Tens of millions of people face the loss of an internet service they use to consume information from around the world. Their government says the block is for their own good, necessitated by threats to national security. The internet service is dangerous, they say, a tool of foreign meddling and a menace to the national fabric — though they furnish little evidence. A situation like this, historically, is the kind of thing the U.S. government protests in clear terms.
When asked, for instance, about Chinese censorship of Twitter in 2009, President Barack Obama was unequivocal. “I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.” When the government of Nigeria disconnected its people from Twitter in 2021, the State Department blasted the move, with spokesperson Ned Price declaring, “Unduly restricting the ability of Nigerians to report, gather, and disseminate opinions and information has no place in a democracy.”
But with the Supreme Court approving on Friday a law that would shut off access to TikTok, the U.S. is poised to conduct the exact kind of internet authoritarianism it has spent decades warning the rest of the world about.
Since the advent of the global web, this has been the standard line from the White House, State Department, Congress, and an infinitude of think tanks and NGOs: The internet is a democracy machine. You turn it loose, and it generates freedom ex nihilo. The more internet you have, the more freedom you have.
The State Department in particular seldom misses an opportunity to knock China, Iran, and other faraway governments for blocking their people from reaching the global communications grid — moves justified by those governments as necessary for national safety.
In 2006, the State Department presented the Bush administration’s Global Internet Freedom strategy of “defending Internet freedom by advocating the availability of the widest possible universe of content.” In a 2010 speech, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned that “countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.” She emphasized that the department sought to encourage the flow of foreign internet data into China “because we believe it will further add to the dynamic growth and the democratization” there.
The U.S. has always viewed the internet with something akin to national pride, and for decades has condemned attempts by authoritarian governments — especially China’s — to restrict access to the worldwide exchange of unfettered information. China has become synonymous with internet censorship for snuffing whole websites or apps out of existence with only the thinnest invocation of national security.
But after years of championing “Digital Democracy,” “the Global Village,” and an “American Information Superhighway” shuttling liberalism and freedom to every computer it touches, the U.S. is preparing a dramatic about face. In a move of supreme irony, it will attempt to shield its citizens from Chinese government influence by becoming itself more like the government of China. American internet users must now get accustomed to sweeping censorship in the name of national security as an American strategy, not one inherent to our “foreign adversaries.”
In a move of supreme irony, the U.S. will attempt to shield its citizens from Chinese government influence by becoming itself more like the government of China.
For decades, China has justified its ban against American internet products on the grounds that the likes of Twitter and Instagram represent a threat to Chinese state security and a corrupting influence on Chinese society. That logic has now been seamlessly co-opted by U.S politicians who see China as the great global evil, but with little acknowledgment of how their rhetoric matches that of their enemy.
“Authoritarian and illiberal states,” President Joe Biden’s State Department warned soon after he signed the TikTok ban bill into law, “are seeking to restrict human rights online and offline through the misuse of the Internet and digital technologies” by “siloing the Internet” and “suppressing dissent through Internet and telecommunications shutdowns, virtual blackouts, restricted networks, and blocked websites.”
While TikTok’s national security threat has never been made public — alleged details discussed by Congress remain classified — those who advocate banning the app make clear their concern isn’t merely cybersecurity but also free speech. The Chinese Communist Party “could also use TikTok to propagate videos that support party-friendly politicians or exacerbate discord in American society,” former GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher and Sen. Marco Rubio warned in a 2022 Washington Post op-ed. Their argument perfectly mimicked unspecified threats to Chinese “national unity” that country has cited to defend its blocking of American internet services.
“It’s highly addictive and destructive and we’re seeing troubling data about the corrosive impact of constant social media use, particularly on young men and women here in America,” Gallagher told NBC in 2023.
If politicians are conscious of this contradiction between declarations of America as the home of digital democracy and the rising American firewall, there’s little acknowledgment. In a 2024 opinion piece for Newsweek (“Mr. Xi, Tear Down This Firewall”), Rep. John Moolenaar decried China’s “dystopian” practice of censoring foreign information: “The Great Firewall inhibits contact between Chinese citizens and the outside world. Information is stopped from flowing into China and the Chinese people are not allowed to get information out. Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube are blocked.”
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling Friday, Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, announced he “commends” the decision, one he believes “will keep our country safe.” His language echoes that of a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, who once told reporters the country’s national blockade of American websites was similarly necessary to “safeguard the public.”
It’s unclear whether they see irony in the scores of Americans now flocking to VPN software to bypass a potential national TikTok ban — a technique the State Department has long promoted abroad for those living under repressive regimes.
Nor does there seem to be any awareness of how effortlessly the national security argument deployed against TikTok could be turned against any major American internet company. If the U.S. believes TikTok is a clear and present danger to its citizens because it uses secret algorithms, cooperates with spy agencies, changes speech policies under political pressure, and conducts dragnet surveillance and data harvesting against its clueless users, what does that say about how the rest of the world should view Facebook, YouTube, or X?
To his credit, Gallagher is open about the extent to which the anti-TikTok movement is based less on principle than brinkmanship. The national ideals of open access to information and unbridled speech remain, to Gallagher, but subordinate to the principle of “reciprocity,” as he’s put it. “It’s worth remembering that our social media applications are not allowed in China,” he said in a 2024 New York Times interview. “There’s just a basic lack of reciprocity, and your Chinese citizens don’t have access to them. And yet we allow Chinese government officials to go all over YouTube, Facebook and X spreading lies about America.” The notion that foreign lies — China’s, or anyone else’s — should be countered with state censorship, rather than counter-speech, marks an ideological abandonment of the past 30 years of American internet statecraft.
“Prior to this ban, the U.S. had consistently and rightfully so condemned when other nations banned communications platforms as fundamentally anti-democratic,” said David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We now have lost much of our moral authority to advance democracy and the free flow of information around the world.”
Should TikTok actually become entirely unplugged from the United States, it may grow more difficult for the country to proselytize for an open internet. So too will it grow more difficult for the U.S. to warn of blocking apps or sites as something our backward adversaries, fearful of our American freedoms and open way of life, do out of desperation.
That undesirable online speech can simply be disappeared by state action was previously dismissed as anti-democratic folly: In a 2000 speech, Bill Clinton praised the new digital century in which “liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem,” comparing China’s “crack down on the internet” to “trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Futile though it may remain, the hammer at least no longer appears un-American.
