The recent hullabaloo over TikTok begs the question: How much should you trust the sale of TikTok to an American billionaire?
Headlines tell us to fear China’s evil intent, but what about the alternative? Like it or not, millions of young people are influenced by and depend upon TikTok for getting “the news.” Does American billionaire ownership guarantee them personal and national security? I think not! and what about bias?
Aren’t there already enough billionaire-owned spheres of influence vying to control public opinion in our country?
Steve Mnuchin, former Trump secretary of the treasury, heads one of the billionaire consortiums in the running to buy TikTok. On the way out from serving in the Trump administration Mnuchin pocketed a billion dollars from the killer Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman. Which, no doubt, greased the wheels a bit in his consortium’s bid.
But then again, what’s a billion dollars to a potential bidder like Elon Musk who is on the verge of getting a $44.9 billion Tesla shareholder-approved pay package? (Which is enough to reimburse Musk for buying Twitter!)
What Musk did to Twitter, what Murdock did to Fox, now that I think about it, what megadonor Harlan Crow is doing to the Supreme Court, will be repeated with TikTok if the ever-increasing political power of the billionaire class is not curtailed by reasonable, common-sense countermeasures.
In March of this year, in a CNBC interview about his bid to buy TikTok, Steve Mnuchin said: “It would be a combination of investors, so there would be no one investor that controlled (the company). The issue is all about the technology,” he claimed. “This needs to be controlled by U.S. businesses.”
That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But the issue is not, as he claims, “all about the technology.”
Who will be the investors is the critical issue here! and what is the driving incentive for investor involvement?
If, like most other Wall Street reasons to invest, the goal is primarily to exploit profit potential, how does that differ from our many other social media behemoths shamelessly pursuing the almighty dollar at their users’ expense?
An insufficiently regulated Facebook is used by Russia to effectively interfere in our elections. A poorly monitored Instagram is warping our youth. YouTube is too often allowed to promote debunked and dangerous conspiracy theories. And billionaires want us to concentrate on China.
In an interview with Joy Reid recently, Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, said “This is really a billionaires’ ball that they are having over TikTok. … Do you (really) trust American billionaires to guard your privacy and not manipulate you?”
“They,” he warned, “are owning more and more of our giant media conglomerates, our technology, and having more and more power in our system. So … the real issue here is power — like it is in so many other domains of our life.”
I say, the fear-China-pitch is a pink herring — a yarn that has just enough fear of “the other” in it to mask the real aim of would-be Wall Street marauders — another money grab in the guise of patriotism.
Surely there is a better option … or is such wishful thinking dead-on-arrival in our unbridled version of capitalism?