Let’s do TikTok all over again?!?!
That sound you’re hearing might be my frustrated shrieking.
The arrangement to keep the TikTok app operating in the United States under the partial ownership of Walmart and Oracle is … probably not happening, The Wall Street Journal reported.
You might recall that this deal last year was the result of the bizarre spectacle involving the president of the United States negotiating a business deal in public with some of the world’s powerful executives.
This was motivated by concerns about TikTok being owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. Because there’s little separation in China between private companies and the government, some American officials feared that the short-video app could be abused to spread propaganda and steal Americans’ personal information.
Some of the concerns about TikTok were legitimate, and some seemed motivated by misdirected nationalism. Either way, the U.S. government’s threat to shut down TikTok and the scramble to make its ownership more American amounted to nothing.
But now, there’s a chance for a do-over. The Journal reported that the Biden administration was determining its own response to the potential risk of Chinese software.
This time around, let’s be more thoughtful about how we approach this. Because while TikTok is the first wildly popular technology in America that originates from China, I doubt it will be the last.
This time, let’s consider ways to make all kinds of apps — not just TikTok — more transparent about material dictated by computers that can pull people into conspiracy theories. This is a chance to reconsider mostly unrestrained harvesting of Americans’ data — by foreign and domestic companies.
This is an opportunity, too, for Americans and our government to grapple with what we want to do about global technology becoming less dominated by the United States. One question is whether American officials and the public should be focusing attention on the most serious technology threats from abroad. (TikTok might not be it.)
And lastly, all of this requires our politicians and companies like Facebook to stop using China as a catchall boogeyman.
TikTok Part 1 was pointless. Let’s make the sequel mean something.
Before we go …
A less shouty Facebook feed. Maybe: The company shifted its computer formulas in a test to show people less material deemed political, my colleagues Kevin Roose and Mike Isaac reported. The goal is to make the feed feel less heated, but Facebook stopped similar experiments in the past after determining that they reduced the time people spent on the app.
Don’t ignore Twitter vs. India: On grounds of free speech, Twitter is refusing the Indian government’s demands to block some accounts belonging to journalists, activists and politicians, BuzzFeed News wrote. My colleague Karan Deep Singh wrote that Twitter did block or hide from view hundreds of other accounts on government orders. This might be the biggest showdown so far between a social media company and a democratically elected government.
These people are good. More people like this, please. My colleague Sharon Otterman and CNN wrote about people who are using their tech expertise to pinpoint open coronavirus vaccination appointments and round them up on simple websites or on social media.
Hugs to this
HAVE YOU SEEN THE ZOOM CAT LAWYER? A Zoom legal hearing (briefly) became a spectacle when a lawyer couldn’t remove a kitty cat virtual image.
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