For its part, China has taken similar actions against US-based companies like Meta, whose WhatsApp and Threads platforms were recently ordered to be removed from Chinese-based app stores over questions of national security.
That’s a pretty important point. Without ties to ByteDance, there would be no reason to ratchet things up – and the ratchet is largely symbolic given the Great Firewall of China.
That China doesn’t have an equivalent of the First Amendment seems to be constantly absent in the media coverage of this, as people are concerned about their First Amendment rights… even as they themselves don’t understand the algorithms, or the cost that they incur on a centralized platform they have no control over. Like any platform these days, aside from the Fediverse.
Better informed users might make better informed decisions. The Fediverse awaits.
Al Jazeera just gave an example of being even-handed by adding that, on the heels of being banned in Israel. ↩︎
I’ve been noting a lot of blow-back related to the ‘Coming Soon’ ban of TikTok in the United States, and after writing, ‘Beyond TikTok *Maybe* Being Banned‘, I found myself wondering… why are people so attached to a social network?
I could get into the obvious reasons – the sunk cost fallacy, where so much time and energy is invested in something that one doesn’t want to leave it. We humans tend toward that despite knowing better.
We see this with all social media where one can’t simply move content from one place to another easily, much less the connections made. If you back up your Facebook account, as an example, it’s only your information that gets backed up – not all the interactions with everyone you know, and not content you may be tagged in. So you lose that, but it’s sort of like moving to different geography – you can’t always keep relationships with those tied to your previous geography.
Yet the vehemence of some of the posts in defense of TikTok had me digging deeper. It wasn’t just the sunken cost, there was more to it than that. I haven’t used TikTok, not because of some grand reason – I just didn’t find it appealing.
Thus I explored some things. I’m not really for or against TikTok. I am against social media that passes your information on to entities you may not know, where it will be used in ways that are well beyond your control – even anonymized, it doesn’t mean an individual isn’t identifiable. How many times have you pictured a face and not remembered a name? Still, there’s something really sticky about TikTok.
Here’s what I found.
The Start: The Death of Vine.
When Vine curled up and died as Twitter started allowing video uploads, TikTok stood in. Vine was used by a diverse group of people – the regular stuff, including marketing and branding. There was nothing too different about users of other social media at that point.
Then Ferguson happened, and Vine ended up becoming a part of an identifiable social movement after Michael Brown was shot and killed, largely because of Antonio French’s (then St Louis City Alderman) posts documenting racial tensions in and around Ferguson.
It connected people who were participating in protests, which happens to an extent in some social media, but it doesn’t seem as much. It makes sense. A short video on a mobile phone drains less of the battery and the context of protests is hard to miss in a short video format – so while documenting things, one is more mobile, can post more information in context, and can be seen by a lot of people. That’s a powerful tool for social commentary and social awareness.
TikTok has the regular band of social media users, from dancing to brands – but it filled a vacuum left behind for social awareness and protest. It had other ‘benefits’ – being able to use copyrighted music on that platform but not others allowed lip synching and dance for a new generation of social media users. You can ‘stitch’ other videos – combining someone else’s video for yours, allowing commentary on commentary, like a threaded conversation only with combined contexts1.
There’s a lot of commentary on it’s algorithm for giving people want to see as well.
Certain landmark things happened in the world that highlighted social awareness and activism.
How the Israel-Hamas War Has Roiled TikTok Internally: (may be paywalled) The internal struggles in the offices of TikTok over the war and bias toward the Palestinians – a subject of further examination in links below.
Plenty of other platforms were used in these, but the younger generations on the planet gravitated to TikTok. It became a platform where they could air their own contexts and promote awareness of things that they care about, though not all of minorities may agree, with one large blind spot.
The Blind Spot
That blind spot accounts for 18.6% of the global population. China. There is no criticism of China on TikTok, it’s removed, and maybe because people are caught up in their own contexts they seem unaware of that, and the state of human rights in China. It’s a platform where you can protest and air dirty laundry except in the country it is headquartered in.
The Great Firewall of China absolves users of TikTok of ignorance by assuring their ignorance.
