Do You Need Help Decoding What’s Going on with TikTok?
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Last Wednesday, the House voted with overwhelming bipartisan support to force TikTok to sell itself to a US government-approved buyer within six months, or face being blocked from app stores and web hosting companies. Wait. What? How did we get here again? Didn’t Trump briefly try to ban it in 2020?
Concerns about TikTok have been growing in a complex geopolitical landscape for years. The fear is that the video-sharing platform, which has over 170 million users in the US, is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which decides what Americans can and cannot see — a fear that’s been stirred up again by the Israeli-Hamas war. There’s been lots of grumbling that pro-Palestinian and antisemitic content seems to be more prevalent on the app, but it’s hard to tease out whether this links to the conspiracy theory that the Chinese are trying to sow discontent (or misinformation), or because younger kids — the majority of its users — tend to lean pro-Palestinian.
ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company, would say that the CCP doesn’t have access or control. But I would say that it is both impossible to know for sure — and more than slightly unbelievable that the Chinese government, which is legally allowed to demand information from Chinese companies for intelligence-gathering operations, doesn’t have a window into what’s going on.
It Always Comes Back to Data Privacy
As with so many things these days, it all comes down to data privacy, a topic that I’ve been exploring a lot in the newsletter in the run-up to Season Two of the Technically Optimistic podcast. (You can listen to the trailer and subscribe here.)
Remember that executive order we talked about a few weeks ago that seeks to prevent Americans’ data from being sold to “countries of concern”? This definitely plays to that national security fear, and in this case, the data doesn’t even need to be sold by a broker. What is TikTok but a highly engaging data-collection machine that we willingly feed? Its proprietary algorithm is constantly showing content to people, seeing their reactions and using it to feed models to accurately predict what they want to see next. (In fact, that algorithm was the prize that China was preparing to protect when the US government proposed a forced sale of the company in 2020 when they changed their export rules to include similar technology.)
TikTok not only knows what we want to see, it knows a lot about who — and where — we are. According to an investigation by the New York Times, TikTok employees shared users’ personal information through the internal messaging and collaboration platform Lark, including addresses, driver’s licenses, device and user IDs, and more — information available to ByteDance workers in China and beyond. And in 2022, ByteDance surveilled the accounts of two journalists who were investigating TikTok in an attempt to find out which employees were leaking information to them. On this season of the podcast, we look at the scary amount of information that American companies are gathering on us. But this is going straight to a country with whom we have an extremely fraught relationship.
India banned TikTok and 59 other Chinese-owned apps in 2020. Other countries and governments forbid its use on government devices. In the US, government employees in 30 states aren’t allowed to have it on their official devices, and colleges have been blocking it from their wifi. (The students just switch to cellular data.) A Montana ban passed last spring, but TikTok sued, pleading the first amendment. A federal judge then stepped in to stop the ban, which was scheduled to take place on January 1.
The question is, can you ban one social media company and not the others? Don’t they all collect and sell our private information? Or is this about banning the most profitable one created in a “country of concern”?
The Pros and Cons of Forcing a Sale
Maybe, but let's zoom out for a second. The Chinese government has banned YouTube, Facebook and Twitter inside the country. Clearly they are worried about a “threat model” that includes the US government (and American culture) influencing their citizens through social media. Why shouldn’t we think through the exact same threat model?
You can certainly argue first amendment issues. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have said that banning TikTok here could set a dangerous precedent, both stifling speech here and establishing a benchmark case for authoritarian governments in other countries seeking to curb online speech.
But I’ll note that they’re already meddling in our legislative process! Last week, TikTok sent push notifications to its users with the contact information for their representatives so they could lobby on behalf of TikTok. Let's say that again: They got TikTok users to start lobbying on their behalf. In the past five years, Bytedance is reported to have spent $21M in federal lobbying.
So will this forced-sale bill pass? The President has signaled that he will sign it — a super-complicated move given that his campaign started posting videos during the Superbowl in an attempt to attract the young voters that this potential ban would alienate. But the path through the Senate seems complicated, as some senators have indicated that the best way to legislate TikTok is to set data privacy rules for all tech companies. If it does pass, we can be sure that TikTok will take it to the courts. And who knows what would happen under a new administration…
A sale would be fraught: If an American tech company buys TikTok, the antitrust regulators who have been trying to prevent the giants from getting more powerful will have their hands full. (Anyone remember the attempted 2020 takeover by Oracle and Walmart? Or Microsoft? Those deals fizzled fast.) The Chinese government could block the sale. And if a group of private investors manage to take control, what will they really be getting for that rumored $50B? Would that include “the algorithm”? You could easily see a world in which that wouldn’t go over.
What does go over in this world, and what are the real motivations behind it? Power and money are always in play, of course. But as the public is slowly beginning to realize, power now comes from data. Their data.
I’d love to know where you stand on this. Please let me know what you think: Leave a comment here, or email me at us@technicallyoptimistic.com.
Worth the Read
Yesterday, the UN voted unanimously to pass a resolution ensuring that AI is “safe, secure and trustworthy” for all nations. We’ll have the UN tech envoy on Season Two of the Technically Optimistic podcast!
Would you pay 1500 euros a year to protect your online privacy? The future of free consent is up for debate in Europe.
New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill, who also appears on Season Two of the podcast, leads an episode of The Daily that looks at just what your car knows — and shares — about you. It’s a great companion piece to a recent newsletter on just that. (The same day her podcast posted, Ford issued a statement on data sharing. Coincidence?)
AI has made flood forecasting at scale possible, a development that could protect 19% of the world’s population. Google Research says that AI helped its forecasters predict floods up to 7 days in advance.
A recent survey by the AI Democracy Projects found that more than half of the election information offered by AI chatbots was wrong.
Photographer Annie Lebovitz said that she’s not afraid of AI in photography. In fact, she’s embracing it as a tool. It will be interesting to see what that looks like!