Meanwhile, relativism—the view that truth and falsehood, right and wrong are not universal but products of differing conventions—is a prominent framework many use to understand the world. If we peer through this lens, we can easily slip into subjectivism, believing that judgments about truth and morality are simply expressions of our own feelings.

Without a recognition that some things are true and some false, some actions right and others wrong, young people, in particular, are at risk of conforming their opinions to the opinions of those they look up to and follow, whether internet influencers, celebrities or friends. This is not a new problem. Famed British writer, scholar and philosopher C.S. Lewis warns of the danger in his 1943 work “The Abolition of Man”: Without a framework through which to evaluate claims about the world, the young become prey for propagandists.

Emotions and Reality

In “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis notes that in World War II-era Europe, some educators were concerned that sentimental individuals were being easily swayed by emotional propaganda. This concern resulted in pedagogical efforts to “fortify the minds of young people against emotions.” But Lewis saw the true problem as the opposite: In his view, many young people were led astray by their lack of sentiment, along with their acceptance of the prevailing cultural message that emotions are just subjective feelings standing in opposition to rational intellect.

Contrary to that message, Lewis argues that emotions are not divorced from objective reality; rather, they are appropriate (or not) to the extent that they conform to reality. Lewis examines this idea through the lens of an elementary school grammar textbook that he’d been sent for review. The book recounted a well-known story from Coleridge about a tourist who called a certain waterfall “sublime.” The textbook’s authors claimed that the tourist was merely commenting on how he felt about the waterfall, but Lewis argues that the tourist was making a statement that conformed to reality. Some waterfalls really are sublime; therefore, the tourist’s emotions were appropriate or, as Lewis puts it, “ordinate to reality.”

Lewis points to patriotism as another example, one particularly resonant in wartime: A person’s love for his or her country and willingness to die for it also conforms to reality, because humans’ natural inclination is to feel a sense of attachment or connection to where they were born and raised. The sentiment is not only subjective but also reasonable.

Today the emotional responses of young people are either dismissed as unscientific, subjective feelings divorced from reality or celebrated as noteworthy products of their lived experience and therefore above critique. In both scenarios, no one considers whether the emotional dispositions of the young are rooted in a set of objective values. Without being rooted in such a framework, young people are more likely to fall prey to the gurus: the influencers who set out to shape their worldview. When the young lack first principles—a core set of values according to which they operate—what they value will be determined by the propagandists, whom Lewis calls “conditioners.”

Going back to the patriotism example, if people value their heritage and truly love their country, their homeland, then they take seriously the necessity to both defend it and improve it. They cannot be swayed by influencers who say they ought to hate it and everything about it, nor by those who decry any criticism as treasonous.

Lewis points to one of his own flaws to provide another example. He admits to not “enjoying the society of small children,” but he recognizes that this is a personal failing, not a properly ordered sentiment. Therefore, he could not be convinced by a guru that disliking the company of children is an acceptable human reaction simply because it’s his lived experience.

Teaching the Tao 

To avoid allowing the young to become prey for propagandists, Lewis argues for inculcating in them a doctrine of objective moral values—first principles—which he calls the Tao or the Way. He claims that most worldviews throughout history, including the Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and Eastern traditions, teach this doctrine of objective value: “[t]he belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false.” Attitudes or emotional responses, according to Lewis, are alogical, but they can either conform to reason or not. Objective values are what guide us as we determine whether our emotional response to some claim an internet guru has made is appropriate or inappropriate.

Essentially, Lewis advocates for educating the young using a framework that acknowledges the existence of truth and falsehood, recognizing that emotional responses can, and ought to, conform to reality. When young people follow the Tao, Lewis explains, their agreements or disagreements are responses to the objective order; thus, emotional states can be in harmony with reason or out of harmony with it.

According to Lewis, the task of those charged with educating the young is not to eliminate their emotions—which are a core element of being human—but rather to encourage sentiments that conform to objective values. In other words, their task is to train emotions.

