The TikTok Ban Is an Act of Elite Desperation

TikTok isn’t some revolutionary force—and NatSec hatred for it is long simmering—but the nonstop images of dead Palestinians is absolutely what sealed its fate.

Whether TikTok is a net bad or good in some objective sense is irrelevant. The federal government—or Chinese or Iranian or Costa Rican government—could nuke all social media companies tomorrow, and it’s possible our society would profit. Much social and traditional media chatter has been made about whether TikTok is a genuine force of social change or better media literacy, whether it helps younger media consumers break through the ideological filters of more traditional media. My position is that TikTok, like all media outlets, is a mix of bad and good social outcomes. But on the subject of Gaza, it almost certainly does give media consumers a more accurate view of what is happening in “the Middle East” than CNN or the New York Times, which filter all their reporting through racist “Human Shields” framing, NatSec blob ideology, conflicted military contractors, and—often—literal IDF censors. This is a low bar, to be clear, but it is the relevant bar. 

The media and government moral panic over TikTok, of course, pre-dates the latest “war” in Gaza. But Gaza is what will put the ban over the top; it’s clearly the dispositive force. If one doesn’t believe this, they should ask lawmakers and pro-Israel organizations, who openly say as much. Several pro-Israel lobbying groups have called for a ban on TikTok. Senator-turned-full-time-pro-Israel-troll John Fetterman has repeatedly blamed TikTok for younger voters’ pro-Palestine preferences, and conservative Senator Josh Hawley has as well. This has been accompanied by a parallel media panic—from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal—about how TikTok is turning your teen into a Hamas sympathizer. 

The November election is fast approaching, and Biden is hurting badly with young voters and voters of color over his lockstep support of what half of Biden voters view as genocide. Now, the administration believes, is the time to change people’s information—rather than change reality. This is consistent with a Biden reelection strategy, as I detailed last week, premised on manipulating public perception rather than substantively changing policy. Conservative Democrats and Republicans, for the most part, have always been pro-banning TikTok over their lizard brain anti-China posture (though Trump has recently switched positions, either because his inner circle is being bought off, or just because he wants to do the opposite of what Biden wants to do, it’s not clear). Overall, the missing element in getting a TikTok ban through Congress has been Liberal-Left squeamishness with such an overt act of censorship. Gaza has radically changed this dynamic, and now the vast majority of congressional Democrats support the move because, clearly, the President doesn’t plan on ending his support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan any time soon. 

It’s not worth litigating whether TikTok is actually revolutionary praxis—or whether any media literacy gained on the subject of Gaza outweighs this social media platform’s numerous social ills (that it shares with many other social media platforms). What’s relevant is whether those in power in the US feel threatened by a social media company that operates outside of their more direct influence. The answer to this is clearly yes, and this seems sufficient reason to oppose the move. Singling out foreign-owned tech companies while letting slide American ones that have the same (non-ideological) problems and deleterious mental health effects will do nothing to mitigate the negative harms of social media outlets. It will simply compel the remaining social media companies to more thoroughly fall in line with US “national security interests” while still doing all the actual bad things social media does. 

Ultimately, the TikTok ban should be viewed as an act of elite desperation. With an emerging bipartisan consensus of further border militarization, and climate chaos accelerating faster than even our most pessimistic predictions, the need to control and manage images of human suffering is more urgent than ever. Gaza isn’t a deliberate testing ground for this—it’s its own unique and discrete evil that stems from unique and discrete colonial conditions. But it is fast becoming one incidentally. Bipartisan national security consensus changing course and seeking political solutions to fundamentally political problems—solutions predicated on justice, redistributing resources, and expanding suffrage—is obviously not an option. And when it’s not, extreme violence and subjugation is the order of the day. Such an order becomes much harder to enforce if images of the human costs of this extreme violence and subjugation are flooding the timelines of the domestic population. And since meaningfully reorganizing society is off the table, censoring the inevitable and horrific negative externalities of continued oppression is all that’s left.