TikTok: Divest or Ban?

 

The online platform TikTok is once again in the news, this time the target of proposed U. S. legislation.  One of the most popular and innovative social-media outlets, the Chinese-originated and Chinese-controlled app's infinite-scrolling videos have been imitated by Facebook and YouTube, and 170 million Americans use it, many of them under 30.  So why is Congress once more considering legislation that would either force ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, to divest itself of the U. S. division of TikTok, or else face a total ban of the app?

 

The ostensible reason is that despite TikTok's public protestations to the contrary, it appears that user data garnered by the U. S. division of TikTok can be accessed by its masters in China, as I noted in a December 2022 blogpost here.  Whether ByteDance actually exploits this capability is not clear, but adding that to the fact that TikTok has engaged in a certain amount of censorship on subjects sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party's sensibilities provides enough rationale to consider legislative action.

 

In a recent essay in Time, reporter Scott Nover describes the bill that the U. S. House of Representatives passed on March 13.  If passed by the Senate and signed by President Biden, it would present TikTok with a choice:  either totally divest the U. S. division so that it is completely independent of the rest of the Chinese-based organization, or face a total ban on selling and using the app in the U. S.  Although the bill theoretically gives the firm a choice, several sources say that the true intent is to enact a ban, not just to force divestiture. 

 

As the only major social-media app not developed in the U. S., TikTok excites the envy of Facebook and YouTube, and U. S.-based social-media firms would be more than happy to see a major competitor eat the dust, so they could rush in with their replacement apps and fill the void. 

 

Never having used TikTok, I have only a dim idea of how essential it must seem to some teenagers.  In a clumsy attempt to prevent the bill's passage, TikTok urged its users to phone their congressperson to protest the bill.  Representatives were flooded with phone calls, some of which carried the caller's intent to commit suicide if TikTok were banned.  Many of the callers were below voting age and presumably unable to vote against anyone who favors the ban, but the campaign apparently backfired, as it demonstrated TikTok's overwhelming influence with its users more than a principled regard for free speech on their part. 

 

Nover, for his part, thinks that even if the bill becomes law, it will quickly become entangled in court cases, and the record for similar bans at the state level in the courts is not good.  Former President Trump's attempt to ban TikTok by executive action was thwarted by a court, which said there were other ways to achieve the same ends.  So just passing Federal legislation that would effectively ban TikTok won't necessarily mean an uptick in teen suicides, although that possibility can't be discounted.

 

The U. S. government has decidedly mixed motives in its move to ban TikTok, as it would be a big favor to U. S.-based social media firms.  To that extent, the proposed law smells of crony capitalism, which uses government influence to suppress competition.  There are those who take the view that as long as users get better, cheaper services, it doesn't matter whether those services come from a multitude of small firms or from one giant firm.  In other words, bigness isn't a sin, just incompetence or exploitation.  That is an economic debate for another day, but it can't be ignored in the mix of motives that gave rise to the proposed TikTok ban.

 

It's still a theoretical possibility that TikTok would actually divest itself of its U. S. division, but as I said in previous blogs, such things can be mainly on paper rather than in reality.  One thinks of the breakup of Ma Bell, which cut the nationwide giant phone company into regional Baby Bells.  But a few years after the telecommunications landscape opened up to competition, AT&T found few obstacles on its way to reuniting itself, and continues to be a major player in that field today. 

 

Another problem with the proposed bill is that we don't have a smoking gun.  No one has come up with hard evidence that China is definitely exploiting its ability to suck data on its U. S. users into Beijing for nefarious purposes.  But the Chinese are very skillful at concealing their espionage activities and their consequences—that is what good spies do. 

 

To give a completely undocumented but likely example I'm personally familiar with, a few years ago a student employee of mine wanted to get a circuit board design he had developed turned into an actual circuit board.  This is done by sending a digital file to a circuit-board-fab company, which etches and drills the board and sends it back to you.  He looked around to find various prices from different vendors.  An outfit in Colorado wanted $50, another one here in Texas wanted $40 or along there—and a place based in China offered three-day turnaround for something ridiculously cheap, like $12.  I let him use the Chinese $12 vendor, but not without wondering whether that firm and others like it were deeply subsidized by the Chinese government for the purposes of obtaining the raw circuit-board files from thousands of U. S. firms, all without sending a single spy to the U. S.  Maybe all this is a fantasy of mine, but I don't think so.  It was all perfectly legal and probably very effective for the Chinese too.