And interesting, of the 30+ countries that have banned TikTok, China’s one of them. The localized version, Douyin, is subject to censorship by the Chinese Communist Party.
I’d say that should make everyone a little leery about supporting TikTok.
But What Will Come Next?
The TikTok platform certainly has allowed the younger generations to give voice to their situations and issues. That is not a bad thing.
There’s a few things that are happening – TikTok won’t go away for a while, it will be in court more than likely for some years appealing the ban. If people do care about social awareness and activism, it’s a hard case to make that what’s good for the rest of the world isn’t good for China.
If you truly care about human rights, TikTok is a paradox. It’s hard to have a conscientious conversation about human rights on a platform which doesn’t practice those same rights in it’s own country.
The key to finding an alternative is an algorithm, since the algorithm is fed by tracking users – users who might not be as keen about being tracked when they understand what that means.
I’ve seen plenty of folks talking about ‘First Amendment’ and ‘Freedom of Speech’ in the context of TikTok, as I saw on Facebook, as I saw on…
All the way back to AOL. Strangely, I don’t remember the topic on BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), mainly because everyone on those generally understood the way things are.
As a moderator on websites in the early days of the Internet right up to WSIS, I heard it again and again. “You can’t restrict my freedom of speech!”
Social media platforms are private companies and are not bound by the First Amendment. In fact, they have their own First Amendment rights. This means they can moderate the content people post on their websites without violating those users’ First Amendment rights. It also means that the government cannot tell social media sites how to moderate content. Many state laws to regulate how social media companies can moderate content have failed on First Amendment grounds.
Most sites also cannot, in most cases, be sued because of users’ posts due to Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act.
The link for the quote has a great article worth reading, because there are some kinds of speech that you can get in trouble for. No sense rewriting a good article.
So this idea about ‘free speech’ on any platform controlled by anyone other than yourself is incorrect. Wrong.
Once you don’t break the terms of service or laws in the country you’re in or the country where the platform is hosted (legally), you can say whatever you want. The principle of the freedom of speech is assumed by a lot of people because it’s in the interests of platforms to let people say whatever they want as long as it doesn’t impact their ability to do business – irritating other users, threatening them, etc.
Even your own website is subject to the terms and conditions of the host.
There’s a quote falsely attributed to Voltaire that people pass around, too: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Powerful words, thoughtful words, unfortunately expressed by someone who is… well, known for the wrong things.
It doesn’t seem to apply that much on social media platforms anyway. I have routinely seen people on Twitter griping about Twitter, on Facebook griping about Facebook… the only social media platform I haven’t seen it on is LinkedIn, but I imagine someone probably did there too.
This idea seems to come up at regular intervals. It could be a generational thing. In a world where we talk about what should be taught in schools, this is one of them.
Government interference in these platforms moderation could be seen as a First Amendment issue. With TikTok, there’s likely going to be a showdown over freedom of speech in that context, but don’t confuse it with the user’s first amendment rights. It’s strange that they might do that, too, because where ByteDance (the owning company) is based, they couldn’t sue their government. China’s not known for freedom of speech. Ask Tibet.
The second you find yourself defending a platform you don’t control, take a breath and ask yourself if you can’t just do the thing somewhere else. You probably should.
The Fediverse isn’t too different, except you can find a server with rules that work for you to connect to it.
The buzz about the possible TikTok ban has been pretty consistent from what I’ve seen in social media, but it seems like most people don’t get why it’s happening.
One post on Mastodon I read said that it was a way for the government to alienate GenZ, and I thought – is this network really such a big deal? Anecdotally, I know quite a few people who peruse TikTok, and I shake my head because I explain why it’s not a great social network to use. In fact, the reasons not to use TikTok are pretty much the same as why people shouldn’t be using Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter X, and whatever else is out there: They want to know your habits, as I wrote.
In that regard, if TikTok is used so exclusively by GenZ, it’s easy to imagine lobbyists from the big social network companies might push for TikTok being banned. That is likely, since all that data on GenZ isn’t in their hands and they believe it should be. But it goes a bit deeper.
…U.S. officials fear that the Chinese government is using TikTok to access data from, and spy on, its American users, spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories...
