FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr Continues To Enjoy Oodles Of Free Press For Fear Mongering About TikTok

The great TikTok moral panic of 2023 shows no sign of slowing down.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has spent the few years getting oodles of free press attention for hyperventilating about TikTok. It doesn't matter that Carr doesn't have regulatory authority over TikTok, or that his proposed ban wouldn't actually fix the problems he claims it does, or that Carr (whose generally been a muppet for AT&T) has no credibility on consumer protection or privacy.

Press outlets keep citing him credibly. That includes the Guardian, the latest outlet to stenograph Carr's calls for a TikTok ban unskeptically without any of this context. Carr last week appeared before the Australian Senate inquiry into foreign influence through social media, once again insisting that a TikTok ban was the only acceptable path forward: for those interested in meaningful privacy:

Carr, the most senior Republican member on the FCC, said only an outright ban of the app in the United States or removing all corporate ties to China would be acceptable.

Ultimately, I think some sort of ... legislation that imposes a ban or a genuine divestiture is the way forward right now," he said.

Here's the thing: we've noted countless times that banning TikTok doesn't fix the actual problem: a poorly regulated, largely unaccountable data broker market that hoovers up every last shred of consumer behavior data (including daily movement patterns, sexual orientation data, or sensitive mental health data), then sells it to any idiot with a nickel. Including the Chinese government.

The primary supposed benefit of a TikTok ban would be to block the Chinese government from obtaining sensitive U.S. consumer data. Blocking TikTok, but doing nothing about the unregulated data broker market, means Chinese intelligence (or Russian intelligence, or Iranian intelligence, or the U.S. government) can simply buy most of this exact same data, unencumbered, from data brokers.

Carr opposes regulating data brokers. He also opposes the U.S. passing a meaningful privacy law. His hyperventilation about TikTok is largely just a distraction from the U.S.' profound failure on privacy legislation and consumer protection. Carr and the Republican party have made it extremely clear they couldn't care less about privacy violations in the U.S. telecom sector Carr actually regulates.

Carr's repeated trips to the TikTok fainting couch are a giant, dumb performance designed to do several things.

One, to help portray Carr (a Trump appointee whose political ambitions are clear) as a serious steward of the public interest, despite absolutely no credibility on the subject. Two, to distract the press and public from our continued failures on real privacy legislation. And three, to help feed a healthy bucket of xenophobic chum to a Republican base often terrified of darker-skinned human beings.

There's another goal to the TikTok hysteria: as Trump himself made very clear, many Republican and Democratic lawmakers simply don't like that a Chinese company out-innovated U.S. companies. Repeated efforts by Facebook et all to build a better TikTok have failed. So Facebook has done what any dominant corporate giant would do: seed moral panics in DC and the press about its competitors..

The goal: use the pretense of national security and privacy to force ByteDance to sell TikTok and its growing advertising revenues to an American company, whether that's Facebook, Oracle, or even Walmart.

None of this is to say that TikTok doesn't present meaningful privacy risks.

But it is to say that TikTok's sadly common privacy abuses are a symptom of our much broader, corrupt failure to regulate data over-collection or pass a meaningful privacy law. The myopic fixation on TikTok and TikTok only is a hyperbolic distraction from the need for broader, meaningful reform. The kind of meaningful reform unserious men like Carr have long vehemently opposed.