Ezra Klein writes:

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 every one 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: Chief executives 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 United States. 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 Senator 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 U.S. customers on U.S. 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 isn’t 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. [Continue reading…]