 

To my mind, the best outcome of the anti-TikTok legislation would be divestiture rather than a total ban. If the federal government shuts down a social-media app with 170 million U. S. users, that is truly a heavy hand placed on First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens to express their opinions.  But even if the ban is attempted, the courts may well have something to say about the matter, so we will just have to stay tuned. 

 

Sources:  I referred to the article "The Grim Reality of Banning TikTok" on the Time website at https://time.com/6952889/tiktok-ban-freedom-of-speech-essay/ and an article in National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/what-it-took-for-republicans-to-break-with-trump/.  My previous blogs on TikTok are at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/time-is-running-out-on-tiktok-in-u-s.html

and

https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/tiktok-and-chinese-connection.html.

 

Utah Clamps Down on Social Media for Teens

 

On Thursday, March 23, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a sweeping bill that will radically change the way social media are used by under-18 residents of the state.  The bill requires social media outlets to verify the age of users, prohibits the use of social media by anyone under 18 from 10:30 PM to 6:30 AM, and allows users to sue companies for alleged harm caused by social media, among other things.  The bill's provisions won't take effect until a year from now, and TikTok and other social-media firms whose products are popular with teens are widely expected to file lawsuits charging that the new bill abridges First Amendment rights.

 

Back in June of 2022, we reported on Christine Rosen's call for a total ban of social media for anyone under 16.  By then it was obvious that teenagers using social media could be seriously harmed by it.  Even if we set aside the isolated cases of social-media-enabled bullying and induced suicides, numerous academic studies have shown a positive correlation between certain types of social media use and "ill-being", as one meta-analysis study puts it.  Especially for those teens who become addicted to the extent that their online activities hamper their daily lives, depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation all increase above the average population's rates. 

 

At the time, Rosen's call was something of an outlier, but in the conservative, pro-family state of Utah, concern has turned into legislative action.  Besides imposing a curfew, insisting on age verification, and allowing lawsuits, the legislation also requires that parents be able to control their teens' access to social media.  In an Associated Press report on the new law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-privacy advocacy group, was quoted as saying that "the majority of young Utahns will find themselves effectively locked out of much of the web."  And lobbyists for social-media tech companies decried the law as violating First Amendment rights of free speech.

 

My two cents on this are that our Federal system allows states to try things that might be unwise to experiment with nationwide.  But if something goes badly wrong with a new law that only one state passes, the damage is limited and other states can learn from the mistakes that were made.

 

I'm sure there will be problems implementing the Utah social-media law.  For one thing, TikTok, Facebook, and the other major social-media players will lead a charge of lawyers to have it declared unconstitutional or void it in some other way, possibly with a case that makes it to the U. S. Supreme Court.  Such a game should be played with caution, however, because the Court's conservative makeup these days may not be favorable to causes that formerly would have been a slam-dunk. 

 

In the meantime, I think it is refreshing that legislators in Utah have tried to place the responsibility for supervising teenagers back where it belongs:  in the hands of parents. 

 

We can make an analogy between social-media use and the use of the family car.  Back when most teenagers desperately wanted to drive and got their driver licenses at the earliest possible moment, Mom and Dad were the keepers of the keys.  Driving was a potentially dangerous activity, and parents exercised judgment over whether Junior was mentally and emotionally ready to drive, and how much, and where.  Such privileges could be revoked at any moment for bad behavior, which furnished a powerful lever of discipline that was entirely within reasonable child-rearing bounds. 

 

Now, of course, kids just call Uber on their smartphones if they want to go somewhere, but usually they don't—social media is much more interesting than reality, or at least some teens act like it is.  The meta-analysis I cited above cautioned that not all types of social media are bad.  Kids simply staying in touch with other individual kids and posting funny or positive things does no harm, and can even contribute to well-being.  But the disruptive downside of social media use in teens has been so obvious for so long, that it is high time one of our laboratories of democracy should do an experiment in restricting it to see what effect it has on rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. 

