We Should All Be Mad for How Loose Our Government Has Played Regarding TikTok’s Safety

The TikTok app is seen on a mobile phone in New York City on March 13, 2024. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Commentary

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.

And while a push last week by senators to possibly declassify some of the intelligence is a start, it could also further enrage platform users in highlighting how poor congressional oversight of the Chinese-owned service has been for years.

Because even as the platform grew at breakneck speed, adding millions of consumers each year, government officials played coy, making ample use of the platform to deliver messages and engage with voters, while at the same banning employees from using TikTok on government devices.

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 fact is, our government has never hesitated to ban items deemed unsafe. We ban unpasteurized French cheese, Cuban cigars, and now in California, certain food additives that could see thousands of products off the shelves unless they reformulate. If a product or a service could “hurt” Americans in any way, we’ve trusted in the past that our government would do something about it.

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.

In 2021, researchers at the University of Melbourne laid out these concerns plainly: TikTok collects biometric information, its privacy policy is opaque, and the long-term implications of a foreign entity using this information can range from identity fraud to extortion, targeted surveillance, creation of deepfakes, and worse.

China is, in fact, considered the world’s leader in facial recognition technology, a distinction honed by decades of mass surveillance on its people—and it now ostensibly has the ability to add from TikTok nearly 2 billion additional, and globally diverse, faces to the data used to refine this expertise.

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 result is that young people in particular are left with the sense that they aren’t trusted to sort through what is fake or true. And many organizations that purport to fight for free speech, such as the ACLU, have followed suit with their opposition to the legislation.

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.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.