The Hated One

EVERYONE IS LYING - Why you shouldn't believe the TikTok Ban

Added 2025-01-28 16:05:45 +0000 UTC

Intro

Everything you have ever heard about the TikTok ban is lie. Thanks to my superior intellect and ability to read, I am going to show you the truth. I am going to show how all involved parties are intentionally misleading you to advance their own agenda at your expense. And I also know what the ultimate solution to all the problems surrounding TikTok is. It’s gonna be a galactic brain hot take that no one in position to actually do something about it has ever proposed. Clearly I will never hold a position of power so watch this till the end and join my Patreon where I talk about all of this in much more detail on my podcast.

But why tho?

The US government’s argument is that TikTok is a hostile app that is controlled by the Chinese government and used to conduct covert operations inside the United States. [0]

They argue that the People’s Republic of China conducts mass surveillance on US citizens and that it then uses the data it collects to track dissidents, surveil journalists, recruit intelligence operatives, develop spies and blackmail assets.

It is true that China is doing all of those things. Like the United States, China is a global superpower with trillion-dollar annual budgets in a world where borders have been completely erased by the Internet. Even with nationwide firewalls erected and all defenses at high alert, it is trivial for a nation-state sponsored hacking group to penetrate any network undetected anywhere in the world. The latest Salt Typhoon hack into US telecom companies was going on “for months or longer” before it was even detected. The total scale of damage may never be fully calculated.

And this is not a “whataboutism” but a statement of international realism – every major nation-state, US included, is engaging in cyber offensive operations on their enemies and friends alike. The principle is if you can do it, you should do it. So to think that a TikTok ban is going to meaningfully limit China’s capability of covert operation is just a public relations “we are doing something about it” point. Yes, you limit one vector of voluntary data contribution, but then China could easily steal that data anyway by hacking into potentially future “independent TikTok” or to steal data from any other US company. Or, what’s to stop China from setting up a legitimate data broker company to purchase US citizen data legally without hacking into anything, since that’s a perfectly legitimate market protected by US law?

Defense

TikTok’s defense is that the US is violating its free speech and first amendment which is why the case made it all the way to the Supreme court. What is TikTok’s speech here? Good question. The algorithm is the speech. Not the content of users, not the content of TikTok itself – it’s the algorithm, the code, the bunch of letters, numbers and special characters that a computer can read, is literally TikTok’s speech.

And TikTok might be onto something because in the eyes of US justice, code is speech. And it has been since the case Bernstein v. US Department of Justice decided so in 1995. [1, 3] At that time, US government classified encryption as ammunition, which meant cryptographers developing strong encryption would be prosecuted for illegal arms proliferation. [2]

To bypass this, cryptographers would often publish their encryption in literal physical books, because when it was in a book, it was no longer ammunition – it was speech. The Supreme Court eventually decided that a programming language is no different than English or German and must be protected equally. And since then, code is speech. [3]

This is a much more dramatic turn of events now that the Supreme Court has officially approved the TikTok ban. Which in other words means – free speech? Haha! Fuck that noise! Code is no longer speech when the government can say “national security” and all your constitutional rights go out the window. This, by the way, is the most crushing takeaway from the whole story – this is the end of free speech on the Internet. But NO ONE CARES!

That being said, let’s not pretend TikTok owner Bytedance and by extension Chinese laws care about free speech. They don’t. TikTok’s algorithm that decides what goes viral and what doesn’t is proprietary. It’s secret. It can be unilaterally updated and changed at any moment. Google does this with YouTube, Meta does this with Facebook and Instagram. ByteDance does this with TikTok. Bytedance has to abide by Chinese laws even when it operates abroad and it would be trivial to implement shadowbanning and discriminate for or against different types of content at the request of Chinese authorities. And we know that China makes these requests to companies that do business in China to censor Taiwanese flags, Tienanmen Square or Hong Kong protests.

So it’s very rich from TikTok to argue it is China’s first amendment right to censor free speech in the United States of First Amendment.

Trump can't do anything... or can he?

The TikTok ban was signed into law by president Biden but it was approved in Congress with a roaring bipartisan support. Even Trump initially supported the ban because “Xina”. [4]

The Biden administration, being competent and not old, decided to do nothing about the law and leave it to Trump. Trump, being a good friend and not easily impressionable at all, has been persuaded by his billionaire buddy Jeff Yass not to prosecute TikTok and repeal the ban. Yass, holding a multi-billion-dollar stake of ByteDance, had no conflict of interest to pursue this policy and is not an oligarch. [5]

Trump has now promised that he will not prosecute TikTok and extended the liability shield to other companies that deliver TikTok to end users. [6]

But the United States is not an oligarchy, because the statute of limitations on this law is five years. So provided Trump leaves office or dies by then, the next president who will not have billionaire friends, might be able to turdslap TikTok into oblivion once again.

