Bad governance is a bigger threat than CCP spooks.
The American state of Montana has been the first US state to completely ban TikTok, the platform to beat in the social media sphere for the last five years. Montana joins Afghanistan and India in banning the app outright, and there is a long list of Western countries where the app is banned for military and/or civilian government employees. Why ban a social media app? The core argument in Kabul is that TikTok “was not consistent with Islamic laws”, but in more civilised parts of the world the core idea is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could use the app to spy on people. While I don’t support a ban I think there are valid reasons for being cautious about TikTok.
TikTok is a monumentally successful social media due to its algorithm. The platform decides which videos to recommend to its users, and the primary page on TikTok is the so-called ‘for you page’ where algorithmically chosen videos are shown, so having control over the algorithm confers power. The idea that TikTok is a CCP spying scheme seems awfully dubious to me. Consider what you would want from an ideal spying app, probably real-time location data, personal information like name and social security number, banking details, and professional information. As with all social media, TikTok is a data harvesting scheme, but the information it gathers are for commercial uses, not political uses. LinkedIn would be a better fit for a spying social media as it records users’ employment status which could enable potential spies to monitor persons of interest. TikTok instead focuses on establishing a user’s tastes and makes a guess about which demographic a user might fit into for the purposes of targeted advertising.
The real issue with TikTok is how it has a form of agenda setting power. TikTok’s censors are aggressive about certain words and users of TikTok-alikes such as Instagram reels and Youtube shorts often use euphemisms like ‘unalive’ to mean kill and ‘seggs’ to mean sex in order to get around TikTok censure, even on platforms with more permissive policies. Not wanting users to discuss not safe for work topics like sex and violence is an understandable if uncomfortable policy for an advertisement-based business. But the fact that TikTok not only has the tools to control the use of certain words, but actively uses those tools necessarily means that TikTok could, if it wanted to, use that toolset to quash discourse surrounding political topics like the way Beijing treats the Uighurs in Xinjiang, or the Tiananmen square massacre, or whatever else the controlling interests in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance might deem appropriate to misinform the public about.
Content moderation tools are not inherently evil; they are necessary to keep out spam, bullying, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and racism. But the fact that those tools exist mean that they could be used for illegitimate purposes. The problem with TikTok then, is that it’s an opaque company where the public has no way of knowing whether or not TikTok uses its power of agenda setting and for what purposes. It’s not a spying issue, it’s a governance issue. One which is not unique to TikTok.
Twitter and Meta are under the complete control of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg respectively, and while Western governments tend to be less afraid of Western companies than Chinese ones, the fact remains that any spying TikTok might do for the CCP, there are Western social media with the capability to do so too. If we take a realistic view of the problems TikTok can cause without the distraction of the Sino-American political rivalry, it is clear that TikTok is no more dangerous than its American counterparts. If we are to solve the TikTok issue the best and most sustainable way of doing so is to overhaul the way we as a society allow social media firms to be run, preferably by mandating more transparency and better governance structures.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover photo by Cottonbro Studio from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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