Manipulating algorithms is only O.K. if you're American
On an increasingly protectionist internet, saving TikTok might not be what the First Amendment is for.
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Today’s piece is an essay in three parts about the forces of nationalism starting to transform digital life.
The first section, “Open protocols < closed borders,” is about the erosion of the open internet against the growing tides of digital protectionism; the second section, “American techno-optimism < American techno-nationalism,” is about how the ideal of the global open internet is continuing to merge with cold, hard American national interests; and the final section, “The First Amendment < America First,” is about how digital nationalism at home in the U.S. appears poised to put liberal internationalism in the backseat in the battle over TikTok.
I. Open protocols < closed borders
The “world wide web” is an idealist fantasy. We live on a mercantilist internet now, fracturing across boundaries of a new Great Power competition. Americans like me could be forgiven for thinking our digital borders are open. The iPhone is a passport preloaded with thousands of visas that take you seemingly everywhere. Google’s heartlands of Chrome, Gmail and YouTube sprawl in front of you. You can visit Meta’s imperium of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads whenever you like. Apple’s App Store is a Schengen Area of countless smaller digital territories begging for your tourism. They’re all “just a click away.”
These porous digital boundaries turn harder once you cross national borders.
“Global internet freedom,” as defined by Freedom House, has declined for 14 years straight. Since 2015, officials in more than 20 African nations have ordered disruptions to online service, usually around election season. Blocking websites is the most common tactic. Myanmar and Iran are among the world leaders in internet shutdowns, but none surpassed India for the sheer volume of blackouts. Following orders from regulators in 2024, for example, “X and Instagram restricted India-based users from viewing accounts that had mobilized as part of a farmers’ protest movement to advocate for a stronger social safety net.” India has banned TikTok and 508 other Chinese apps nationally since 2020 after a violent flare-up in border tensions.
On the old imperial proving grounds, digital frontiers are rewritten in cold wars and hot wars alike. Inside occupied Ukraine — where Ukrainians didn’t cross the Russian border, the border crossed them — Putin’s troops raided local internet service providers to reroute mobile and internet data access from Kyiv to Moscow, blocking Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and local news sites in the process.
It’s part of Russia’s project to build a sovereign intranet, similar to efforts by Iran, which mirror China’s far-reaching efforts under Premier Xi Jinping to seal off its internet from the rest of the world. The 21st century internet is still a physical, geographically rooted thing, made up of data centers, service providers and personnel. They’re exposed to all the old 20th century vulnerabilities of war, disaster, prosecution and regulation. The international internet, in other words, is still deeply exposed to nations.
For those reasons, the social-media app Telegram, one of the only top global major social-media companies without Americans or Chinese operators, had based itself in Dubai, “the best place for a neutral platform like ours to be in if we want to make sure we can defend our users’ privacy and freedom of speech.” (Despite this, the app’s private messages aren’t encrypted.)
Telegram, uncoincidentally, was seen as flouting democratic regulators and authoritarian regimes alike right up until its Russian-born founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested at an airport in Paris. He was accused of not curbing the drug trafficking and child porn on his app and not providing information to investigators.
After his arrest, Durov, who had founded the Russian version of Facebook called VKontakte before divesting, softened his tone on moderation. Durov suggested “Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard.”
When you take the satellite-level view of all these accelerating digital curbs worldwide, the ideal of a borderless open internet — like liberal democracy itself — is falling apart as a universal norm. Life online for billions of humans, like life in general, increasingly operates under a mix of political and commercial controls, some more intrusive than others.
As users, we live in a thicket of increasingly unstable contradictions: Online, we are hybrid citizens of our geographic nations and of a world community. Who gets to be in charge? More of our time is being spent in digital spaces beyond all democratic accountability, and more of the backlash to the loss of control is becoming illiberal.
For governments, one plain lesson, amid all of it, is that whoever controls digital infrastructure controls digital sovereignty, and maybe national sovereignty itself.