That’s fair. We have enough domestic (American) disinformation and conspiracy theories during a 2024 election, we don’t need other governments doing their own to their benefit, as happened in 2016 with Russia.
Interestingly, and perhaps unrelated, the U.S. Senate passed a bill renewing FISA, which makes discussion about a ban of any foreign social media a little awkward.
…“It’s important that people understand how sweeping this bill is,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee and outspoken proponent of privacy protections. “Something was inserted at the last minute, which would basically compel somebody like a cable guy to spy for the government. They would force the person to do it and there would be no appeal.”…
Articles about FISA are very revealing – but people who are focused on the TikTok ban alone are missing some great information. This article by Hessie Jones on Forbes puts together some pretty great quotes. so much so I won’t quote it and point you at it: “Data Privacy And The Contested Extension Of FISA, Section 702” (April 23rd, 2024).
You see, it’s not just about foreign data:
“…Under FISA’s Section 702, the government hoovers up massive amounts of internet and cell phone data on foreign targets. Hundreds of thousands of Americans’ information is incidentally collected during that process and then accessed each year without a warrant — down from millions of such queries the US government ran in past years. Critics refer to these queries as “backdoor” searches…“
The TikTok ban will likely be fought in court for years, anyway, and who knows what direction it will take depending on who wins the election?
But social networks and companies will still be hoovering that data up, training artificial intelligences all about you. It will help train algorithms to sell you stuff and influence you to make decisions.
It’s in Chapter 2 that Tom Sawyer gets punished and has to whitewash a fence for his Aunt Polly, and when mocked about his punishment by another boy, he claims whitewashing the fence is fun. It’s so fun, in fact, that the other kid gives Tom an apple (an initial offer was the apple core, I believe), and so Tom pulled this con on other kids and got their treasures while they painted the fence. He got ‘rich’ and had fun at their expense while they did his penance.
That’s what’s happening with social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Videos, text, everything being generated on these social networks is being used to train generative AI that you can use for free – at least for now – while others pay and subscribe to get the better trained versions.
It’s a pretty good con that I suppose people didn’t read about. It’s a classic con.
Some people will complain when the AI’s start taking over whitewashing the fences, or start whitewashing their children.
Meanwhile, these same companies are selling metaphorical paint and brushes.
Found floating around today in the wild. As an atheist that doesn’t use Chrome, I know he ain’t talking to me.
There are some funny memes going around about TikTok and… Chinease spyware, or what have you. The New York Times had a few articles on TikTok last week that were interesting and yet… missed a key point that the memes do not.
Being afraid of Chinese Spyware while so many companies have been spying on their customers seems more of a bias than anything.
Certainly, India got rid of TikTok and has done better for it. Personally, I don’t like giving my information to anyone if I can help it, but these days it can’t be helped. Why is TikTok an issue in the United States?
It’s not too hard to speculate that it’s about lobbyism of American tech companies who lost the magic sauce for this generation. It’s also not hard to consider India’s reasoning about China being able to push their own agenda, particularly with violence on their shared borders.
Yet lobbying from the American tech companies is most likely, because they want your data and don’t want you to give it to China. They want to be able to sell you stuff based on what you’ve viewed, liked, posted, etc. So really, it’s not even about us.
It’s about the data that we give away daily when browsing social networks of any sort, websites, or even when you think you’re being anonymous using Google Chrome when in fact you’re still being tracked. The people who are advocating banning TikTok aren’t holding anyone else’s feet to the fire, instead using the ‘they will do stuff with your information’ when in fact we’ve had a lot of bad stuff happen with our information over the years.
Found circulating as a meme, which lead me to check out StoneToss.com – some really great work there.
What value do you get for that? They say you get better advertising, which is something that I boggle at. Have you ever heard anyone wish that they could see better advertising rather than less advertising?
They say you get the stuff you didn’t even know you wanted, and to a degree, that might be true, but the ability to just go browse things has become a lost art. Just about everything you see on the flat screen you’re looking at is because of an algorithm deciding for you what you should see. Thank you for visiting, I didn’t do that!
