Let me make one thing crystal clear; the Chinese Government owns only 22% of the Spritzler Report. They have never, asked us to modify our content. Occasionally, some strange folks in Black suits show up in our front yard with binoculars.
Congress Didn’t Ban TikTok
The Supreme Court should uphold the law I wrote, which requires only finding a new owner.
By Mike Gallagher, WSJ
Jan. 9, 2025 1:01 pm ET
Imagine it’s 1956. The first Cold War is raging. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev has told Western ambassadors: “We will bury you!” Out of nowhere, Pravda, the Soviet propaganda outlet, launches a bid to buy ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Such an effort would have been rejected by the American people and the government entities that protect their free speech.
Today, a more insidious version of this hypothetical is a reality. TikTok, a major source of news and information in America, is controlled by America’s geopolitical adversary, China. On Friday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in TikTok v. Garland before deciding whether the company must comply with the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which I wrote and which requires ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese Communist Party-controlled owner, to divest itself of the platform by Jan. 19.
If TikTok vanishes from app stores this month, ByteDance will have no one to blame but itself. Rather than pursuing divestiture, it will have devoted the 270 days since the law went into effect to lobbying. Its actions suggest that ByteDance and the Communist Party believe it is easier to manipulate our system than comply with our laws. The justices must join bipartisan majorities in Congress in sending the message that ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party are mistaken.
TikTok, however, has something in its back pocket that few would have predicted five years ago: a friend-of-the-court brief from Donald Trump. The president-elect recognizes the national-security threat TikTok poses under Chinese control. In the brief, Mr. Trump reiterates that “the national security concerns presented by ByteDance and TikTok appear to be significant and pressing.” He was ahead of the curve when he took on TikTok in his first term. His incoming national-security team, especially Mike Waltz, Marco Rubio and John Ratcliffe, have led the way in addressing the Chinese Communist Party’s cold war against America and the threat of TikTok.
Curiously, though, Mr. Trump’s brief compares the TikTok law to the social-media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. I share the president-elect’s concerns about censorship, which is why I drafted the law. There have been documented instances of censorship with the app in Beijing’s control.
The courts agree. Last month a panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the law unanimously and dismissed TikTok’s Orwellian position that protecting the First Amendment somehow violates the First Amendment: “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” If the Supreme Court follows suit, TikTok will have no remaining legal recourse.
The best outcome for TikTok would be a sale to an owner that isn’t connected to a foreign adversary. The goal has never been to stop Americans from using TikTok but rather to let them use it safely. This position enjoys bipartisan and bicameral agreement in Congress and support from the executive branch and would raise no objection in the courts.
Contrary to TikTok’s claims, the Protecting Americans Act isn’t a ban on TikTok or any other app. It simply prevents foreign adversary entities, like ByteDance, from owning American social-media platforms. For almost a century, the U.S. has prohibited foreign control of radio and television stations—America would never have permitted the Soviet Union to buy or control such entities. Had social media existed at the time, it would have undoubtedly been included.
Limits on foreign social-media ownership are even more justified for two reasons. First, TikTok—unlike broadcast stations—doesn’t merely produce content. TikTok can manipulate the content that Americans themselves create, for example by censoring what TikTok’s communist overlords don’t want Americans to see or by amplifying inflammatory content.
Second, through TikTok, China can gain access to detailed data on hundreds of millions of American users. One only need look to the recent Salt Typhoon hacking operation of American telecom networks to understand this threat.
The law Congress passed isn’t the obstacle to saving TikTok. It is General Secretary Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Despite having six months to find a buyer, TikTok insists that divestment is impossible. That is only because Mr. Xi and the Chinese have imposed export restrictions preventing a sale and have blocked negotiations to facilitate divestment.
Mr. Trump can still force a sale. Potential purchasers are waiting in the wings. A consortium led by Project Liberty founder and investor Frank McCourt, joined by Canadian entrepreneur and “Shark Tank” co-host Kevin O’Leary, is ready to acquire TikTok, even without its algorithm.
If Mr. Xi decides to scuttle such a sale, it will be further evidence he perceives the Communist Party to be in a “smokeless war” against the West. In a 2023 address by Mr. Xi that had been kept secret until last week, the Chinese leader described, in Khrushchevian fashion, the arrival of a “new era” that can be defined as “order in China versus chaos in the West.”
Let’s free TikTok from Mr. Xi’s control and thereby prevent him from fomenting further chaos in America.
Mr. Gallagher, a Journal contributor, is head of defense for Palantir Technologies and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. As a Member of Congress from Wisconsin, he was chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
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