The TikTok bill is about defense, not censorship, says the retired American general

Retired US Air Force Brigadier General. Gen. David Stilwell says new legislation to force popular video-sharing application TikTok to divest its Chinese ownership or lose the ability to operate in the United States should be viewed as a measure of national defense rather than as a matter of freedom of speech and censorship. .

On April 20, the House of Representatives passed a package of legislation called the “21st Century Peace through Strength Act,” which includes legislation that would give TikTok about nine months to divest itself of Chinese ownership, after which U.S. app stores and websites a fine of up to $5,000 per day per user if they continue to support downloads and updates of the application. This legislation stems from allegations that TikTok is controlled or otherwise used by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to influence US users or harm US national security.

Critics of the TikTok divestiture legislation have raised concerns about the power it would give current and future U.S. presidents to decide which mobile applications can do business in the United States and how that would impact the free flow of information online.

Mr Stilwell, a supporter of the divestment legislation, stressed during an interview with NTD’s ‘China in Focus’ that it is wrong to define the debate around the bill as a matter of censorship.

“It’s not censorship, it’s defense. So we need to better define our terms,” he said.

Mr Stilwell – who retired from the Air Force in 2015 and served as Assistant Secretary of State for State, East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2019 to 2021 – said the potential threat from a hostile foreign government “would cause unrest, disinformation and undermine our electoral elections.” process” is “a much bigger problem than any loss to a single app.” He emphasized that those concerned about the loss of TikTok still have plenty of other apps to turn to, such as Instagram, Reddit and Twitter.

What the bill says and does

The bill passed by the House of Representatives and now before the Senate would prohibit entities deemed to be sufficiently owned or controlled by individuals within a hostile country – namely China, Russia, Iran or North Korea – from operate within the United States.

The bill specifically identifies “foreign adversary-controlled” applications as applications that are located, headquartered in, or organized under the domestic laws of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, or a business in which an individual, entity, or combination of persons or entities in the above-mentioned countries have a collective ownership interest of 20 percent or more in said company. A third category of “foreign adversary controlled” applications are those deemed “subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity.”

The bill gives the President of the United States the authority to determine when a filing poses a threat to national security and what “qualified divestiture actions” a parent company should take to resolve issues related to its foreign ownership.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — who has opposed the legislation — has warned that the bill’s language surrounding TikTok’s ownership could be used to justify forcing other companies to shake up their ownership and corporate structure .

“What scares me is that the president can say, ‘You are under the control of a foreign adversary country,’” Massie said during a debate on the bill in March. “And just this week, Dan Goldman and Jamie Raskin sent the Chairman of the Oversight Committee a letter saying we are concerned that X is allowing foreign terrorists and foreign adversaries to use the platform.”

Speaking to NTD, Mr Stilwell argued that giving companies affected by the legislation time to say goodbye to problematic owners creates a “reasonable” and “balanced” approach to dealing with foreign ownership and control issues .

“We don’t want to kill TikTok; you in the US who like it, you can use it. We are simply going to remove the evil hand of the Chinese Communist Party from our open media system,” Mr Stilwell said.

Health reasons also favor TikTok’s divestment: Stilwell

Mr. Stilwell went beyond the free speech and censorship issues raised by opponents of the TikTok divestment bill and argued that shaking up TikTok would also be worthwhile from a public health perspective.

“One of the biggest and most nefarious aspects of TikTok is that it activates dopamine centers, you know, it goes after the emotional center, the amygdala, the lizard brain in all of us. And that’s what makes it so addictive,” he says.

The retired Air Force officer said a colleague of his is calling TikTok’s algorithm “digital fentanyl.”

“That’s not an exaggeration. Instead of a chemically produced opioid, it is a naturally occurring opioid called dopamine,” he added. “The thing is designed to keep you doom-scrolling forever, because of the images it flashes, because it gives you more and more of what you want to see.”

Mr. Stilwell noted that other social media applications besides TikTok use algorithms that show users more of the type of content they have previously interacted with. The retired Air Force officer argued that applications from US competitors such as Facebook are “in no way as addictive as TikTok.”

TikTok’s Timeline to Sell

An earlier version of the TikTok divestiture bill would have given the application’s owners about six months to sell the platform before app store services would face prohibitive fines for hosting the application. The decision to extend the divestiture deadline to approximately nine months drew praise from the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee Mary Cantwell (D-Wash.), a development that could boost the bill’s Senate passage.

Mr. Stilwell said the extended time frame for the divestiture appears to be a reasonable measure to “accommodate some interests that we don’t want to rush into.”

‘Let’s find a good buyer. Let’s make this a good deal. And then we will break it open and show everyone what it did, because we know it does nefarious things,” he added.

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