The TikTok? Ban: Too Many Distractions and Not Enough Selfish Considerations

-- By ArielBenson - 25 Oct 2024

Huawai and TikTok?

The world forgot about Huawei and its ban across the west. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) created a national security law in 2017, the 2017 National Intelligence Law, assuring that they had infinite, domestic dominion over data. The move also created a target on PRC’s back. Their move in the new era of trade and internet war provided the proof that the United States Senate based its decision to regulate TikTok? .

The unnecessary ticking

The controversy of regulating TikTok? derived from many sources, however most criticisms do not actively address the issue at hand, the protection of data for the sake of both personal autonomy and national security. Pushing back on regulating big tech that is headquartered elsewhere because of loss of content-creation deals ignores the same requests society has asked coal miners and oil drillers to do over the past twenty years, to pivot. The empathy of job loss can be present in a room with the realities of the PRC’s past oversight and backdoor opportunism. The same goes for the fact that we can have both the uneducated and xenophobic representatives on Capitol Hill and the messaging from Capitol Hill demanding privacy of personal data, a message long overdue from the United States of America. To things can be true.

On the other hand, there are some domestic criticisms that get to the issue at hand. First, there is the criticism that there are other avenues to protect domestic data. President Biden enacted one of them, finally calling for the bureaucratic and legal protections of American data this past winter. The long overdue call almost mirrors the PRC’s 2021 data protection laws (Personal Information Protection Law and Data Privacy Law). However, the pitfall in this argument is that it conflates data protection of domestic data on domestic soil with data protection of domestic data on extrajudicial territory. The TikTok? ban signals to other sovereign states that backdooring domiciled organizations to gain insight into user data is unacceptable and a transgression against the privacy of Americans/ domestic persons. Biden’s call for data privacy in his Executive Order orders the American government to create a regime for protecting American data from reaching the hands of adversarial countries because of domestic or internationally initiated transactions and storage. It deals with the act and obligation of organizations, rather than the policing of sovereign states and their imposition on aforementioned organizations.

Level headed considerations

The one criticism that possesses merit is the inefficiency of the Bill. The Bill only addresses TikTok? , because of its relationship with ByteDance? . It does not provide regulation around future organizations in similar positions, nor does it provide regulation around other ways PRC may gain user data from TikTok? outside of demanding TikTok? itself for data (e.g. receiving data from third party data brokers). These critiques are difficult to refute. I will not attempt to do so. It is the error of the drafters for following the waves of political discourse and not considering the necessity of the Bill’s future relevance and all-inclusivity.

America, we have a problem

Protecting freedoms, the nucleus of the national security and privacy arguments, is going to require a renaissance. It seems like these issues, which would in theory be appealing to all individuals, are taking a backseat to other social concerns and chaos. The push from the government for such measures is understandable in the context of national security (because of information asymmetry), however it is surprising that the broader society is not politically behind the efforts created to regulate what is assumed to currently be the most profitable and relevant information available to surveillants and marketers. Potentially, it is a symptom of the current distrust and disdain of the American government and its international policies. With the three branches on a streak of unpopular moves, it is not difficult to understand why younger generations, the ones that are most impacted by a potential TikTok? data “breach”, are unwilling to understand the relationship between ByteDance? , the PRC, and the PRC’s objectively brilliant data privacy regulatory and surveillance regimes.

Moving forward: Buy-in

In order to get the public to care, you have to properly showcase the harm. It is comparative to the public’s awareness of our environmental crisis. There will always be naysayers, however the majority of the population cares about their future vis-à-vis safety and security. The environmental protections cause has properly utilized the school system to ensure engagement with the issue. The concepts of data privacy and where it currently sits in the framework of international trade belong in high schools. It is not as difficult as algebra, and it effectively provides an avenue to review the current state of the world’s diplomacy, conflict, competition, and even greed. Unfortunately, there are not many wealthy and influenceable backers for these efforts. The national security issues will only be relevant when realized, and the privacy concerns are adversarial to those powerful and opportunistic. Critiquing how the government messages these concerns, encouraging academics to engage with these issues, and pushing local governments to revamping education (as is typically done) to include relevant and worldly issues will provide the grassroot efforts necessary for the engagement to ensure that the public’s buy-in is present in the conversation.

What the draft most needs is clear organization. Start with a new, tighter outline. Take the outline down to the sentence level if possible, show what points each paragraph must make and making sure that the sentences comprising the paragraph focus tightly on their intended role. Every word must pull its weight or be left behind.

Clear organization should allow us to see the basic ideas clearly that are now obscure. Television that watches you watch it is a danger to freedom of thought, as I first pointed out more than a dozen years ago. (See "Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media.") Whether the surveilling video intermediary is TikTok or YouTube makes essentially no difference. Whether Google or Oracle acquires the behavior data on US users (the current state with YouTube and Tiktok, respectively) also doesn't matter. Whether software that surveils users' behavior under any pretense should be running on the work devices used by government employees is not a difficult question whether the software involved is some bullshit TV-like application or not.

So was there ever any real meaning to the TikTok controversies? Almost certainly not. If your point, presently obscure to me, is that there was something other than empty political theater involved, some question of principle or general policy, it would be very valuable to show clearly the law, politics and technology involved.

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