The House voted recently to force a sale of TikTok away from its Chinese owned company or be banned in the United States. This is likely mostly a tempest in a teapot as the ban is not likely to make it out of the Senate for a variety of reasons. A lot of online folks, though, think that banning TikTok (really, forcing its sale) would be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet, free speech, and apple pie. And that, to my mine, is a worse problem that the idea of a ban on TikTok.
We have given up, it seems, on the idea of regulating internet-based products as products. TikTok’s value is its algorithm, which decides for users what they will and won’t see on the platform. They take an unregulated amount of personal data and use that data, even for children, to determine your experience on the app. No agency, watchdog, or researchers know exactly what data goes in, how its processed, or what the effects on what its users see really are. And despite claims to the contrary, that algorithm really can have an effect.
TikTok’s decisions appear to have further radicalized MAGA adherents before the insurrection on January 6th. TikTok’s algorithm only interface does, in fact, appear to lead to more radical content over time. But what is important here is the algorithm part — TikTok is hardly alone. Facebook conducted an experiment on how its data affected mood on seven hundred thousand users without their consents. YouTube’s algorithm does, in fact, recommend more and more extreme content to users under certain conditions. Facebook is trying to get out from an FTC investigation around the use of children’s data because it interferes with their ability to make money off said children’s data. And yet we pretend that regulating these companies is somehow bad, somehow an assault on freedom and decency and motherhood. That is nonsense.
The internet is not a magical land of fairy dust and unicorn farts, where products are magically turned into speech because the editorial decisions are run on math rather than by chain smoking old white guys with suspenders (or maybe I watched one too many 30s movies as a kid?). Products are products whether or not they are created on the internet. And any company that shows you content based on an algorithm is not engaged in speech, it is selling you a product. The notion that society cannot regulate such products is a one-way street to ruin.
The problem with the TikTok regulation is not the regulation. It is that it is focused on TikTok only. It may not be good politics, it might not be effective (making them make their algorithm public, or at least inspectable, would probably be more useful), it might not be practical (unwinding a company this big in six months would be hard), and it might be unfairly signaling out one company (though foreign owned companies will always be subject to greater scrutiny). But it must be within the purview of a democratic society or we have given up on the concept of promoting the general welfare.