Tik’d Off!

 

House of Representatives bill 7521 (“Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”) was fast-tracked to the House after it was approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week by a unanimous vote of 50-0 and passed by the House on March 13th, 352 to 65. It is off to the Senate where its future is not certain, particularly after Donald Trump, following a conversation with a major shareholder/personal buddy in TikTok, seems to have reversed his personal stance that otherwise would have forced the social media company to be banned unless it completely divests from its Chinese parent, ByteDance. According to Theodore Schleifer, writing in the March 13th Puck.com, “Meanwhile, there has been no shortage of media attention lavished this week on Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, and the alleged role he’s played in convincing Donald Trump, among others, to oppose any legislation that would imperil his sizable stake in TikTok.” Autocrats do that with their cronies.

The official House legislative summary of the bill reads in part: “This bill prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok). However, the prohibition does not apply to a covered application that executes a qualified divestiture as determined by the President… The bill gives the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia exclusive jurisdiction over any challenge to the bill. Further, a challenge to the bill must be brought within 165 days after the bill's enactment date. A challenge to any action, finding, or determination under the bill must be brought with 90 days of the action, finding, or determination.”

If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by Joe Biden, it may face judicial scrutiny since it rather directly targets TikTok as opposed to a more generic ban on adversarial ownership of media companies operating in the United States. That targeting may be a fatal flaw, easily fixed with generic standards to be enforced against any entity meeting the relevant criteria. But TikTok has evolved as a social platform as the primary source of news for millions of Americans, an effective “how to” search engine, a marketing machine for a lot of small businesses and start-up entrepreneurs and one of the greatest sources of user-generate content, from photogenic cats to dancing teens to joyful spreaders of conspiracy theories.

To legislators, it is also a mega-source of metadata on tens of millions of Americans, with tons of information on some very private consumer habits, also identifying political and personal biases and predispositions, all exceptionally valuable for anyone mounting an election mis- and dis-information campaign. It is also a front door delivery platform for the mis- and dis-information itself. We have some pretty clearly defined international enemies – Russia and China as the mega-powers and Iran and North Korea as menacing US-destroyer wannabes – who often take advantage of our first amendment right of open communication.

The issue is thoroughly unpleasant as the David Leonhardt, writing for the March 13th The Morning by the New York Times, reports: “Despite low unemployment and falling inflation, TikTok is full of viral videos bemoaning the U.S. economy. One popular group of posts uses the term ‘Silent Depression.’ The posts falsely suggest that the country is in worse shape today than it was in 1930. (My colleagues Jeanna Smialek and Jim Tankersley reported on the posts late last year.)

“”After Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, TikTok flooded users with videos expressing extreme positions from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tilted toward the Palestinian side, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. ‘Many stoked fear,’ The Journal reported. In November, videos praising an old Osama bin Laden letter also went viral.

“In December, a Rutgers University research group concluded that videos about topics the Chinese government dislikes — including Tibet, Uyghurs, Hong Kong protests and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown — were strangely hard to find on TikTok. All were more prominent on Instagram. ‘It’s not believable that this could happen organically,’ a Rutgers expert told my colleague Sapna Maheshwari.

“On Monday [3/11], the top U.S. intelligence official released a report saying that the Chinese government had used TikTok to promote its propaganda to Americans and to influence the 2022 midterm elections. This year, the report warned, China’s ruling Communist Party may try to influence the presidential election and ‘magnify U.S. societal divisions.’

“There does not seem to be any historical precedent for TikTok’s role in the United States today. The platform has become one of the country’s biggest news sources, especially for people younger than 30, and has collected vast amounts of information about Americans.” It has also sparked biased users to stoop to fake AI generated or doctored images and sounds to present “alternative facts” as truth. There’s no question that malign superpowers have clear agenda in manipulating American elections (the focus, but they are messing with elections worldwide), but there is a big question over “censorship” in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“President Biden has said he will sign the bill if Congress passes it. Already, many federal workers are not allowed to use the TikTok app on government phones… There are still big hurdles to the bill’s becoming law. [In addition to Trump mega-donor Yass, O]thers object to the bill because it would interfere so aggressively in the private sector. This opposition could complicate passage in the Senate or lead to later legal challenges… It’s not clear what will happen. But the chances of the U.S. government acting against TikTok have risen significantly in recent months.” NYT. TikTok has so woven itself into the fabric of everyday living for millions of Americans, but it is equally clear that Chinese ownership is more than mildly troublesome.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Western democracies and the resulting open societies are woefully unprepared for and are constitutionally impaired against malign actors using cutting edge technology that is often simply not understood by the vast majority of those elected to Congress… from either party.