II. American techno-optimism < American techno-nationalism
The “open web” is more reliably shaped by American interests than the “techno-optimism” or the liberal universalism of tech enthusiasts. Open digital systems tend to belong to the massive zone of geopolitical interest dominated by U.S. monopolies providing “free” services to billions of users.
Just as laissez-faire markets tend toward monopoly and the elimination of competition, so too with the open internet now concentrated around American public and private power. Parts of vast U.S. corporate fiefdoms were built atop open protocols like HTTP and SMTP, with international connectivity providing access to a vast global market. The tools are there for anybody to use, but the European Union is yet to cough up its own Google or Meta.
Once you understand that everyone is equally free to stake endless billions of capital a year to develop highly speculative next-gen artificial intelligence for the masses, you understand why nobody else is doing it. After the world’s most populous nation, India, banned TikTok and other Chinese apps in 2020, it wasn’t domestic apps that emerged as replacements, but the same U.S. giants.
Countries outside the U.S. and China, with their options limited to playing online traffic cop, have started wising up to the growing foreign concentration in their domestic digital spheres. Many have gotten more aggressive about asserting traditional powers of taxation and regulation, with mixed results.
Some internet censorship increasingly comes from American companies themselves via capital strikes to discipline democratic regulators, like when Meta recently blocked journalism on its services in Canada to discourage a law requiring platform monopolies to pay for scraping news.
Amid the global turn toward regulation, U.S. government trade enforcers are now increasingly interested in mercantilist protections on American firms’ access to international digital markets.
Trade policy is where the idealism of the open internet melts seamlessly into the cold, hard national interests of American power.
“When governments impose unnecessary barriers to cross-border data flows or discriminate against foreign” — meaning American — “digital services, local firms are often hurt the most, as they cannot take advantage of cross-border digital services that facilitate global competitiveness,” the office of the U.S. Trade Representative wrote in 2020.
Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation — the “world’s leading think tank for science and technology policy,” headquartered in Washington, D.C. — recently argued that the U.S. should “go to the mattresses” (a term from “The Godfather”) to fight “techno-economic aggression” by the E.U. and China.
This fight could be won, Atkinson wrote, by developing new digital tools for good-old-fashioned trade war against longtime allies in Europe: retaliatory digital taxes, reciprocal limits on American data going abroad, and forced local-ownership rules.
“The next administration should make it clear that unless the EU effectively addresses a significant share of these trade barriers and anti-U.S. policies, the U.S. government will take firm action,” Atkinson writes. “And the faster that the EU can recognize that the challenger is not America but rather China, the sooner we can get on with forging a much more productive relationship. However, should the EU continue to choose to go it alone, seeing the United States and China each as threats, it will lose.”
Donald Trump, the 19th-century mercantilist who wants tariffs on everything entering American borders, is absolutely your guy for some messy bilateral strong-arming like this.
Notwithstanding Trump’s naked interest in illiberal antitrust to make American tech companies more obedient, the incoming president has signaled the Google antitrust action his first administration launched shouldn’t lead to the U.S. Justice Department’s proposed breakup of the company. “China is afraid of Google,” Trump said. “It’s a very dangerous thing, because we want to have great companies … We don’t want China to have these companies.”
Other democracies are already wincing. In a new essay “On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power,” Canadian media scholar Taylor Owen notes that the new fusion of Silicon Trumpism is an ominous development for other democracies’ “ability to govern digital spaces.”
Agreements like the USMCA could be renegotiated under Trump “to override local attempts at tech regulation and enforcement” like the kind Canada has been attempting, forcing a losing choice between good trade relations and digital sovereignty. “The chilling effect on digital governance could last for years, leaving a regulatory vacuum filled only by US corporate interests,” Owen writes.
Inauguration hasn’t even happened, and it’s already begun. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago to get ahead of the expected opening salvo of American tariffs, the incoming U.S. president suggested Canada become the 51st state.
III. The First Amendment < America First
One of the Great Power lessons of the internet is that whoever controls the infrastructure controls the content. The governments of the United States and China, knowing this, are nearing the end of a showdown over who controls the shortform video app TikTok.
