Americans are Better Off Without TikTok But Banning It is Bad Policy

If there’s one thing that everyone can agree on with regards to the future of TikTok in the United States, it is that congressional leaders have embarrassed themselves during the questioning of TikTok’s US CEO as the government considers whether or not to ban the popular app.

From questions like, “Does TikTok access my home wifi network?” to Dan Crenshaw’s misguided line of questioning that assumed the CEO of TikTok was Chinese (he’s from Singapore), the hearings underscore the fact that our representatives are ill-equipped to create sensible technology policy, because they don’t understand how it works—or they don’t care because they’re going to legislate tech to their own political ends.

This is a bad process that could ultimately have a positive outcome—but we shouldn’t support bad processes.

Sure, we’ve come to understand how harmful the effects of social media can be on Americans—from its effects on self-esteem to how it isolates and divides us—and I’ll be the first one to admit that my Chef Reactions time on TikTok would be better spent reading a book, talking with my wife, playing with my daughter, or calling a family member.

That makes it very tempting for me to think about American life without TikTok, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram—much in the same way I sometimes ask my wife to take a bag of pretzels away from me that I’m clearly about to finish on my own.

These well documented harms aren’t the reason why politicians are looking to ban the platform. The concern, at least the stated one anyway, is a national security concern about what the Chinese government is doing with data from the Chinese platform and how it might be influencing the content that Americans see.

That’s a truly legitimate concern and I strongly believe Americans should be protected from state sanctioned propaganda and the exploitation of our data—whether it’s from the Chinese government on TikTok, Russian hackers trying to influence our elections on Facebook and Twitter, or American conservative media and politicians lying about election results.

Before we tumble down the rabbit hole on the levels of bad government behavior—the Chinese treatment of the Uighur population in Xinjiang or the fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world's population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world's total prison population—we can all agree that people everywhere should be protected from shitty governments and bad actors of all sorts.

You can’t call out Chinese government censorship but be ok with Florida book banning.

Historically, we’ve taken the position that participation in the global economy is better for the spread of human rights. On the one hand, proponents of free trade argue that it has promoted economic development and lifted millions of people out of poverty, which can in turn lead to improved human rights outcomes and improved living standards.

On the other hand, multinational corporations have engaged in exploitative labor practices in countries with weaker labor laws. Some countries, including China have been accused of prioritizing economic growth over human rights, which can lead to violations of workers' rights, environmental degradation, and other issues.

Even if we’ve gotten a mixed bag of results in that regard, I don’t think isolationism is the right way to go for the future of technology. We already have a fairly fractured internet and I don’t want to see it get worse—with each country’s citizens only seeing what their government wants them to see.

That’s already a huge issue in China and we’re on the verge of going down that road here.

Not only that, it’s a slippery slope when you can spend billions of dollars creating a huge company only to have the government come in and shut it all down based on prevailing political winds.

Venezuela much?

We don’t necessarily want that happening to our companies overseas, do we?

We need to find a consistent and fair playing field that keeps the rights and safety of the end consumer in mind—a set of rules that TikTok should play by that protects our data and creates transparency around where content is coming from, but also that Facebook, Twitter and Google should have to play by as well.

We didn’t even come close to considering the shutdown of Facebook when personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by Cambridge Analytica. They harvested the data of over 80 million Facebook profiles and used the data to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. While the company got slapped with a big fine, the business of Facebook pretty much continues as normal.

Meanwhile, there’s no specific allegation of misuse of data by TikTok and yet, here we are on the verge of a national ban.

It seems to me that the very same politicians that decry “shadow banning” and the suppression of clear misinformation are the very same ones that want to eliminate an entire platform because “we don’t like China”.

China presents lots of complicated questions. They have a much larger population than we do and they’re increasing their sphere of influence, especially in places like Africa. They’re a global superpower with a checkered human rights record that we’re simply going to have to play ball with in complex and nuanced ways—unless we want to get relegated to being a minor player on the world stage or go to all-out war with them.

Neither of these seem like popular options among reasonable people—but by trying to answer the China question right here and right now around the TikTok issue, we’re ducking the fundamental question around tech regulation, which is arguably just as complex.

The first priority of the government should be to shed light for consumers—to help them understand who is behind what they see both from a content creation perspective and an algorithmic one and to set some controls around the use of their data.

Secondly, if we do want to get serious about consumer data protection, we should take more seriously laws like GDPR and the CCPA in California. It’s hypocritical to say you want to protect citizens from data collection by China without actually getting behind any data collection policy bills that would not only protect users from China, but also from Russia, and the US itself, and by American corporations.

I mean, is it any better if I’m targeted on a social platform with a viral outrage-inducing video that Fox News is behind to generate ratings for their fear-mongering TV network than it would be if the same video was put up by China? The outcome would be the same—a fractured population.

Not sure it really matters who fired the proverbial shot—speaking of inconsistent applications of law to “protect Americans.”