In just about every discussion concerning TikTok’s ability to operate within the United States, including my own, two areas of concern are cited: users’ data privacy, and the manipulation of public opinion through its feeds by a hostile foreign power. Regarding the first, the U.S., Canada, and any other country is not serious about the mishandling of private information unless it passes comprehensive data privacy legislation, so we can ignore that for now. The latter argument, however, merited my writing thousands of words in that single article. So let me dig into it again from a different angle.
In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost leadership by the U.S. in technology. “A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American,” he said. “Today, six of the top ten are Chinese”.
Incidentally, Zuckerberg gave this speech the same year in which his company announced, after five years of hard work and ingratiation, it was no longer pursuing an expansion into China which would necessarily require it to censor users’ posts. It instead decided to mirror the denigration of Chinese internet companies by U.S. lawmakers and lobbied for a TikTok ban. This does not suggest a principled opposition on the grounds of users’ free expression. Rather, it was seen as a good business move to expand into China until it became more financially advantageous to try to get Chinese companies banned stateside.
I do not know where Zuckerberg got his “six of the top ten” number. The closest I could find was five — based solely on total user accounts. Regardless of the actual number, Zuckerberg was correct to say Chinese internet companies have been growing at a remarkable rate, but it is a little misleading; aside from TikTok, these apps mostly remain a domestic phenomenon. WeChat’s user base, for example, is almost entirely within China, though it is growing internationally as one example of China’s “Digital Silk Road” initiative.
Tech companies from the U.S. still reign supreme nearly everywhere, however. The country exports the most popular social networks, messaging services, search engines, A.I. products, CDNs, and operating systems. Administration after administration has recognized the value to the U.S. of boosting the industry for domestic and foreign policy purposes. It has been a soft power masterstroke for decades.
In normal circumstances, this is moderately concerning for those of us in the rest of the world. Policies set in the U.S. — either those set by companies because of cultural biases or, in the case of something like privacy or antitrust, legal understanding — may not reflect expectations in other regions, and it is not ideal that so much of modern life depends so heavily on the actions of a single country.
These are not normal circumstances — especially here, in Canada. The president of the U.S. is deliberately weakening the Canadian economy in an attempt to force us to cede our sovereignty. Earlier this week, while he was using his extraordinary platform to boost the price of Tesla shares, the president reiterated this argument while also talking about increasing the size of the U.S. military. This is apparently all one big joke in a broadly similar way as is pushing a live chicken into oncoming traffic. Many people have wasted many hours and words trying to understand why he is so focused on this fifty-first state nonsense — our vast natural resources, perhaps, or the potential for polar trade routes because of warming caused by those vast natural resources. But this is someone whose thoughts, in the words of David Brooks, “are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar”. He said why he wants Canada in that Tesla infomercial. “When you take away that [border] and you look at that beautiful formation,” he said while gesticulating with his hands in a shape unlike the combined area of Canada and the United States but quite like how someone of his vibe might crassly describe a woman’s body, “there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that”. We are nothing more than a big piece of land, and he would like to take it.
Someone — I believe it was Musk, standing just beside him — then reminded him of how he wants Greenland, too, which put a smile on his face as he said “if you add Greenland […] it’s gonna look beautiful”. In the Oval Office yesterday, he sat beside NATO’s Mark Rutte and said “we have a couple of [military] bases on Greenland already”, and “maybe you will see more and more soldiers go there, I don’t know”. It is all just a big, funny joke, from a superpower with the world’s best-funded military, overseen by a chaotic idiot. Ha ha ha.
The U.S. has become a hostile foreign power to Canada and, so, we should explore its dominance in technology under the same criteria as it has China’s purported control over TikTok and how that has impacted U.S. sovereignty. If, for instance, it makes sense to be concerned about the obligation of Chinese companies to reflect ruling party ideology, it is perhaps more worrisome U.S. tech companies are lining up to do so voluntarily. They have a choice.