 

The progressive push toward radical autonomy of the individual, teenage or otherwise, dictates that old-fashioned notions such as parental discipline and control get thrown out the window.  As studies have shown, however, the teenage brain has a long way to go before it produces mature adult-style reasoned decisions (and some just never make it at all).  For teens' own safety, parents need to supervise what teens do with their time, and increasingly that means social media.  While there are loopholes in every law, Utah's attempt to rein in the unbridled access to teens (and younger people) that social media companies have enjoyed up to this point should be applauded.  There are really some things more important than the free market, and even the First Amendment, when it comes to the raising of kids.  And the Utah law recognizes this.

 

State legislatures can often be wound around the little finger of lobbyists, and we will see what happens when multibillion-dollar international corporations throw their legal weight behind a concerted effort to overturn Utah's restrictions on social media.  It will be a test of integrity for the political system, as money and cultural influence seem to prevail over all kinds of better principles these days.  But maybe Utah can resist the onslaught, and show the rest of the country what can be done about the issue of social-media abuse in teens, a problem that has become a serious public-health crisis.  The next year or so will tell us whether state laws can do anything about it, or whether Big Tech can steamroller over the stated preferences of parents and legislators without regard to their feelings or the well-being of their children.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press article "Kids in Utah will need parents' OK to access social media," appeared on Mar. 24, 2023 at https://apnews.com/article/social-media-utah-kids-84bd1f6481071726327bce25cf3e7522.  I also referred to an article in Public Health, " Digital Media Use and Adolescents' Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic:  A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis" at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.793868/full

and a reference to a Pew Research study on teen suicidal ideation and social media at https://www.levylaw.com/blog/2022/august/social-media-linked-to-rising-teen-suicide-rates/.

Time Is Running Out on TikTok in the U. S.

 

The video-sharing app TikTok has come up several times in this space in the last year, and never in a complimentary way.  In April, I noted that a couple who learned the suicidal art of fractal woodburning over TikTok succeeded in killing themselves and burning their house down.  In September, a number of U. S. TikTok executives resigned in protest over being forced to take orders from the Chinese corporate headquarters (TikTok is a subsidiary of the Chinese company ByteDance).  And just last week, following revelations that TikTok executives lied about whether data from U. S. users could be accessed from China, several states banned its use from all state-provided devices and members of Congress began looking into the possibility of banning it from the U. S. altogether.

 

A recent article in National Review outlines the increasing concerns that TikTok poses for uses who don't want to be spied on by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or be subjected to propaganda and social-media manipulation coordinated by that entity. 

 

According to members of the U. S. House's Oversight Committee, TikTok executives told them that "China-based staff cannot access U. S. users' locations."  A few weeks later, reports indicated that the China-based parent company ByteDance was laying plans to do exactly that. 

 

In common with many China-based corporations, part of ByteDance is owned by the CCP and hosts a CCP committee that meets at the company's headquarters.  We have learned that there are "no meaningful firewalls" between the U. S. division of TikTok and ByteDance, and 300 TikTok and ByteDance employees formerly held jobs with the Chinese state media, which are not known for fairness or objectivity.  While there is no smoking gun showing that TikTok is taking orders direct from Xi Jinping, it's pretty clear that ByteDance and consequently TikTok are heavily influenced by CCP policies and goals, including its policies toward the minority Uyghurs.

 

Among the actions taken against TikTok this week were bans on using it on state-provided devices in South Dakota and Texas.  This follows a bill introduced by Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Mike Gallagher to ban the app outright in the U. S.  The FBI and the Treasury Department are also beginning to view TikTok as a threat to national security, as the app is beginning to cover more general news and political issues, as well as music videos and failed juggling attempts.

 

TikTok appears to be most appealing to people under 30, who increasingly rely on it for Google-type services as well as amusement and social connections.  This poses a problem for laws that would ban it outright, but less radical steps such as insisting that ByteDance relinquish ownership of the U. S.-based TikTok division are more likely to succeed.

 

The Internet famously knows no boundaries:  global, state, or local.  And so it's not surprising that one of the newest rapidly-growing and popular social media apps (it became available worldwide only in 2018) originated in China. 

