Discussing the U.S. TikTok Ban with Julia Angwin: Livestream Summary and Highlights
(Tuesday, March 25, 2024, New York, NY) All Tech Is Human was privileged to host Founder of Proof News Julia Angwin for a livestream discussion about the United States House of Representatives vote to force TikTok to divest from Chinese ownership within six months or be banned.
Angwin discussed the consequences of a ban, privacy and transparency concerns, and what United States voters really want legislators to take action on. We’ve highlighted key excerpts of the livestream conversation in this post. To view the full livestream, click here.
What issues are Americans interested in?
One of the things that really just struck me right away with the TikTok ban was this disconnect from what the public wants, right? There's not currently a groundswell of people crying out for a TikTok ban.
The latest polling shows that about 30 percent of Americans would support a TikTok ban. And it's not clear if all of those people were very enthusiastic about it. There is a lot of enthusiasm though for privacy legislation. So 70-plus percent of Americans want federal privacy legislation that would basically put some limits on how their data is used by commercial actors. We are one of the only countries that doesn't have comprehensive baseline privacy protections and yet Congress has continued to fail to pass a law on that, despite having one [piece of legislation] that had strong bipartisan support in the last session of Congress. This is one of many issues where Congress is really disconnected from the public, right?
How can legislators better address the desires of their constituents around issues like data privacy and transparency in the United States?
The good news is that since we're so late to the game and tech regulation in the United States, there are plenty of models to choose from.
Probably the most natural model is Europe. They have got a very strong privacy law called GDPR that has been in place for almost a decade. I think we've learned a lot from what GDPR offers. California actually passed a law kind of similar to GDPR, but improves upon it because some of the problems with GDPR was that those little boxes that show up saying, “Do you consent to these cookies?”
That was their big privacy move. And, in fact, everyone just clicks yes. So it didn't end up really improving a lot of people's privacy. But Europe just passed a new package of laws, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act that are actually really innovative tech regulations.
They essentially identify the big platforms and put special obligations on them, and those obligations have to do with, partly, assessing the risk of their algorithms. I think we're now in an era where we realize it's not just the data, but also the algorithms that are troubling, right? The fact that you can't control what you see on your feed and that these companies have such great control over it, and they can really turn that dial.
Whatever way they want to boost or amplify the type of content that they want. We've definitely seen this with the new ownership of Twitter where the owner, Elon Musk, has really chosen to promote some pretty outrageous and offensive material through his algorithm.
What did The Office of the Director of National Intelligence find out about TikTok?
The argument that's been made about Tiktok is that China is going to have our data and they're going to use it to manipulate us or to weaponize it in some way against the U. S. And because they have all the data about these Tik Tok viewers, first of all, it's worth noting that TikTok claims it keeps the data about the U.S. separate and that China can't access it. But there have been instances where it's been proven that there have been some individual employees of Biden's have accessed it. So we don't know how strict that line is. But one other thing we don't know is what the intelligence and national security meeting really thinks is happening with this data.
The one clue we have is this February threat assessment report that the office of the Director of National Intelligence put out. And, in that report, they said that they had evidence that there were Chinese government run accounts that were put on TikTok in the 2022 midterm elections to target US candidates. That sounds a little bit scary. It's not totally clear. They didn't expel out what exactly that targeting looked like, but it's also worth noting that basically it doesn't require you to own an app to build. To make an account to target someone, right? I mean, we have seen this multiple times.
There's both bots on all of our social media and there are different fake accounts that do weird things. And we have, we saw this in 2016 when the Russian government, put together some bots and some actual humans who made fake accounts on Facebook. And they were quite successful in spreading a lot of disinformation and trying to put together these influence campaigns to get certain sectors of voters to not be interested in voting.
What we know about this is that all of these social media platforms are basically kind of perfectly designed for influence campaigns. And there's not a lot stopping any actor, state actor, non-state actor from creating accounts and trying to use them to create influence. So really the question is, was TikTok itself part of this?
Did they promote those accounts with their algorithm? And what we do in the report from the national intelligence committee basically didn't say that it didn't say that the algorithm was promoting it. So we don't know if they have any evidence that TikTok was participating in this. And I think that's a really key question that we would want to have answered before going ahead with something as aggressive as a ban.
