Would introducing legal regulations on how social media companies collect and share personal information & build algorithms solve the TikTok saga?

Would the The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) threat on banning TikTok be solved if USA would start introducing legal regulations on how social media companies collect and share personal information &?build algorithms to promote unpaid content and paid advertisements?

Will they/ Wont they?

US threatens to ban TikTok unless Chinese owners divest. So far I have posted a poll on Linkedin questioning if anybody cares about this and out of 44 votes, 36 voted ‘’scandalous’’ and 64% voted in favour of ‘’who cares’’ option.?

Well we care. Let's dive in, the saga started when the US Congress blocked the video-sharing app on federal government devices last December in a last-minute addition to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Ever since, Republican states(Texas, Georgia, and Alabama) have also prohibited the video-sharing app on government devices, as well as public universities such as University of Oklahoma and Auburn University who have blocked access on campus Wi-Fi.?

Then, the European Union and Canada, which had not previously focused on TikTok, suddenly joined the United States in recent weeks in banning it on government-owned devices, too.

However, it appears that these measures do not go far enough for Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) who called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from app stores, which would amount to a soft ban and then Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Marco Rubio (R-FL)? followed on and reintroduced the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act, which would force either an outright ban or a sale of TikTok to a U.S.-based company—and, more widely, any social media companies based in China and a handful of other countries.?

Intense, isn't it? But why you ask?

This wasn’t the end of it, for example, on March the 7th, Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) introduced the RESTRICT Act to give the Secretary of Commerce greater powers to act against technology companies based in China.

WHAAAAT?

It appears that the proponents of TikTok ban cite TWO general concerns.?

Yes,ok,? give them to me.

The first is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could potentially access U.S. personal information as TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. Does this sound like USA in 1950’s? Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950 when he claimed to possess a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the U.S. Department of State. So USA citizens got pulled into meetings with authorities (FBI) because of the Red Scare to advocate their none ties to anything politically related to the Communist Party.?

The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA.So why does this TikTok ban in 2023 seems like history repeating itself? Well, Buzzfeed reported in 2022 that at least some China-based ByteDance employees had accessed non-public U.S. data. Suspicious, you say?

Hardly, from a data protection standpoint, it makes little practical sense to ban TikTok when numerous other U.S. mobile apps collect very similar types of personal information—device identifiers, geolocation, face or voice prints, and more—and face few legal restrictions on transferring it abroad. Also, Foreign governments, including China, could very easily purchase Americans’ personal data from intermediaries like data brokers? Thats more suspicious, right?

So will a ban on TikTok? meaningfully increase the privacy or security of U.S. internet users? Not really. So then what is this about?

The other issue which has been raised by some politicians is concern that the CCP could control TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm to target propaganda or disinformation to U.S. users. Sorry, did we just enter a time machine, again back to USA in 1950’s? There is no direct evidence to show that the CCP has yet conducted influence operations through TikTok. But sure, it can be implied. Lets assume that it is happening.

But lets zoom out and look at the bigger picture for a second.?

Do the Chinese government and other gov states need corporate ownership of a platform to strategically target disinformation or other harmful content? Not really. Even if TikTok was owned by a U.S. company, at present the United States has almost no legal regulations on how social media companies collect and share personal information ( just take a look at Facebook), there are no regulations on how to build algorithms to promote unpaid content and paid advertisements either.

Since there are no regulations to flag harmful or polarizing content either, are the Chinese really to blame?. In other words, the infrastructure is in place for disinformation to spread on U.S.-based platform as it stands so, if this would be about protecting their citizens from misinformation wouldn’t that be the main concern?

There are always economic incentives from social media companies to maximize user engagement and purposely built algorithms which automatically amplify content based on a personalisation and recent activity. So if any foreign government wanted to influence users indirectly and spread misinformation, they would not need to own the algorithm but only know how to game it.

On a much broader scale, a ban would cut off a form of expression & income for approximately 100 million users—especially younger Americans—who utilise the app as a creative outlet to share and view music, dancing, and communications. The United States should not broadly censor avenues for free speech based on their country of origin, especially when it lacks strong examples to show that TikTok’s data practices are different from its U.S. competitors or raise specific—not vague—national security concerns.

Instead, why not strengthen accountability mechanisms over the app’s privacy, security, and transparency policies? The Congress could also work towards establishing comprehensive rules across the entire data ecosystem that would limit how all companies—including TikTok—use personal information in ways that could amplify the spread of harmful content. Another way to support its citizens would be to advocate for all technology companies to adhere to legal obligations to prevent harm to their users, including auditing their algorithms for bias or disparate impact by race, gender, or religion and improving the transparency of their outcomes and give users power to flag objectionable content and appeal the removal of posts or accounts.

#artificialintelligence #datagovernance #geopolitics #security #technologyinnovation #intelligencesurveillance #privacy