the Trump administration could choose not to enforce the law. Musk, Zuckerberg or another Trump friend might buy the platform. But for millions of Americans, the damage has been done: The idea of America as a defender of free speech has been shattered forever by this shameful ban.