By: William Thatcher Dowell
On the surface, it’s hard to think of TikTok as a serious threat to national security. The site’s often silly offerings look about as offensive as a Barbie doll or your average teddy bear. But looks can be deceiving and the potential threat is both immediate and real. The beauty of TikTok from the point of view of the Chinese government, which owns a major share in it, is that most of the raw creativity that makes TikTok so addictive comes from its users, who are mostly American. How that raw creativity is actually used, however, is determined by the platform’s algorithms, which thanks to AI can shape the final product to produce subtle effects that may not be immediately obvious.
Until now, the US Congress has focused primarily on the TikTok app’s ability to collect intelligence in the form of intimate data concerning the American public. A greater, longer-reaching threat is its potential to subtly manipulate the way we understand everyday reality.
The ultimate goal is to better understand how to influence and control each of us so that we will do something that we might not decide to do on our own. Social media today not only gives influencers extraordinarily detailed information about anyone who is online, it also lets messaging be tailored to the sensitivities and weaknesses of each individual member of its target audience. That audience is essentially us.
An example of the destructive potential of uncontrolled social media was provided when Facebook’s news feed used engagement-based algorithmic systems to blanket the web with inflammatory pictures supercharging hatred against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar in 2017. According to Amnesty International, Facebook’s algorithms created a firestorm reinforcing a government ethnic cleansing campaign that led to thousands of Rohingya being raped, killed, and displaced. Although Facebook was warned about the violence that was taking place, it initially did nothing to stop its algorithms.
It is important to note that the bill debated in Congress does not call for shutting TikTok down; instead, it demands that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell the platform within six months. The Chinese government has already indicated that it may try to block any sale. It has the US caught in a honey trap enforced by TikTok’s popularity.
To be fair, the Chinese and TikTok arrived on the scene fairly late in the game. The crucial breakthrough came in the early 1990s, when a network software engineer, Lou Montulli, invented the internet “cookie,” essentially a bit of software code that is stored in your computer every time you access something on the internet. Cookies leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs that can track just about everything you do on the internet.
Social media turned out to be the perfect vehicle to reach the previously disenfranchised and convince them to add their votes to the Trump campaign. The strategy worked. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but won the Electoral College by 77 electoral votes and was declared president. Cambridge Analytica’s meddling in US politics was one thing. Giving that kind of leverage to China, which has increasingly expressed hostile intentions against the United States, especially in disputes over Taiwan and naval traffic in the South China Sea, is a different matter altogether.
Allowing Beijing access to vital financial and personal information on roughly 170 million Americans is unnerving enough, but letting ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, operate a platform that enables it to frame and manipulate communications among more than half the US population could in the long run prove to be even more dangerous.
ByteDance argues that until now it has never had any undue influence from the Chinese government, even though Beijing is a major shareholder. That may be true, but there is no guarantee that Beijing won’t intervene in the future. A shotgun is harmless until someone decides to pull the trigger. While TikTok broadcasts a tantalizing mix of silliness in America that is largely targeted at a younger generation more than happy to make jokes in front of a camera, Douyin, the version of TikTok that operates in China, is anything but frivolous. The Chinese version stresses that Chinese youth need to study science and technology, and it promotes core virtues favored by China’s Communist Party. The message is clear: If Americans really want to amuse themselves to death, China is more than willing to oblige.
While ByteDance sticks close to the party line in China, TikTok offers the company an amazing amount of leverage when it comes to manipulating what Americans think about the world. According to a Pew survey, roughly 22 percent of TikTok users polled in 2020 said that they were getting most of their news from TikTok. Only a year later, according to Pew, 43 percent said they were getting their news from TikTok. Statista, another polling group that keeps tabs on social media, reports that 1 out of 3 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 currently gets their news from TikTok. A surprising number of TikTok users find the app addictive as well as amusing.
The threat, however, is not limited to TikTok. What happens if a powerful US-based social media platform – Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) or Zuckerberg’s Facebook, or Google – decides to shape our reality for its own potentially destructive purposes?
Large language models and artificial intelligence are redefining what is possible, especially as more and more of our lives are conducted over the Internet. We live, to a greater extent than ever before, in a virtual reality conveyed to us by smartphones, tablet screens, and laptops, and very likely in the future by virtual reality goggles and headsets. It’s a good deal easier to tamper with that reality than the physical reality that surrounds us. Taking all that into account, it is not hard to understand why Congress voted nearly unanimously to insist that TikTok cut itself loose from any future manipulation by a potentially hostile Chinese Communist Party. Business naturally disdains government regulation, but what happens when business gets access to tools that enable a few CEOs to redefine society? The damage at home could be just as great as anything from a malevolent TikTok teleguided by China.
The US clearly needs social media guidelines that go further than simply blocking TikTok. How that can be accomplished with a government that is already so polarized that it can just barely vote to fund itself is anyone’s guess. But an answer needs to be found fast, or Orwell’s vision of a deadened population governed by Big Brother may become a reality.
source : asiasentinel