Responding to a lawsuit from video-sharing platform TikTok, the US Justice Department argued that China could order the company to manipulate TikTok’s algorithm and expand Beijing’s “malign influence.”
The US Justice Department defended a law that aims to either ban TikTok or force it to divest its assets in the US after the social media company filed a lawsuit against the legislation.
Under the law, the social media platform will have to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in the US by January 19, 2025.
The Chinese-based TikTok is challenging the law before a US appeals court.
You don’t give an authoritarian government with a freedom index of 9 access to international user data.
They can already buy it. They are already getting it! Look at ALL of the latest televisions on the market - they require you to accept user agreements to basically suck the life out of you. They listen, report what you watch, how long you watch it, when you change channels, it is really unbelievable. And cars are doing it too! How fast you drive, what you are saying. All of the Google and Apple Home Pods, Amazon’s Alexa products. It is a joke. Except it is not! I think it is a competition for information between big companies backed by big governments.
And we can reject it. Fuck the CCP (1st), but also fuck Google, Amazon, Apple next.
You’re talking past the other guys point. We all agree that the CCP sucks, but just going after tiktok doesn’t solve the problem when they can just buy user data from a broker. You need to go after all surveillance adtech if you want to keep entities like the CCP from buying that data anyway.
Tiktok isn’t special here, just about every online advertiser will run whatever campaign you want as long as you pay their prices so you have to go after all of them to resolve the issue. Tiktok has CPC ties, yes, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg if you’re serious about the national security risk of adtech.
Edit: if you really want to go after manipulation of public sentiment you’ll also need to mandate disclosure and auditing of social media feed and advertising algorithms to a regulatory agency with extremely heavy fines (say X million $/day) for violators. That’s about the only way you can actually stop the sort of behavior the CCP is engaging in on tiktok.
Adtech itself is an entirely bigger ball of wax, if you want to reduce adtech’s social influence you’re going to have to take ownership of private user data out of the hands of advertisers and give it back to people themselves.
