This week, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it is legal to require that TikTok be forced to divest from its parent company by January 19 or be banned. You may know this as the “TikTok ban” because that is how it has been reported basically everywhere. Seriously — I was going to list some examples, but if you visit your favourite news publication, you will almost certainly see it called the “TikTok ban”.
Pedants would be right to point out this is not technically a ban. All TikTok needs to do is become incorporated with entirely different ownership, with the word “all” doing most of the work in that phrase. Consider a hypothetical demand by a populous country that Meta divest Instagram to continue its operations locally. Not only is that not easy, I strongly suspect the U.S. government would intervene in that circumstance. No country wants another to take away their soft power.
Coverage of Supreme Court hearings is always a little funny to read because the justices are, ostensibly, impartial adjudicators of the law who are just asking questions of both sides, and are not supposed to tip their hand. That means reporters end up speculating about the vibes. Amy Howe, syndicated at SCOTUSblog,1 reports the justices were “skeptical” and “divided over the constitutionality” of the law. CNN’s reporters, meanwhile, wrote that they “appeared likely to uphold a controversial ban on TikTok”. While some justices were not persuaded by the potential for manipulation, they did seem to agree on the question of user data. I also think privacy is important, and perhaps for some intersecting reasons, but targeting a single app is the dumbest way to resolve that particular complaint.
Mathew Ingram wrote a great piece calling this week’s proceedings a slide into “even stupider” territory, which could refer to just about anything. How about NBC News’ reporting that the Biden Administration is looking into “ways to keep TikTok available in the United States if a ban that’s scheduled to go into effect Sunday proceeds”? Yes, apparently the government which signed this into law with bipartisan urgency is now undermining its own position.
Alas, Ingram’s article has nothing do to with that, but it is worth your time. I want to highlight one paragraph, though, which I believe is not as clear as it could be:
We’ve had decades of fear-mongering about both American and foreign companies manipulating people’s minds, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but there’s no evidence that any of it has actually changed people’s minds. All of the Russian manipulation of Facebook and other platforms that allegedly influenced the 2016 election amounted to not much of anything, according to social scientists. I would argue that Fox News is a far bigger problem than Russia ever was. And even if the Chinese government forces TikTok to block mentions of Tiananmen Square (as it has forced Google to), it’s a massive leap to assume that this would somehow affect the minds of gullible young TikTok users in any significant way. In my opinion, people should be a lot more concerned about how Apple — despite all of its bragging about protecting the privacy of its users — gave the Chinese government effective control over all of its data.
I get the feeling the discussions about manipulating users’ opinions will be never-ending, as have those about, say, the influence of violence in video games. Two recent articles I found persuasive are one by Henry Farrell, and another by Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield, in the Atlantic, calling the internet a “justification machine”.
But to Ingram’s argument about Apple, it should be noted that it gave over control of data about users in China, not “all of its data”. This is probably still a bad outcome for most of those users, yes, but the way Ingram wrote this makes it sound as though the Chinese government has control over my Apple-stored data. As far as I am aware, that is not true.
