Trump Even Screwed Up the TikTok Sale
Corruption all the way down.
TikTokWe have a TikTok deal? Maybe? Sort of?
A few weeks ago when Trump announced that the government was going to force the sale of TikTok, I said that even if Trump was going about the sale the wrong way—key money!—it was a good thing. Because allowing TikTok to continue to operate in the current configuration was a threat to national security.
Readers objected to me giving Trump credit for doing something helpful. The general tenor of these objections was, “You are a fool to trust anyone this corrupt to do anything right.”
Point taken. My apologies.
As a “private” Chinese company which ultimately answers to the Chinese government, TikTok poses two challenges to the United States.
The first danger is that TikTok is gobbling up the private information of U.S. citizens. It can do whatever it wants with that information. If the Chinese government asks for it, TikTok will give hand it over.
The second danger is that TikTok surfaces—or hides—videos according to its proprietary algorithm. If the Chinese government decides that it wants TikTok to only show American users videos in which someone declares that, for instance, the results of the 2020 election are illegitimate, then that is what TikTok will do. Or, if the Chinese government forbids TikTok from showing videos in which users say that China is abusing human rights, then TikTok will suppress those videos.
In other words, TikTok is a giant propaganda cannon which is ultimately controlled by an authoritarian country with strategic interests opposed to our own.
And this second danger far, far outweighs the first. Allowing TikTok to operate in this way would not be all that different than the FCC giving a broadcast license to the Russian government.
Which is why I said it was good that Trump was forcing the sale of TikTok.
But in the end, the joke is on me. Because the TikTok “sale” Trump just blessed only addresses the first problem—user data security—while entirely side-stepping the biggest problem—giving the ChiComs the power to determine what information this massive platform shows Americans.
This “sale” to Oracle and Walmart gives the American companies “ownership” of the user data, but not the TikTok algorithm. Which remains entirely in under the control of the Chinese.
Here’s Ben Thompson:
[T]his deal is the worst possible outcome:
First, there is at best a marginal gain in U.S. data security, which probably wasn’t a concern in the first place.
Second, there are only fig leaf improvements to the question of the recommendation algorithm, which will have zero impact on very real concerns around the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to censor and push propaganda to U.S. consumers.
Third, the very concept of the rule of law is in shambles, as the only real change from the original Microsoft deal is to ensure that ByteDance keeps the company while Trump donors get a cloud deal.
This last point can’t be made enough: this deal is significantly worse than the original Microsoft deal that Trump squashed, but unfortunately for Satya Nadella, he wasn’t a big Trump donor. I hate to be cynical, but it’s honestly hard to see what else mattered.
I was a fool to have expected anything less.
thebulwark |
