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.
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The post A U.S. Sale Isn’t Enough. Here’s How to Make TikTok Safer. appeared first on New York Times.
