TikTok faces bans on government-issued devices
The US Congress is looking to expand the ban of TikTok on social media: NPR in the Light of U.S. Senate Majority Leader David McQuaide
Fresh off their successful effort to ban TikTok on government devices last year, China hawks in the US Congress are looking to expand that ban further, even as lawmakers continue allowing US companies to scoop up Americans’ data and share or sell it with third parties—potentially including China’s government.
The proposed legislation would “block and prohibit all transactions” in the United States by social media companies with at least one million monthly users that are based in, or under the “substantial influence” of, countries that are considered foreign adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.
As a result, some government agencies turned to the platform to spread their messages. NPR found examples of state government agencies on TikTok, ranging from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation to the Oregon Secretary of State.
The flurry of activity contrasts with the lengthy negotiations TikTok has been having for years with the US government on a potential deal that may allow the company to address the national security concerns and to continue serving US users.
“We will continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that 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,” McQuaide added.
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.
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State-Dependent Apps aren’t Forbidden by the App Store, but Do They Need to Be Forgotten?
Some public universities and government agencies have used the app for marketing and recruiting purposes, but at least 16 states are taking steps to forbid the use of the app while using state government networks.
The Senate bill has some exceptions for law enforcement activities and national security interests.
TikTok reached one billion monthly global users in 2021, it announced. In the US, two-thirds of teens say they use it, according to the research center.
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.
Most drastic measures, since they lacked the political will, have not advanced, so the ban on federal government devices is anIncremental restriction.
“I would not expect individualized targeting through [TikTok] to do malicious things,” Joyce said. Overall ability to do large-scale influence is something I am concerned about.
When China shuts down, the TikTok Committee is pleased with the status of the ByteDance-US hacking app
As recently as December, Forbes reported that ByteDance employees inappropriately obtained data collected from US users. At least two reporters had their data viewed by ByteDance employees who were investigating past leaks of internal company documents. ByteDance confirmed the reporting and said it had fired all four employees who participated in the scheme, two of whom worked in China.
“While social media companies are certainly harvesting all kinds of data about users, I think it’s usually overblown to what extent they ‘know’ about users on an individual level,” he said.
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.
On Monday, a TikTok official presented a keynote detailing Project Texas, the company’s most substantial effort to mitigate foreign threats to US data. The proposal would wall off most of TikTok’s US operations from ByteDance, its Chinese parent company. Larry Ellison’s Oracle would play a role in auditing American data flows.
A second possible resolution is that the committee is pleased with the steps TikTok has taken to make sure the Chinese government and U.S. users don’t get access to user data.
secretive and happen behind closed doors. The committee isn’t clear about when it’s going to finish or which way it is leaning.
At least 14 states have recently banned the application from being used on government devices; some state-run public universities followed suit, banning or blocking the app on their campuses.
Chinese law requires Byte Dance to help the government, so it could include sharing user data from anywhere in the world.
He said that there was no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with the company. It’s time to stop Beijing-controlled TikTok.
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“It certainly makes sense, then, for U.S. soldiers to be told, ‘Hey, don’t use the app because it might share your location information with other entities,” said Chander. The weather app is one of the many apps in your phone that are owned by China or not.
Ryan Calo is a professor of law and information science at the University of Washington. He says that, while data privacy in the United States still needs much improvement, the proposed legislation is more about geopolitical tensions and less about TikTok specifically.
The Chinese intelligence sector probably wouldn’t need to go through TikTok to get the information they wanted on US state employees.
He says it is always easy to say that a foreign government is a threat. “And I think we should be a little cautious about how that can be politicized in a way that far exceeds the actual threat in order to achieve political ends.”
Both Chander and Calo are skeptical that an outright TikTok ban would gain much political momentum, and both argue that even if it were to move forward, banning a communication platform would raise First Amendment concerns. Calo believes the conversation could push policy in a positive direction.
“I think that we’re right in the United States to be finally thinking about the consequences of having so much commercial surveillance taking place of U.S. citizens and residents,” he said. To address it we should pass comprehensive privacy rules or laws which is something that the Federal Trade Commission appears very interested in doing.
