Tiktok as a threat to democracy? Conceptions of cognitive security in discourse on the TikTok ban

(Submission for special issue on Interference and information manipulation in elections and governance) Canada, the US, and other countries are moving to ban TikTok, citing concerns about Chinese ownership of the platform and privacy threats related to access to personal information (Karadeglija 2024, Shepardson 2024). Underlying these concerns is the idea that personal information might be leveraged by the Chinese government to influence the opinions, attitudes, and even behaviours of TikTok users in ways that undermine democracy (e.g., by promulgating messaging that suppress voting behaviour in certain demographics – [Murray, Peter. 2022. TikTok 2022 Election Interference: Evidence of TikTok Suppression of Nonpartisan Voter Turnout Videos. Accelerate Change]). A variety of labels is currently used to describe this kind of influence and the sorts of protections that might be put in place to prevent it, including ‘cognitive security’ and ‘epistemic security’. These labels encompass a vague, multifaceted, and loosely defined cluster of manipulative threats, and invite incomplete or even inappropriate conceptions of security from malign influence that in turn motivate ill-conceived or incomplete policy responses. This paper identifies the perceived threats articulated as motivations for the TikTok ban and analyses them using Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) framework. We show that while TikTok is problematised in terms of foreign ownership, data collection, and cognitive effects, these representations are often underdeveloped, competing, and at times contradictory. As a result, they obscure rather than clarify the specific mechanisms of influence at stake, hampering the development of coherent and effective policy responses.