Among the generation most needed at the polls for a win, it’s common knowledge that voting for President Joseph Robinette Biden is basically like eating a bowl of soggy Cornflakes in lukewarm tap water — you do it because your only other option in the kitchen is a moldy orange slimeball that’s grown legs and now wants to put its enemies in camps. And yet here Biden is, the guy begging us all to swallow another bowl of his mealy-mouth pap at the polls, glibly pissing in our Wheaties.
As of Wednesday, China-based parent company ByteDance has been ordered to either sell its crown-jewel app TikTok to a U.S. company or see it banned here. This comes courtesy of a bill that every news writer in this country is trying their hardest not to describe as a run-of-the-mill mob shakedown ordered from the Oval Office.
And that bill was signed into law by good ol’ train-union-busting, Anita-Hill-ignoring, Delaware-corporate-fiefdom-defending Joe Biden. Behold, the very president who’s relying on TikTok users to share his campaign ads, even though they’re busy uploading videos of their college classmates getting beat to hell by some war-armored cops that — like predatory student loans and medical bankruptcy — Biden could stop, but simply won’t.
Good ol’ Joe is one trigger-happy SWAT-cop away from having another Kent State on his hands but, thank God, he can at least find the time for a little cybersecurity theater to entertain Republican voters, and still have enough left to put a nice bow on whatever future tech-company sweetheart deal will be funded by this wannabe corporate takeover.
Good to know he’s out there protecting us innocent Americans from having our data collected by the government of a country that has absolutely no jurisdiction over us, so that our own God-fearing National Security Administration can safely collect that data for itself instead. Isn’t that nice of him? After all, it would be a shame if we were allowed the choice of giving our data to a country that can’t use it to arrest or persecute us, instead of being forced to feed it to the gaping maw of the most massive domestic spying operation the world has ever known, in a country whose prison population is greater than China’s. *Insert screeching eagle here.* FREEDOM!
And wouldn’t it be a shame if an American company like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta or Twitter (or X, whatever) — which protect user data from government spying about as well as a screen door protects a submarine — was suddenly losing out on the lobbying leverage it gets from quietly playing ball with the Feds’ warrantless wiretaps and gag-orders? Sure would be a sad day on the Hill if those campaign coffers dried up all because some egomaniacal tech bros stopped making dark-money deposits to everyone’s crack-shack LLCs and post-Citizens-United think tanks.
Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer put it best in the advocacy group’s recent response:
“Whether it’s dressed up as a ban or a forced sale, the bill targeting TikTok is one of the stupidest and most authoritarian pieces of tech legislation we’ve seen in years,” Greer said. “Not only is this bill laughably unconstitutional and a blatant assault on free expression and human rights, it’s also a perfect way to derail momentum toward more meaningful policies like privacy and antitrust legislation that would actually address the harms of Big Tech and surveillance capitalism.”
Biden just did more to promote TikTok and ByteDance — and China itself — than any ad-buy or propagandizing Mao-machine ever could. As Greer put it: “Banning TikTok without passing real tech regulation will just further entrench monopolies like Meta and Google, without doing anything to protect Americans from data harvesting or government propaganda.”
In the same fell swoop, Biden also made himself look more politically impotent than anything he’s done so far in the Oval — except for, of course, his attempts to pass off chintzy regulatory band-aids as some kind of valiant restoration of abortion access. Nice move getting Net Neutrality restored then letting us all know in the same week that it means jack squat if Uncle Sam’s snoop-net gets threatened. The divest-or-ban play was a lose-lose scenario that only a D-triple-C blue dog could sundown his way into.
If ByteDance sells, Biden looks like a GOP corporate shill and the NSA ends up with a God-tier algorithm; if ByteDance refuses to sell and TikTok is banned, no one under 45 is voting for him. It’s like punching the high school pretty boy — win or lose, people still aren’t going to sit with you at lunch.
And now Biden’s going to wear this TikTok albatross all the way to November because ByteDance isn’t selling. If Biden wants to steal ByteDance’s baby, then the company is going to make sure the whole world sees Biden yanking it out of ByteDance’s hands. So ByteDance is taking this to court as expected, where it could drag out for years. Granted, Biden and Congress did offer ByteDance plenty of time to figure out what it wants to do with its baby — it’s now got nine months to decide. Unlike the rest of us.
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.
