In the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt—literally minutes after the bullet grazed flesh—social media networks dumped a polluted sewer of misinformation and conspiracy theories into the minds of the American public. The worst offender was TikTok. Whether the misinformation and conspiracy theories came from the left or right didn’t matter: The assassination was all a Republican false flag operation, or the work of transgender activists, or an intervention from the deep state, or whatever. America’s adversaries don’t care who says what, after all, so long as the fury rises.
That day, they must have been as surprised as they were pleased. By allowing TikTok, an entity controlled by the Chinese government, to operate in the run-up to the 2024 election the US has given its largest geopolitical rival a pipeline to pump polarization right into the mass of its citizenry. It could shut off that pipeline. It cannot find the will to do it.
The idea that shutting down a social media network is incompatible with American values and the First Amendment will not survive a passing glance at history. In 2022, I published a book called “The Next Civil War,” analyzing various undercurrents churning amid the current political turmoil: The hyper-partisanship of its politics, the spiking inequality, and the decline in collective trust in its institutions. They have numerous causes. But if I were forced to pick a single point of origin for the collapse of American political sanity, that moment would be the Reagan Administration’s 1987 decision to overturn the Fairness Doctrine, a regulation that had required broadcasters to give equal time to contrasting views on controversial subjects. This was the beginning of the great fracture: Of Americans siloing themselves into ever smaller intellectual and spiritual worlds, the slow erosion of the power of the fact, the death of a common language by which American citizens could discuss their differences.
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Future historians will no doubt be mystified by this bizarre paralysis. Cybersecurity for Democracy, an independent think tank devoted to online threats, recently identified TikTok as a “key spreader of misinformation due to the way its recommendation algorithm surfaced videos it believed would resonate with users, rather than primarily authoritative information.” And yet the US—fully aware that the technology is suffusing the country with ever more elaborate and dangerous rage, shattering consensus reality into ever tinier shards—is allowing it to keep destroying the basis of America’s political existence.
The craziest part is that TikTok itself seems to understand the untenability of its position. Last month, it confirmed that it offered the US government a “kill switch” in 2022, with the “explicit authority to suspend the platform in the United States at the US government's sole discretion.” The US ignored that offer, and instead passed legislation this past April that gave the app’s parent company ByteDance until January 2025 to divest from Chinese investment or be banned.
January isn’t soon enough. The Republic could fall by January. (After Kamala Harris announced her presidential candidacy, a manipulated video of her slurring her words at a speech went viral on TikTok. It was posted by thousands and watched by millions before the site removed it.) If such a kill switch exists, the President needs to order it thrown immediately. Not tomorrow. Today.
The FCC had imposed the Fairness doctrine in 1949, in the aftermath of the Second World War, having learned the lesson of the rise of fascism in Europe. (In 1969, the Supreme Court voted unanimously that the doctrine wasn’t just constitutional but “essential to democracy.”) They understood that mass media–at that time, radio–was simply too powerful a tool to be left to market forces. What goes for the radio applies a hundredfold for social media platforms. These are not just venues for expression; they are political weapons. A Fairness Doctrine updated for the twenty-first century would, at the very least, impose on social media companies a mandate for public responsibility concomitant with their power. Apparently, our own moment is doomed to relearn the lessons of fascism’s rise all over again, this time amplified, both in speed and in scope, by radically accelerated networks given completely free rein.
Regulating mass media is a matter of democratic survival, pure and simple. The abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine turned America’s information networks into an open sewer. We live with the results. With TikTok, China saw an opportunity and took it. They don’t need a beachhead in Taiwan if they have a beachhead in the American soul. “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?” Abraham Lincoln asked in his famous Lyceum address. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
China is smart. Its leaders know that you can’t really destroy democracies. You can only help move their self-destruction along. But China has been lucky too, having been given access to a democracy-destroying machine at the exact moment America’s elite political class had grown too old and disconnected to understand the threat the country faced. The situation is not that complicated: A foreign government controls an active vector of polarization. It is using that tool to spread social and political chaos which will destabilize democracy and lead, ultimately, to violence internally and American decline globally.
TikTok’s continued existence isn’t a freedom of speech issue, but a matter of national security. Everybody, on every side, is fully aware that the 2024 election is a struggle for the survival of American democracy itself. The Supreme Court has, in its recent Trump v. United States decision, given the executive branch unprecedented powers. The Biden Administration must now use them or risk losing the Republic.
