Early in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, protagonist Winston Smith encounters some children playacting as tools of the despotic regime that dominates Oceania. It is a depressingly common spectacle, as under that government, children are trained to adore “the Party and everything connected with it,” such that “all their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals.”
As a result, parents tended to fear their children. And not without justification: “for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.”
There was some unsettling real-world basis for Orwell’s storytelling: Apart from the more general efforts of despotic governments to suborn the family, an institution capable of resisting totalizing impulses, some such governments celebrated pro-regime children who (allegedly) informed on their anti-regime parents.
Times and circumstances may have changed, but totalitarian actors haven’t. As Congress considers taking action against the evil social-media app TikTok, which is based in China and tied to the Chinese Communist Party, the app has activated its users, many of them young, against a bill that would force its sale to a U.S. company or ban it if no sale occurs. Before the House passed the bill earlier this month, Capitol Hill switchboards lit up — at the app’s urging, and with its help — with young users urging members to vote no. Some of them threatened suicide.
The Wall Street Journal reports that this campaign has gotten personal for some lawmakers. Some of their own children are lobbying them not to act against the app. Take Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.):
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman was headed back to Pennsylvania after the House voted on the legislation when his tween daughter lobbied him.
“I’m driving home and she sent me some texts, and it was ‘please don’t destroy TikTok, I’m going to get bullied,’” he recalls.
Fetterman got a visit recently from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and instead of shaking his hand, he pulled out those texts from his daughter.
“I was like, you got to my daughter,” says Fetterman. Chew responded that Fetterman’s daughter’s fear was terrible, according to the senator.
It’s true that there is (currently) nothing stopping TikTok from manipulating children in this way, and that it did not deliberately target the children of legislators in its lobbying efforts. It is also (fortunately) the case that our own government does not wield TikTok as a tool of oppression against Americans, and that, when looked at superficially, it is but one app competing among many for eyeballs. One might still worry about any platform capable of engaging the attention of 170 million users, many of them young, and for many of whom it is the primary source of news.
But it is the national-security threat TikTok poses, by virtue of its extensive CCP ties and the spyware-laden nature of its operation, that has rightly drawn congressional scrutiny and may yet subject it to further action. That the app’s strategy for surviving challenges to its current business arrangement bears an ominous resemblance to totalitarian tactics, both fictional and real, ought to redouble Americans’ skepticism of it. TikTok would have us win the victory over ourselves and allow what is effectively a tool for Chinese spycraft to operate freely within our borders. Congress should secure victory over it instead.