Matthew Yglesias: “My sense of the argument around TikTok is that the debate has been bedeviled by overstatements from TikTok’s critics, which have in turn been met by TikTok defenders setting an excessively high evidentiary bar.”
“Here’s the analogy I like to use. It’s 1975 and a state-owned Soviet firm wants to buy CBS.
What happens? Well, what happens is they wouldn’t be allowed to. The FCC would block it. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US or its predecessors would block it. If they didn’t have the power, congress would write a new law. And even if it wasn’t CBS, if it was a chain of local TV affiliate stations, the outcome would be the same. There would be no detailed factual analysis or demand for gold standard evidence that a Soviet-owned television statement might do Moscow’s bidding or that television is capable of influencing public opinion. We’d reject the idea out of hand. And rightly so, because the downsides would be very clear, and the upside minimal.”“That’s how the TikTok situation looks to me.”