The recent congressional hearings in which members questioned (and harangued) TikTok CEO Shou Chew went according to plan: members rode the moral panic wave for all it was worth. And no minds were changed. The pols are keen to ban the platform; the platform is just as keen to show it’s not a tool of the Chinese government.
What did not come out of the hearings were questions about whether the state should be banning a social media platform (never mind how it would enforce a ban without looking exactly like the thuggish authoritarians the worthies say are brainwashing kids).
Fortunately, not everyone in official Washington was willing to swallow what Congress was peddling. The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a report detailing how the government “hasn’t justified a TikTok ban.”
Putting aside the very real and largely ignored First Amendment questions about government censoring users’ speech, there is also the grubby business of who wins if the government decides TikTok loses. Not surprisingly, it’s Facebook and friends who are playing for keeps (because money and eyeballs are on the line):
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta still dominates the market – Facebook has 2.9 billion monthly active users, and Instagram another 2 billion, with Insider Intelligence putting their 2024 ad revenues at $85bn and $82bn respectively. Even so, it emerged last month that fear of TikTok had led it to hire a lobbying firm to paint the company as the “real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app”.
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Meta’s tactics aim to exploit the suspicion promoted under the Trump administration that Chinese companies, from telecoms giant Huawei to TikTok’s parent ByteDance, pose a national security threat as potential conduits of personal data to Beijing.
All of which adds another layer of meaning to actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2019 remarks before the Anti-Defamation League about Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube: collectively they are “…the greatest propaganda machine in history.”
Needless to say, none of them were the object of the congressional version of the “two-minutes hate.” Because Congress prefers American social media companies (which they don’t like either)) to harvest, package, and sell way too much of our personal data (the tendency toward propaganda? That’s just part of the fun).
The EFF does have a sensible suggestion for those who are still deeply concerned that TikTok and others are up to no good: support a broad and meaningful data privacy law…
Consider location data brokers, for example. Our phone apps collect detailed records of our physical movements, without our knowledge or genuine consent. The app developers sell it to data brokers, who in turn sell it to anyone who will pay for it. An anti-gay group bought it to identify gay priests. An election denier bought it to try to prove voting fraud. One broker sold data on who had visited reproductive health facilities.
If China wanted to buy this data, it could probably find a way to do so. Banning TikTok from operating here probably would not stop China from acquiring the location data of people here. The better approach is to limit how all businesses here collect personal data. This would reduce the supply of data that any adversary might obtain.
Let’s not forget the U.S. law enforcement agencies that use these same brokers to get around that pesky Fourth Amendment and its troublesome requirement that cops need warrants to conduct searches.
A comprehensive data privacy law requires a lot of hard work and careful consideration – neither of which are common traits in the political class. But it should be the policy government pursues because it’s the right, necessary, and constitutionally essential thing to do. And leave the moral panics…whether they center on TikTok, comic books, rock music lyrics, hip hop music, violent video games, books and literature, skateboards, dancing and on and on…to the blue-nosed fringe.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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ALL to aid Chinese
So it seems you believe there is a Chinese owned platform that isnt a direct feed to the communist governmenf. What competitore to that platform exisf in China? They are as much “the govrtnment” as their hard working farmers down the street or their cops manning their own police stations in American cities. Nothing suspiciousthere, huh?
The author is playing for the CCCP. Paid off to write an ambiguous pile of B.S. What it neglects to mention is that for all the info sales, it’s not nearly as comprehensive as other platforms is a lie! Tic-Toc is harvesting far more info and it’s for the Chinese. The author here is a lying piece of…!