In the latest security crackdown, UK ministers and officials have been ordered to remove TikTok from their mobiles lest it be used to hand sensitive private data to the Chinese government. And quite right too. We really don’t want the People’s Republic knowing whether government figures are up to speed on the steps to the Wednesday dance.
Mind you, such admirable alertness to the threat from China may be misdirected as long as ex-ministers are guilelessly prepared to share their entire WhatsApp message history with hostile journalists. Why worry about TikTok when you’ve still got HanCock and OakShok?
On the downside, the political class may now head into meetings unaware of the Lizzo song, not having seen Chris Rock’s takedown of Will Smith and blithely ignorant of how Liverpool fans are coping with their season. Meanwhile, Chinese intelligence could gain a strategic advantage in awareness of dance crazes, silly pet videos, promos for OnlyFans pages and Billie Eilish’s facial contortions. Our leaders may not exactly be left walking naked into the conference chamber, but they may not know the latest moves.
Clearly the concern is not only that TikTok data may leak to an increasingly unfriendly power, but that it may offer a backdoor into more damaging surveillance. There is to be no such prohibition on personal mobiles because we all know that ministers are never stupid enough to send anything sensitive on those. But government departments still intend to use TikTok as part of their own social media strategy. The Chinese will still be able to see Rishi Sunak working hard in his shirtsleeves and palling around with Emmanuel Macron.
Even if the security fears are overstated, separating key political personnel from the addictive, intellectually enfeebling medium must be a good thing. There is a growing body of work on the adverse impact of the 60-second culture. Concentration disorders are increasingly common among the young, and we’ve already seen the damage that can be done by political leaders with similar attention issues. Who knows how Brexit might have worked out if Leavers had bothered to develop a policy prospectus longer than a TikTok video? Boris Johnson might not have been felled by partygate if the lockdown rules hadn’t been too long to fit in a 30-second clip.
We’ve already seen complex issues reduced to three-word slogans. If banning TikTok helps ministerial focus to the extent that a policy can stretch to a couple of sentences, the country will be moving in the right direction. Somewhere out there is a world where nuanced matters are not chunked up into confected, 45-second rants designed solely to promote contrarian presenters.
Ministers are not advising private citizens to follow suit but the BBC has ordered the app off its phones, presumably in case Gary Lineker has any views he wants to share. Other firms are bound to do the same, if only to stop staff whiling away working hours on mindless scrolling.
As one such mindless scroller, I have mixed views about the looming loss of TikTok. On the one hand, it is a monumental waste of time (to say nothing of battery life). On the other hand, it stopped me playing Sniper and kept me up to speed on any number of Gen Z and Gen Y crazes, all of which would have passed me by until they were so old hat that their creators were appearing on Strictly Come Dancing.
I guess I’ll just start mindlessly scrolling through something else, though TikTok definitely gave me a touch more cred with the spawn, while Instagram just seems to offer animal clips. Now I’ll have to read Teen Vogue just to stay relevant. I had a look at it yesterday and this is going to be a steep learning curve. TikTok was where deeply unhip people like me got their fix of a younger zeitgeist without having to wait two weeks until someone at Mail Online discovered the “new viral trend”.
On balance, I’d probably rather politicians found other outlets for amusement. Then again, after the past few years, maybe it would be better if they just spent more time learning the latest dance.
Follow Robert on Twitter @robertshrimsley and email him at robert.shrimsley@ft.com
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