Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

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caltrek
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House Rebuke of TikTok CEO is a Bipartisan Affair
by Benjamin S. Weiss
March 23, 2023

Introduction:
WASHINGTON (Courthouse News) — A video of a firing handgun punctuated a hearing Thursday morning with the CEO of TikTok as some lawmakers pushed for a national ban against the social media platform.

The short TikTok clip, played by Florida Representative Kat Cammack, depicted what appeared to be a 3D rendering of a Glock 17 handgun firing with the caption “me asf [as f**k] at the House Energy and Commerce Committee on 03/23/23.”

After Cammack showed the video posted Feb. 10 during the meeting of the lower chamber’s energy panel, TikTok moderators quickly removed it. The clip had a little over 450 likes — thin gruel for a platform where some creators command engagement in the hundreds of thousands — but lawmakers positioned it regardless as an example of the threat posed by TikTok.

Cammack called it a blatant display of how vulnerable everyday users are on the platform.

“This video has been up for 41 days,” the Florida Republican told TikTok CEO Shou Chew, who was invited to give testimony. “It is a direct threat to the chairwoman of this committee and the people in this room. … You expect us to believe that you are capable of maintaining the data privacy and security of 150 million Americans, when you can’t even protect the people in this room?”

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/house-r ... n-affair/

caltrek’s comment: Defenders of free speech may object to the harsh scrutiny and criticism being levied against Tik Tok. Still, a lot rests on how truly independent from mainland China is Tik Tok?

Of course, one could also turn that argument around and apply it to social media platforms based in the U.S but operating in a foreign country. As an example, it would be a shame to see the Future Timeline forum banned or severely restricted across the globe simply because it is based in England. Still a big part of the equation rests on the size of the social media platform in question. The larger the size, the more appropriate it is to have oversight. So, yes, that even means that if certain foreign countries decide they don’t want a U.S based firm that is hogging up too much of their attending audience, then protective actions may be justified.
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caltrek
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Congress Might Want a TikTok Ban, But Their Questions Suggest Going Further
by Ali Breland
March 24, 2023

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) What if the United States government banned every single social media app? Not just TikTok. All of them. Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter–sayonara. It may sound ludicrous, but if you apply the logic behind the kinds of questions posed at Thursday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the data security risks and alleged harm to children posed by TikTok, that’s what the members inadvertently proposed.
During the hearing, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) called out TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew for spreading dangerous viral trends—like the blackout challenge, which shows kids how to intentionally pass out. Rep. Gus Billarakis (R-Fla.) lamented TikTok serving users videos sympathetic to suicide. Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) criticized illicit drug sales on the platform. Rep. Kim Schrier (D-Wash.) challenged the company for being addictive.

Carter, Billarakis, Guthrie, and others all essentially asked the same thing: What if we lived in a world where there was no algorithmic amplification of harmful content? That’s basically the same as asking: What if we lived in a world where there was no such thing as social media?

To be clear, encouraging self-harm, facilitating illegal drug sales, and deploying addictive design are bad, but they’re also not unique to TikTok. Every other social media platform has been a vector, to varying degrees, for such harms. Snapchat has become a vital tool for some drug dealers. Tumblr was infamously home to pro-eating disorder content. More bad things have happened on Facebook and YouTube than anyone could reasonably count. While it stands to reason TikTok’s powerful algorithm, which is uniquely good at widely distributing content, is probably better at distributing problematic, that isn’t desirable at any scale.

Alas, social media companies in their current form probably can’t exist without producing this kind of deleterious runoff. They’ve tried to get rid of the worst of it for years; they know that the PR risk of drug dealing and social security numbers theft is not worth the profit boost that minuscule subset of users brings. The same goes for content that directly encourages eating disorders or other self-harm.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... hearing/

caltrek’s comment: All of which reminds of the expression that “even paranoid people have enemies.”
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TikTok Hires Former Biden Staffer as it Fights U.S. Ban
by Donald Shaw
March 24, 2023

Introduction:
(Sludge) On the same day its CEO appeared before Congress for the first time, social video company TikTok hired a new lobbyist in D.C. who formerly worked for President Joe Biden.

Ankit Desai, the new TikTok lobbyist, was a legislative correspondent for Biden for 10 months in 2005 while he was a U.S. senator, as Sludge previously reported. Since January 2021, Desai has been a managing member at lobbying firm ABI Associates.

TikTok hired Desai to lobby in D.C. on “Issues related to internet technology, regulation of content platforms,” according to a disclosure filed with the Senate.

The video platform company is under increasing scrutiny from lawmakers who say they are concerned about its data surveillance practices as well as national security concerns stemming from the fact that it is owned by a Chinese company. In December 2022, President Biden signed into law legislation from Sen. John Hawley (R-Mo.) that bans TikTok from being installed on federal devices. Earlier this month, the White House called on TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to sell the app in order to avoid it being banned in the U.S. by Congress, a ramping up of its pressure which had previously focused on getting the company to sign a security deal with the U.S.

Desai is just one of the people in the Biden orbit who TikTok has recently hired. Public relations firm SKDK was also recently employed by the company according to reports. SKDK is very closely tied to the Biden administration, with many of its former employees having shifted to working in the administration in recent years. Most notable among these individuals is Anita Dunn, a founder and former partner at the firm, who is a senior advisor to Biden.
Read more here: https://readsludge.com/2023/03/24/tikto ... s-u-s-ban/
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Twitter pushes hate speech, extremist content into 'For You' pages
Source: Washington Post

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter is amplifying hate speech in its “For You” timeline, an unintended side effect of an algorithm that is supposed to show users more of what they want.

According to a Washington Post analysis of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, accounts that followed “extremists” — hate-promoting accounts identified in a list provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center — were subjected to a mix of other racist and incendiary speech. That included tweets from a self-proclaimed Nazi, for example, a user the account did not follow.

Many were from users previously suspended by Twitter and let back on by new owner Elon Musk, who pledged to de-boost hate speech following his takeover of the site.

The tweets appeared on Twitter’s new “For You” page, which the company unveiled in January as part of Musk’s redesigned site. Twitter says the timeline includes “suggested content powered by a variety of signals,” including “how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it.”
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... te-speech/
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