TikTok has few allies in Washington these days, as members of Congress from both parties advance legislation to force the app’s divestiture by ByteDance, its Chinese parent company. But among its remaining friends are think tanks to which it has donated.
NBC has just published an article pushing TikTok’s talking points, and it cites an expert from one of those think tanks, the Center for Democracy and Technology. The piece’s main point is to reveal how “experts warn” that the TikTok legislation would “shatter the United States’ reputation as an international champion of free speech” and embolden foreign authoritarian regimes to ban other apps.
There are a few problems with this right off the bat. The first sentence of the piece is inaccurate, as it refers to “the proposed TikTok ban working its way through Congress.” The bill forces ByteDance to sell the app or otherwise face a ban within six months; this is not an outright ban. That erroneous characterization of the app is also in the headline: “A TikTok ban could embolden authoritarian censorship, experts warn.”
As it turns out, one of the “experts” to whom NBC turns to support this framing works for an organization that received funding from TikTok. The outlet turned to a staffer at the Center for Democracy and Technology to make that point. As Michael Sobolik points out, the think tank reports that it received a donation worth more than $100,000 from TikTok in 2022. According to archived webpages of CDT’s website, TikTok’s patronage of the think tank stretches back to 2020.
CDT certainly deserves credit for its transparency on the funding that supports its work, but its relationship to TikTok completely undercuts any claim to credibility that the think tank has on the topic of the current legislation. Worse, NBC is advancing talking points delivered by an ally of TikTok without disclosing this donor–recipient relationship — and without disclosing its own partnerships to the company. Anyone who reads this piece comes away from it well versed in the talking points deployed by TikTok’s allies but less informed than before they clicked on it. These warnings by “experts” deserve to fall on deaf ears.