Trump’s TikTok Deal Would Further Entrench Big Tech Surveillance
The transfer of TikTok’s United States operation to a group of Trump administration-selected controlling investors should be vigorously opposed, as it would effectively endorse the current extractive system shaping our social media platforms and most other commercial digital services.
TikTok orchestrates its social media marketing business in the same ways that Meta and Google do — harvesting our data, leveraging the power of the now ubiquitous generative artificial intelligence products, closely partnering with the most powerful global brands, ad agencies and adtech companies and enabling an array of human and virtual influencers — all to generate the mechanisms of “engagement” that are the core of the commercial surveillance monetization model for our digital media.
How are we ever to reform our country’s current digital media giants — as well as the AI behemoths lined up to become new, ad-saturated marketplaces — if our government uncritically sanctions the current business model?
A US TikTok should be required, at the very least, to operate its data practices in ways that really protect privacy, shield users from manipulative and unfair marketing tactics, adopt accountable generative AI applications, and serve in ways that strengthen our democracy, including by promoting civic discourse, civil rights and diverse viewpoints.
While such proposals may appear to be digital “pie in the sky” aspirations at this perilous political moment, the transfer of TikTok’s US ownership and its connections to recent and pending mega-media mergers is precisely the moment to make our views known and put up a fight.
Related Knowledge Center: The TikTok ban
The U.S. Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed into law a measure banning TikTok if it weren’t sold by its Chinese ownership. But now-President Donald Trump gave the service a reprieve, and a sale of its U.S. operations appears imminent.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance
Related Knowledge Center: State surveillance
While government monitoring of personal digital communications has traditionally been associated with authoritarian regimes such as China, the Trump regime has moved to use citizens’ personal information in unprecedented ways.
Digital privacy and data security | FISA — Section 702