But it isn’t just lobbying that 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 difference between the two shows how simple narratives, well-funded lobbying and questions about policy can make or break a bill. It indicates that a few Big Tech companies continue to maintain their dominance over the rest of the US market.
Tech-Focused Antitrust Negotiations: The Case of ByteDance, Google, Amazon, and TikTok
“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.
In 2019, ByteDance had 17 lobbyists and spent $270,000 on lobbying, according to public records gathered by the transparency group OpenSecrets. The company spent more than five million dollars on lobbying by the end of last year.
The internet industry spent upwards of $20 million on lobbying last year. Next was Amazon at $19 million, then Google at almost $10 million. The parent company of TikTok spent more than twice what was spent on lobbying.
For a while this year, supporters of the legislation called on Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer to bring it to a floor vote, believing it had enough votes to pass. Supporters of the bill were worried that it didn’t have the votes and that the floor time they wanted was not available. The same fate was given to other tech-focused antitrust bills, such as one that would have forced Apple to allow users to download iPhone apps from any website, not just its own app store.
For a brief moment this month, lawmakers were close to passing a bill requiring tech platforms to give more money to news organizations. The legislation was thrown into disarray after Meta said it would have to remove all news content from its platforms if the bill passed.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/washington-tiktok-big-tech/index.html
Do Social Media Professors and Professors in Silicon Valley Stand Up to the U.S. Laws? The Case for Social Media Research and Teaching in the 21st Century
Silicon Valley’s biggest players have successfully defended their turf on many occasions in Washington.
By contrast, the decisions about the rules the government might impose on tech platforms have thrown into question how they may affect different parts of the economy from small businesses to individual users.
Legislation that raises First Amendment issues as well as partisan divisions may be the reason for the proposed revision of the tech industry’s moderation liability shield. Democrats have said Section 230 should be changed because it gives social media companies a pass to leave some hate speech and offensive content unaddressed, while Republicans have called for changes to the law so that platforms can be pressured to remove less content.
It’s difficult for lawmakers to reach an accord because of the cross-cutting politics and technical challenges of regulating an entire sector of technology.
It’s crucial to establish a Republican brand. “Republicans are united by taking a strong stance and standing up to China,” says a University of California, San Diego professor.
Social media research and teaching have become a staple in higher education. The app has fundamentally changed the nature of modern communication with its aesthetics, practices, storytelling, and information-sharing.
From an educational standpoint, how are media and communications professors supposed to train students to be savvy content creators and consumers if we can’t teach a pillar of the modern media landscape? Students can access TikTok within their own homes, but Professors can no longer use PowerPoint or classroom websites to show links to TikTok. Brands, companies, and novel forms of storytelling all rely on TikTok, and professors will no longer be able to train their students in best practices for these purposes. Students can see things they’re learning in real time as TikTok makes parts of the world more accessible.
The world keeps turning as these states implement their bans, leaving their citizens disadvantaged in a fast-paced media world. Additionally, media and communications students in the states will be at a disadvantage in applying for jobs, showcasing communicative and technical mastery, and brand and storytelling skills, as their peers from other states will be able to receive education and training.
Professors also must do research. Social media scholars in these states quite literally cannot do what they have been hired to do and be experts in if these bans persist. While university compliance offices have said the bans may only be on campus Wi-Fi and mobile data is still allowed, who will foot that bill for one to pay for a more expensive data plan on their phone? No one answered the question. While working at home does remain an option, professors are also employees who are expected to be on campus regularly to show they are in fact working. This means any social media professor attempting to research TikTok on campus will have to rely on video streaming via mobile data, which can be quite expensive, either through having to individually pay for unlimited data, or accidentally going over one’s limits.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the CEO of TikTok is expected to face questions from Congress in March about safety and security on the app.
Earlier this month, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was reportedly considering offering a bill to ban a broader “category of applications” that could be applied to other apps that pose security risks, according to Axios.
