The TikTok Sale Was Always About Control

Martin Meissner / AP

By Thomas Neuburger

Advertising is not an art form, it’s a medium for information. —David Ogilvy, the “father of advertising,” in Ogilvy on Advertisement

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. —Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.  —Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations,” in his book Propaganda

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The public reason for our government’s forced sale of the social media platform TikTok was concern over Chinese control. Here’s the New York Times with the official story*.

Concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data through the short-form video app TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, have prompted the U.S. government to pass legislation banning the social media platform unless it is sold to a government-approved buyer. […] Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations. They are also worried that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to fuel misinformation, a concern that has escalated in the United States during the Israel-Hamas war and the presidential election. Critics say that TikTok has fueled the spread of antisemitism.

* “Official story” in this case means a) the government’s approved explanation, and b) the Times’ endorsement of it as “what you should believe.”

Note the word phrase “fuel misinformation” in the quote above. We’ll come back to it.

The Other Official Story

That’s the official story. But there’s another official story. I call this one “official” as well because government officials at the heart of it say this is true.

The other official story? Listen below. I’ve cued the video to start at 19:32, where TikTok is discussed. (If the video starts at the wrong place, just advance it to 19:30.)

For those who prefer to read rather than listen, here’s the relevant part of the conversation from the State Department transcript (lightly edited):

SENATOR ROMNEY: Why has the PR been so awful? … Why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel. It’s like, why are they not screaming about Hamas? Accept the ceasefire and bring home the hostages. Instead, it’s all the other way around. … Typically the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here? How have they and we been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?

Keep Romney’s comment about the Israelis being “typically good at PR” in mind.

Blinken starts by acknowledging people's response to the suffering in Gaza. Then he says this:

SECRETARY BLINKEN: I think in my time in Washington, which is a little bit over 30 years, the single biggest change has been in the information environment.

Keep that phrase “information environment” in mind as well.

Blinken continues:

And when I started out in the early 1990s, everyone did the same thing. You woke up in the morning, you opened the door of your apartment or your house, you picked up a hard copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. And then if you had a television in your office, you turned it on at 6:30 or 7 o’clock and watched the national network news. Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t – we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.

Blinken’s “context, history, facts” are not everyone’s. Those are, in fact, his opinions, his “narrative.” So the last sentence boils down to this:

You have a social media ecosystem environment [that] has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.

Romney understands the statement in exactly this way:

SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is 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. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.

This the Other Official Story of the TikTok forced sale: too many “mentions of Palestine,” which the president will fix by taking “action in that regard.”

So which is the actual reason, the one in the New York Times, or the one offered by Biden’s Secretary of State and a senior senator speaking among friends?

If the latter, what does that make the New York Times story?

‘Disinformation’ and Information War

We’re already long, so I’ll keep this as brief as I can and return to it later.

After much overuse, “disinformation” is now a degraded word, like “terrorist” or “fake news.” It used to mean “false information intended to deceive.” That is, calling something “disinformation” meant the statement was false and manipulative.

But the term has so often itself been use falsely to manipulate, that it’s lost all real meaning and functions just to attack, as a way to manipulate response.

In other words, using the term disinformation can be disinformation, and often it is. (Is there nothing that can’t be corrupted? Answer: No. Not a thing.)

The larger message is this: There’s an information war in the nation as a whole. For the military, disinformation is an aspect of that warfare. NATO defines information war as “an operation conducted in order to gain an information advantage over the opponent.”

It consists in controlling one’s own information space, protecting access to one’s own information, while acquiring and using the opponent’s information, destroying their information systems and disrupting the information flow.

About information warfare over the Internet, NATO says:

The Internet enhances and expands the possibilities of … information disruption, and makes it easy to reach both the citizens of a given country and the international community. … Social networking sites are also a valuable source of information on the target groups to which (dis)information activities are to be addressed. Information warfare over the Internet uses, among others: • Troll factories – entities employing people who post comments on the Internet in line with the goal of the ordering party, using fake profiles in social media. • Bots – programs sending out messages automatically, e.g. in response to the appearance of a keyword. • Fake news – messages intended to mislead media users.

The context here is information attacks against a foreign adversary, and the example is Russia. But that’s not the only context for “information war.”

Edward Bernays, Information War and Your Friendly Neighborhood TV Commercial

To take a mundane example, almost all of the television commercials you watch are information warfare, attempts to deceive and mislead. It’s real disinformation to say that commercials exist to give information, as David Ogilvy once wrote (see quote above).

Your common sense, your life’s experience and your eyes tell you the opposite. Edward Bernays, the most important man you’ve probably never heard of, wrote this in his book Propaganda:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Bernays is considered the father of modern public relations. He wrote Propaganda in 1928 and The Engineering of Consent in 1945. He sold tobacco for Liggett and Myers and the American Tobacco Company, and drummed up the “communist menace” for United Fruit, owners of Chiquita Banana, to support regime change in Guatemala.

His work for United Fruit earned him $1.27 million per year in today’s dollars.

"Girl in Red" advertisement for Lucky Strike; shot by Nickolas Muray, a photographer enlisted by Bernays to help popularize feminine thinness and cigarette smoking. Source: Wikipedia

In Bernays’ world, advertising and PR exists to “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and “pull the wires which control the public mind” (Propaganda).

Information War and the American Public

With all this in mind, you have to ask yourself:

Is the Establishment — people in halls of power, on media thrones, in the high mahogany suites that create our ads — running an “information war” on the public at large? The domestic public at large? Not just today, but generally? And always?

For many, the answer has long been “Yes, obviously.” But even they can be misled, can be brought to doubt in any specific instance, by the push of their peers and the absence of “eyeball witnesses,” smoking gun proof.

Or as Lily Tomlin has said in various ways, “No matter how cynical you become, you can’t keep up.”

You can keep up today. For those who doubted the reason for TikTok’s forced sale, here’s smoking gun proof.