Cheers for X, Jeers for TikTok

Does this make me sound old? I don’t really care. The U.S. TikTok ban is spot on and the Brazilian X ban is not. No “back in my day” speech required.

True, I am old enough to remember when the cool kids hung out on X. Sheesh, I remember when the cool kids hung out on Facebook or even MySpace. True, I have never signed up for a TikTok account and the imitations thereof on other socials fall flat for me. But, Instagram has never resonated with me, either, and yet I dutifully post church-related things there.

Generational differences are not the issue. No, the difference between the X ban and the TikTok ban has to do with the insidious underbelly of TikTok. The underpinnings below the content are why I have never signed up for the Chinese-owned social.

Superficially, the two bans do seem to have a similar aim: prohibit a social media provider from a country it is foreign to in order to protect that country. The ban of TikTok garnered broad bipartisan support of this concept.

If that’s good for the TikTok goose, then what of the X gander?

I could argue over technical nuance. The action against TikTok parent ByteDance has been a painstakingly deliberate process that involved Congress and the President. In a time America regularly struggles to pass regulation the proper way, this time it happened. The law came with a possible relief valve, too (ByteDance could divest the company to American ownership). The Brazilian decision is far more blunt.

Implementation is not the biggest issue, though. The reason for the ban is the issue.

Recall that the raison d’être for the TikTok ban legislation is that ByteDance is a company closely controlled by the Chinese government. The company arguably has a two-prong attack towards countries, like the United States, to which China is hostile.

First, TikTok’s algorithm — which, unlike X’s, is a proprietary black box to users — can and likely is used to promote materials the Chinese government desires for us to see. In a sense, without appearing so overtly, TikTok is likely an undeclared propaganda outlet for the Chinese Communist Party. Nonetheless, we would not see a ban arise if the only crime were being a covert CCP propaganda tool.

(Arguably, the NBA, Apple and all the others who bow the knee — even internationally — to CCP pressure already do that job and get away with it.)

Second, and far more problematic, TikTok gains an absolutely eye watering level of tracking information on users — locations, preferences, web sites they visit and so on. We are right to question whether other Big Tech companies should be able to do this level of digital surveillance on us (no, they really shouldn’t), but we should doubly question the situation when a company can function as an arm of a hostile government.

Neither of these prongs applies to X in Brazil or elsewhere. X is under fire for refusing to censor distasteful speech. No one believes X is operating as a de facto arm of the American government, people simply object to certain bits of what is said on X.

Nor does anyone believes X only, or primarily, manipulates the flow of information to serve a particular nation’s purposes. Musk, for his part, has made the algorithm used to display content on X open. Love or hate what is shown, content’s appearance is not a mystery.

To be sure, X is not the paragon of user privacy. I would love to see it pursue the same pro-user privacy path as Apple now that the social company is leaning into paid membership. Nonetheless, while governments around the world could subpoena X data — as they could Facebook, Microsoft or Google data — that is still a step away from a government operating the social network for its benefit.

The case against X is directly an attack on free speech. Full stop. The Brazilian censors, and others of similar mind around the world, now suppress the speech of the company and its users. The company, since they seek to force X to prevent certain speech it wishes to publish and the individuals, since governments want to prevent certain speech from being said.

Can anyone name a time democracy has been served by a government censoring speech found disagreeable by those in power?

Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes showed he knows how undesirable his order is by the extreme efforts he’s undertaken to accomplish the suppression of X. Citizens of Brazil are threatened with a fine equal to a year’s wages if they attempt to circumvent the X ban.

It is one thing to argue X cannot operate directly within Brazil. That would be akin to the American TikTok ban, which seeks to stop the company from operating here. Even if the ban holds and TikTok closes its U.S. offices, that would merely hinder a foreign company from doing business here. Americans could continue to access TikTok’s international websites as we can a multitude of sites that have never “done business” in the United States.

Brazil’s order goes much further. Far more comparable to actions taken in China, Russia, Iran and the like, it seeks to wall off Brazilians from access to X content even if it is stored abroad. The TikTok ban restricts TikTok as a company; the X ban restricts individual citizens. Is a Great Firewall of Brazil far off?

How sad that the much more severe net is cast upon a company guilty of promoting free speech. Yet, TikTok continues to try to cloak its own battle under the flag of free speech.

Sorry, ByteDance, the regulation against you is not about speech. The case against TikTok has nothing to do with restricting legal speech and everything to do with stopping a company’s Trojan horse of seditious activities that happen in the technical underpinnings beneath the speech.