Why do you believe selling TikTok to a U.S.-based company wouldn’t address consumer and legislative concerns?
The reality is TikTok is really expensive, so it's going to have to be some sort of billionaire consortium.And what we have seen is that people with money are realizing that owning these types of media properties is a great way to push their agenda. And so we're just going to trade one agenda for another.
I don't know if China has actually been using it to push their agenda. There hasn't actually been compelling evidence there, but let's say that they were. It's interesting because what we know about China's agenda is that they interfered with Zoom, which also has Chinese ownership.
There were six employees who were just prosecuted by the Justice Department recently from Zoom who were actually interfering actively with Zoom calls that Chinese dissidents were trying to have. And so we know that China is very concerned about cracking down on dissidents, but what we don't know is actually they're trying to interfere with our elections in any way.
I'm not saying that cracking down on Chinese dissidents is a good idea, but I'm saying where we're trading one type of interference for another doesn't feel like a solution to me. A solution to me feels like some sort of understanding of how we can force all the platforms to be more transparent about what their algorithms are boosting and what they're not boosting and giving the public some oversight, accountability and control over those algorithms, which is what Europe has done with its Digital Services Act.
How can platforms build public trust, accountability, and access?
One really key part of all of this is transparency. People really want to know how their data is being used, what type of data is being collected, and they also want some bright lines about the ways that data can be used. One story that recently came out from the great reporter Kashmir Hill at the New York Times was about how some connected cars are collecting data about your accelerating and breaking patterns and then some of those consumers found that that data was actually being uploaded into reports on LexisNexis that insurance brokers were using to set their insurance rates. That's exactly the kind of use of data that is unexpected and is harmful and is something that people have no idea knowledge or ability to control, right? When they bought these cars, they were not aware that it was going to do this.
This is constantly happening, right? You browse the web, you look on a website, then all of a sudden, you're getting an email from somebody saying, like, “I saw you were on this website.” You're like, “who the hell is this person?” I think we have this unregulated ecosystem right now, where your data is being transmitted through our devices to all sorts of different players. They are then sending it to other third players who are then sending it to someone else. And there's no limits and no rules on it right now. One thing I always say as a joke, but it's kind of true, is that China could just go buy all this data from data brokers right now. The Biden Administration did, I think pass an Executive Order recently that aims to limit data brokers from selling to foreign adversaries.
Maybe for the first time ever, it's not possible to sell directly to China, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't sell it to someone who would then sell it to them. So we just don't have any sort of minimum standards right now about the data that you're transmitting should only be used for the purpose that you transmitted it for. And then if they want to use it for something else, they have to ask. We don't have any sort of rules about algorithmic transparency and how we can see how the algorithm is targeting us and what kind of decisions are being made about what content we see. So those are the bare minimum standards that I think have been sorted out through most other countries that have put in some version of these two things. And so it seems like that's where we should start.
If the TikTok ban were to take place in the United States, how would it influence the app on a global scale?
A TikTok ban would be a really big deal. First of all, there are thousands of businesses that sell on TikTok. TikTok is actually kind of like Etsy. It's a marketplace. And some people would say, myself included, that watching TikTok these days is a little bit too much selling. They have this TikTok shop and all these little small businesses are trying to sell you things. It's actually a pretty important economic engine inside the U S.
First of all, I think the ban would impact a lot of small businesses and you saw a lot of them protesting and obviously it would affect a lot of influencers who make their money through brand deals or whatever that they do to support the videos that they make.
There's a whole economy that would suffer from this ban. Then, when you talk about the rest of the world, well, what they have is a weird app. That's just kind of missing a hole. There [would be] no United States info in there. It just becomes a very weird ecosystem. It means that there would be even more attempts to circumvent the ban.
There would be a lot of people inside the U S trying to use VPNs and other ways to access TikTok. It's like a lot of bans. They're usually not that successful, right? Like China's been trying to ban all these companies for a long time and people still use VPNs to access them. So I think we also have to recognize that bans are not always that successful.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
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