Thursday, September 24, 2020

TikTok and the problems of social media in a global information economy

John Herrman, What Happens When Americans Join the Global Internet, NYTimes, Sept. 22, 2020.
In contrast to mounting political criticisms of, say, Facebook and Twitter, platforms where the president is extremely active and invested, the government’s public case against TikTok has been largely speculative, citing theoretical dangers and hardly trying to appeal to the app’s users directly. It’s no surprise that the vague message from Ms. Pappas gave some users comfort, given how little this process has addressed them.

TikTok’s users are experiencing for the first time something long familiar to much of the world outside the United States: a flourishing online social space existentially threatened by diplomatic and political fights between states and corporations, with little input from those affected by their decisions. Likewise for WeChat, the Chinese messaging app used by millions in the U.S. to keep in touch with friends, families and colleagues abroad, which was set to be banned on Sunday until a federal court intervened.

To the limited extent that the plights of TikTok and WeChat have familiar precedents, they’re mostly overseas: China’s broad bans on foreign platforms including Facebook and Google; Russia’s “data localization” laws, which require foreign firms to store certain types of data locally; the occasional national shutdowns of Twitter, Facebook or YouTube during periods of political unrest in many countries around the world, including Egypt, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Turkey and others; or the Indian ban on TikTok and other Chinese internet services earlier this year. [...]

Worrying about a foreign government’s influence or access to data — or about whether imported competitors might hurt domestic firms — has been a burden for practically every country in the world except the United States, where many of the global internet’s most popular services were started. For a large majority of their users, Facebook, Twitter and Google are foreign firms.

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