TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew arrives to testify during the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing titled "TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy And Protect Children From Online Harms" in Rayburn Building in Washington DC, the U.S., March 22, 2023. /CFP
Editor's note: Bradley Blankenship is a Prague-based American journalist, political analyst and freelance reporter. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
On March 23, TikTok Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Shou Zi Chew faced a Congressional hearing over his company's app in the United States and the potential "dangers" it poses to society. I saw one particular clip, shared by the Associated Press, of Georgia Representative Buddy Carter, who torched the CEO with a board behind him, showing dramatized imagery of "deadly TikTok challenges" and asking him repeatedly if similar content for children exists in China.
The obvious answer to that is no, and there is a very important explanation that I will delve into shortly. However, the TikTok head's response was extraordinarily restrained, which I must give him serious credit for. He explained that, in fact, this is an industry-wide problem all over the U.S. and amongst its media companies. It should be noted that this is 100 percent the case because there have been numerous cases of deadly "challenges" on apps like Facebook, Twitter and formerly Vine.
Additionally, it must be noted that apps like Facebook and Twitter pose an especially serious risk to civil society because of their propensity to allow harmful disinformation. They also serve, especially in the case of Facebook, as an organizing tool for far-right terrorist groups, which the Department of Homeland Security has identified as the most significant threat to domestic safety.
Moreover, as many TikTok influencers have pointed out, TikTok is an important tool for organizing civil society in favor of just causes like Black Lives Matter, in which the app played a pivotal role. It is also a means for people to share on-the-ground information about hot-button issues worldwide, which European users are able to witness vis-a-vis the ongoing pension reform protests in France.
However, it is true that TikTok does encourage its users to engage more and more with the app to drive traffic and develop its algorithm, creating an additive feedback loop. But this is not unique to TikTok and, in fact, every single major U.S. app does exactly the same thing. So this is clearly what TikTok's head was talking about as an industry-wide issue.
The point is not that Americans should be outraged by a Chinese-made-and-owned app that is creating addictive habits. The point is that they should be outraged that this is the market standard in the United States.
This leads to the major question asked by the Congressman: Does China have the same content for children on its own domestic version of TikTok? The answer to that is a resounding no, and the reason is that Beijing actually cares about its children's well-being enough to actually implement relevant regulations on content for children.
U.S. representative for New York's 16th congressional district Jamaal Bowman speaks as TikTok content creators gather outside the Capitol to voice their opposition to a potential ban on the app, highlighting the platform's impact on their livelihoods and communities, in Washington DC, the U.S., March 22, 2023. /CFP
The reason that TikTok has two different apps in the first place, one domestic and one foreign, is not part of some Chinese conspiracy. It is, first of all, to do with branding. Of course, Western people wouldn't like to use an app that's hard to pronounce for them in their native languages. Secondly, and more importantly, it's that the legal atmospheres in China and the West, most especially the United States, are far different from each other.
The U.S. is essentially the "Wild West" of the internet. Children can freely access pretty much anything, any adult content, and the algorithms behind popular apps are allowed to be extremely addictive because of this lax legal environment. This has been extraordinarily well-documented in countless books, documentaries and articles.
China is well ahead of the U.S. on this issue. In August 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), published a set of draft regulations for recommendation algorithms that I described at that time as "the new gold standard." I described them as such because, for example, they allow users to be provided with a convenient way to see and delete keywords that algorithms use to profile them. They also strictly limit the kinds of keywords that providers can use, as well as make it so users need to be explicitly informed that algorithms are being used to recommend content or products with the ability to opt out. I think more countries, such as the U.S., should have this.
At the heart of it, TikTok has not committed any crime in the United States. The only thing the company has done wrong, as far as we can see, is merely to exist as a successful Chinese venture in the American market. Whatever Congress' problems are with the app, these same grievances could be leveled against every single app and major tech company in the country. What is truly at fault here is not the market – but, rather, American politicians' complete and total failure to do their jobs. They cannot single out TikTok for merely using the existing regulatory environment to their advantage just like every other company on the planet.
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