The allegation [0] is that a Russian influence campaign used TikTok as at least one of its platforms, to major effect. The subtext is that TikTok was at the very least complicit, in that, at a minimum, it tolerated what I believe Facebook calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
If you think of TikTok as an instrument of the Chinese state, this could look consistent with the phenomenon Anne Applebaum has been talking about lately: a pattern of loose alliances-of-convenience between autocratic nations in service of specific disruptive missions [1]. A less spooky reading might be that Chinese norms don’t align with American ones as far as proactively stopping this kind of thing—that they just don’t care about this kind of Russian caper on the other side of the world. They sure do think carefully about their domestic information environment, though; and they’re probably the best in the world at policing mass thinking when they feel like it.
Where are the lines between mere negligence, complicity, and active participation? That seems a little more delicate than a couple news cycles’ work. The Europeans have asked TikTok to preserve records to find out.
I suspect the light and fire seems to be around whether a nation wants any tool like this to just be lying around, ready to disrupt the nation’s politics at a moment’s notice. Social media may be new in the scheme of things, but in the years since the UN studied Facebook’s genocides [2], governments have at least tried to get a handle on the kinds of monitoring and moderation tools and tactics that can help counter this kind of campaign (some with more deference than others to authentic speech).
As far as I’ve heard, the allegation had never been that Chinese government villains cackled and rubbed their hands together and said “today we take Romania!” Rather, it’s that the tools are powerful enough that we don’t want to leave them lying around unchecked—especially since, at least from the perspective of American and European policy professionals, Chinese thinking doesn’t really recognize a distinction between commercial and national security interests.
Others may have better sourcing than I do for this specific instance, but I think it’s fair to point to Western thinking about China’s Military-Civil Fusion policy [3] to think about dual-use idea-disseminating technologies like TikTok.
If you think of TikTok as an instrument of the Chinese state, this could look consistent with the phenomenon Anne Applebaum has been talking about lately: a pattern of loose alliances-of-convenience between autocratic nations in service of specific disruptive missions [1]. A less spooky reading might be that Chinese norms don’t align with American ones as far as proactively stopping this kind of thing—that they just don’t care about this kind of Russian caper on the other side of the world. They sure do think carefully about their domestic information environment, though; and they’re probably the best in the world at policing mass thinking when they feel like it.
Where are the lines between mere negligence, complicity, and active participation? That seems a little more delicate than a couple news cycles’ work. The Europeans have asked TikTok to preserve records to find out.
I suspect the light and fire seems to be around whether a nation wants any tool like this to just be lying around, ready to disrupt the nation’s politics at a moment’s notice. Social media may be new in the scheme of things, but in the years since the UN studied Facebook’s genocides [2], governments have at least tried to get a handle on the kinds of monitoring and moderation tools and tactics that can help counter this kind of campaign (some with more deference than others to authentic speech).
As far as I’ve heard, the allegation had never been that Chinese government villains cackled and rubbed their hands together and said “today we take Romania!” Rather, it’s that the tools are powerful enough that we don’t want to leave them lying around unchecked—especially since, at least from the perspective of American and European policy professionals, Chinese thinking doesn’t really recognize a distinction between commercial and national security interests.
Others may have better sourcing than I do for this specific instance, but I think it’s fair to point to Western thinking about China’s Military-Civil Fusion policy [3] to think about dual-use idea-disseminating technologies like TikTok.
[0] https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-russia-election-interference...
[1] e.g., https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-r... and https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/russia-chi...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... , https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/myanmar-ffm/reportoft... , https://iimm.un.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Hate-Speech-R... [PDF, large]
[3] https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/12/chinas-military-civil-f...