Topics: TikTok, China broadly, thawing geography, a cute cancel culture Rorschach test, and quick question: are we all just literally going crazy? Oh, also aliens.

TikTok block party. The question this week most hotly discussed was whether or not TikTok, a Chinese company under control of the Chinese Communist Party, employing thousands of CCP content moderators specifically charged with upholding Chinese censorship laws, posed to the United States of America a significant enough security threat that operation of that company should here be banned. What seemed at first an early and obvious bi-partisan yes to the question was soon complicated by such prominent media personalities as the New York Times reporter focused on that company, per her tweet crediting recent concern about TikTok to racism, as well as venture capitalists Josh Constine and fan favorite Hunter walk, both of whom seemed to argue Mark Zuckerberg was in some way a danger to the average American comparable to the government of China, a totalitarian, genocidal ethnostate now violently annexing territory across Asia. Before we break this one down, it’s worth noting some of the most thorough reporting on the horrors now facing the Uyghur people of China has come from the New York Times. Colleagues of the above-mentioned TikTok reporter have worked hard to follow what increasingly appears to be one of the great humanitarian crimes of this century, and were no doubt as perplexed by her editorializing on the topic as were many who followed the story on Twitter. Most people, across industries, do appear to be on the right side of this issue. But the pro-China reaction was popular enough — and here as well across industries — that it warrants concern, and clearly requires a thorough dismantling lest the sentiment be any further normalized.

I myself was late to the potential dangers inherent of Chinese social media, as my strong biases toward openness and a generally free market blinded me to what now seems obvious, and it wasn’t TikTok that first roused me to the problem. It was a quaint little “dating” app called Grindr. In March of this year the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) forced Grindr, which had been acquired in 2018 by the Chinese company Kulun Tech, to sell the property on national security grounds (Kunlun reportedly never submitted a request to acquire the company, as per a report from the Verge). When the move was first announced, I opposed the sale. This struck me as a wild imposition on free trade. But in the first place there has never been free trade between the United States and China. The Chinese government has withheld significant access to their market, while selling unencumbered into our own, for decades — all while blatantly stealing American IP. Still, our too-often one-sided trade policy, while frustrating, isn’t really the issue here. At the beginning of this year, in conversation with a patient, former Obama staffer, I was reminded espionage is not limited to the technology industry. We must assume it is a danger to most, if not every, critical American institution, including our government and military. There has likely been no piece of information shared on Grindr from 2018 through 2019, and possibly earlier depending on that company’s former data practices — or perhaps even now depending on what actions have been taken since the sale was forced — that is not sitting on a server in Beijing. For straight readers who may not immediately grasp the problem here, we’re talking about highly-graphic sexual material shared exclusively between men. Homosexuality is still taboo in many corners of the country, and evidence of taboos, especially sexual taboos, constitutes leverage — even before one considers the additional social complications for closeted men. How confident are you we’ve never had a Senator on the Intelligence Committee who liked to share an unwise chat or two on lonely, Washington nights? Because if the gay whisper network is to be believed (and I’d frankly call it 50/50, with reliability inversely proportional to the fame and hotness of the subject (sorry, I don’t make the rules)) the correct answer is “not confident.” With the data practices of TikTok exposed, one can imagine any number of ways the government of China could extort citizens of the United States. But the threat of TikTok is in my opinion far greater than Grindr, and not only for the tremendous difference in scale. TikTok does not limit itself to collecting information from active chatters, as it is rather principally designed for spreading information among passive consumers. This presents new possibilities for the Chinese government, and considerable new risks for the United States.