Even that system gets gamed. This past week I got a ‘account restriction’ from Facebook for reasons that were not explained other than instructions to go read the community standards because algorithms are deciding based on behaviors that Facebook can’t seem to explain. Things really took off with that during Covid, where even people I knew were spreading some wrong information because they didn’t know better and, sometimes, willfully didn’t want to know better or understand their own posts in a broader context.
Am I worried about TikTok? Nope. I don’t use it. If you do use TikTok, you should. But you should worry if you use any social network. It’s not as much about who is selling and reselling information about you as much as what they can do with it to control what you see.
Of course, most people on those platforms don’t see them for what they are, instead taking things at face value and not understanding the implications it has on choices they will have in the future that could range from advertising to content that one views.
One of the ongoing issues that people maybe haven’t paid as much attention to is related to the United States Supreme Court and social networks.
That this has a larger impact than just within the United States takes a little bit of understanding. Still, we’ll start in the United States and what started the ball rolling.
“A majority of the Supreme Court seemed wary on Monday of a bid by two Republican-led states to limit the Biden administration’s interactions with social media companies, with several justices questioning the states’ legal theories and factual assertions.
Most of the justices appeared convinced that government officials should be able to try to persuade private companies, whether news organizations or tech platforms, not to publish information so long as the requests are not backed by coercive threats….”
This deals with the last United States Presidential Election, and we’re in an election year. It also had a lot to do with the response to Covid-19 and a lot of false information that was spread, and even there we see arguments about about whether the government should be the only one spreading false information.
Now I’ll connect this to the rest of the planet. Social networks, aside from the 800lb Chinese Gorilla (TikTok) are mainly in the United States. Facebook. The Social Network formerly known as Twitter. So the servers all fall under US jurisdiction.
Why is that data important? Because it’s being used to train Artificial Intelligences. It’s about who trains their artificial intelligence’s faster, really.
It’s also worth noting that in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that money was free speech. This means, since technology companies lobby and support politicians, the social networks you use have more free speech than the users combined based on their income alone – not to mention their ability to choose what you see, what you can say, and who you can say it to by algorithms that they can’t seem to master themselves. In a way that’s heartening, in a way it’s sickening.
So, the Supreme Court ruling on issues of whether the United States government’s interference in social networks is also about who collects the data, and what sort of information will be used to train artificial intelligences of the present and future.
The dots are all there, but it seems like people don’t really understand that this isn’t as much a fight for individual freedom of speech as it is about deciding what future generations will be told.
So who should control what you can post? Should governments decide? Should technology companies?
These days, few trust either. It seems like we need oversight on both, which will never happen on a planet where everybody wants to rule the world. Please fasten your seat-belts.
It’s likely at some point we’ve all spread some misinformation involuntarily. It can have dire consequences, too. Washington Post has an article on misinformation but they forgot the most important thing, I think.
Waiting.
‘Trusted sources’ has been a problem that I’ve been studying since we were working on the Alert Retrieval Cache. In an actual emergency, knowing which information you can trust from the ground and elsewhere is paramount. I remember Andy Carvin asking me how Twitter could be used for the same and I shook my head, explaining the problem that no one seemed to want to listen to: The problem is that an open network presents problems with flawed information getting accepted as truth.
Credentialism is a part of the problem. We expect experts to be all-knowing when in fact being an expert itself has no certification. It requires being right before, all the while we want right now and unfortunately the truth doesn’t work that way.
We see a story on social media and we share it, sometimes without thinking, which is why bad news travels faster than good news.1
The easiest way to avoid spreading misinformation is to do something we’re not very good at in a society that pulses like a tachycardic heart: We wait and see what happens. We pause, and if we must pass something along to our social networks, we say we’re not sure it’s real, but since headlines are usually algorithm generated to catch eyes and to spread them like Covid-19, we have to read the stories and check the facts before we share rather than share off the cuff.
Somewhere along the line, the right now trumped being right, and we see it everywhere. By simply following a story before sharing it, you can stop spreading misinformation and stop the virus of misinformation in it’s tracks. Let the story develop. See where it goes. Don’t jump in immediately to write about it when you don’t actually know much about it.
Check news sources for the stories. Wait for confirmation. If it’s important enough to post, point out that it’s unconfirmed.
