So far, the Texas Project has appeared to be primarily a geography exercise, one that seems well-positioned to address concerns about the Chinese government’s access to Americans’ personal information. But it did not mention other ways China could weaponize the platform, like tweaking the TikTok algorithm to increase visibility of divisive content, or tweaking the platform to seed or encourage campaigns. translate misinformation.
Adam Segal, director of the Cyber and Digital Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told BuzzFeed News that the influence of the Chinese government over TikTok’s algorithms is a more pressing concern. is data intrusion. “I’ve never seen a particularly good argument about what the Chinese can get from TikTok data that they can’t get from hundreds of other sources,” he said. But he pointed to examples of the Chinese Communist Party using technology to distort digital discourse, including that of TikTok. previous censorship Harmful statements to China’s “national honor” and 2020 efforts by a China-based Zoom employee to interrupt video meetings commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre.
TikTok vehemently denied Allegedly it censors speech critical of China today. And members of TikTok’s Trust & Safety team, which makes and enforces content policies for the company, describe it as relatively isolated from ByteDance’s influence. Employees describe Trust & Safety employees as having less contact with Beijing and clearer reporting lines than other employees BuzzFeed News spoke with – and describe Trust & Safety operations of TikTok is similar to the methods adopted by the US-based tech giants. However, the question of reporting structure remains large: Like other senior TikTok officials, its head of Trust & Safety reports to TikTok’s CEO, who reports to ByteDance as how to be the company owner of TikTok. And as long as the coin stops with ByteDance, “there is a ceiling” for TikTok to distance itself from the Chinese government, Lewis said.
US lawmakers have made it clear that their concerns about TikTok extend beyond where the data is stored. In a year 2019 tweetSenator Chuck Schumer said that under Chinese law, TikTok and ByteDance “may be forced to cooperate with intelligence operations controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” In October 2021 Senate hearing, TikTok’s Head of Public Policy for the Americas, Michael Beckerman testified that TikTok’s privacy policy allows it to share the information it collects (including US user data) with ByteDance . He declined to answer questions from Senator Ted Cruz about whether the policy would allow TikTok to share that data with Beijing ByteDance Technology, another ByteDance subsidiary partly owned by the Chinese Communist Party. or not.
At the same hearing, Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Beckerman if ByteDance employees had access to TikTok’s algorithm. Beckerman, who did not directly answer the question, said that US user data is kept in the US. Blackburn also asked if there are programmers, product developers and data teams in China working on TikTok. Beckerman confirmed that yes.
Lawmakers outside the US have also raised concerns about TikTok’s relationship with China. In June 2020, the government of India forbidden TikTok, WeChat and more than 50 other Chinese apps after a clash on the India-China border left 20 Indian soldiers dead. India’s regulator, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, alleges that the apps “stealed and smuggled” Indian user data to data centers outside of India. In August 2020, intelligence agencies in Australia start investigating whether TikTok poses a security threat to the country. In September 2021, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission opened an investigation about how TikTok transfers user data to countries outside the European Union.
The parallels between different countries’ regulatory concerns about TikTok and China underscore the potential importance of Project Texas. If successful in the US, the project could serve as a roadmap for TikTok in other jurisdictions (possibly even in India, where it has been banned). It could also serve as a model for other large companies, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, which face similar concerns from foreign regulators about the collection of personal information. of their citizens.
Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the Stanford Project – New America DigiChina at Stanford University’s Center for Cyber Policy, considers TikTok “a guinea pig” to lawmakers’ inherent skepticism about public companies. Foreign companies collect data on their citizens. Still, Webster says he’s optimistic, because ByteDance has great incentive to make regulators completely comfortable with TikTok.
“This is a company that is looking for a way to make this really work,” he said. “They’ll keep trying until there’s a clear failure, because the money on the table is huge.” ●