Similarly, should we be suspicious that our Instagram feeds and Google searches are being tilted in a pro-U.S. direction? I am certain one could construct a study similar to those indicating a pro-China bias on TikTok (PDF) with U.S. platforms. Is YouTube pushing politically divisive videos to Canadians in an effort to weaken our country? Is Facebook suggesting pro-U.S. A.I. slop to Canadians something more than algorithmic noise?
This is before considering Elon Musk who, as both a special government employee and owner of X, is more directly controlling than Chinese officials are speculated to be over TikTok. X has become a solitary case study in state influence over social media. Are the feeds of Canadian users being manipulated? Is his platform a quasi-official propaganda outlet?
Without evidence, these ideas all strike me as conspiracy-brained nonsense. I imagine one could find just as much to support these ideas as is found in those TikTok studies, a majority of which observe the effects of select searches. The Network Contagion one (PDF), linked earlier, is emblematic of these kinds of reports, about which I wrote last year referencing two other examples — one written for the Australian government, and a previous Network Contagion report:
The authors of the Australian report conducted a limited quasi-study comparing results for certain topics on TikTok to results on other social networks like Instagram and YouTube, again finding a handful of topics which favoured the government line. But there was no consistent pattern, either. Search results for “China military” on Instagram were, according to the authors, “generally flattering”, and X searches for “PLA” scarcely returned unfavourable posts. Yet results on TikTok for “China human rights”, “Tianamen”, and “Uyghur” were overwhelmingly critical of Chinese official positions.
The Network Contagion Research Institute published its own report in December 2023, similarly finding disparities between the total number of posts with specific hashtags — like #DalaiLama and #TiananmenSquare — on TikTok and Instagram. However, the study contained some pretty fundamental errors, as pointed out by — and I cannot believe I am citing these losers — the Cato Institute. The study’s authors compared total lifetime posts on each social network and, while they say they expect 1.5–2.0× the posts on Instagram because of its larger user base, they do not factor in how many of those posts could have existed before TikTok was even launched. Furthermore, they assume similar cultures and a similar use of hashtags on each app. But even benign hashtags have ridiculous differences in how often they are used on each platform. There are, as of writing, 55.3 million posts tagged “#ThrowbackThursday” on Instagram compared to 390,000 on TikTok, a ratio of 141:1. If #ThrowbackThursday were part of this study, the disparity on the two platforms would rank similarly to #Tiananmen, one of the greatest in the Institute’s report.
The problem with most of these complaints, as their authors acknowledge, is that there is a known input and a perceived output, but there are oh-so-many unknown variables in the middle. It is impossible to know how much of what we see is a product of intentional censorship, unintentional biases, bugs, side effects of other decisions, or a desire to cultivate a less stressful and more saccharine environment for users. […]
The more recent Network Contagion study is perhaps even less reliable. It comprises a similar exploration of search results, and surveys comparing TikTok users’ views to those of non-users. In the first case, the researchers only assessed four search terms: Tibet, Tiananmen, Uyghur, and Xinjiang. TikTok’s search results produced the fewest examples of “anti-China sentiment” in comparison with Instagram and YouTube, but the actual outcomes were not consistent. Results for “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang” on TikTok were mostly irrelevant; on YouTube, however, nearly half of a user’s journey would show videos supportive of China for both queries. Results for “Tibet” were much more likely to be “anti-China” on Instagram than the other platforms, though similarly “pro-China” as TikTok.
These queries are obviously sensitive in China, and I have no problem believing TikTok may be altering search results. But this study, like the others I have read, is not at all compelling if you start picking it apart. For the “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang” examples, researchers say the heavily “pro-China” results on YouTube are thanks to “pro-CCP media assets” and “official or semi-official CCP media sources” uploading loads of popular videos with a positive spin. Sometimes, TikTok is more likely to show irrelevant results; at other times, it shows “neutral” videos, which the researchers say are things like unbiased news footage. In some cases — as with results for “Tiananmen” and “Uyghur” — TikTok was similarly likely to show “pro-China” and “anti-China” results. The researchers hand-wave away these mixed outcomes by arguing “the TikTok search algorithm systematically suppresses undesirable anti-China content while flooding search results with irrelevant content”. Yet the researchers document no effort to compare the results of these search terms with anything else — controversial or politically sensitive terms outside China, for example, or terms which result in overwhelmingly dour results, or generic apolitical terms. In all cases, TikTok returns more irrelevant results than the other platforms; maybe it is just bad at search. We do not know because we have nothing to compare it to. Again, I have no problem believing TikTok may be suppressing results, but this study does not convince me it is uniformly reflecting official Chinese government lines.
