US lawmakers have said there will be increased regulation of social media platforms in 2023. The development comes just days after Congress passed a bill banning the use of TikTok on government devices.
The critical and regulatory scrutiny around TikTok in the US has increased significantly in the past year as the short-video app became one of the world’s most popular social media platforms with over a billion monthly active users. Since TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based tech firm ByteDance, concerns are echoing in the federal ranks about the Chinese government’s potential contamination of US citizens’ personal data collected by the app. Some critics and regulators have expressed concerns that TikTok, under the country’s laws, can be forced to transfer specific datasets from the US to the Chinese government, especially information that is sensitive and confidential.
TikTok, on the other hand, has repeatedly claimed that it protects a user’s personal data properly. Last month, however, the company confirmed a few employees had managed to get hold of location information of a few US journalists and other TikTok staffers to investigate the potential leaks of confidential company information that circulated in the press earlier. The employees were fired after an internal investigation. The journalists whose locations were tracked were associated with such leading publications as BuzzFeed and Financial Times.
Despite its high pecuniary potential to empower individuals, communities, and small independent businesses, the resistance against TikTok and the efforts to get it banned are becoming more pronounced across the US. Even though TikTok has reiterated its US data is not based in China, lawmakers and some advocates refuse to believe the data is not accessible in China. Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallaghar, who is quite vocal against TikTok, has called for a nationwide ban on the app.
“It’s highly addictive and destructive,” Gallaghar said Sunday. “We’re seeing troubling data about the corrosive impact of constant social media use, particularly on young men and women here in America.”
The congressman’s statement indicated TikTok is surreptitiously tracking users’ location.
“Tiktok is owned by ByteDance, ByteDance is controlled by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], that means the CCP can track your location, it can track your keystrokes, it can censor your news — why would we give our foremost adversary that amount of power?”
Frances Haugen, former Meta employee turned whistleblower behind the widely reported on Facebook Papers in 2021, is of the opinion that leading social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter have the same algorithmic infrastructure and that there should be more transparency around their business practices. “This is like we’re back in 1965, we don’t have seatbelt laws yet,” Haugen said on the NBC show Meet the Press.
TikTok is among the fastest growing social media platforms in the world with more than one billion downloads globally. It took over Meta-owned platforms, Facebook and Instagram, in 2022 and penetrated various foreign markets, rapidly expanding its reach around the world. At the same time, however, user privacy and data protection on the platform have attracted ample scrutiny, with critics calling for more transparency around TikTok’s privacy and data-sharing practices.
