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Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

A Note about TikTok

illustrations of many different objects and animals

illustrations of many different objects and animals

Anticipating Decisions

Irina Raicu

Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Hidden Labour of Internet Browsing / CC-BY 4.0 - cropped

Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program (@IEthics) at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are her own.

Following a hearing last Friday, the Supreme Court is poised to decide whether a law widely described as a ban on TikTok in the U.S. can pass constitutional muster.

The TikTok case is about the intersection of 3 things: 1) the collection of a lot of personal data about more than 170 million American users; 2) the delivery of many kinds of information to 170 million American users; and 3) the fact that the entity controlling both the data collection and the information delivery (as well as amplification and downranking of posts) is subject to Chinese law and governmental pressure.

The analogies offered in recent court hearings and elsewhere don't map well onto that confluence. Most traditional media sites don't collect as much information about their readers and don't personalize their content as much in response. Many commerce sites do collect lots of information but aren't information providers. And most social media sites most clearly comparable to TikTok, both in terms of content control and in terms of privacy concerns, are based in the U.S. and primarily governed by U.S. law.

Had TikTok been owned by a French or Swedish company, the situation would have been different. The law at issue is called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” so a lot depends on which countries are deemed by the U.S. government to be “adversaries.”

Many civil rights groups in the U.S. (including the ACLU) have come out against the law, focusing on its impact on “American’s speech and access to information.” Some of the Supreme Court justices pushed back against those arguments.

What remains to be seen, even if the Supreme Court allows the law to stand, is how effective its enforcement might be. Will U.S. users continue to access TikTok (and other Chinese social media apps, given the flood of self-described “TikTok refugees” to platforms like Xiaohongshu and Lemon8), using VPNs, for example? (A separate question is whether they should continue to use it; in considering that, a framework for ethical decision-making might help.)

The concern about the data privacy of American users is warranted—but so is the concern that this particular law (if allowed to stand) won’t be an effective response.

Image: Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Hidden Labour of Internet Browsing / CC-BY 4.0 -- cropped

Jan 15, 2025
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