The Bill of Rights is not a vehicle for America’s foreign adversaries to undermine Americans’ freedoms. The Supreme Court recognized as much when it upheld the requirement of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (“the Act”) that TikTok divest from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ownership or stop operating in the United States.
TikTok is a Trojan horse. It is a means by which the CCP is infiltrating American culture and collecting Americans’ private data, threatening both personal privacy and national security. What makes this Trojan horse unique is that it is transparent. Anyone willing to look can see the CCP engineers sitting inside the horse. The CCP hopes that Americans will be too engrossed with the app to notice or care before bringing it inside the city walls.
“TikTok doesn’t operate in China,” as the attorney for TikTok acknowledged during oral arguments before the Supreme Court on January 10. That is because, as Advancing American Freedom argued in its amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold the Act, TikTok is designed as a weapon for CCP foreign interference.
A report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) found evidence that content on TikTok critical of China, like content about Tiananmen or the Chinese Uyghurs, was suppressed when searched for, drowned out by irrelevant and pro-China material. Nor is there any reason to think the algorithm is not manipulating what Americans do and do not see on the app in more subtle, and thus even more nefarious, ways.
TikTok argued before the Supreme Court that the act violates its First Amendment rights as an American corporation, claiming the app’s recommendation algorithm is its protected speech. Several of the justices rightly pushed back, however, pointing out that the speech in question is arguably that of the Chinese government, not of TikTok.
TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and such companies are naturally subject to Chinese communist control. TikTok’s argument is that a foreign adversary like the CCP can manufacture First Amendment rights for itself merely by creating a couple of layers of artificial corporate insulation and then use the Constitution’s protections of Americans’ freedoms as a shield against efforts to manipulate Americans’ speech or collect their private information.
In other words, TikTok is insisting that the First Amendment protects the “right” of the Chinese Communist Party to engage in behavior that, if carried out by our Federal Government, would violate the First and Fourth Amendments.
In anticipation of TikTok’s shutting down on Sunday, many Americans have joined RedNote, a Chinese TikTok alternative named for mass murderer and CCP founder Mao Zedong’s little red book, apparently out of spite for the act. Americans’ skepticism of government and its tendency to overreach is admirable and is a tradition fundamental to the history of our republic.
Our Founders were likewise concerned about the potential abuse of government power and thus implemented both the structures of our federal government and, later, the Bill of Rights to help curtail that abuse. However, the Constitution was the culmination of an effort for freedom that began with resistance to foreign tyranny.
As the Declaration of Independence explains, it is the duty of the people to throw off despotic governments. Americans should not, out of spite for Washington, welcome the despotism of Beijing.
When TikTok shuts down on Sunday, rather than downloading another CCP controlled app, Americans would do well to revisit the Declaration of Independence and the Aeneid and consider the words of Laocoon who warned the Trojans not to bring the horse into the city: “This hollow fabric either must inclose,/ Within its blind recess, our secret foes;/ Or ‘tis an engine rais’d above the town,/ T’ o’erlook the walls, and then to batter down./ Somewhat is sure design’d, by fraud or force:/ Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.”
Marc Wheat is the General Counsel for Advancing American Freedom.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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