TikTok’s forced sale is an opportunity to reclaim digital town square
The oral arguments before the Supreme Court on TikTok made clear that the social media app is skating on thin legal ice. Last term, I cosponsored the bipartisan bill it is challenging. This term, Congress must follow through on forcing TikTok’s divestment from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. That will require muscling past President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle, who want to put his China policy up for sale. Then lawmakers must stand up to the entire Big Tech lobby by establishing a duty of care for children. To reclaim the digital town square, Congress must fight both Chinese Communist and American corporate power.
It starts with getting TikTok out from under the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok is owned and operated by a Chinese company, and under Chinese law, that means the CCP controls the most influential social media platform in America. President Xi Jinping has ultimate authority over personal data, underage usage, and content moderation.
Don’t believe me? Try learning about Tiananmen Square through TikTok.
TikTok is Xi’s best weapon on what he calls the “smokeless battlefield” — the global contest for hearts and minds. Thus the irony of TikTok defenders citing free speech. Americans have migrated much of our national discourse onto a platform of censorship and propaganda.
Trump seemingly understood this in his first term and got tough on TikTok. But he is backtracking as he approaches his second term, influenced by flattery and lobbyists. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has even been invited to sit in a place of honor at Trump’s inauguration, a visual manifestation of the oligarchy that Joe Biden warned Americans of in the president’s final speech. Congressional Republicans must find their spine. They claim to be China hawks; they should insist that Trump see through the sale to an American company.
Once sold, TikTok would join Meta, X, YouTube, and the rest of the Web 2.0 leviathans in answering to the US Congress. The problem is, Congress acts as though it answers to them.
Trillion-dollar social media corporations are attention-fracking Americans. Over the past 15 years, as smartphones with social media apps became ubiquitous, civil discourse coarsened and mental health deteriorated. Children are particularly harmed. Yet Congress has passed no relevant legislation this century.
As the youngest parent in the Democratic caucus, I spend considerable time with fellow parents of kids at or near smartphone age. We discuss how to pry our kids from the grip of the phone-based childhood. As a dad, I am outmatched by the tech executives with armies of coders who get richer each minute my children spend staring at a screen. But as a member of the congressional committee with jurisdiction over social media, I am fighting back hard.
I have filed two bills that would revamp Section 230, which currently immunizes social media corporations from liability. These bills raise the age of internet adulthood to 16, affording younger users significant protections, while establishing a duty of care for all users that requires platforms to address cyber-harassment and deepfake abuse. For example, a recent study found that 98 percent of online deepfake videos are nonconsensual pornographic content of women. Yet companies like Instagram are not liable for hosting these deepfake privacy violations. My legislation would make it a board-level problem for their CEOs.
It’s not only young victims of harassment who want change. The middle and high schoolers I meet with know that they’re not the customers of these apps — they are the product. They don’t want their attention spans and social lives configured for maximum monetization by advertisers. Today’s anti-social social media is the consequence of corporate monopoly, which sells instant gratification and outrage as a service.
By contrast, public stewardship over the digital town square could build community, not tribes.
Fittingly, it is Taiwan, under siege by information warfare, that has done the most to reclaim its digital town square. In her fascinating book, “Plurality,” Taiwan’s former digital minister, Audrey Tang, explains how open governance can empower communities to understand, shape, and benefit from their feeds. Instead of secret algorithms that amplify fear, envy, and anger, content moderation is open, transparent, and pluralist.
TikTok’s forced sale would be an opportunity for this better version of social media, if Congress is willing to fight back against both Chinese Communist and American corporate control of the digital town square.
By: Jake Auchincloss
Source: The Boston Globe