Why Would America Ever Want to Emulate China’s Internet Laws?

Over the past week, I’ve spent several hours scrolling through Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok also owned by ByteDance. Both apps are governed by a central algorithm that recommends videos to users based on their interests and behavior. Here is what I saw one morning in the order it was fed to me: a video of an influencer wearing glittery thigh-high stockings posing for a photo shoot, a livestream broadcast of a girl who appeared to be using editing software that made her breasts look comically enormous, a clip from a samurai-themed video game, a day in the life vlog of a single woman living in Tokyo, and a video of a boxing match between two attractive women wearing sports bras.

The content I watched on Douyin was often maximized for shock value, but it was also frequently funny or insightful. In other words, it largely mirrored what can be found on the American version of TikTok, although notably, I didn’t see political videos or criticism of the Chinese government. What was readily apparent is that Douyin is not the sanitized utopia that some commentators have described. “In China, TikTok has a comparable product that promotes educational videos on math & science to kids. In America, they’re promoting videos on eating Tide Pods,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz wrote on X in March. “China’s version of TikTok celebrates academic achievements, athletic achievements, it’s all science projects,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast in 2022. The venture capitalist Vinod Khosla called TikTok “programmable fentanyl,” while Douyin, he said, amounted to “spinach for Chinese kids.”

These comparisons are grossly exaggerated, and the truth is that kids in China regularly view content on Douyin that may be dangerous or harmful, just as kids around the world do on TikTok and every other large internet platform. But there’s something more perplexing—and, frankly, alarming—about this line of thinking, and the extent to which people have begun to imply that Americans can learn lessons from how the internet is regulated in China, where an oppressive regime regularly blocks foreign-owned apps and censors what information citizens can access on the internet.

“China is much more thoughtful and protective of its young people” when it comes to social media, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said at an event earlier this year. “The fact that China has been far more effective in protecting its children from the excesses of technology should make western legislators think,” the British journalist Camilla Cavendish wrote in the Financial Times around the same time, adding, “We are hardly going to win the battle with China over artificial intelligence, or anything else, if we raise a generation of zombies.”

What rarely gets mentioned in these discussions, however, is the fact that the Chinese government has built the most comprehensive digital surveillance system in the world, which it primarily uses not to protect children, but to squash any form of dissent that may threaten the power of the Chinese Communist Party. “Everybody exists in a censored environment, and so what gets censored for kids is just one step on top of what gets censored for adults,” Jeremy Daum, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and the founder of the site China Law Translate, told me.

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It should set off warning bells for Americans that many states have explored legislation limiting internet access for minors in ways that mirror what China has done. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to block a controversial law in Texas that would require pornography sites to verify a user’s age with a government-issued ID or other means before they access sexually explicit content. At least half a dozen states have passed similar age-verification laws recently. Related bills—governing not just pornography, but also basic access to social media—are pending in some 30 different states and Puerto Rico, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Although creating obstacles to prevent children from stumbling upon sexual material or signing up for TikTok without their parents’ consent may seem justifiable, the courts have held for decades that forcing adults to verify their age puts an undue burden on the right to access constitutionally protected speech online. Before, we might have expected the Supreme Court to recognize the First Amendment issues at hand and “affirm its previous position that the speech rights of adults outweigh the potential harms to minors,” the journalist Casey Newton recently wrote. “But it’s not clear that we can do so any longer.”

China, however, doesn’t have free-speech concerns, and has spent the past 20 years building and iterating on an elaborate system for confirming the name and age of every internet user, slowly chipping away at the ability to remain anonymous online. The real-name-registration system in the country requires companies to verify the identity of each person who signs up to use a social-media platform or discussion forum. People also need to show a form of identification to purchase a new SIM card, which allows the Chinese government to try to keep track of who is connected to every phone number. Unlike in the U.S., you can’t just walk into a Walgreens in China and pick up an anonymous burner phone. “There is a structural way to verify age that has been embedded in the system for a long time,” Kendra Schaefer, a partner at the research firm Trivium China, told me. “That technical foundation doesn’t exist here.”

The urge to figure out how to protect young people online is, of course, understandable. Many experts worry that children are experiencing profoundly negative side effects from social media, and much of what China has done in this area is part of a sincere attempt to address the same concerns shared by parents everywhere. In this light, it’s tempting to argue that America could also reasonably trade everyone’s digital privacy in exchange for keeping kids safe. But we can look at what has happened in China and see the obvious problem with that logic: It would trap the U.S. in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

Four years ago, Beijing started cracking down on video-game companies, and it now prohibits kids from gaming for more than just three hours most weeks—one hour each on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But roughly a year after the rules were put in place, nearly a third of youth gamers in China readily admitted that they were still playing for more than three hours each week, including outside the approved time slots, according to a survey by the market-research firm Niko Partners. The findings reflect what any parent already knows to be true: Teenagers figure out how to break the rules.

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One work-around they relied on is buying SIM cards on the illegal black market that were already linked to the identity of an adult, or they simply got their parents or older siblings to sign in for them. These loopholes prompted major game publishers like Tencent to build stringent facial-recognition systems that could be used to root out underage users. In 2022, Tencent announced that people 55 and older would need to scan their face before playing popular mobile games at night to ensure that their grandchildren weren’t using their phones. Why would the U.S. want to go down a path that has resulted in the need for grandmas to pass a facial-recognition test before they can play Candy Crush?

But critics of TikTok are probably right in saying that educational content is more popular on the Chinese version of the app, though not necessarily because of anything ByteDance has done. Rui Ma, the founder of the technology-investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, told me that Western commentators often fail to appreciate how intense the culture around academic achievement is in China and the ways that is reflected on social media. Kids who are put under enormous pressure to get good grades, in other words, might be more interested in videos related to studying than their American peers.

“The entire system is already set up to support studying over play, and yet, it is still a very difficult problem for parents to get their kids to stop playing video games and wasting time on the phone,” Ma said. On that count, at least, China and the U.S. see eye to eye.