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America is politically polarized. But there is an issue on which both sides agree: We need more privacy and TikTok should not be banned.
A record 72 percent of Americans want “more government regulation” of what companies can do with their data, according to an October report from Pew Research Center. And only 31 percent of Americans favor a nationwide ban on TikTok, according to a February Associated Press-NORC opinion poll.
Despite public sentiment, the U.S. House passed legislation on Wednesday by an overwhelming majority that could force TikTok to divest from control by its Chinese parent company or be banned. It’s fate in the Senate is not clear.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, and American lawmakers say they are pursuing a ban in the name of protecting U.S. data from the Chinese government. But lawmakers are not pursuing comprehensive federal privacy legislation that would protect Americans’ data across all the apps they use.
This is, sadly, just more evidence of how removed federal law-making has become from the will of the people. Issues with wide popular support such as abortion access and gun control remain unaddressed at the federal level. And a majority of Americans say that government policies do not reflect public opinion on key issues.
Despite this growing divide, it is truly stunning that lawmakers feel comfortable pushing a TikTok ban during a high-stakes election year. After all, one-third of U.S. adults say they use the site and one-third of U.S. adults under 30 say they regularly get their news on TikTok. Even President Biden, despite saying he would sign the ban into law if it made it to his desk, just started a TikTok channel for his re-election campaign.
Some members of Congress, such as Representative Jeff Jackson, a North Carolina Democrat, regularly use TikTok to communicate with their constituents. Mr. Jackson, who voted for the bill, has 2.5 million followers on the site. “My message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users,” said bill sponsor Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican.
The legislation seeks to bar the distribution within the United States of “foreign adversary controlled applications such as TikTok” unless it sells itself within six months to a buyer that is approved by the U.S. president.
The rush to pass this bill is particularly odd because the federal government already has a process for dealing with foreign entities buying stakes in domestic companies. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is an interagency body that reviews foreign investments for national security concerns. For instance, it was a review by the committee that caused a Chinese buyer to reverse its acquisition of the dating app Grindr back in 2020.
The committee and TikTok have been negotiating for years over how to mitigate the national security concerns. After Donald Trump while president ordered the committee to investigate, TikTok offered a plan that would have transferred all its data on U.S. citizens to a U.S. subsidiary that would be overseen by Oracle. Oracle would have also overseen TikTok’s algorithms and content takedown decisions on behalf of the U.S. government. But the U.S. government rejected it for reasons that have not been disclosed, and it appears the negotiations have reached an impasse.
But the tricky thing is that forcing TikTok to sell would not solve the problems that lawmakers claim they are trying to address. Selling TikTok to a big tech company such as Google, Meta or Microsoft — after all, who else could afford its estimated price of $84 billion? — would not make U.S. users’ data more secure. In fact, it would simply give the tech giant buying it a new trove of information about all of us that the new owner could use to enhance its already astoundingly detailed portraits.
Right now, for example, Google has most of my email, my documents, my web-browsing behavior and my search queries. The videos I watch on TikTok are, in fact, among the few things it doesn’t have. Adding those videos would add valuable new data to its dossier on me and allow it to monetize it with advertisers, data brokers and anyone else that uses its self-service online advertising platforms and services.
Sure, maybe in the worst-case scenario, the Chinese government is spying on my viewing of TikTok videos. (TikTok, of course, says that its Chinese parent company is entirely separate from the U.S. entity). But TikTok doesn’t have much more data than any other app — all it knows is that I spend too much time watching cooking videos and makeup tutorials. This information probably helps China in its endless quest to provide all of the material goods that I buy — from kitchen equipment to makeup brushes — but it was already manufacturing those goods anyway, so my feeling is that my viewing data is just additional information about potential future demand for products.
OK, fine you say, but what about the Chinese propaganda that is being spread through TikTok? I’ve read the same scare stories — and all I can say is that they aren’t that convincing. Referring to the People’s Republic of China, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated in its February threat assessment 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.”
That sounds terrifying until you consider that anyone can set up a TikTok account to target anyone during an election. We know, for instance, that Russians set up accounts on Facebook to try to influence U.S. elections in 2016. And they didn’t have to buy Facebook to do that. It’s also worth noting that the threat assessment does not allege that TikTok’s algorithm promoted the People’s Republic of China accounts — and I’m guessing that if the director of national intelligence’s office had evidence of that, it would have stated it.
And it’s not clear that the intelligence community has better evidence that it is providing behind closed doors. After a national security briefing on TikTok for members of Congress, 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.”
Meanwhile, China appears to be having plenty of success pushing its political agenda through influencers on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a 2022 Associated Press investigation.
And that’s my point. All of the social media platforms are information minefields, rife with deceptive content from state actors, corporations, paid influencers and others. Their algorithms fuel our worst impulses by highlighting content that promotes anger and outrage. They strip mine our data to make money.
Forcing TikTok to merge with another data-hungry social media platform won’t solve any of that. What will make a difference is establishing base-line privacy rules that prohibit companies from exploiting our data and that give us control over the algorithms used to manipulate us.
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