• Home
  • Politics
  • Health
  • World
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
What's Hot

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
Facebook Twitter Instagram
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
Friday, May 9
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
  • Home
  • Politics

    Security video shows brazen sexual assault of California woman by homeless man

    October 24, 2023

    Woman makes disturbing discovery after her boyfriend chases away home intruder who stabbed him

    October 24, 2023

    Poll finds Americans overwhelmingly support Israel’s war on Hamas, but younger Americans defend Hamas

    October 24, 2023

    Off-duty pilot charged with 83 counts of attempted murder after allegedly trying to shut off engines midflight on Alaska Airlines

    October 23, 2023

    Leaked audio of Shelia Jackson Lee abusively cursing staffer

    October 22, 2023
  • Health

    Disparities In Cataract Care Are A Sorry Sight

    October 16, 2023

    Vaccine Stocks—Including Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech And Novavax—Slide Amid Plummeting Demand

    October 16, 2023

    Long-term steroid use should be a last resort

    October 16, 2023

    Rite Aid Files For Bankruptcy With More ‘Underperforming Stores’ To Close

    October 16, 2023

    Who’s Still Dying From Complications Related To Covid-19?

    October 16, 2023
  • World

    New York Democrat Dan Goldman Accuses ‘Conservatives in the South’ of Holding Rallies with ‘Swastikas’

    October 13, 2023

    IDF Ret. Major General Describes Rushing to Save Son, Granddaughter During Hamas Invasion

    October 13, 2023

    Black Lives Matter Group Deletes Tweet Showing Support for Hamas 

    October 13, 2023

    AOC Denounces NYC Rally Cheering Hamas Terrorism: ‘Unacceptable’

    October 13, 2023

    L.A. Prosecutors Call Out Soros-Backed Gascón for Silence on Israel

    October 13, 2023
  • Business

    Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

    May 8, 2025

    Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

    May 7, 2025

    Tyson Foods Announces It Will Bend The Knee To Trump Admin’s New Rules

    May 7, 2025

    Federal Reserve Holds Interest Rates Steady Despite Pressure From Trump

    May 7, 2025

    ‘Wait Them Out’: John Kennedy Tells Larry Kudlow One Lie He Suspects China’s Telling US

    May 7, 2025
  • Finance

    Ending China’s De Minimis Exception Brings 3 Benefits for Americans

    April 17, 2025

    The Trump Tariff Shock Should Push Indonesia to Reform Its Economy

    April 17, 2025

    Tariff Talks an Opportunity to Reinvigorate the Japan-US Alliance

    April 17, 2025

    How China’s Companies Are Responding to the US Trade War

    April 16, 2025

    The US Flip-flop Over H20 Chip Restrictions 

    April 16, 2025
  • Tech

    Cruz Confronts Zuckerberg on Pointless Warning for Child Porn Searches

    February 2, 2024

    FTX Abandons Plans to Relaunch Crypto Exchange, Commits to Full Repayment of Customers and Creditors

    February 2, 2024

    Elon Musk Proposes Tesla Reincorporates in Texas After Delaware Judge Voids Pay Package

    February 2, 2024

    Tesla’s Elon Musk Tops Disney’s Bob Iger as Most Overrated Chief Executive

    February 2, 2024

    Mark Zuckerberg’s Wealth Grew $84 Billion in 2023 as Pedophiles Target Children on Facebook, Instagram

    February 2, 2024
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
Home»Finance»Taiwan’s TikTok Liberal Paradox
Finance

Taiwan’s TikTok Liberal Paradox

January 3, 2025No Comments6 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Taiwan’s TikTok Liberal Paradox
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

The United States has steadily tightened its grip on TikTok, the massively popular video-sharing app owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, since early 2020. The clampdown began that January, during President Donald Trump’s first term, when the Pentagon deemed the app a security risk and barred its use by military personnel. Under Biden’s administration, tensions rose further in April 2024 with the signing of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, requiring TikTok to divest its American operations by January 19, 2025 or exit the market altogether.

Although TikTok quickly mounted a constitutional challenge, the courts upheld the measure on national security grounds. The matter now lies before the Supreme Court, where President-elect Trump has filed an amicus brief urging a stay of the ban, insisting that his incoming administration should have time to pursue an alternative resolution.

In contrast to the United States’ fiery debates over regulating TikTok, Taiwan’s policy discourse has remained conspicuously subdued. Much like Japan, despite worries that TikTok could sway public opinion and fuel disinformation campaigns, Taiwan has thus far confined its response to a 2019 ban on the app on government devices – a narrowly targeted effort to address cybersecurity concerns rather than a sweeping prohibition.

As cross-strait relations continue to sour, Taiwan’s reluctance to impose tighter controls appears timid, if not sanctimonious. The core problem is that policymakers fear curtailing free speech and igniting a political backlash. This concern grows more pressing in the face of escalating information manipulation, now magnified by AI, and for Taiwan in particular, the strategic ambitions of its geopolitical adversary, China.

To echo Tim Wu from Columbia Law School, a liberal legal framework that views free speech merely as a shield against government censorship is at risk of becoming obsolete. The problem lies in understanding free speech too myopically – focusing solely on preventing government intrusions – while overlooking how its protection can also impose a positive duty on governments to foster an environment conducive to robust public discourse.

See also  Oppenheimer Says This Sector Is an Attractive Place to Be

Nonetheless, it would also be helpful not to frame the TikTok controversy simply as a matter of state censorship in domestic settings alone, without taking seriously the extraterritorial clout of social media platforms run by illiberal powers. The deeper issue at stake thus points to a far more elemental clash of governance systems, with liberal openness contending against the looming influence of authoritarian encroachment.

