My Take | The dirty, ugly and deadly politics behind America’s TikTok block
- Israel’s war on Gaza, rather than China, is the real drive behind Biden’s ‘ban or sell’ law because young US app users tend to be pro-Palestinian
President Joe Biden has signed legislation ordering the forced sale of TikTok or its complete ban across the United States. The fact that American politicians went after the immensely popular app is not surprising, given its Chinese ownership. But the speed with which lawmakers have managed to push through the law does make you question the timing.
After all, their antagonism has gone off and on for the past four years, so why this desperate urgency? The threatened ban is not without precedent, of course. In 2020, Washington forced Chinese video-game developer Kunlun Tech to sell its LGBTQ dating app, Grindr, in the US to an American company on the grounds of national security. Well, you never know about those congressional staff and politicians.
But TikTok is no Grindr. It has 150 million active daily users, most of whom are aged between 16 and 35, a key electoral demographic for the Democrats. A Democrat White House doesn’t want to antagonise such voters, especially in an election year.
But all that changed after the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, and then Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza.
That’s the most plausible explanation offered by a Wall Street Journal report and an analysis by Glenn Greenwald, one of the key journalists behind Edward Snowden’s exposé of the US National Security Agency’s hitherto unknown mass surveillance, both at home and abroad.
Of the most popular social media platforms, TikTok appears to have the most pro-Palestinian posts. I use “appear” because TikTok has released statistics that claim to prove otherwise. It claimed that the hashtag #standwithisrael had 46 million views in the US between October 7 and 31, which was far ahead of the hashtag #standwithpalestine, with 29 million views.