At the heart of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I believe is correct: the major social media platforms are, in a way that is difficult to define, essential to modern life. We can call them city squares. Or infrastructure. They exist in a murky region between public utility and private interest. They are too important to trust to billionaires and corporations, but that makes them too dangerous to hand over to governments.
We still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to the problem of ownership and governance. But some schemes are more worrisome than others. There are worse fates than Musk.
TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years old. But its growth is something never seen before. In 2021, it had more active users than Twitter, more US watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more website visits than Google.
The app is best known for viral dance trends, but there was a time when Twitter had a 140-character limit on each post and Facebook was restricted to elite universities. Things change. Perhaps they have already changed. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina and asked students where they liked to get their news. Almost everyone said TikTok.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and will of the Chinese government. There is no possible ambiguity at this point: the Chinese Communist Party has spent much of the past year clamping down on its technology sector. They made Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, a special example. The message was unmistakable: CEOs will act on the party’s wishes or have their lives turned upside down and their companies broken up.
In August 2020, former US President Donald Trump signed an executive order insisting that TikTok be sold to an American company — or else it would be banned in the United States. In the fall in the Northern Hemisphere, ByteDance was looking for a buyer, with Oracle and Walmart the most likely suitors, but Joe Biden won the presidential election, and the sale was put on hold.
In June, Biden replaced Trump’s carelessly written executive order and successfully challenged in court with one of his own. The problem, as Biden’s order puts it, is that apps like TikTok “can access and capture vast areas of users’ information, including US citizens’ personal information and proprietary business information.” “This data collection threatens to give foreign adversaries access to this information.”
Let’s call this the data eavesdropping problem. Apps like TikTok collect user data. This data can 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 equipment.
TikTok is working on an answer: “Project Texas”, a plan to host US customer data on US servers and somehow restrict access by its parent company.
But as Emily Baker-White of BuzzFeed News wrote in an excellent report, “Project Texas appears to be primarily a well-placed geography exercise to address concerns about the Chinese government’s access to Americans’ personal information.” “But it doesn’t address other ways China could use the platform, such as adapting TikTok’s algorithms to widen exposure to divisive content or tweaking it to seed or encourage disinformation campaigns.”
Let’s call this the manipulation problem. The real power of TikTok is not about our data. It’s about what users watch and create. It’s about the opaque algorithm that governs what is seen and what is not. TikTok is full of videos that support the Russian narrative about the war in Ukraine.
Media Matters, for example, tracked a seemingly coordinated campaign, led by 186 Russian influencers who typically post beauty tips, prank videos and gossip.
And we know that China has been expanding Russian propaganda around the world. How comfortable are we not knowing whether the Communist Party has decided to influence how the algorithm handles these videos? How comfortable will we be in a similar situation five years from now, when TikTok is even more ingrained in American lives and the company has the freedom it may not feel today to operate as it sees fit?
Imagine a world where the US has a contested presidential election, as it did in 2020 (not to mention 2000). If a candidate were more friendly to Chinese interests, could the Communist Party insist that ByteDance push content favorable to that candidate?
Or if they wanted to weaken the US rather than shape the outcome, perhaps TikTok would start showing more conspiracy videos, sowing chaos at a time when the country is close to a fracture.
The billions of TikTok users don’t think they’re seeing a Chinese government propaganda operation because most of the time, they’re not. They’re watching makeup tutorials and recipes, lip sync videos, and funny dances. But that would make it an even more powerful propaganda channel, if deployed. And because each TikTok feed is different, we have no way of knowing what people are seeing. It would be extremely easy to use it to shape or distort public opinion, and to do so silently, perhaps in an untraceable way.
For all this, I’m suggesting a simple principle, though not a simple one to apply: our collective attention matters. Who (or what) controls our attention largely controls our future.
The social media platforms that capture and shape our attention need to be governed by the public interest. That means knowing who is actually managing them, and how. I’m not sure which social media owner currently meets this criteria. But I’m sure ByteDance doesn’t. In this, Donald Trump was right, and the Biden administration needs to finish what it started.
