Mid Rivers Newsmagazine 3-20-24

6 I OPINION I
March 20, 2024
MID RIVERS NEWSMAGAZINE
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MIDRIVERSNEWSMAGAZINE.COM
EDITORIAL
How dangerous is TikTok?
We’ve seen the headlines. The House of
Representatives overwhelmingly voted to
force TikTok’s Chinese ownership group to
sell or face a ban from all U.S. app stores. The
reason? The social media app poses a risk to
national security, they say. That bill now heads
to the Senate, where its ultimate outcome is
unclear. President Joe Biden has said that he
will sign the bill. Then again, the president is
also using TikTok to promote his re-election
campaign. All of this begs the question, just
how dangerous is TikTok really?
THE CHINA THREAT
TikTok is owned by the Chinese conglomerate
ByteDance. Does ByteDance cooperate
with the Chinese Communist Party? The
simple answer is yes, they do, because they
are required by law to do so. Article 7 of the
National Intelligence Law of 2017 states:
“All organizations and citizens shall support,
assist, and cooperate with national
intelligence efforts in accordance with law,
and shall protect national intelligence work
secrets they are aware of.”
Now, the law continues to say those efforts
must preserve individual rights and be conducted
lawfully, but the inherent threat
remains. There is a long list of anecdotal
evidence that company leaders who do not
acquiesce to government demands get punished
harshly. The most famous businessman
in China, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, disappeared
for three months in 2020 after publicly
questioning the government. Google search
Bao Fan, Xu Ming, Whitney Duan or Xiao
Jianhua. It is very, very dangerous to be a Chinese
billionaire unless you toe the party line.
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So is Chinese ownership a legitimate problem?
Absolutely, yes.
THE DATA THREAT
We have established that Chinese ownership
is a problem, so the question now
becomes how big of a problem? What data
do they have and what can they do with it?
First off, let’s admit that TikTok’s privacy
policy is shark-fin-in-shallow-water,
Norman-Bates-outside-the-shower-curtainlevel
scary. Seriously, when they flatly
acknowledge collecting “keystroke patterns
or rhythms” and “biometric identifiers” such
as “faceprints and voiceprints,” the “Jaws”
theme starts playing in your head. The truth
is, however, the same could be said for any
and all social media app privacy policies.
Elon Musk’s X (nee Twitter) collects biometric
information as well. Seriously, if we all
read the privacy policies from our favorite
apps, we would just curl up into a collective
fetal position and go back to using pagers or
even corded landline telephones.
In short, TikTok does not seem to be collecting
data that is more nefarious than
anyone else.
Now, how do they use that data? Therein
lies the rub, as old Bill Shakespeare might
say. If the collection of data is the devil we
know, then the manipulation of that data is
the devil we don’t. It’s Oz behind the curtain,
only Oz is the Chinese Communist Party. We
have absolutely no (zero, zip, zilch, nada)
transparency into how the company adjusts
its algorithm to target certain goals. This is
the real problem with a Chinese ownership
group. The app, which now has more than
170 million U.S. users, can elect to increase
or decrease exposure to any content it so
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chooses. As an example, pro-Russian videos
certainly seem to be amplified on TikTok
more than any other platform. If China can
manipulate the data, one must assume that
they will manipulate the data.
THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT
This is the worst part. Whether a byproduct
of its inner-workings or by design,
TikTok promotes harmful content to children.
Last year, two reports commissioned
by Amnesty International led them to the
following conclusion:
“TikTok’s content recommender system and
its invasive data collection practices pose
a danger to young users of the platform by
amplifying depressive and suicidal content
that risk worsening existing mental health
challenges.”
One of the reports showed that in the first
20 minutes of logging on “more than half of
the videos in the “For You” feed were related
to mental health struggles with multiple recommended
videos in a single hour romanticizing,
normalizing or encouraging suicide.”
That’s terrifying. It also will not be solved
by forcing ByteDance to sell to an American
owner.
The decision to ban or force a sale of a
private company is complicated. One hopes
that government never intercedes in matters
of speech or privacy. That said, the level of
technical manipulation possible today was
never envisioned by our Founding Fathers.
By the way, perhaps this can be indicative
of needed action. Do you know what other
country has seen fit to ban TikTok because it
is too dangerous? You guessed it. China.
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