While social media can largely be a cesspool, I still tend to enjoy it to some degree. It’s a good way to connect with people, learn stuff from folks who know more than you on a given topic, and so on.
But I’ve avoided TikTok.
Part of it is the formula of short videos doesn’t appeal to me. I have enough issues with my attention span as it is. I don’t need to make it worse.
The other is that because there have been security concerns since the app first launched. Owned, at least in part, by the Chinese government, it was accused of using the app as a back door into users’ personal information.
And now, it seems the Department of Justice is accusing TikTok of doing more than looking at your browsing history outside of the app.
In a fresh broadside against one of the world’s most popular technology companies, the Justice Department is accusing TikTok of harnessing the capability to gather bulk information on users based on views on divisive social issues like gun control, abortion and religion.
Government lawyers wrote in documents filed late Friday to the federal appeals court in Washington that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance used an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.
TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about U.S. users, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said.
One of Lark’s internal search tools, the filing states, permits ByteDance and TikTok employees in the U.S. and China to gather information on users’ content or expressions, including views on sensitive topics, such as abortion or religion. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported TikTok had tracked users who watched LGBTQ content through a dashboard the company said it had since deleted.
Now, the fact that they said they deleted a dashboard they didn’t is one thing, but is TikTok really any different than YouTube in regard to basically accumulating data on people’s views?
For example, YouTube routinely feeds me videos from people like Jared at Guns and Gear, Brandon Herrera, and Demolition Ranch. On some level, it knows I’m a gun guy and likely support the Second Amendment. It also knows I hold views on a host of other topics that put me more or less into a particularly political camp. TikTok’s algorithm is intended to do pretty much the same thing, right?
Well, not quite.
“By directing ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate that algorithm, China could for example further its existing malign influence operations and amplify its efforts to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions,” the brief states.
The concern, the Justice Department said, is more than theoretical, alleging that TikTok and ByteDance employees are known to engage in a practice called “heating” in which certain videos are promoted in order to receive a certain number of views. While this capability enables TikTok to curate popular content and disseminate it more widely, U.S. officials posit it can also be used for nefarious purposes.
While I don’t use the app, I have a lot of friends who do. Some of them report consistently getting content that runs particularly contrary to their own views and their viewing history. In other words, it’s probably less theoretical than the Department of Justice thinks.
Here’s how it may well work.
Rather than promoting the most reasoned argument of the other side, the ones that you may disagree with but can at least look at as belonging to someone who isn’t rabid and crazed about taking away your gun rights, it promotes the biggest nutbars they can find, thus infuriating you and making it more likely that you’ll look at your opponents in the gun debate as the crazies.
Now, no argument is likely to sway us in the least, but let’s flip the script. As a wise man once said, there is no cause so noble that it won’t attract some fuggheads. Ours is no different.
So someone who leans toward gun control is potentially being fed content that comes from the most bat guano nuts gun guys you can think of–and I know you know a few of that fall into this camp.
Suddenly, we’re all tarred with that same brush because that is what they’re seeing in their feed.
Plus, there’s a part of me that’s genuinely concerned about China’s long-term goals as a general thing. Obviously, they stand to benefit from a destabilized United States as there wouldn’t really be any superpower that would be able to stop them from, say, invading Taiwan, but could they be looking at the United States as a potential target? Could they want as much data on Americans as possible as a potential aid in such a thing?
Maybe I’m more paranoid than is necessary when it comes to China, but I damn sure don’t like them trying to monkey with our politics. Our own media does a good enough job without their help, thank you very much.
