On the menu today: Vivek Ramaswamy is the man who is most likely to be the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio this year. There was a time, not that long ago, when he argued that Republicans like him should be signing up for TikTok in order to reach young voters. This week Ramaswamy revealed he has a dramatically different perspective now. Meanwhile, everyone on the right who understands the Chinese Communist Party, technology, and information warfare is warning that the Trump administration’s new deal for TikTok is “capitulation,” “ignores the central problem,” and represents “lipstick on a pig.” Read on.
Vivek Ditches His Social Engagements
Then-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, back on September 23, 2023:
Had dinner with Jake Paul on Sunday. He changed my mind and convinced me to join TikTok. Yes, kids under age 16 shouldn’t be using it, but the fact is that many young voters are & we’re not going to change this country without winning. We can’t just talk about the importance of the GOP “reaching young voters” while hiding in our own echo chambers. It’s bad when the CCP collects data from U.S. users via TikTok, but the truth is it’s no better when “American” companies like Airbnb do the same thing by handing over U.S. user data to China, and we’re not going to get China to play by the same set of rules until we win this thing. I’ll be on there starting later today.
Knowing that TikTok is basically Chinese spyware for your phone, a tool for spreading anti-American propaganda, and “the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds,” I was unpersuaded about the need for American political voices to join TikTok.
Your friendly neighborhood newsletter writer, shortly thereafter:
I keep getting told to take Ramaswamy seriously, but the evidence keeps piling up that Ramaswamy himself isn’t taking any of this too seriously. It would still be wrong, but understandable, if Ramaswamy had reached his decision after a careful examination of the security and privacy issues and consulting with experts, and had found some way to object to the platform’s indefensible targeting of adult material to users under 18, and so on. But no, Ramaswamy was convinced to accept the risk of Chinese spyware in his smartphone by a social-media influencer whose past controversies “included but [are] not limited to accusations of sexual assault, a federal search warrant exercised on his property, COVID-19 hoax claims, accusations of scamming his fans and a looting and trespassing incident in an Arizona mall.”
Hey, if Jake Paul says something is worthwhile, it must be okay, right?
Still, in a Ramaswamy administration, I look forward to the fine work of Secretary of State Addison Rae.
Not everyone around here agreed with me on that.
I mention all this because now, as a candidate for governor of Ohio, Ramaswamy has a new attitude. Not only is Ramaswamy no longer advocating for Republicans to download and join TikTok, but he’s also publicly pledging he’s going to stay off social media entirely. He writes in an op-ed of the Wall Street Journal:
My New Year’s resolution is to do something similar: I plan to become a social-media teetotaler in 2026.
On New Year’s Eve, I deleted X and Instagram from my phone. I’ll spend my newfound time listening to more voters in real-world Ohio, developing more policies to make our state affordable, and being more present with my family. I predict that ending my consumption of social media will make me a better leader and a happier man.
My campaign team will still use social media to distribute messages and videos on my behalf. But I won’t browse any of it myself. There’s a fine line between using the internet to distribute your message and inadvertently allowing constant internet feedback to alter your message. That isn’t using social media; it’s letting social media use you. . . .
Social media’s warped projection of reality is reinforced inside modern government. Political staffers on both sides of the aisle skew young and hyper-attuned to social media. Twitter was built to imitate real-life conversations, but in modern younger political circles, real-life conversations are imitating Twitter.
Good for you, Vivek Ramaswamy. But . . . this is an awfully dramatic about-face. Is it possible that Jake Paul was not, in fact, a reliable or trustworthy voice on the geopolitical and national security implications of downloading and using TikTok? What, did somebody recently knock some sense into him or something?
As for TikTok, the Trump administration has ignored a federal law that banned the app for the past year. The deal to set up a Trump-administration-approved version of TikTok is scheduled to close on January 22. Under the deal, Chinese company ByteDance will retain only a 20 percent stake in the U.S. version of the app.
Last month, Matt Pottinger and Craig Singleton warned that the forthcoming deal hand-waves away the national security concerns that drove the ban in the first place. Pottinger was President Trump’s deputy national security adviser from 2019 to 2021 and chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Singleton is a senior fellow at the foundation:
Ownership changes mean nothing if an app’s source code or decision-making process traces back to Beijing. Last January, the Supreme Court underscored that risk, voting 9-0 to uphold the statute. In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch warned that Chinese-developed software carries threats of “malicious code, backdoor vulnerabilities, [and] surreptitious surveillance,” and that divestiture must preclude “cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.”
Yet the executive order on TikTok that Trump issued in September appears to fall far short of that imperative. The order claims the divestiture would place “the operation of the algorithms and code, as well as content-moderation decisions” under the control of a new TikTok-U.S. joint venture. But what the order doesn’t clarify is who will own the source code, model weights or signing keys — or whether the restructured venture will simply license the algorithm from ByteDance, in violation of the law. Nor has the administration specified whether ByteDance employees will retain access to the algorithm, in effect leaving China in charge of determining what content TikTok users see and, importantly, what they don’t.
