This week, the Home Vitality and Commerce Committee will maintain a full committee listening to with TikTok CEO Shou Chew to debate how the platform handles customers’ knowledge, its impact on youngsters, and its relationship with ByteDance, its Chinese language mother or father firm.
This listening to is a part of an ongoing investigation to find out whether or not TikTok ought to be banned in america or compelled to separate from ByteDance.
A ban on TikTok would have an effect on over 150 million Individuals who use TikTok for training, leisure, and earnings technology.
It will additionally have an effect on the 5 million U.S. companies utilizing TikTok to succeed in clients.
Is TikTok The Solely Threat To Nationwide Safety?
In keeping with a memo launched by the Tech Oversight Venture, TikTok isn’t the one tech platform that poses dangers to nationwide safety, psychological well being, and youngsters.
As Congress scrutinizes TikTok, the Tech Oversight Venture additionally strongly urges an investigation of dangers posed by tech corporations like Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google.
These platforms have a documented historical past of serving content material dangerous to youthful audiences and adversarial to U.S. pursuits. They’ve additionally failed on many events to guard customers’ non-public knowledge.
Many Large Tech corporations have seen TikTok’s success and tried to emulate a few of its options to encourage customers to spend as a lot time inside their platforms’ ecosystems as attainable. Lecturers, activists, non-governmental organizations, and others have lengthy raised considerations about these platforms’ dangers.
To actually cut back Large Rech’s dangers to our society, Congress should look past TikTok and maintain different corporations accountable for a similar risks they pose to nationwide safety, psychological well being, and personal knowledge.
Dangers Posed By Large Tech Corporations
The next are examples of the dangers Large Tech corporations pose to U.S. customers.
Amazon
Amazon has made a number of controversial strikes, together with a partnership with a state propaganda company to launch a China books portal and providing AWS companies to Chinese language corporations, together with a banned surveillance agency with ties to the army.
Apple
Impartial analysis discovered that Apple collects detailed details about its customers, even when customers select to not permit monitoring by apps from the App Retailer. Over half of the highest 200 suppliers for Apple function factories in China.
The FTC fined Google and YouTube $170 million for accumulating youngsters’s knowledge with out parental consent. YouTube additionally modified its algorithm to make it extra addictive, growing customers’ time watching movies and consuming adverts.
Meta
Fb allowed Cambridge Analytica to reap the non-public knowledge of over 50 million customers. It additionally didn’t notify over 530 million customers of an information breach that resulted in customers’ non-public knowledge being stolen.
It additionally allowed Russian interference within the 2016 elections. The affect operation posed as an impartial information group with 13 accounts and two pages, pushing messages crucial of right-wing voices and the center-left.
TikTok
TikTok workers confirmed that its Chinese language mother or father firm, ByteDance, is concerned in decision-making and has entry to TikTok’s consumer knowledge. Whereas testifying earlier than the Senate Homeland Safety Committee, Vanessa Pappas, TikTok COO, wouldn’t verify whether or not ByteDance would give TikTok consumer knowledge to the Chinese language authorities.
Conclusion
Whereas the risks posed by TikTok are simple, it’s clear that Congress also needs to deal with the dangers posed all through the tech business. By holding all main offenders accountable, we will create a protected, safe, and accountable digital panorama for everybody.
Featured Picture: Koshiro Okay/Shutterstock
