For years, national security experts have been warning Americans that TikTok is a danger because it is too vulnerable to political manipulation by China. Now the White House has outlined a deal to transfer most of the ownership of the company’s American arm to a consortium of investors. President Trump has mentioned several likely members of that consortium, business leaders who have supported his policies and advanced his agenda — raising the question of whether TikTok’s new incarnation would be equally vulnerable to political manipulation, this time by the White House.
We don’t know yet whether Mr. Trump’s deal will be finalized, nor, if it is, how much power those investors’ companies (or TikTok’s parent company, or Beijing, for that matter) will have over the app’s inner workings. However it plays out, the proposed change in ownership is a chance for both federal and state lawmakers to diminish the threat that TikTok or any other app might seed our feeds with propaganda. Our elected officials can do this, now, by forcing tech companies to reveal which messages they’re serving users in what quantities and why.
In this and many other regulatory matters, Congress has proved useless, spinelessly letting Mr. Trump blow past the restrictions on TikTok that it passed before he took office. Now that his plan looks likely to succeed, it’s not too late to build in this urgent measure of accountability. The American public should demand it.
In 2021, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation that showed how Facebook (where I once worked) had prioritized profit over safety — and in the process rewarded angry rhetoric and harmed teenagers’ self-esteem. A bipartisan group of lawmakers rallied, insisting that Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t have so much power over our discourse. When Facebook lost traction and TikTok rose in its place, lawmakers again rallied to insist that the Chinese government shouldn’t have that power either.
Today, amid remarkable media consolidation and a federal government crackdown on speech, the threat of platform manipulation is worse than ever. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is the least accountable social media platform of all.
Is it suppressing information that Beijing doesn’t like? Is it manipulating public discourse, pushing its chosen agenda? At present, it’s hard to be sure. There’s no way to look up the 10, 100 or 1,000 most popular posts on the app. And because everyone’s feed is different, it’s virtually impossible to compare across a wide number of users.
While the terms of the potential deal are still being worked out, lawmakers should require TikTok — and beyond it, all social media platforms — to publish live, searchable databases of their posts, which researchers, journalists and lawmakers can use to track online discourse. This wouldn’t deprive the companies of their trade secrets. It would just allow us to check the ingredients on what we’re all consuming.
There’s precedent here. For years, a browser-based tool called CrowdTangle offered deep insights into what was happening at Facebook, revealing a post’s view counts and engagement numbers and whether it was over- or underperforming in the context of the account that produced it. CrowdTangle could reveal posts with anomalous success just as they were starting to break through, and help expose even subtle, narrowcast disinformation.
In 2016, Facebook bought CrowdTangle, and for years, maintained it. Researchers at Stanford and Columbia used it to reveal the reach of Russian propaganda, and academics at Harvard and Johns Hopkins used it to track public attitudes about Covid-19 vaccines. Journalists also began using CrowdTangle to report on Facebook itself, revealing that right-wing provocateurs seemed to do better than other creators on the platform. The reporting caused a scandal that the company’s C-suite did not much enjoy, and in 2021, Facebook broke up CrowdTangle’s team. Last year, Meta shut it down.
CrowdTangle’s death is a near-perfect illustration of why legislatures can’t just trust social platforms to act in the public interest, or to give us the information we need and deserve. Lawmakers should force these companies to give us much more visibility into what they’re feeding users. And they should make these companies give us much more visibility into what their advertisers are feeding users, too, since the personalization of social media makes it otherwise virtually impossible to tell.
The European Union shows how it could be done. Large platforms operating in that region are required to maintain ad libraries: public, queryable databases that show who’s paying to advertise what. In 2023, using those databases, a colleague and I found that Chinese state media had run a flood of propagandizing ads on TikTok in Europe, reaching millions of people. Some were bland, such as cats playing on the Great Wall. Some were sinister, such as apparent attempts to whitewash the oppression of the Uyghur minority. This research would not have been possible without that kind of database. But Chinese propaganda isn’t limited to Europe, and it isn’t limited to TikTok.
Is TikTok (or Instagram or YouTube) amplifying or suppressing speech to keep the Chinese Communist Party or the White House happy, to make itself look good or to make its competitors look bad? Instead of just wondering and worrying, we should be able to answer those questions with data and rigor. The alternative is to continue letting platforms control the narrative about their own effects on society. We have more than enough reason to conclude that this approach does not work.
Congress has considered mandating transparency for tech companies before. The idea is nonpartisan, but its mechanisms would have to be carefully negotiated. In 2021, the founder of CrowdTangle helped lawmakers figure out how a transparency law might work, with a focus on forcing disclosure about “news and civic content.” Lawmakers have also considered using the Federal Trade Commission to enforce platform transparency — an idea that might not work today, given Mr. Trump’s efforts to remake the agency.
Congress wouldn’t need the F.T.C., though, to require companies to maintain CrowdTangle-esque tools and ad libraries. It could designate a different enforcement entity, or even create a new body to oversee companies’ compliance with transparency requirements. And if Congress won’t do it, even one or two large states passing strong transparency laws could change companies’ practices across the whole country.
Now is the moment for legislation — while this deal is closing — to reset expectations about how tech companies shape our information ecosystem. Private, opaque companies like ByteDance (and the new U.S. TikTok, if a deal goes through) control which ads, news reports, conspiracy theories, electoral candidate clips and other messages are pushed out to millions of people every morning. At the very least, they should have to show us what those messages are.
That way, we can detect covert propaganda, whether it’s made in China or patriotically re-shored right here in America.
Emily Baker-White is a senior writer at Forbes and the author of “Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok.”
Source photograph by Jeffrey Hamilton/Getty Images
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