Liza Tobin, who served as China director on the National Security Council from 2019 to 2021, writing in the Wall Street Journal December 23:
Congress passed, and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld, a law requiring the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest and relinquish operational control of the U.S. business or be banned. The emerging deal in Washington allows ByteDance to maintain a significant stake and appears to preserve Chinese control over the algorithm that shapes the media diets of more than a third of Americans, cementing Beijing’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion on everything from Taiwan to the midterm elections.
In an appearance on Bloomberg Technology the day before, Tobin warned:
What appears to be the case is that ByteDance, the parent company that owns TikTok, is going to maintain control over TikTok’s algorithm. This, of course, is the special sauce that makes TikTok what it is that makes it so addictive and so special in the first place. And I just want to remind your audience that Beijing has never agreed to turn over control of this algorithm over to these U.S. investors. And that’s really at the heart of the deal. . . . The Trump administration keeps trying to come up with some kind of a deal to end this Tik Tok saga and keep it in the United States, it keeps kind of lowering the bar on this deal with Beijing over TikTok to the point where now we’re probably going to be settling on a deal where Beijing, through ByteDance, maintains control over this algorithm and this vector of influence over American discourse. . . . I think they’re going to be putting some kind of lipstick on the pig in some kind of security arrangement in place.
I know that any official who served in the Biden administration will always get a skeptical reception from a right-of-center audience, but the previous administration was tough enough on China to sign the TikTok ban into law. (Remember, the votes in Congress on the TikTok ban weren’t all that close; the House passed the ban 352 to 65, and the Senate passed it, 79 to 18. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban as constitutional. Almost everybody in the U.S. government agrees that TikTok represents a serious national security risk . . . except for the current guy behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.)
During the Biden years, Jim Secreto was chair of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States at the Department of the Treasury, and Brett Freedman was chief of staff for the assistant attorney general of the National Security Division at the Department of Justice.
On December 23, they wrote in the New York Times:
Mr. Trump’s deal preserves many of the ties to China that the law was designed to sever. ByteDance would reportedly license or transfer its recommendation algorithm to the new U.S. entity. TikTok would continue to manage “global product interoperability,” meaning the American app would remain integrated with TikTok’s worldwide platform. Oracle, the app’s U.S. cloud provider, would serve as a “trusted security partner,” monitoring the system and eventually retraining the algorithm. Make no mistake: In this new arrangement, Beijing will still have leverage over the newly structured entity. . . .
Under the proposed arrangement, Beijing would still retain leverage over a platform that shapes what millions of Americans see every day — influence that China would never allow the United States to wield over its own digital ecosystem.
And a deal that glosses over or only partially addresses the national security concerns is exactly what right-of-center policy analysts wanted to avoid. Back on September 18, leading technology and China experts at The Heritage Foundation released a joint statement warning, “A halfway deal that leaves a backdoor open for Beijing, such as an algorithm license, presents the same threats we currently face and should be rejected. If China refuses real divestment, President Trump should call their bluff and ban TikTok outright.”
Over at the American Enterprise Institute, China specialist Ryan Fedasiuk warned, “The deal on the table is not a victory for U.S. national security — it is a face-saving compromise that leaves the most egregious threat unresolved. . . . TikTok survives, ByteDance keeps control of its secret sauce, and the White House can credibly claim to protect Americans’ data while ignoring the central problem — CCP leverage over the social media diet of 170 million Americans.”
Marc Short and Michael Sobolik of the Hudson Institute write of the forthcoming deal:
This may sound like a compromise, but it is in fact a capitulation. Licensing is not ownership and monitoring is not control. As long as ByteDance retains the ability to alter the algorithm from Beijing, the CCP will preserve one of its most powerful tools for influencing American minds and waging psychological warfare against the West. The administration implicitly concedes the deal’s weakness by touting Oracle’s ability to “fully inspect” the algorithm. What the administration cannot quite bring itself to say is that those inspections will be searching for evidence of ByteDance’s ongoing manipulation of the platform.
The problem is not theoretical. We have already seen how TikTok floods American feeds with antisemitic propaganda in the wake of terror attacks and the crass celebration of political violence after the assassinations of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. While fanning the flames of domestic American conflict, TikTok buries any content critical of China: e.g., the Uyghur genocide, the crackdown in Hong Kong and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Unsurprisingly, the algorithm that serves such a toxic cocktail of content in the United States is banned domestically within China. This is the very essence of information warfare. To allow China to keep a hand on the levers of TikTok’s algorithm is to allow the CCP to continue shaping what our children watch and believe.
But hey, at least Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t browsing X and Instagram anymore.
You can find me on X here, on Instagram here, and the work Facebook page here. And you can’t find me on TikTok because the app is basically Chinese spyware for your phone, a tool for spreading anti-American propaganda, and “the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds.”
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, an observation that no two countries with a Trump-branded property have ever gone to war with each other, and a not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek suggestion that U.S. allies make property deals with the Trump organization. If countries like Qatar, Serbia, and Oman can ingratiate themselves with the president through lucrative real estate deals that are blatant conflicts of interest, why can’t U.S. allies? We are just one Trump Tower Copenhagen announcement away from the administration forgetting about its dreams of a Greenland conquest.