The app, owned by ByteDance, Inc., has been under fire since the Trump administration, when the former president signed an executive order to enforce a nationwide ban of the app, but ByteDance sued and it never went through.
All executive agencies and those who contract with them have to remove any application from TikTok within 30 days of notice by Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Within 90 days, agencies must include in contracts that the short form video app cannot be used on devices and must cancel contracts that necessitate the app’s use.
In a rare public interview at last year’s New York Times DealBook summit, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew described “Project Texas,” the company’s plan to move all data from Virginia and Singapore to US-based Oracle servers overseen by a new subsidiary known as TikTok US Data Security Inc.
Responding to Monday’s hearing announcement, TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter welcomed “the opportunity to set the record straight.” Oberwetter said that TikTok will discuss its plan to protect US users during the March 23rd hearing.
Apple and the US: What will we learn from the India-US ban on tech innovation and app development? An analysis by Ricardel and Rubio
Unlike Google, Apple has a lot to lose regarding its relationship with both the US and China. Much of Cook’s success at Apple can be attributed to his ability to maintain working relationships with the Chinese government and manufacturers.
Observers expect Washington to take action. “We will see limitations this year,” says Mira Ricardel, a former White House deputy national security adviser now at the Chertoff Group advising businesses on regulations. “There is a unanimity of view that will lead to doing something.” Here are the things that it may look like.
India’s TikTok blockade is permeable. According to NetBlocks, there are a few small internet providers that allow access. And Ram Sundara Raman, lead developer for the University of Michigan’s Censored Planet project, says he was able to watch videos during a visit to India using the app he had downloaded in the US. But the ban has forced many Indian users to turn toward rival services, including from Google and Facebook, and has caused turmoil for influencers who built businesses on TikTok.
Trump’s order would have immediately prohibited app stores from distributing TikTok, and nearly two months later would have barred cloud providers and internet infrastructure services from doing business with the company. People or companies caught dodging the order could have faced fines or prison sentences. Ivan Kanapathy, vice president at policy consultants Beacon Global Strategies, said they wanted to start at the root, where it comes into the US.
The company wants the chance to set the record straight about TikTok and ByteDance.
Congress can take a more deliberative approach to issues when they know details of our comprehensive plans with the full Committee.
“If you’re certainly willing to fly a balloon over your continental airspace—and have people see it with a naked eye—what would make you not weaponize data? Or use an app that’s on the phone of 60 million Americans to drive narratives in society that try to influence political debate in this country?” says Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida.
“There’s no question about the fact that they are trying to gather as much data as they can about all aspects of our country, and even the most minuscule, small items can add up to providing them with more data,” says Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota. There is a lot of data but it is the small pieces that add up. They are working on it. They are patient. But they clearly see us as a threat, and they’re collecting data.”
After hosting Chew in his office last week, Senator Michael Bennet said that none of the suggested efforts were relevant to his concerns.
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Gen. Paul Nakasone said during testimony before the Senate armed services committee that he can change something, but also turn off the message if he has a lot of followers.
“Our status has been debated in public in a way that is divorced from the facts of that agreement and what we’ve achieved already. Brooke Oberwetter from TikTok said they would continue to deliver a comprehensive national security plan for the American people.
A bipartisan Senate bill drafted by Virginia DemocratMark Warner and South Dakota Republican John Thune is expected to be unveiled on Tuesday, and would give the Commerce Department authority to developmitigation measures to ensure the safety of foreign-linked technologies.
Like the US government push to ban hardware and other gear made by Huawei, another Chinese technology giant, US officials are often short on specifics when asked to show public proof of collusion between the Chinese government and ByteDance.
“People are always looking for the smoking gun in these technologies,” NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce told reporters in December. “I characterize it much more as a loaded gun.”
TikTok has 7,000 American employees, which is less than the 10,000 or more that TikTok aimed for in 2020 but a huge leap over the 1,400 US employees that year.
A move to lock TikTok out of the US would be a huge move that many Americans would notice, and TikTok is betting that they won’t like it.
