Fears About TikTok U.S. Are Only as Grounded as Fears About Other Products Supported by Behaviour Ads ⇥ newrepublic.com

Logan McMillen, of the New Republic, is very worried about TikTok’s new ownership in the United States — so worried, in fact, that it deserves a conspiratorial touch:

The Americanization of TikTok has also introduced a more visible form of suppression through the algorithmic throttling of dissent. In the wake of recent ICE shootings in Minneapolis, users and high-profile creators alike reported that anti-ICE videos were instantly met with “zero views” or flagged as “ineligible for recommendation,” effectively purging them from the platform’s influential “For You” feed.

The new TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC attributed these irregularities to a convenient data center power outage at its Oracle-hosted facilities. While the public attention this episode garnered will make it more conspicuous if user content gets throttled on TikTok again, the tools are there: By leveraging shadow bans and aggressive content moderation, TikTok can, if it wanted to, ensure that any visual evidence of ICE’s overreach is silenced before it reaches the masses.

If these claims sound familiar to you, it is probably because the same angle was used to argue for the divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. assets in the first place. The same implications and the same shadowy tones were invoked to make the case that TikTok was censoring users’ posts on explicit or implied instruction from Chinese authorities — and it was not convincing then, either.

These paragraphs appear near the bottom of the piece, where readers will find the following note:

This article originally misidentified TikTok’s privacy policy. It also misidentified the extant privacy policy as an updated one.

This article has been updated throughout for clarity.

That got me wondering. I compared the original article against the latest version, and put them into Diffchecker. The revisions are striking. Not only did the original version of the piece repeat the misleading claim that TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy changes were an effort to collect citizenship status, it suggested TikTok was directly “feed[ing] its data” to the Department of Homeland Security. On the power outage, quoted above, McMillen was more explicitly conspiratorial, originally writing “the timing suggests a more deliberate intention”.

404 Media reporter Jason Koelber, in a Bluesky thread [sic]:

it’s important to keep our guard up and it can be very useful to speculate about where things may go. that is not the same as saying without evidence that these things are already happening, or seeing different capabilities and assuming they are all being mashed together on a super spy platform

The revised version of the article is more responsible than the original. That is not a high bar. There are discrete things McMillen gets right, but the sum of these parts is considerably less informative and less useful.

For example, McMillen points out how advertising identifiers can be used for surveillance, which is true but is not specific to TikTok either before or after the U.S. assets divestiture. It is a function of this massive industry in which we all participate to some extent. If we want to have a discussion — or, better yet, action — regarding better privacy laws, we can do that without the snowballing effect of mashing together several possible actions and determining it is definitely a coordinated effort between ICE, TikTok, Palantir, Amazon’s Ring, and the Supreme Court of the United States.