To achieve this, Lewis advocates for traditional education, which is (as the phrase implies) education rooted in a tradition. He assumes—or wishes—that students and teachers are operating within a shared set of values, but any tradition will do so long as it recognizes objective value and aims to correspond with reality. The goal of education then becomes not merely shaping the young’s emotional responses but transmitting human heritage.

Being Human

Traditional educators, according to Lewis, initiate “the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity,” which encompasses teacher and students alike. Educators are, as Lewis puts it, “old birds teaching young birds to fly.” They teach using human exemplars and show how our nature—our rationality, our emotions and our appetites—dictates how we process and respond to inputs.

A liberal arts education, for example, achieves Lewis’ aim through the texts students read. The character Antigone, in Sophocles’ tragedy of the same name, faces capital punishment for defying the king to give her brother a proper burial. She does what is morally right by her brother despite the risk to her own life. Euripides’ Medea, on the other hand, commits a morally reprehensible act by murdering her children in an act of revenge against her husband. Both texts provide the opportunity to discuss and nurture appropriate emotional responses to moral questions.

When young people are armed with a doctrine of objective value, they can confront the gurus of this age properly prepared to either agree or disagree with their claims rather than blindly accept whatever they are selling. And these young people will understand that emotional responses don’t need to be completely stripped away—nor should they haphazardly drive how people react to content they encounter on the internet. Young people trained in this way will be prepared to objectively filter value-based claims and respond to them appropriately.

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The ban is to come into force immediately, the Ministry of Public Sector Transformation and the Civil Service wrote on Twitter on Friday.

“In order to guarantee the cybersecurity of our administrations and civil servants, the government has decided to ban recreational applications such as TikTok on the professional phones of civil servants,” Stanislas Guerini said on Friday.

He added that for several weeks, several of France’s European and international partners have adopted measures to restrict or ban the downloading and installation of or the use of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok by their administrations.

Guerini said recreational applications do not have sufficient levels of cybersecurity and data protection in order to be deployed on administrations’ equipment, adding that exemptions can be given for professional reasons, such as institutional communication of an administration.

Widening ban

A string of governments and institutions have banned TikTok in recent weeks, including the White House, the UK parliament, the Dutch and Belgian administrations, the New Zealand parliament, and the governments of Canada, India, Pakistan, Taiwan and Jordan.

Concerns regarding alleged security risks posed by TikTok have most prominently been raised by US lawmakers and national security officials who say that user data gathered by the app could be accessed by the Chinese government.

Calls to ban TikTok from government devices gained momentum after FBI Director Christopher Wray said in November it poses national security risks.

Late last month, the European Union’s two biggest policy-making institutions – the Commission and the Council – banned TikTok from staff phones for cybersecurity reasons.

Concerns have mounted globally about the potential for the Chinese government to access users’ location and contact data through ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company.

The company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, pushed back on assertions that TikTok or ByteDance are tools of the Chinese government during a questioning by US lawmakers on Thursday. The company has been reiterating that 60 percent of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors.

A law China implemented in 2017 requires companies to give the government any personal data relevant to the country’s national security. There’s no evidence that TikTok has turned over such data, but fears abound due to the vast amount of user data it collects.

Beijing has accused Washington of spreading disinformation and suppressing TikTok.

Earlier this month, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the US has yet to present evidence that TikTok threatens its national security and was using the excuse of data security to abuse its power to suppress foreign companies.

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The Japan office of ByteDance Ltd. is believed to have spread TikTok videos handpicked by the company through the influencers to raise recognition levels of the app in a strategy that could be considered stealth marketing. It is believed viewers could have mistaken those videos as ordinary posts by general social media users.

Photo taken in December 2021 shows an advertisement in Tokyo for the 
video-sharing app TikTok. (Kyodo)

The company said the practice, which had been in place until last December, of paying influencers to upload specific videos was not aimed at increasing the number of the app’s downloads and therefore it thought it was not obliged to clarify that the videos were intended for public relations activities.

