This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.” —Sen. Mitt Romney on Friday
Mitt Romney took the stage at the McCain Institute on Friday, sitting down across from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and for an hour the two talked shop. The setting was strange enough: It would be unfathomable to see a Republican president’s secretary of state interviewed by a Democratic senator at a forum named for a Democratic presidential also-ran. Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo weren’t yukking it up with, say, Michael Bennet at the Hillary Clinton Institute during the Trump years.
That setup didn’t put much elevation in the eyebrows, but Romney’s comments about TikTok and Palestine sure did. Twenty minutes into their keynote, the men exchanged some perhaps all-too-candid thoughts about the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza and its rank unpopularity among young Americans, along with the rest of the world, a fact that the American political establishment has otherwise refused to publicly acknowledge.
“Why has the PR been so awful? … Typically the Israelis are good at PR!” Romney put it to Blinken, in a looping question that came out less like inquiry and more like confessional.
“You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion—the impact of images—dominates,” Blinken responded.
Romney was quick to co-sign that hypothesis: “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”
The conversation went on for 40 minutes more, but that exchange was the functional last word. Here was the Democratic secretary of state—the point person on Biden’s disastrous Israel policy, which has been at turns unwilling and unable to rein in far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as famine rages in Gaza and the Palestinian death toll nears 40,000—and one of the Senate’s most senior Republican members, both suggesting a theory for the recently passed TikTok “ban” that seemed ripped from the videos of conspiracy-curious teenage power users and lefty activist types: that the app is being banned because it is home to an insufficiently censored look at the atrocities in Palestine.
In reality, the “TikTok ban” is not even accurately referred to as such: The legislation that Congress passed requires only that Chinese parent company ByteDance divest its ownership stake in the app within nine months, or else the app will be kept out of American phones’ app stores. (The app will not disappear from phones that already had it before that deadline, but it could get buggier for users in the U.S., as hosting services would also be forbidden from working with it, and the app would be unable to be updated.)
TikTok scares members of Congress in part because national security experts warn that ByteDance’s close proximity to the Chinese government could result in the company’s turning over sensitive user data to an adversarial foreign government, which could in turn use the app to spread propaganda—though, as the New York Times has reported, Congress has produced largely speculative rather than evidence-based arguments on this point. Still, this was a live issue long before Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza and had everything to do with yearslong escalating tensions with China.
But it’s amazing that a sitting senator would imply that this—awareness of the brutality of a war being waged by an American ally—is a prime justification for keeping TikTok out of American hands. It’s even more remarkable that the senator issuing this call is Romney, the self-styled last man standing on behalf of democratic and constitutional principles even when it’s politically inconvenient in Trump’s GOP.
Blinken’s response was right, though, in some sense. Social media does distort the media environment and heighten emotions. But in this case, we’re not talking about rampant misinformation about COVID vaccines. We’re talking about a very real, troubling, deadly war! And the flip side of his contention is worth noting as well: Human Rights Watch found that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and TikTok’s closest rival, had been engaged in “systemic censorship of Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook.” A subsequent investigation by the Markup found the same.
Meanwhile, left-wing organizers—on issues related to Palestine and beyond—have found success on TikTok, as the platform is currently one of a few social media environments that are not actively suppressing news content. They have voiced concerns about the impact of a TikTok shutdown for months, without speculating as to the motivation. Romney’s statement is an accelerant, implying that the app is being shut down for that very reason. And TikTok itself is now suing the government over the ban, alleging abrogation of free speech, in a suit that will likely make note of Romney’s comments too.
Why did Romney say anything at all?
The simplest explanation, of course, is that TikTok users are responding dramatically to what they are seeing. They are able to witness incredible horrors up close: children crushed beneath rubble, starving to death, and piled in mass graves. That might rightfully make a person aghast and opposed to the war that is causing it. And a TikTok ban, however provisional, for whatever reasons, could possibly lessen the pressure on politicians like Romney, in that they will have to answer fewer questions about the horrors they tacitly support. So he seems to hope, at least!
But the TikTok fracas is also not so ideologically tidy. The legislation enjoys vast support from both parties. Among the most prominent opponents of it is Donald Trump, who came to that position by coincidence, no doubt, after securing support from an archconservative donor group backed by a major TikTok investor. Trump sports about as decorated a record of contempt for the free press and left-wing organizing as a person can find in American politics; his concern for the Palestinian plight is, shall we say, scant. And let’s not forget that his former adviser Kellyanne Conway has also been serving as a TikTok lobbyist.
So it’s hard to say that the TikTok quasi-ban is a grand anti-left and anti-Palestinian conspiracy. But it’s also worth noting that, according to one of the critical votes to enact it, there is some expectation that there could be a grand anti-left and anti-Palestinian downstream effect. Notable, too, is Romney’s other insinuation: that the problem of the waning support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza requires a policy solution of some kind.
