Why the House Fears TikTok: When You’ve Got Them by the EYE-Balls, Their Hearts and Minds Will Follow

The real reason behind the TikTok ban ...

In a divided Congress that can’t agree or get anything done, House of Representatives members found one thing to agree on: TikTok is bad.

So the House of Representatives today passed legislation under which TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance must either sell the video platform – or face a “defacto”
ban in America.

The House bill – with the clunky title Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act – passed in a landslide, by a vote of 352 to 65. The Senate gets it next.

But (in an intentionally oversimplified way) here’s how House members are looking at this.

TikTok is the prolific incubator of the viral “short-form” videos your kids or grandkids obsess over: Market-research handicappers say 80% of the users are aged 16 to 34.

For a big swath of those users, TikTok serves as their version of the newspaper, TV station or news site – meaning those videos actually shape their view of the world.

That’s not an assumption. Adults aged 18 to 29 are most likely to say they regularly get news on TikTok. And about a third of Americans in this age group (32%) say they regularly get news there, the PEW Research Center think-tank found.

And that, folks, is the unifying “hot button” for U.S. House members, who’ve positioned this as a national-security issue. They view TikTok as a kind of “fifth column” – an enemy plant that will:

Serve as a direct pipeline to Beijing for the personal data of 170 million Americans.

And serve as a deeply entrenched, popular and effective propaganda mill.

That latter worry is what spurred me to take the “Hearts and Minds” maxim made famous during the Vietnam War (“when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow”) and adapt it to the Social-Media Platform Era (copyright 2024 SPC LLC, all rights reserved … lol).

FBI Director Christopher Wray adopted a more-serious tone when speaking to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.

“Americans need to ask themselves whether they want to give the Chinese government the ability to control access to their data, whether they want to give the Chinese government the ability to control the information they get through the recommendation algorithm,” Wray said.

We’ll watch the bill when it makes its way to the Senate, where it faces a lot of resistance.

But Stock Picker’s Corner (SPC) is investment-focused … not politically focused. So we’ll now turn to the real reason for this report: We want to detail why it matters to you.

Panning back and viewing the “big picture,” the real issue isn’t whether this bill passes or not … it’s that we’re having this discussion at all. It underscores that the broader reach of what we’re referring to here as the “New Cold War” – a growing conflict where a growing number of battles will be fought digitally … virtually … and sweepingly.

New technologies – and new strategies – will be harnessed, including artificial intelligence (AI). A new lexicon is emerging. Global defense budgets are climbing – and will continue to climb in the decade to come.

And folks like you and me – regular American consumers and investors – will need to understand the New Cold War … to avoid the risks it poses … and to protect our money.

SPC has prepared a multi-part special report that accomplishes all of this – and more.

We’ll share it in the next few days.

Be sure to keep visiting.

See you then.

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