Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s TikTok Ban Is A Dumb Performance That Ignores The Real Problem

We've noted for a while how most of the hyperventilation about TikTok is of the manufactured moral panic variety. We've also noted how the folks who've been the loudest about TikTok's privacy and security threats spent decades fighting against competent oversight or privacy legislation, yet now want to pretend that banning a single app somehow fixes the broad problems they themselves created.

With that as backdrop, this week Governor Greg Abbott announced he's pushing forward with a plan to ban TikTok on all government employee devices. The Texas Governor's announcement proclaims that TikTok poses a unique threat due to its alleged connection to Chinese Communist Party members":

The security risks associated with the use of TikTok on devices used to conduct the important business of our state must not be underestimated or ignored. Owned by a Chinese company that employs Chinese Communist Party members, TikTok harvests significant amounts of data from a user's device, including details about a user's internet activity."

Here's the thing. While not quite as dumb as the push to ban TikTok on college campuses (easily avoided by switching from Wi-Fi to cellular), this is kind of silly and performative. There's no real evidence the Chinese government uses TikTok to influence Americans at scale, and while TikTok has been found to violate privacy in very stupid ways, so has pretty much every major company doing business in our barely regulated data monetization markets across adtech, telecom, and numerous industries.

Abbott's initiative pretends to address this by also prohibiting WeChat, Alipay, ByteDance, Tencent Holdings, and Russian-owned Kaspersky. The simplistic argument is that by just banning the biggest, clearly foreign-owned companies from devices, you've somehow fixed the problem.

But a random student or employee's phone is absolutely filled with a long parade of dodgy domestic and foreign apps collecting everything from their daily location habits, to detailed online behavior metrics. That data is then feebly anonymized" (a meaningless term) and access to it is sold to a laundry list of dodgy international adtech companies and data brokers (if your telecom provider hasn't done so first).

It's trivial for the Chinese, Russian, or any other government (including our own) to then acquire this data inexpensively, to help them build detailed profiles about Americans daily online habits in granular detail. So again, fixating on a single app doesn't make any coherent sense. You've either got to fix the broader problem with actual policies and solutions, or you're just making noise.

Republican policymakers in particular have a loud, proud, and not at all subtle history of fighting tooth and nail against privacy legislation for the Internet era, no matter how simple. They've also worked tirelessly to ensure privacy enforcers at the FTC lack the funding, authority, or staff to adequately police widespread privacy abuses.

They literally created the policy environment TikTok (and countless other companies, foreign end domestic) exploits. Now they want to pretend that banning a single app somehow fixes the problem they created. They want their cake and eat it too; they want to pretend they're being tough on China," but they don't want to do things like crack down on U.S. corruption (something clearly and easily exploitable by both Russia and China) or impose any rules that might cost U.S. companies money.

The resulting performance seems designed to distract the public from our multi-decade failure on consumer protection and privacy legislation. And with the occasional fleeting exception, a U.S. press blind to its own patriotic bias seems keen on helping them.

I still argue that policymakers making the most noise about this issue don't actually care about TikTok's privacy or national security issues. At all. As Trump's failed fix" for TikTok made pretty clear, I believe the end goal is to agitate a xenophobic base and force a sale of TikTok to a U.S. company friendly with the GOP (likely Facebook or Oracle, both with their own long history of privacy abuses), who'll then immediately turn around and utilize the app to engage in all the same behavior GOP mainstays like Abbott are accusing China of.