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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Sometimes our elected officials are more aware of the dangers from abroad than we give them credit for. Even if Republicans benefit from TikTok’s current biases, they see the dangers for their own party writ large on the wall of things to come.
Without advocating a sale, the platform would effectively be banned and the House legislators would have to contend with a huge outcry from the app’s users.
The inflection when the Freedom Caucus and isolationist hold hands is not a good look for freedom of speech or democracy.
To understand why the House of Representatives voted to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the platform, it helps to consider what scares both Democrats and Republicans:
- the platform has become one of the country’s biggest news sources, especially for people younger than 30, and its parent company is based in a country that is sparring with the United States over global power
- China’s government has a well-documented history of treating its companies as extensions of the ruling party, and its current leader, Xi Jinping, views the U.S. as a threat to China’s interests
- a top U.S. intelligence official released a report saying that the Chinese government had used TikTok to promote its propaganda to Americans and to influence the 2022 midterm elections, and that China’s Communist Party might “magnify U.S. societal divisions” to influence the upcoming elections
- while ByteDance executives say they routinely remove misleading content from TikTok, many experts doubt the company is free from interference by the Chinese government
- TikTok is exploding with viral videos falsely suggesting that America is in worse shape today than it was in 1930, disingenuously tagged “Silent Depression”
- issues the Beijing spinmeisters would rather see suppressed – the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Hong Kong protests, and the oppression of Tibet and the Uyghurs – rarely appear on TikTok
- after the terrorist attack by Hamas last October, TikTok swirled with extreme positions from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, stoking a free-for-all on fears
- China’s pro-Hamas tilt and its criticism of the American economy circulate far more widely than on other social media platforms
- when experts called out the platform’s clear bias toward the Palestinian side, TikTok curbed the tool that made analysis possible
However, some Senators are sure to stall the bill fulfilling their function in the checks and balances dance of the U.S. government by parsing the long-term implications on First Amendment rights and democracy.
Is the danger from TikTok alone? Or from all online aggregators of personal data?
TikTok would have a huge price tag, fiscally and socially.
The cost to acquire the app would not come cheap. Buyers might have to band together, increasing the risk of further abuse as they try to monetize the platform to recoup their investment and generate future profits.
Ultimately, it’s un-American to interfere so aggressively in the private sector although there is a crying need to do so.
Progressive politicians labelled the bill xenophobic censorship, arguing that Congress instead should have targeted underlying digital privacy issues.
Furthermore, it’s unclear what restrictions, if any, would be placed on any eventual owners to ensure consumers are protected. Or if they would even need to be pro-American.
Would there be adequate oversight and transparency to confirm ultimate control does not fall into the hands of Putin or the next Osama bin Laden?
Sure it was fine for Facebook and Twitter to take over social media and twist the news for so many app addicts, even allow Russian and Chinese government hackers to manipulate our elections. But to permit a foreign company to profit?
Congressmembers and spokespeople from constituencies across the country strongly opposed the bill as passed and instead, are demanding robust protections for all social media users.
California’s Barbara Lee was quoted: “Rather than target one company in a rushed and secretive process, Congress should pass comprehensive data privacy protections and do a better job of informing the public of the threats these companies may pose to national security.”
And Greg Casar from Texas pointed out that “This bill was rapidly rushed to a vote by the Republicans with almost no public scrutiny – and that's a recipe for unintended consequences.”
ACLU senior policy counsel Jenna Leventoff called out the bill for its blatant censorship and lack of constitutionality, appealing to the Senate to reject it as violating “the First Amendment rights of more than half of the country”.
Fight for the Future, long time activists for beneficial use of technology, called the TikTok ban as an attempt to panic people about the app’s promotion of some types of content over others that ignores users’ right to “use the app for news, small business, community organizing, and free expression.”
Trump, who initially and vociferously supported a ban, now seems to be piping a different tune, opining the ban would anger younger Americans and help his now-nemesis, FacebookBut could our ever-self-serving Ex have possibly been influenced by a Republican donor with whom he met recently, one who stands to incur significant losses on TikTok investments?
Key to passage of the bill was the fear that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, might be compelled by the Chinese government to disclose data on the app’s 170 million Americans users. But how is that any different from American corporations siphoning off their customers’ data to sell to the highest bidder?
Critics of the bill that passed are far more concerned about broad domestic corporate abuses of user privacy rights, routinely violated in the name of exploiting assets. Hordes of businesses from voter pollsters to marketing mavens track Americans’ every online click, parsing those decisions, scrutinising their behavior, and profiting off people’s private information.
Instead of forcing a foreign company to sell a successful business to an American profiteer, our lawmakers should double down on rejecting further interference by the plutocracy and pass far more comprehensive privacy laws limiting how all companies collect, store, analyze, and sell our personal data.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
