What the TikTok Ban Reveals
Hi friends,
Just when it seemed like Congress really wasn't going to pass any tech legislation -- not the bipartisan privacy bill, nor the bipartisan antitrust proposals, nor the bipartisan limits on government surveillance -- lawmakers pulled a rabbit out of their hat.
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed by an overwhelming margin a bill that would force TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company or be banned.
No matter that TikTok is wildly popular -- one-third of US adults use it -- and banning it is wildly unpopular -- only one-third of Americans support a ban. And no matter that what Americans really want -- 72 percent of them -- is "more government regulation" of what companies can do with their data.
In my latest for New York Times Opinion, I write that Congress's actions are not making our data safer and that their refusal to pass broad data protection laws are more evidence of how removed federal law-making has become from the will of the people.
But what about Chinese propaganda being spread through TikTok? Sure, I've heard the stories, too. But the evidence is very thin. In its February threat assessment report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that "TikTok accounts run by a P.R.C. propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022."
This sounds kind of scary until you remember that is exactly what Russia did on Facebook during the 2016 election. And they didn't have to buy Facebook to do that.
The threat assessment also does not allege that TikTok’s algorithm promoted the Chinese TikTok accounts — and I’m guessing that if the director of national intelligence’s office had evidence of that, it would have stated it.
As Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, told The Associated Press: “Not a single thing that we heard in today’s classified briefing was unique to TikTok. It was things that happen on every single social media platform.”
The truth is that forcing TikTok to sell to one of the big tech platforms -- such as Meta or Google -- only puts more data in the hands of unregulated companies whose business models depend on leasing access to our data and using it to fuel the algorithms that highlight content that promotes anger and outrage.
There's a simple way to fix that: by establishing privacy rules that prohibit companies from exploiting our data and that give us control over the algorithms being used to manipulate us.
As always, thanks for reading.
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Best
Julia