Let's talk TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media company that has taken hold of the nation’s ever-shrinking attention span. TikTok has seen a tremendous amount of growth in the last couple of years, though it’s been accompanied by an equally tremendous level of scrutiny, primarily due to its Chinese roots. There has been a growing chorus of voices in the U.S. calling for the ban of the app, and it has already been banned on several university campuses and from the government devices of most federal employees. TikTok poses a host of national security dangers to Americans, but TikTok and its surrounding controversies also reveal more dangers in our own home-grown social media companies.
First, let’s establish what TikTok actually is. TikTok is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. TikTok is an entirely separate, internationalized version of Douyin, which was released in the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018. TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. The two products are similar, but their features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them, along with other features such as buying, booking hotels, and making geo-tagged reviews.
Douyin, despite its similar interface, serves a very different purpose than TikTok. The domestic, Chinese version of this app serves educational and patriotic content to its young users, with a hard limit of 40 minutes a day, while the international form of TikTok is designed to hook its users with addictive content served at a rapid, non-stop pace. Tristan Harris, the executive director and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, described it as quote, “they make their domestic version a spinach TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world" end quote. It is worth noting that this addictive model is far from unique to TikTok, though TikTok is this very unique case as we have two versions with different purposes to compare. And it’s owned by a nation that many consider to be one of America’s greatest rivals.
In its privacy policy, TikTok lists that it collects usage information, IP addresses, a user's mobile carrier, unique device identifiers, keystroke patterns, and location data, among other data. TikTok has long claimed that peoples’ data is not sent back to ByteDance, the parent company which is controlled by the Chinese government. However, ByteDance itself confirmed that four of its employees in China scooped up the data of two TikTok accounts belonging to U.S. journalists, according to an internal investigation by the company towards the end of last year. So, the company has admitted they can access this data, and while it is likely an exaggeration to state that the Chinese government has easy access to this data, let’s assume that they do. What does that data give them the power to do?
TikTok, along with every other social media service, collects data on its users with the goal of constructing an accurate model of each individual user. By examining statistics on watch-time, likes, dislikes, subscriptions, and demographic data like age and gender, sites like TikTok create a model that’s able to predict that person’s next move on the app. Using this model, TikTok serves content that is most likely to get that individual to stay on the app, in addition to selling that user’s ad time to advertisers targeting people with a similar model. These models are created using advanced machine learning techniques that are completely beyond human understanding.
Machine learning is the engine behind every social network’s success, so to understand TikTok, we must understand the basis of the algorithm behind it. However, it is worth noting that no one knows exactly how any social media company’s algorithm works. That information is a closely guarded trade secret, and due to how these algorithms are created, the companies themselves don’t fully understand how they work in the first place. The algorithm that decides what video is shown next on TikTok or what videos are suggested on YouTube or whatever form of content on whatever social network is created by giving an algorithm a goal. That goal can be increased viewer retention, interactions including likes, dislikes, comments, and shares, improved user retention, meaning how long they stay on the service, or any combination of these and more. The algorithm then creates itself.
Basically, the algorithm tracks the actions of users, and it pays attention to the content that gets closest to achieving that goal. That kind of content is rewarded by being shown to more people. This has led to a growth of content designed almost entirely to divide and be controversial. When TikTok shows you a video of someone acting insane or rambling about a conspiracy theory or something like that, you may not like it, but you may feel compelled to comment about how insane you think it is. Commenting is rewarding the algorithm, and since it is more time consuming than likes, they are often also more valuable. With that in mind, these controversial videos get spread around more and more, and eventually, plenty of people who may be vulnerable to believing this content will see it, and like it, causing TikTok to reward that video further and suggest more content like it to those vulnerable people. This is the source of much of our political polarization today.
TikTok is undeniably contributing to political division in the United States and other countries today, in addition to almost certainly providing detailed models of human activity to the Chinese government. It is very important to note, however, that it is only that second part that primarily concerns American politicians. If TikTok is banned, as seems increasingly likely due to the bipartisan support behind the idea, only the Chinese government aspect is eliminated. The division continues on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and just about every other social network, major or otherwise. They all have these algorithms, and they all create these human models that know more about you than you know yourself. The only difference is how they provide that information to advertisers, our own government, and anyone else for a nominal fee. TikTok is dangerous, but that does not mean the other social networks are safe.
Comments