Operational Parity Should Be the Issue for TikTok
(March 26, 2023)
by Steve Balkin, Professor Emeritus, Roosevelt University, Email: sbalkin@roosevelt.edu
It seems that the U.S. Government is very much against TikTok being so popular in the USA for fear of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) tracking and collecting information about USA users, and using that data to compromise our military defense capability. The mainstream bi-partisan policy objective is to force ByteDance, a company with ownership in the PRC, to be sold to a US technology corporation.
My sense is that this policy objective is wrong. The policy objective should instead be operational parity with the PRC. The US should allow Tiktok to be owned and operated by ByteDance in its current manner if and only if ByteDance removes Douyin, the ByteDance version for PRC, from China and replaces it with the same TikTok as used in the USA, and that Chinese and American users, using digital translation programs, can view the same content and interact with each other. The big issue is not China collecting data on USA users but China being allowed to use a different version of Tiktok than in the US. The big harm of Tiktok is not China learning more about the US than we want them to. The big harm is the prevention of the Chinese people from learning more about US culture, government, and politics. No Tiktok censorship should be allowed in the US or China, except for content that is well defined as pornography or criminal and is the same in both places.
I have personal reasons for wanting this policy objective. I want to communicate better with my former students from the PRC. They honor and respect their teachers and elders. Also, my knowledge of Chinese cooking needs improvement; I need extra help and instruction with my Chinese Buddhist meditation and Xi Gong practices; I want to learn more about high speed trains, and I want to learn more about efforts in the PRC to preserve historic buildings and places.
If PRC has a superior form of organizing and operating its public sphere, we ordinary US persons should know about that system and consider its merits for use in the US. We should hear and evaluate what Xi Jinping is saying and consider those ideas for the US. Let Chinese ideas and culture infiltrate into the US and US ideas and culture infiltrate into the PRC. I don’t think we are ready for one world government but we are ready for one world communication.
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