A State-Level Measure to Suppress the Chinese-Owned Short-Form Video Platform TikTok, a Business Threat in the United States

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio became the latest GOP politician to target the ubiquitous Chinese-owned short-form video platform, proposing a bill on Tuesday with a pair of bipartisan House members that aims to ban the app used by millions of Americans.

The legislation would block transactions made within the United States by social media companies with more than one million monthly users that are based in countries that are considered foreign adversaries, such as Cuba, Russia, and North Korea.

Probably not — unless you’re a federal government employee who uses a work phone to browse TikTok. The rule for all government employees is that they can’t have a device with TikTok on it. More than a dozen states have passed TikTok bans on devices issued by state governments.

“[TikTok] has the capability to collect massive amounts of data on our citizens,” Marc Berkman, CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety, told NPR. There’s a chance that the Chinese government knows about it, but it’s unsure if this is happening right now.

Oberwetter said that the agreement would address security concerns raised at both the federal and state level. “These plans have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the United States, and we will continue to brief lawmakers on them.”

TikTok is Bringing Privacy to the Forensic Internet: Addressing Security Concerns with the U.S. Social Media App

McAuley said that TikTok, like all major social media companies, is vacuuming up vast amounts of personal data of the people using the app, though he questions what exactly TikTok might be able to do with what it knows: a user’s age, contact information, viewing habits, search history, location.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

There is a lot of use in the U.S. The app could be used to control devices, which raised eyebrows after FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers in November.

The Senate passed a bill that included exceptions for the activities of law enforcement, national security interests, and security researchers.

Berkman concedes that it would be difficult to get users off the app. According to the app last year, more than a billion users visit its site each month.

While the company denies it would ever be used for nefarious purposes, national security experts say China-based businesses usually have to give unfettered access to the authoritarian regime if information is ever sought.

So the ban on federal government devices is an incremental restriction: Most drastic measures have not advanced, since the efforts lacked the political will, or courts intervened to stop them.

Why is TikTok so Popular? The View from a Researcher with Privacy Concerned by ByteDance and CFIUS

According to a professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego, the main difference between Tik Tok and other social media applications is that they are more driven by the users.

“While ByteDance claims that it maintains its operations in the United States separately, there is no easy way to determine the extent to which that claim is true,” said Sameer Patil, a professor at the University of Utah who studies user privacy online.

He said that social media companies were harvesting all kinds of data about users, but that it was usually overblown to what extent they knew about users on an individual level.

Patil said if TikTok users are worried about their privacy, he suggests restricting posts to friends only and to remove location data from videos, which can be done in the app’s settings.

TikTok, Oberwetter said, has faith in the CFIUS process, which is centered on making sure the video app does not become manipulated by the influence of the Chinese government.

Another possible resolution is that the committee is satisfied with the steps TikTok has taken to make sure that there is no data transfer between the US and China.

CFIUS deliberations are famously secretive and happen behind closed doors. It’s not known which way the committee is leaning or when it will finish its investigation.

Lobbying has made some of these bills difficult to pass. It’s much more challenging to impose sweeping regulations on an entire industry than it is to pass a bill governing how the US government handles its own technology.

The tech industry’s largest players have faced a kitchen sink of allegations in recent years. Washington has made Big Tech one of the biggest villains in the state, from knee-capping rivals to damaging children and mental health.

AICOA: a big tech bill that forces news organizations to compete with third-party sellers on its own marketplace – and what can it tell us?

“We think a lot of the concerns are maybe overblown,” Beckerman told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, “but we do think these problems can be solved” through the ongoing government negotiations.

ByteDance had 17 lobbyists who spent $270,000 on lobbying in the last year, according to public records. The company had spent more than five million dollars on lobbying by the end of last year.

Last year, the internet industry lobby firm Meta spent 20 million dollars. After Amazon was at $19 million, followed by Google at around $10 million. TikTok’s parent spent less than $10 million on lobbying, so they made the top four list.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) is a bill that would make it difficult for Amazon to compete with third-party sellers on its own marketplace. That legislation was a product of a 16-month House investigation into the tech industry that found that many of the biggest tech companies were monopolies.

For a brief moment this month, lawmakers seemed poised to pass a bill that could force Meta, Google and other platforms to pay news organizations a larger share of ad revenues. Meta warned it could lose news content if the bill passed, so the legislation fell apart.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/washington-tiktok-big-tech/index.html

The Changing Face of Tech Policy: Why We Are So Hard on the Tech Sector, and Why We Shouldn’t Just Close Our Eyes

Silicon Valley’s biggest players in Washington have excelled in defending their turf from politicians who want to knock them down a peg.

By contrast, decisions about the rules government might impose on tech platforms have called into question how those regulations may affect different parts of the economy, from small businesses to individual users to the future of the internet itself.

Legislation might raise First Amendment issues or partisan divisions as a result of proposed changes to the tech industry’s decades-old content moderation liability shield. Democrats want Section 230 altered because it gives social media companies a pass on removing hate speech and offensive content, while Republicans want to change the law so that platforms are pressured to take down less objectionable content.

The cross-cutting politics and the technical challenges of regulating an entire sector of technology, not to mention the potential consequences for the economy of screwing it up, have combined to make it genuinely difficult for lawmakers to reach an accord.

Nebraska has had a ban in place since 2020, which covers all state devices. So has the Florida Department of Financial Services. Louisiana and West Virginia had partial bans.

It’s important to establish a Republican brand. A central tenet of what unites Republicans now is taking a strong stance [and] standing up to China,” says Thad Kousser, professor of political science at U.C. San Diego.

On the Impact of the No-Go Theorem on TikTok’s Role in the House Managed Phone System (Research Paper)

The ban on TikTok would not have a big impact since very few House managed phones have TikTok installed, according to Brooke Oberwetter, a spokeswoman for the company.