As the fervor and tenor of dissent grows in the wake of the House vote to force a sale of TikTok, users are right to be angry at our government. But Americans shouldn’t be angry because of free speech concerns, but instead because of how clear and present TikTok’s dangers have always been to our nation.
What’s Good for Government Is Not Good for Constituents?
Imagine the federal government not driving a certain brand of car because of its propensity to crash, or nixing a certain food from buildings for being carcinogenic, but then saying “you do you” to all of us? How would that feel? It’s a bit like elected officials putting on their oxygen masks first, but then saying to us, “You are on your own.”The Simplest of Truths Exists
It should have been far simpler to explain the harms of the TikTok platform as analogous to unpasteurized cheese, because just the fact that TikTok collects user biometric data (essentially the equivalent of a “fingerprint” but of your face) is problematic. And our inability to control how that very data is shared between ByteDance business units, and ultimately the Chinese Community Party, is where the lines have been drawn.
Dangers of Sending Mixed Messages
Any concerns about coercion and disinformation on the platform, as some in Congress have suggested, start and end with the technology. Data, its collection, and extraction is the paramount and singular issue from which everything else should flow.But in rolling all concerns up into a single bucket, as the bill does, advocates have been sent in different directions, because by going top down with the company’s ability to conduct “espionage campaigns, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda,” the message immediately lost its cohesion.
The Long, Winding Digital Road Ahead
Having spent most of my career advocating for consumer technology empowerment and literacy, I’m shocked at how little respect we’ve shown to Americans who are more than able to understand the facts at hand. How easy it would have been to engage GenZ, our first fully digitally native generation, in particular, on the subject, and solicited creative thinking around alternatives to the platform.Realistic or not, our government, could have afforded constituents the consideration of the truth. But instead, by muddying the waters, and flip-flopping (as the Biden campaign did when putting POTUS on the platform in February) support has now been mixed to negative.
But regardless of how this nets out, one thing is clear: If a foreign government racing to dominate in AI, with little regard for freedom and free expression, decides to test out its ability to destabilize a Western government by pitting it against itself, well, it has already won.