TikTok couldn’t resist the urge to engage in a little bit of political theater when it shut down for a day leaving users with a dire warning and a hopeful glazing of the glorious supreme leader. [7]

Only to be reinstated 24 hours later with even more glazing of the leader of the free world. [8]

It’s so funny to see this, because it was Trump himself that initiated this whole TikTok ban in the first place. Now he is coming down like Jesus, ready to save you from punishment you were about to suffer from him.

The most beautiful thing is that Trump can’t actually save TikTok. All he can do is delay prosecution through an executive order until the next president or until the Congress changes the law again. [9] Trump is now seeking a joint venture with ByteDance, splitting the ownership 50-50. [9]

I think the only way China would agree to that, is if they maintained full access to all TikTok data, resulting in both US and Chinese spies surveilling and censoring TikTok users equally.

TikTok bans around the world

But let’s leave all the fun and giggles aside for a moment to really look what the government is actually saying about TikTok here. Because government employees in the US and many allied countries are already banned from using TikTok on their phones. [10]

The message that this is saying is far more profound than you would think if you didn’t know the implications.

What all of these government bans are assuming is that the TikTok app is potentially malicious. [11]

Meaning – it’s actually malware, that it’s a virus designed to infect your phone. But on a modern mobile operating system, this is no easy task. If TikTok were indeed a piece of malware, it would have to bypass the entire mobile security model. On both Android and iOS, provided they are up-to-date with security patches, TikTok would have to escape the application sandbox – the guardrails that prevent every app on your phone from accessing data outside the app itself. This is something that both iOS and Android enforce at the kernel, the very core of the system. Which means TikTok would need chains of multiple vulnerabilities to exploit each and every safeguard put in place by multi-billion-dollar security research by Apple and Google and thousands of open source cybersecurity researchers all around the world. And even then, every new update and reboot of a phone would likely erase TikTok’s infiltration, so they would have to do that whole exploit chain again and somehow gain persistent access on people’s phones. And all of that would have to have happened without anyone noticing that something’s off. Which on a scale of millions of simultaneous targets is virtually impossible to achieve. If China can make TikTok an actual malicious app that can do all of that, then they can do that to literally every other app on the planet, no matter where it’s based or who owns it.

TikTok is absolutely a privacy nightmare, don’t get me wrong. It collects all of your usage and viewing habits, it tracks your information all the time and ties your data to a unique profile linked to your identity. But we all know that from the permissions TikTok asks for and from their privacy policy. None of this is clandestine. And none of this is in any way different from what US-based social media apps are doing. That does not make it okay. Just makes singling out TikTok a really shallow hypocritical stance that doesn’t address the fundamental problem.

The only real solution

So what is the fundamental problem and how to solve it?

Well the most commonly stated solution was for ByteDance to divest from TikTok by selling it to a US company. ByteDance had already said no to an outright sale and China could also block it at any point. [12] Even if there is a deal and sale of sorts happens, this is the worst solution possible. It doesn’t address anything about TikTok’s data practices. No limits on the amount of data collected and retained will be imposed. China will still be able to buy the data from TikTok through a data broker or steal it from them by hacking the company.

A far more interesting solution was something that I’ve only seen briefly floated during the Supreme Court hearing “29:40 Maybe Bytedance will make TikTok algorithm open source”. That’s right, open sourcing the underlying TikTok algorithm. That would be the ultimate win for everybody. We would see what TikTok is actually doing, we could have open and public research into it. We could verify claims on either side as to whether there is any covert manipulation or access. But that would never happen. No big tech company would willingly give up access to their technology. And no such law would ever pass because their powerful lobby would kill it in its infancy. Still, while it would give tremendous transparency, it would not ultimately solve the problem of surveillance and spying.

But that brings us to our fundamental problem. It’s not TikTok and it’s not even China. It’s insatiably thirsty data collection that creates too lucrative a target for hackers and threat actors to ignore. As long as any company is allowed to conduct such immense data collection and retention, there will always be a threat of an adversary trying to steal it and use it covertly.

So here is a solution that only a galactic brain such as mine could come up with. Are you ready to have your brain explode from this high level important idea? Hear this: a nationwide ban on all personal data collection and retention beyond the needs of a service delivery. If there is no personal data stored by the big tech, then there is no point hacking them. Most private data is no data. That would also stop all the allegations of developing spies and blackmailing assets and recruiting sympathizers and all that jazz. Not just on TikTok but on all social media platforms across the board. That would be the only way to actually protect user privacy from foreign and domestic threats and prevent attacks on key individuals and targets for covert operations. Something that can happen to anyone using Facebook, YouTube or iMessage just as much as to anyone using TikTok.

It would also prevent the US intelligence from doing the exact same things they accuse Russia and China of doing. Which is why this is also something the US intelligence will do everything to prevent from being implemented.

What? You expected me to come up with a solution that will actually happen and help? Well if that’s what you want, join my Patreon and make it possible for me to keep making these videos and use the algorithm to destroy the algorithm.