 

As we have learned in recent years, there is no such thing as a neutral social-media app.  The depths of human depravity ensure that as an app grows beyond a few hundred thousand users, the worst stuff on it will be so bad that some form of control or monitoring becomes necessary, even with the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts internet service providers (e. g. TikTok) from lawsuits over content provided by third parties. 

 

Given that TikTok has to exert some kind of control over its content, and also has to amass user-generated data to satisfy its advertisers, why should we be worried that all this goes on under the watchful eye of the CCP?  It all depends on how well you trust the CCP to act benevolently toward the United States, its citizens, and anybody in the U. S. who has drawn its unfavorable attention. 

 

In my somewhat misspent teenage years, one day I was rummaging through some old books at our house and came upon a slim volume with a black-and-white dust cover that carried the bold title "YOU CAN TRUST THE COMMUNISTS—to do exactly as they say!"  In other words, when a country such as China excoriates another country such as the U. S. for doing things like being friendly to Taiwan and protesting maltreatment of Uyghurs, and China threatens to take over the world in the future, there's no reason not to believe that they are serious. 

 

In such a situation, allowing a CCP-friendly company to embed itself so deeply in the lives of U. S. citizens and residents as to track their movements all the way from Beijing is a dumb thing to do.  Fortunately, more and more government leaders are seeing things that way, and the main question now is how to disengage from TikTok without fomenting a revolution among those 25 and under.

 

Perhaps a corporate breakup similar to what happened with Standard Oil or AT&T is in the best interests both of the U. S. at large, and the millions of TikTok users who depend on their daily fifteen seconds of buffoonery and news reports, or whatever it is they use TikTok for.  But any breakup will have to be rigorously enforced, because corporate breakups have a way of losing effectiveness after a while.  Even in such a relatively benign case as AT&T, after a decade or two the sundered pieces began rejoining like a cut-up flatworm turning into lots of little flatworms that crawl back together for a party.  (That's a lousy simile, but then again, I never took biology.) 

 

The point is that even if the U. S. division of TikTok is formally severed from its ByteDance parent, informal ties through corporate leaders and relationships could persist—in fact, would have to persist unless there was a leadership shakeup along with it.  As one of the most popular apps for sharing music, TikTok worldwide is on track to garner $12 billion in revenue in 2022, so a split-off piece of it would probably attract U. S. investors, who could then dispense with the political slant toward China and concentrate on just making money.

 

That won't mean TikTok's troubles are over, as accusations of addiction and other problems will not be solved by a change of ownership.  But at least if TikTok was cut off from its Chinese corporate parent, we wouldn't be harboring a giant social-media spy network, which is pretty much what it looks like right now.

 

Sources:  I referred to a National Review article calling for the ban of TikTok in the U. S. at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/ban-tiktok-from-operating-in-america/, Gov. Abbott's declaration of a ban of TikTok on state-provided devices at https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-orders-aggressive-action-against-tiktok, and a Fortune profile of TikTok at https://fortune.com/2022/11/08/tiktok-profits-record-industry-wants-increase-royalties-revenue/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on TikTok.

TikTok and the Chinese Connection

 

One of the newest stars in the social-media constellations is TikTok, a free video-sharing app that is very popular among young users.  Ostensibly, you have to be at least 13 to join TikTok, but such age limits are notoriously easy to evade.  Like other social-media apps, the TikTok app has various ways of making money, including advertising, contests, and in-app purchases.  It was the first non-Meta app (e. g. not Facebook or its ilk) to reach the threshold of three billion downloads worldwide, even with the handicap of being banned in India.

 

The reason India banned TikTok in 2019, only two years after it went global, was that an Indian court viewed it as a source of pornographic content and a medium likely to be used by sexual predators.  In 2020, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a permanent ban, citing national security concerns.  Although there have been efforts to ban TikTok in the U. S., they have been unsuccessful so far.

