With TikTok potentially on the chopping block, per a warning from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Chinese-controlled app’s supporters have emerged from the woodwork to defend the video-sharing platform with not just the illogical but the indefensible.
TikTok’s proponents argue not just that it’s comparable to any other app farming your data but that anyone criticizing it must be motivated by racism.
Actually a bad explanation pic.twitter.com/q8XzImJeBV
— Joe Gabriel Simonson (@SaysSimonson) July 11, 2020
While TikTok zoomers pledge fealty to Beijing and lambaste President Trump for Pompeo’s threat, the Washington Post and New York Times resident TikTok correspondent Taylor Lorenz tried a different tack, accusing the app’s critics of racism against the Chinese regime.
“TikTok doesn’t appear to grab any more personal information than Facebook,” the Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler wrote. “That’s still an appalling amount of data to mine about the lives of Americans. But there’s scant evidence that TikTok is sharing our data with China, and we should be wary of xenophobia dressed up as privacy concerns.”
In a since-deleted tweet, the New York Times writer who editorialized that banning the app would be “devastating” also attributed opposition to TikTok to xenophobia and racism.
Contemporary tech journalism has long been littered with analysis so dumb that it’s offensive by that standard alone. This analysis isn’t just offensively dumb, however. It’s egregiously offensive. It is lunacy to suggest that there’s an equivalence between Facebook or Amazon harvesting your data to target advertising versus a Beijing regime-controlled app mining your data for the Chinese Communist Party, the record of violence and murder of which exceeds any organization in history.
But to go another step — arguing that opposition to such a notion isn’t just wrong but racist — constitutes a sort of vile racism of its own. Why do Westerners continue to whitewash and, in this case, accept the borderline genocide going on right now at Beijing’s hands?
China has locked up some 2 million Uighur citizens in concentration camps, or, if you’d like to be generous, “internment camps.” As a part of the country’s ethnic cleansing campaign against a predominantly Muslim minority, women are forced to undergo abortions and seemingly unsafe IUD insertions. Both men and women in the camps are subjected to forced organ harvesting, slavery, systemic violence, torture, and even murder.
And let’s not even get into the regime’s disregard for the human rights of its majority Han Chinese citizens. They, too, suffer from government speech policing, a corrupt justice system devoid of basic civil liberties and due process, and mass executions.
The most effectively racist power on the planet is the Chinese Communist Party. It subjugates both a Muslim minority and other citizens as well to the sort of horrors that privileged white liberals think only exists in The Handmaid’s Tale or the Bible Belt.
So, when critics balk at empowering the most racist and vile superpower on the planet by voluntarily turning over to it useful domestic data, maybe take them at their word. Only an utter fool or, worse yet, an apologist for Beijing’s lengthy record of genocide would argue otherwise.
