TikTok is Banned in China, Notes X User Community - Along With Most US Social Media

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is 'on the wrong side of fair competition' was flagged by users on X. 'TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China,' the X community note read. (The BBC reports that 'Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.')

Newsweek adds that China 'has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world.'

From the Wall Street Journal:
Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, 'are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant....'

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. 'The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself,' Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users 'express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that.' In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

'The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. 'If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs.'
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review:
Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok 'radicalized' some of their supporters 'with disinformation or biased reporting,' according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues 'this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age.'

The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.

Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, 'who's making the decisions on how they're used?' And he also proposes a solution.

'If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.