No, TikTok Is Not ‘Programmable Fentanyl.’ Stop It

What do Fentanyl and TikTok have in common? Well, the real answer is absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. But, if you want to push a nonsense moral panic, apparently, you compare the two.

While it’s unclear exactly where Congress currently stands on the push to ban TikTok in the US (or, at the very least, force ByteDance to divest its ownership stake in the company), it appears that some are still pushing for it. Strongly opinionated Venture Capitalist Vinod Khosla took to the pages of the Financial Times (while insisting he has no financial dog in this fight), to claim that the US must ban TikTok because it’s “programmable fentanyl.”

Few appreciate that TikTok is not available in China. Instead, Chinese consumers use Douyin, the sister app that features educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to 40 minutes per day of total usage. Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl — another chief export of China’s — for ours. Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.

First of all, it’s only true that “few appreciate” that point if you haven’t been paying any attention at all. The point that inside China people use Douyin rather than TikTok is mentioned in basically every discussion of the app. There are tons of articles in the media about it. It’s been mentioned in congressional hearings. So, if people don’t know about it, that means they haven’t been paying attention and their opinion is already not well informed.

But, more importantly, it’s a meaningless point. There are lots of apps that aren’t available in China because China is an authoritarian country that deliberately censors much of the internet that its citizens can access. While there are all sorts of accusations (including above) that the Chinese Communist Party puts its fingers on the moderation scales of TikTok, one indication that TikTok is a lot more free and open than Douyin is the very fact that China doesn’t allow TikTok inside the country.

I’d already pointed out if China is using TikTok to influence American opinions, it’s doing a terrible job of it, as American opinions towards China are at record lows.

And, just as an experiment, I just went on TikTok and searched for “uyghur.” I found tons of videos about China’s attempted genocide of the Uyghur people, many with hundreds of thousands of views. Even the autocomplete search suggestion shows “uyghur genocide” as the second option after I type Uyghur. I can also find lots of videos about Tiananmen Square. If China is really trying to suppress speech on TikTok, it’s not doing a great job.

But, even more to the point, this whole idea is based on the false belief that people are simply sheep that are easily brainwashed by an algorithm and the content they see. And… that’s not true. Human beings are not puppets. Yes, content can have some level of influence on the margins, but there’s little to no evidence supporting the idea that the internet, as a whole, is a vast brainwashing machine.

Of course, the internet and tech industries have a strong incentive to tell you that the internet is uniquely powerful in brainwashing you, because that makes it seem like it’s super worthwhile to buy ads or use those tools yourself to brainwash others. But, most of that is nonsense.

In addition, the claim of “programmable fentanyl” is even dumber. It’s yet another attempt to pretend that speech is somehow the equivalent of something you actually put into your body. As we’ve discussed before, speech online is not lead paint or cigarettes or chocolate or fentanyl.

It’s speech.

And sometimes there’s speech we disagree with. And sometimes that speech we disagree with is persuasive. But in a free society, we deal with that. We respond to it. We explain why it’s wrong and we seek to persuade in the other direction.

We do not take the Chinese approach and shut down the speech. But that is exactly what people pushing a TikTok ban are doing. They’re so convinced (or they so want to convince us) of the power of online speech that they are giving way more power to speech than it actually has.

They’re treating it as if it’s some sort of mind-altering drug, rather than recognizing that it’s just another form of communication. And, in doing so, they’re actually giving more power to the Chinese government by suggesting that its speech is so powerful that it must be banned.

A free society has dealt with bad and misleading speech in the past. It is possible. Speech is not all powerful. It is not “brainwashing,” it is not like a drug. Sometimes it’s persuasive when we’d prefer it not be, but that doesn’t mean we need to ban it. Just counter it.