TikTok is one of the rare digital platforms massively popular with Americans that wasn’t founded by Americans. Twenty-one percent of TikTok’s corporate parent, ByteDance, is still owned by its 41-year-old founder Zhang Yiming, reportedly China’s richest person; another 21% is owned by employees; and 58% is owned by institutional investors like BlackRock, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group.
TikTok, fearing this moment, has worked for years to create the appearance of distance between TikTok and China. The leadership team works in Singapore and the U.S., and TikTok’s subsidiary CEO, Shou Chew, is a third-generation Singaporean. The app exited Hong Kong in 2020 as Beijing imposed a draconian new security law to curb civil dissent, and TikTok routs U.S. data to servers minded by Oracle.
But U.S. national security officials argue the true core of TikTok’s business — particularly its all-powerful recommendation algorithm — is headquartered in China, where ByteDance first launched the forerunner to TikTok called Douyin. (Addressing the “myth” that ByteDance is headquartered in China, TikTok officials say that ByteDance “does not have a single global headquarters.” ByteDance is registered in an offshore tax shelter, the Cayman Islands.)
The U.S. government case, supporting Congress’ law requiring divestment of platforms owned by a “foreign adversary,” rests on two concerns. First, that China could mass-harvest data about U.S. citizens for later strategic use. Second, that China could manipulate TikTok’s content moderation to push pro-China messaging to Americans or content that would exploit our sizable domestic divisions.
TikTok, free-speech advocates and content creators have stridently objected to the government’s case. Isn’t America supposed to be the country of free speech and global digital freedom?
“Consistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression, the United States has long championed a free and open Internet,” ByteDance’s attorneys wrote. Creating an American-only TikTok “would become an ‘island’ where Americans would have an experience detached from the rest of the global platform and its over 1 billion users.”
For a platform to be the best it can be, it needs to be globally interconnected. But a platform still has to be anchored somewhere, and the host country inevitably has its own interests that may only coincidentally involve an open internet.
In the middle of all this, Chinese officials, asserting national interests, threatened to ban the export of the technology behind TikTok, an intervention that spectacularly undermined ByteDance’s defense that TikTok is insulated from Beijing. (TikTok is not available in China.) “China has specifically acted to maintain its ability to exercise control over TikTok,” the Justice Department noted.
Last Friday, a U.S. Appeals court in the District of Columbia agreed. Judge Douglas Ginsburg, rejecting ByteDance’s appeal against divestment, wrote that First Amendment concerns did not transcend the United States’ national interest in who controls of critical media infrastructure.
As if echoing Marshall McLuhan, Judge Ginsburg wrote that it isn’t the message but the medium that really matters, at least when reconciling liberal speech interests with protectionist divestment demands:
People in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing. What the Act targets is the PRC’s ability to manipulate that content covertly. Understood in that way, the Government’s justification is wholly consonant with the First Amendment.
In a concurring opinion, Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote that while tech is new, nationalist protectionism of information infrastructure isn’t.
“The first communications medium capable of reaching mass audiences in real time — radio — was subject to restrictions on foreign ownership and control from the very outset,” he wrote. Foreign organizations operating abroad do not have First Amendment rights, and so curation decisions ordered by foreign governments aren’t protected, Srinivasan wrote.
The problem isn’t an adversary’s speech, but an adversary’s interests. As long as the app is American-owned, the Chinese Community Party can be a tenant like everybody else. Like many Great Power conflicts in the end, it’s ultimately about the struggle for real estate. American society doesn’t exactly seem in convulsion over a federal contractor and top Republican donor, Elon Musk, turning a competitor social media platform into a partisan campaign platform to advance his own interests.
As long as you’re an American owner, you can manipulate the algorithms however you like. The old sovereignty is still king.
“Life online for billions of humans, like life in general, increasingly operates under a mix of political and commercial controls, some more intrusive than others.”
- Matt Pearce