FISCHER: Is the clock running out on TikTok?

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

In a stunning and shocking turn of events, the United States Congress is poised to actually do something interesting.

Weird, right?

How often does Congress do anything these days outside of barely maintaining the status quo?

In a branch of government so paralyzed by partisanship that that struggles to find common ground on whether or not bribery is wrong or insurrections are bad, somehow the potential dangers of TikTok, of all things, has garnered bi-partisan support.

Last week the House of Representatives, the same people that regularly threaten to shut down the government because they can’t come to a consensus about whether or not the United States should pay its bills, overwhelmingly passed a bill to force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the service to an American-based company or be banned from the U.S. all together.

It still has to get through the Senate and President Biden’s desk, but there is a non-zero chance that this bill could become law.

There’s a lot to unpack there.

The central motivation behind the bill is concerns about the user data collected by TikTok. There are about 150 million active users on TikTok in the United States alone and the data collected by the ap is big business. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be a free service.

Now it’s one thing when a good ol’ American corporation like Google or Facebook collects and organizes user data to fuel its advertising algorithms, but it is another matter when that corporation is Chinese and thus, by default, at the beck-and-call of the Chinese government.

While ByteDance has tried to assure Congress that American data is kept secure on American servers outside of Chinese access, that has apparently done little to alleviate those concerns.

Beyond that, there’s the ever-present concern about foreign entities manipulating viewer algorithms, and thus the audience watching them.

A 2019 leak of moderation guidelines showed that the company was suppressing videos about Tiananmen Square and Tibetan independence. There is little doubt that the platform is engaged in some level of censorship and narrative manipulation on certain topics. The only really question is to what extent.

Ironically, concerns about government interference on speech are also a main argument against the bill. China may not have First Amendment protections, but America does and the government telling a business what it can or can’t do with the information willingly volunteered by its users is an uncomfortable position to take. Even if it constitutes a national security threat.

No wonder this is an issue that has created unusual ideological splits outside of the usual partisan lines.

Personally, I like TikTok. I won’t put it on my phone, but I’ve found a dozen or so cool creators on the platform and I would hate to see them have to redirect their efforts to Facebook or YouTube Shorts.

On the other hand, I haven’t been able to follow new creators for several months now because TikTok is convinced that my account is a robot and, ironically, I have been unsuccessful in convincing the actual robots that run its “Feedback and Help” service otherwise.

So… let ’em get banned from the U.S. for all I care. Serves them right.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and wonders if it’s time for Vine’s creators to take another crack at it.