As The US Freaks Out About TikTok, It’s Revealed That The CIA Was Using Chinese Social Media To Try To Undermine The Gov’t There

You know that line, every accusation is a confession?" For no reason at all, that's coming to mind all of a sudden. No reason.

Anyway, a decade ago, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore wrote a fantastic piece for Foreign Affairs on The End of Hypocrisy" (which we also wrote about here at Techdirt). They argued that, even as many people mock American hypocrisy around the world, at least the plausible deniability of Americans taking the moral high ground was an incredibly powerful and effective tool of soft pressure. And how it was squandered with each revelation of just how little Americans respected the sovereignty of other nations, and regularly abused our access to internet backbones to spy on others.

The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington's ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government's public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook Washington's covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their own.

Speaking of all that: what interesting timing to have Reuters break the news that the Trump administration gave the go ahead on a covert program by the CIA to try to use social media inside China to turn the public against the government and cause chaos.

Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.

Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping's government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.

I am also suddenly reminded of how the US government ran this big campaign for a few years about how no one should use Chinese networking equipment from companies like Huawei. This is despite the fact that a comprehensive White House report could find no evidence of nefarious behavior. Oh, but also, how some of the Ed Snowden docs revealed that the US government was actually installing secret backdoors in Cisco networking equipment to spy on people elsewhere?

Of course, there are a few different ways to look at this. One argument is that well, we're doing this, so we know that they must be too, and that justifies the US's actions to try to cut them off." And that would be maybe more compelling if there were more serious evidence that any of this actually works and that it doesn't look absolutely ridiculous when it inevitably leaks out later.

The other way of looking at it is that the US comes off as a bunch of hypocrites who repeatedly squander whatever moral high ground they have on these arguments. As Farrell and Finnemore highlighted in that piece a decade ago, US foreign policy and the soft power it traditionally wielded relied heavily on (1) US politicians believing in the principles of freedom and openness we espoused, (2) our allies being able to back us up on those claims, and (3) our adversaries looking weak and pathetic in trying to go up against those principles.

But with each revelation of the US doing exactly what they accuse others of doing, all of that falls apart. US politicians making such claims look ever less sincere. Our allies can no longer continue to claim the moral high ground with a straight face. And our adversaries use our own stupid policies to justify their even worse ones.

I know (because I heard it all the time) that some people will say but our adversaries don't need any justification to do bad stuff." That's only true to some extent. Global pressure can be effective, but it's harder to use that pressure legitimately when the US is doing something just as bad. In making it easier for our adversaries to justify their bad actions by pointing to similar activities by the US, it makes it even easier for them to go further, and to convince others to join them.

As that article noted towards the end, the solution should be that the US should act in a way that lives up to its rhetoric, rather than just being pathetically hypocritical.

A better alternative would be for Washington to pivot in the opposite direction, acting in ways more compatible with its rhetoric. This approach would also be costly and imperfect, for in international politics, ideals and interests will often clash. But the U.S. government can certainly afford to roll back some of its hypocritical behavior without compromising national security. A double standard on torture, a near indifference to casualties among non-American civilians, the gross expansion of the surveillance state - none of these is crucial to the country's well-being, and in some cases, they undermine it.

The US's attempts to use social media in China as a propaganda tool does not appear to have been very effective. The end result looks pretty silly and helps justify China doing very dangerous shit:

The covert propaganda campaign against Beijing could backfire, said Heer, the former CIA analyst. China could use evidence of a CIA influence program to bolster its decades-old accusations of shadowy Western subversion, helping Beijing proselytize" in a developing world already deeply suspicious of Washington.

The message would be: Look at the United States intervening in the internal affairs of other countries and rejecting the principles of peaceful coexistence,'" Heer said. And there are places in the world where that is going to be a resonant message."

But, coming at the same time that we're looking to ban TikTok (or force its divestiture from a company based in China), maybe we should actually consider that suggestion from Farrell and Finnemore again. Maybe we should try to live up to our ideas. Maybe we should believe that if America is about freedom, and freedom is better than the authoritarian tyranny of China, we should be able to resist whatever they wish to pull with any social media propaganda campaign they could cook up.

Or do we think so little of Americans in general, that we think they won't be able to resist the allure of this one social media app and its algorithm? If American freedom can't resist an app of short videos, mostly used by kids, what kind of freedom is it really?