At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is
an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in
some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life. Call them town squares. Call
them infrastructure. They exist in some nether region between public utility
and private concern. They are too important to entrust to billionaires and
businesses, but that makes them too dangerous to hand over to governments. We
have not yet found a satisfying answer to the problem of their ownership and
governance. But some arrangements are more worrying than others. There are
fates worse than Musk.
اضافة اعلان
TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years
old. But its growth is like nothing we’ve seen before. In 2021, it had more
active users than Twitter, more US watch minutes than YouTube, more app
downloads than Facebook, and more site visits than Google. The app is best
known for viral dance trends, but there was a time when Twitter was
140-character updates about lunch orders and Facebook was restricted to elite
universities. Things change. Perhaps they have already changed. A few weeks
ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked
some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost everyone said
TikTok.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And
Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and the will of the Chinese
government. There is no possible ambiguity on this point: The Chinese Communist
Party spent much of the last year cracking down on its tech sector. They made a
particular example out of Jack Ma, the high-flying founder of Alibaba. The
message was unmistakable: CEOs will act in accordance with party wishes or see
their lives upended and their companies dismembered.
In August 2020, President Donald Trump signed an
executive order insisting that TikTok sell itself to an American firm or be
banned in the US. By the fall, ByteDance was looking for a buyer, with Oracle
and Walmart the likeliest suitors, but then Joe Biden won the election and the
sale was shelved.
In June, Biden replaced Trump’s executive order,
which was sloppily written and being successfully challenged in court, with one
of his own. The problem, as Biden’s order defines it, is that apps like TikTok
“can access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including United
States persons’ personal information and proprietary business information. This
data collection threatens to provide foreign adversaries with access to that
information.”
Let’s call this the data espionage problem. Apps
like TikTok collect data from users. That data could be valuable to foreign
governments. That’s why the Army and Navy banned TikTok from soldiers’ work
phones, and why Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a bill to ban it on all government
devices.
TikTok is working on an answer: “Project Texas,” a
plan to host data for US customers on US servers, and somehow restrict access
by its parent company. But as Emily Baker-White of BuzzFeed News writes in an
excellent report, “Project Texas appears to be primarily an exercise in
geography, one that seems well-positioned to address concerns about the Chinese
government accessing Americans’ personal information. But it does not address
other ways that China could weaponize the platform, like tweaking TikTok
algorithms to increase exposure to divisive content, or adjusting the platform
to seed or encourage disinformation campaigns.”
Let’s call this the manipulation problem. TikTok’s
real power is not over our data. It’s over what users watch and create. It’s
over the opaque algorithm that governs what gets seen and what doesn’t.
TikTok has been thick with videos backing the
Russian narrative on the war in Ukraine. Media Matters, for instance, tracked
an apparently coordinated campaign driven by 186 Russian TikTok influencers who
normally post beauty tips, prank videos, and fluff. And we know that China has
been amplifying Russian propaganda worldwide. How comfortable are we with not
knowing whether the Chinese Communist Party decided to weigh in on how the
algorithm treats these videos? How comfortable will we be with a similar
situation in five years, when TikTok is even more entrenched in the lives of
Americans, and the company has freedom it may not feel today to operate as it
pleases?
Imagine a world in which the US has a contested
presidential election, as it did in 2020 (to say nothing of 2000). If one
candidate was friendlier to Chinese interests, might the Chinese Communist
Party insist that ByteDance give a nudge to content favoring that candidate? Or
if they wanted to weaken America rather than shape the outcome, maybe TikTok
begins serving up more and more videos with election conspiracies, sowing chaos
at a moment when the country is near fracture.
TikTok’s billion users don’t think they are looking
at a Chinese government propaganda operation because, for the most part,
they are not. They are watching makeup tutorials and recipes and lip sync videos
and funny dances. But that would make it all the more powerful a propaganda
outlet, if deployed. And because each TikTok feed is different, we have no real
way of knowing what people are seeing. It would be trivially easy to use it to
shape or distort public opinion, and to do so quietly, perhaps untraceably.
In all of this, I’m suggesting a simple principle,
albeit one that will not be simple to apply: Our collective attention is
important. Whoever (or whatever) controls our attention controls, to a large
degree, our future. The social media platforms that hold and shape our
attention need to be governed in the public interest. That means knowing who’s
truly running them and how they’re running them.
I’m not sure which of the social network owners currently
clear that bar. But I’m certain ByteDance does not. On this, Donald Trump was
right, and the Biden administration should finish what he started.
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