Extraterritorial Algorithmic Moderation

As Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute shows, for instance, there seems a stark disparity in the volume of posts on sensitive China-related topics, such as Tibet, Hong Kong protests, and the Uyghur issue, between TikTok and Instagram. Despite receiving nearly twice as many likes, anti-China content on TikTok exhibited a views-to-likes ratio 87 percent lower than pro-China content.

Such algorithmic moderation was further exposed by the Guardian in 2019. It detailed that TikTok’s review mechanisms cooperate with the Chinese government’s policies to suppress content that is detrimental to China’s image. TikTok, for example, censors mentions of the Tiananmen Incident and Tibetan independence, tailoring its exposure algorithms to curtail the dissemination of these topics.

To make the matter worse, China itself has developed the world’s largest stringent censorship apparatus, including the Great Firewall and its outright bans on foreign platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Instagram. Any attempt to access international networks – locally termed as “jumping the wall” –  must route through official gateway channels provided by the national public telecommunications network, as mandated by PRC law. Neither organizations nor individuals are permitted to establish or use alternative channels for international connectivity (although many use private VPNs, these are technically illegal and subject to crackdowns).

See also  Wall Street sticks with Nvidia as US reportedly weighs curbs on chip exports

The asymmetry is obvious. While Chinese platforms like TikTok operate freely in democratic countries, those managed by Western entities are excluded from China’s controlled cyberspace. This disparity not only creates an uneven playing field but also exemplifies how authoritarian regimes might leverage global openness to advance their influence while insulating their own populations from external narratives.

China’s Regulatory Leverage Strategy

This disequilibrium can, of course, be attributed to the longstanding appeasement of China’s digital influence in open societies. But the TikTok case also reveals an inherent vulnerability within the liberal international order: the very freedoms and openness championed by democratic countries can be exploited by authoritarian actors.

Such a highly visible paradox is hardly limited to China’s approach to the information ecosystem worldwide. Described as “institutional arbitrage” by Weitseng Chen of National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Law, it appears to be an established tactic through which China capitalizes on the complexity and differences in cross-border regulatory regimes to gain economic or political benefits.

Chen’s study on international capital markets, for instance, illustrates how Chinese companies leverage this strategy. Despite domestic shortcomings in corporate governance and financial systems, they have risen to major global prominence by taking advantage of regulatory tools such as Rule 144A and Regulation S under U.S. securities laws – provisions that allow foreign companies to offer securities without fully complying with standard U.S. regulations.

Regulating TikTok thus exposes a systemic problem with global governance, wherein China’s regulatory leverage becomes ubiquitous, but on an even larger scale. And restricting TikTok is not merely about curbing an app’s features; it is a move against the “regime of truth,” to borrow Foucault’s terms, that the platform perpetuates under Chinese ownership. In essence, it involves an ethical choice for parrhesia, the practice of candid, principled truth-telling critical to the functioning of democratic governance, over propaganda.

See also  China's TikTok Secretly Tracked Journalist in Hopes of Busting Leakers

This is not to suggest that the encroachment of authoritarian influence is confined to TikTok alone. Disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining Taiwan’s democratic processes and institutions appear across various platforms, irrespective of their ownership. Nevertheless, tighter regulation of TikTok poses no obstacle to policymakers determined to tackle information manipulation wherever it emerges.

For a democracy like Taiwan, what is probably most troubling is that TikTok’s Chinese ownership renders its overseas operations likely subject to China’s domestic policies and laws – a circumstance that could facilitate censorship, data access, or political influence in line with Beijing’s agenda. This distinction lends credence to treating TikTok under a different regulatory approach than other platforms.

While the result of the U.S. effort to compel ByteDance to divest from TikTok remains uncertain, the choices made today will set the terms by which democratic allies such as Taiwan address the persistent issue of geopolitical rivals leveraging regulatory gaps between democratic and authoritarian regimes to extend their influence in the global digital ecosystem. 

Liberal Paradox Taiwans TikTok
Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

Chinese Manufacturers Flood TikTok To Subvert Trump’s Tariff Agenda

April 28, 2025

Ending China’s De Minimis Exception Brings 3 Benefits for Americans

April 17, 2025

The Trump Tariff Shock Should Push Indonesia to Reform Its Economy

April 17, 2025

Tariff Talks an Opportunity to Reinvigorate the Japan-US Alliance

April 17, 2025
Add A Comment

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Posts

Risks lie ahead for US credit standing after tentative debt ceiling deal

May 31, 2023

Gender dysphoria in young people is rising—and so is professional disagreement

February 26, 2023

Bank of America fined for consumer abuses, fake accounts, bogus fees

July 12, 2023

Morning Bid: Range-bound markets awaits Powell – again

November 9, 2023
Don't Miss

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

Business May 8, 2025

President Donald Trump announced Thursday the U.S. has reached a trade agreement with the U.K.,…

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025

Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

May 7, 2025
About
About

This is your World, Tech, Health, Entertainment and Sports website. We provide the latest breaking news straight from the News industry.

We're social. Connect with us:

Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest
Categories
  • Business (4,110)
  • Entertainment (4,220)
  • Finance (3,202)
  • Health (1,938)
  • Lifestyle (1,626)
  • Politics (3,084)
  • Sports (4,036)
  • Tech (2,006)
  • Uncategorized (4)
  • World (3,944)
Our Picks

Texas Rangers Win First World Series Title with 5-0 Win over Diamondbacks in Game 5

November 2, 2023

Bob Odenkirk dismissed advice from ‘cranky conservative’ doctor — but admits why he now regrets that decision

September 18, 2023

$200 Bonus for Notre Dame vs. Navy + $100 Off NFL Sunday Ticket for 2023

August 26, 2023
Popular Posts

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
© 2025 Patriotnownews.com - All rights reserved.
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.