Trump was right about TikTok — it's more dangerous than it looks

At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life. Call them town squares. Call them infrastructure.

They exist in some nether region between public utility and private concern. They are too important to entrust to billionaires and businesses, but that makes them too dangerous to hand over to governments.

We have not yet found a satisfying answer to the problem of their ownership and governance. But some arrangements are more worrying than others. There are fates worse than Musk.

TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years old. But its growth is like nothing we've seen before. In 2021, it had more active users than Twitter, more U.S. watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more site visits than Google. The app is best known for viral dance trends, but there was a time when Twitter was 140-character updates about lunch orders and Facebook was restricted to elite universities. Things change. Perhaps they have already changed. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and the will of the Chinese government. There is no possible ambiguity on this point: The Chinese Communist Party spent much of the last year cracking down on its tech sector.

In August 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order insisting that TikTok sell itself to an American firm or be banned in the United States. By the fall, ByteDance was looking for a buyer, with Oracle and Walmart the likeliest suitors, but then Joe Biden won the election and the sale was shelved.

TikTok has been thick with videos backing the Russian narrative on the war in Ukraine. Media Matters, for instance, tracked an apparently coordinated campaign driven by 186 Russian TikTok influencers who normally post beauty tips, prank videos and fluff. And we know that China has been amplifying Russian propaganda worldwide.

Imagine a world in which the United States has a contested presidential election, as it did in 2020 (to say nothing of 2000). If one candidate was friendlier to Chinese interests, might the Chinese Communist Party insist that ByteDance give a nudge to content favoring that candidate? Or if they wanted to weaken America rather than shape the outcome, maybe TikTok begins serving up more and more videos with election conspiracies, sowing chaos at a moment when the country is near fracture.

TikTok's billion users don't think they're looking at a Chinese government propaganda operation because, for the most part, they're not. They're watching makeup tutorials and recipes and lip sync videos and funny dances. But that would make it all the more powerful a propaganda outlet, if deployed.

In all of this, I'm suggesting a simple principle, albeit one that will not be simple to apply: Our collective attention is important.

Whoever (or whatever) controls our attention controls, to a large degree, our future.

The social media platforms that hold and shape our attention need to be governed in the public interest. That means knowing who's truly running them and how they're running them.

I'm not sure which of the social network owners currently clear that bar. But I'm certain ByteDance doesn't.

On this, Donald Trump was right, and the Biden administration should finish what he started.