As for the survey results, they show TikTok users had more favourable views of China as a travel destination and were less concerned about its human rights abuses. This could plausibly be explained by TikTok users skewing younger and, therefore, growing up seeing a much wealthier China than older generations. Younger people might simply be less aware of human rights abuses. For contrast, people who do not use TikTok are probably more likely to have negative views of China — not just because they are more likely to be older, but because they are suspicious of the platform. “When controlling for age,” the researchers say, “TikTok use significantly and uniquely predicted more positive perceptions of China’s human rights record” among video-based platforms, but Facebook users also had more positive perceptions, and nobody is claiming Facebook is in the bag for China. Perhaps there are other reasons — but they go unexplored.
This is a long digression, but it indicates to me just how possible it would be to create a similar understanding for social media’s impact on Canada. In my own experience on YouTube — admittedly different from a typical experience because I turned off video history — the Related Videos on just about everything I watch are packed with recommendations for Fox News, channels dedicated to people getting “owned”, and pro-Trump videos. I do not think YouTube is trying to sway me into a pro-American worldview and shed my critical thinking skills, but one could produce a compelling argument for it.
This is something we are going to need to pay an increasing level of attention toward. People formerly with Canadian intelligence are convinced the U.S. president is doing to Canada in public what so many before him have done to fair-weather friends in private. They believe his destabilization efforts may be supported by a propaganda strategy, particularly on Musk’s X. These efforts may not be unique to social media, either. Postmedia, the publisher of the National Post plus the most popular daily newspapers in nearly every major Canadian city, is majority U.S.-owned. This is not good.
Yet we should not treat social platforms the same as we do media organizations. We should welcome foreign-owned publications to cover our country, but the ownership of our most popular outlets should be primarily domestic. The internet does not work like that — for both good and bad — nor should we expect it to. Requiring Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. social media companies or banning them outright would continue the ongoing splintering of internet services with little benefit for Canadians or, indeed, the expectations of the internet. We should take a greater lead in determining our digital future without being so hostile to foreign services. That means things like favouring protocols over platforms, which give users more choice over their experience, and permit a level of autonomy and portability. It means ensuring a level of digital sovereignty with our most sensitive data.
It is also a reminder to question the quality of automated recommendations and search results. We do not know how any of them work — companies like Google often cite third-party manipulation as a reason to keep them secret — and I do not know that people would believe tech companies if they were more transparent in their methodology. To wit, digital advertisements often have a button or menu item explaining why you are seeing that particular ad, but it has not stopped many people from believing their conversations are picked up by a device’s microphone and used for targeting. If TikTok released the source for its recommendations engine, would anyone trust it? How about if Meta did the same for its products? I doubt it; nobody believes these companies anyway.
The tech industry is facing declining public trust. The United States’ reputation is sinking among allies and its domestic support for civil rights is in freefall. Its leader is waging economic war on the country where I live. CEOs lack specific values and are following the shifting tides. Yet our world relies on technologies almost entirely dependent on the stability of the U.S., which is currently in short supply. The U.S., as Paris Marx wrote, “needs to know that it cannot dominate the tech economy all on its own, and that the people of the world will no longer accept being subject to the whims of its dominant internet and tech companies”. The internet is a near-miraculous global phenomenon. Restricting companies based on their country of origin is not an effective way to correct this imbalance. But we should not bend to U.S. might, either. It is, after all, just one country of many. The rest of the world should encourage it to meet us at our level.