The Japan office declined to disclose the amount and the period of payments, citing contracts with the social media influencers.

The operator said in a statement the measure it took could mislead app users and other people concerned and that it will take necessary measures to prevent a similar incident from happening again.

According to U.S. research firm Sensor Tower Inc., worldwide downloads of the TikTok app, which lets users upload short videos set to music and is especially popular among young people, reached 3 billion by July 2021.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump banned major China-based mobile apps including TikTok in August 2020 on national security grounds, saying the apps automatically capture vast amounts of information from users.

In June 2021, President Joe Biden reversed executive orders issued by his predecessor, though he did seek an assessment of the risk associated with foreign adversary-connected software applications.

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District Judge Carl Nichols, who has promised to rule on a TikTok request to block the president’s order before it takes effect at 11:59 pm Sunday (0359 GMT Monday), heard arguments on the free-speech and national security implications of the Trump ban on the Chinese-owned app.

TikTok lawyer John Hall said a ban would be “punitive” and close off a public forum used by tens of millions of Americans.

In a written brief ahead of the hearing, TikTok lawyers said the ban was “arbitrary and capricious” and “would undermine data security” by blocking updates and fixes to the app used by some 100 million Americans.

The company also said the ban was unnecessary because negotiations were already underway to restructure the ownership of TiKTok to address national security issues raised by the administration.

TikTok said the ban is not simply a business restriction but would “prohibit core constitutionally protected speech: videos composed by millions of Americans containing a vast array of individual expression, ranging from art to political speech.”

Government lawyers argued the president has a right to take national security actions, and said the ban was needed because of TikTok’s links to the Chinese government through its parent firm ByteDance.

A government brief called ByteDance “a mouthpiece” for the Chinese Communist Party and “committed to promoting the CCP’s agenda and messaging.”

“The president determined that (China’s) ability to control this data presented an unacceptable threat to the United States’ national security and foreign policy,” the government argued in its filing.

TikTok filed the case in response to Trump order, saying even a temporary ban would “inflict devastating and irreparable harm” on the service.

Earlier this month, Trump cited national security concerns and issued orders to ban both TikTok and the popular Chinese app WeChat, which has been put on hold in a separate court case in California.

But the TikTok order stops short of a full ban until November 12, giving parent firm ByteDance time to conclude a deal to transfer ownership of the app.

A tentative deal unveiled last weekend would make Silicon Valley giant Oracle the technology partner for TikTok and a stakeholder in a new entity to be known as TikTok Global.

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An announcement of a deal had been expected as soon as Tuesday, CNBC previously reported, but that day came and went with no news of a transaction. On Friday, Chinese officials introduced new restrictions on technology exports that could require Chinese approval for TikTok to sell its algorithm, which is part of the core value of the app.

The new rules out of China have prompted Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, to reconsider his options, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The need for approval from officials in the U.S. and China could push the deal past the November U.S. presidential election, a source familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

ByteDance and the companies seeking to buy TikTok’s U.S. business are considering four options to navigate the new restrictions from China, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

• The first option is to sell TikTok without the algorithm, potentially expediting the sale but requiring the new owner to inject an alternative into the app.
• The second option is to negotiate an up to a year-long transition period with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), though its unclear if China’s rules would allow this in the required time frame.
• The third option is to seek approval from China to sell the algorithm to the chosen U.S. company.
• The fourth option is for the new buyer to license TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance. However, it’s unclear if U.S. authorities would be content with any continuing relationship between TikTok and the China-based ByteDance after the sale.

If deal talks extend into November or later, the app could face an effective ban in the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s executive orders. Trump initially signed an order that would bar U.S. businesses from transacting with ByteDance as of Sept. 20, and later signed an order forcing ByteDance to sell or spin off its U.S. TikTok business by Nov. 12.

A potential change in administrations after Election Day could give TikTok another chance to negotiate with the U.S. government. TikTok has sued the Trump administration over the ban, claiming it denied the company due process.

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