CLAIM: “TikTok is not only spyware. It is polluting the minds of young people all throughout this country.”
VERDICT: MOSTLY TRUE. TikTok is a major influence on American culture and politics, and it is controlled by China.
Gov. Chris Christie was asked during the third Republican presidential primary debate in Miami, Florida, on Wednesday night about whether he would ban the TikTok app. He replied:
Let me say this: TikTok is not only spyware. It is polluting the minds of American young people all throughout this country. And they’re doing it intentionally. And when you saw what happened in the last few weeks, with all of this antisemitic, horrible stuff that their algorithms were pushing out at a gargantuan rate, this is China trying to further divide the United States of America. And this is one of the big failings, among many, of the Trump administration. He talked tough about TikTok. I heard him do it many times. But when it came down to it, he did not ban them when he could have and should have [sic]. And now since then, we’ve had [an] additional nearly six years of this type of poison being put out throughout the United States, even putting aside the spying, and which we know going on, and the theft of American personal data and information. So in my first week as president we would ban TikTok. They want to go ahead and sell it, let them go ahead and sell it. But I’ll tell you another reason we would do it. Facebook’s not in China. “X” [formerly Twitter] is not in China. They’re not permitting a free flow of information to the Chinese people from our social media companies, yet we just open the door and let them do what they’re doing. TikTok should be banned because they are poisoning American minds, and I would do it Week One.
Christie was correct on all of the above points — except for Trump’s efforts, which were stopped by a lawsuit, not lack of effort.
China takes “extreme measures” to keep its own teens off TikTok, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, limiting use to an hour per day. And like all social media content in China, content on TikTok is tightly regulated.
But in the U.S., TikTok is a free-for-all — and that makes it susceptible to manipulation, including by China. Many lawmakers are concerned that TikTok is promoting controversial fads and fashions — including transgenderism among teens — and hostile ideas.
The Times of Israel noted that much of the anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric in the U.S. lately is reflected in TikTok content:
According to a recent Harvard CAPS Harris poll, 51% of young adults can “justify” the massacres perpetrated by Hamas, in part because their main exposure to Israel since October 7 came from TikTok videos.
News site Axios reported this week that since October 16, there have been 210,000 posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine and 17,000 using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael throughout the globe. Citing TikTok’s data, the news site stated that 87 percent of the audience makeup for #StandwithPalestine posts is under the age of 35, compared to 66% of the audience makeup for #StandwithIsrael posts. There are over 1 billion TikTok users worldwide.
“Now we are seeing levels of antisemitism and violence that we’ve never experienced,” said Cohen, referring to TikTok videos that celebrate the massacres using graphic footage captured by Hamas terrorists on their phones.
The imbalance on social media only partly represents the small number of Jews in the world: TikTok controls what goes viral on the platform, and has a “heat” button that accelerates certain posts and ideas. That gives it profound leverage over U.S. debates.
The counterargument was presented by rival candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who said that Republicans should learn to use the app, and appeal to young people, rather than banning it. He added that he would ban Internet companies from transferring data to China. X owner Elon Musk has also expressed skepticism about banning the TikTok platform, citing free speech concerns.
But TikTok is not simply an open town square. It is one in which content is manipulated by a foreign rival — or adversary — to manipulate political outcomes. Christie’s concerns, while debatable, were accurate.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.