In yesterday's political turmoil, the House of Commons overwhelmingly supported The bill would force social media app TikTok to be sold from China-based owner ByteDance or face a ban. The Senate should be more sensible and delay this.
If you're worried that TikTok will become overrun with propaganda, disinformation, or anti-democratic junk, and you're hoping a sale to a U.S. company will improve that, we have bad news. The site formerly known as Twitter has been mired in the same quagmire ever since it was acquired by American billionaire and well-known narcissist Elon Musk. removed a large swath As a member of the trust and safety team, Pushing racist awesome alternative garbagewill be injected at the top of the user's feed. Algorithms tuned to improve his posts.
Lawmakers are concerned that vast amounts of user data, especially about young people, is being siphoned off, stored, sold to third parties, used for marketing and political targeting, and fed into AI training algorithms. If so, we wholeheartedly agree with that concern.
That's why they are hell-bent on making up for lost time, and have been allowed to grow over the past 30 years into a series of dominant monopolies with little oversight or guardrails, including not only ByteDance but also Meta. We should start looking at industries that have , Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube; Apple has cornered the device market and has firm control over the app store. and so on.
Stop rampant data collection and force transparency into opaque internal processes that affect billions of people. Don't like how the government uses your social media app data to override your civil liberties? Great, stop the NSA and other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies from committing criminal acts. Simply buy personal data Otherwise, a warrant would be required.
Better yet, stop widespread purchasing, bundling, and third-party sales of detailed personal data in the first place. Although it bills itself as a center of innovation, it boosts competition in an industry that has run out of venture capital and been reduced to upstarts until an exit plan to be acquired by one of the tech giants ends. Show companies that they can't play roughshod over regulations: Gone are the days when Uber and Airbnb could openly ignore the law without much consequence.
If lawmakers refuse to take any action on this matter, perhaps it indicates that TikTok is an easy scapegoat because of its ownership by the Chinese government. The Chinese Communist Party is attempting to interfere in American elections in violation of American law. But the Politburo doesn't need to own the app for its pranks.
Indeed, despite months of insinuations, lawmakers have yet to present any concrete evidence that TikTok has been exploited by the Chinese government, or at least not by U.S.-based companies like Twitter. Not so compared to its competitors. It was a trajectory A massive disinformation campaign by the Xi Jinping regime.
Perhaps this ambiguity is indicative of what the tech industry's large lobby has bought. A staggering $70 million in Congress alone in 2022.That's more than big companies like oil and pharmaceuticals, not even considering the surge in lobbying spending at the national level. I'm embarrassed.
