Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) is the President of Signal and the Cofounder and Chief Advisor of the AI Now Institute.
Earlier this month, the United States House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a bill that would force TikTok’s parent company to sell the platform to U.S. citizens or be banished from the U.S. market. The same fate could await any other platform the President designates as a “foreign adversary-controlled application.” A loud mix of celebration and outcry greeted the bill’s movement, splitting both right and left and placing common allies across from each other. While its path in the Senate remains uncertain, the issues the bill raises and the political fissures it has exposed must be critically engaged.
In this I am not a neutral observer. I stake a position in the “outcry” camp. I see no evidence that this bill will offer meaningful privacy protection from China, the United States, or anyone else, or liberate people from the mental buffeting of engagement-driven algorithms. What the bill would do is ensure that TikTok joins almost all other widely-used social media platforms on earth under U.S. control, enriching U.S., not Chinese, interests and further entrenching U.S. social network dominance. U.S.-owned social media platforms include the top four most widely used services in the world, with TikTok lagging far behind YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Nineteen of the twenty most widely used social media platforms in the world are based in either the United States or China — making all other countries consumers, not developers, of these services. In light of the existing concentration of military and financial power in the United States, handing the country even more “control” over all relevant social media platforms is not something we should reflexively embrace — especially when there is no evidence that U.S. control will make them meaningfully better in any way.
In this brief essay, I outline why I am particularly concerned with the implications of U.S. control in our present political moment, a view that is rooted in concerns for free speech and expression. Those who raise such concerns often do so in bad faith, and because of this, liberals and some on the left tend to dismiss these worries out of hand. In ceding speech and expression to the right, they misunderstand the problem that the current tech industry and its business model present, and thus proffer the wrong solutions, with this TikTok bill being just the most recent example.
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