 

TikTok is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ByteDance, a company based in China.  The U. S. division of TikTok recently made the news when five executives resigned after facing interference by ByteDance into the U. S. organization's internal workings. According to an article originally published in National Review, one executive complained that "A lot of our guidance came from HQ, and we weren't necessarily part of strategy building. . . . I don't want to be told what to do."  Coming after earlier reports of a leaked strategy document from ByteDance that ordered subsidiaries to "play down the China connection," one wonders just how tight a rein ByteDance holds on its foreign TikTok operations.

 

Nothing major goes on in China without at least the passive acquiescence of the government.  So we can be sure that Chinese government leaders are aware of what ByteDance is doing.  This is one reason that the TikTok app itself is not available in China.  Instead, a modified version called Douyin is available there.  But the leaked document urges PR people to respond to questions about Chinese control of TikTok by saying that "TikTok is not available in China."  It's the truth, it's nothing but the truth, but it's not the whole truth.

 

The question of how much control a central ownership hub should exert over foreign subsidiaries is nothing new.  Dodgy things were done during World War II with regard to American-owned properties in Nazi Germany, at least up to the point when Germany blocked American assets there once the U. S. declared war on Germany. 

 

The U. S. isn't at war with China.  But one could be pardoned for wondering why China is exporting tons of fentanyl for illegal consumption in the U. S.  Perhaps it's in revenge for the Opium Wars, a sordid episode in the relationship between China and the West that forced China to open its doors to opium imported from British-colonized India in the 1800s.  Whatever the reason, some people doubt that China has the best interests of the U. S. at heart, and look with suspicion on the way ByteDance is consolidating control of TikTok in China.

 

Starting in the 1990s, globalizing free trade became a worldwide goal and, just as Adam Smith would have predicted, raised the living standards of billions of people around the globe.  Most of these were in the developing world, but Walmart wouldn't be able to sell most of its stuff as cheaply as it does if it weren't for China, so to that extent the U. S. benefited as well. 

 

But lately, we are seeing a variety of ways in which the pernicious effects of social media are becoming increasingly obvious—in the toxicity of political discourse, in the soaring rates of depression and suicide among young people, and in the general distractedness of the U. S. population.  A purely U. S. version of TikTok might not be much better than the one we have, but the fact that its strings are being pulled by Chinese masters adds a sinister look to an already fraught situation.

 

If sovereignty means anything, it means that a sovereign government can control the kind of activities and commerce that foreign-owned and foreign-operated enterprises conduct.  So as a theoretical matter, the U. S. would be entirely in its rights to ban TikTok outright, as India in fact has.  Yes, there would be a howl, but people would get over it.  And probably something similar to TikTok would spring up overnight and try to evade the ban. 

 

But that presumes a unity and coherence of action on the part of government which is notably absent today.  As with everything else, a serious movement to ban TikTok would become politicized, with Republicans (probably) favoring it and Democrats (probably) opposing the ban on account of free speech, or possibly even just because the Republicans favor it and we're opposed to whatever Republicans are in favor of.  And then the outcome would depend on which party controls the levers of power, unless there is a stalemate. 

 

That is the good old small-d democratic way, but social media itself has thrown numerous monkey wrenches in the formerly smooth operations of democratic governance.  I have never viewed TikTok, but by its reputation it doesn't seem that political.  (I wouldn't put it past the Beto for Texas Governor campaign to put an ad on it, though—he reportedly joined TikTok in March of 2020, just in time for COVID-19.) 

 

I begin to wonder whether we are ever going to get back to the former compromising and horse-trading that went on when U. S. politicians knew both how to condemn the other side in fiery speeches, and then join their opposite-aisle colleagues at the bar after work for a friendly chat about how to wrangle out legislation that would leave most parties at least partly satisfied.  The current style of take-no-prisoners scorched-earth politics may make for entertaining sound bites, but it doesn't get much done.  Including banning TikTok, if in fact that is what we ought to do.

 

Sources:  The article "TikTok Execs Resign After Being Asked to Take Orders from Parent Company" originally appeared in National Review, but was republished at https://www.yahoo.com/video/tiktok-execs-resign-being-asked-143812196.html.  I also referred to an article at Gizmodo at https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-master-messaging-pr-playbook-china-music-1849334736, the website GoBankingRates at https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/business/how-does-tiktok-make-money/, and the Wikipedia articles "TikTok" and "Censorship of TikTok."