U.S. lawmakers are apparently competing to see who can emerge as the fiercest opponent of social media. In mid-March, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a law forcing Chinese company ByteDance to sell video-sharing platform TikTok to a U.S. company or another company not located in a “hostile country.” If ByteDance fails to sell TikTok (it’s hard to imagine who could absorb such a large business without facing antitrust concerns), the platform, which has 170 million U.S. users, could suddenly become inaccessible.
This does not constitute a TikTok ban. The Senate would need to pass the legislation, and any ban would be followed by a lengthy appeals process. But surprisingly, the proposed ban is popular on both sides of the political spectrum. Joe Biden has said he will sign the legislation, although former President Donald Trump, who originally proposed banning TikTok, now opposes the ban, amid speculation that Biden has begun to face opposition to him on the platform. Attack of progressive youth. No action against Gaza.
When a country that values free markets and free speech is considering a mandatory sale or wholesale ban of a popular video-sharing platform, it’s not hard to see the contradiction. Indeed, a blanket ban on TikTok would put the United States alongside increasingly authoritarian India and Afghanistan. India banned the platform citing national sovereignty, while Afghanistan banned it as anti-Islamic. The argument that TikTok poses a national security risk — the rationale for the United States, Britain and several other European countries to ban it from government equipment — is more theoretical than practical. Yes, TikTok’s powerful algorithm has the potential to influence public opinion, but evidence of any coordinated attempt at manipulation is conspicuously lacking.
Government officials worry that China could use the information collected on users to spy on their movements or activities, but experts point out that TikTok collects more or less the same data as companies like Facebook. Combating this behavior through app-specific bans would make less sense than passing comprehensive privacy legislation. Some of the serious concerns about TikTok — its addictive nature, the adverse effects it may have on young people — could be addressed in less radical ways.
However, a wave of social media bans appears to be underway in the United States. States such as Florida, Louisiana and Utah have passed legislation banning users under 16 from using social media without parental permission. Civil rights groups say these bans are harmful to LGBT+ youth, who may find support in digital communities (especially when they face hostility from their parents), and that such bans impact young people’s ability to organize and protest online. However, it seems likely that some of these restrictions will be expanded nationwide. The most important of these efforts is KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act), which has bipartisan support and requires platforms to actively work to prevent young people from encountering content that may be exploitative or damaging to their mental health.
There are at least three forces at work behind these social media restrictions. One is the fact that many different groups view Big Tech as the villain, which means all parties can agree to join forces to deal with it. Those on the right believe social media companies conspire to silence their voices through algorithmic discrimination and blocking of content. Left-leaning politicians balk at reckless uses of concentrated corporate power. Even a long-time Internet supporter like me has a hard time defending companies that pay lip service to platform security while building lucrative and intrusive businesses around user data collection.
The second force pushing for social media bans is the “parents’ rights” movement, which has gained traction among the Christian right in the United States, where parents believe they have the right to restrict which books their children can be exposed to in school and which ideas they can be exposed to in the classroom. . If we accept the idea that parents should be able to veto curricular decisions that affect the entire school system, it’s easy to see how the argument that parents should be able to control their children’s social media behavior arises.
Even a long-time Internet supporter like me has trouble defending social media companies
Finally, there is a fierce academic debate about the impact of social media on young people. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt supports the idea that social media is “reshaping” young people to become more anxious and depressed. Most academic research on social media does not find that social media has a negative impact on most young people, although there are signs that young women in particular may be experiencing negative effects on body image. Although there has been an increase in young people reporting anxiety and depression, it is difficult to argue that this is primarily due to social media, as social norms are changing broadly to de-stigmatize mental illness and make it more difficult for young people to seek help. more common.
Even as these forces come together, stopping young people from engaging with social media remains fraught with difficulties. All such proposals rely on the system to verify the age of a given user. Previous attempts to require the use of documents such as government-issued ID for age verification have been complicated by a challenge in a U.S. federal court: In a country with a deep-seated distrust of authority as its founding, showing government ID to access the internet would put people at risk not feeling well. in principle. Furthermore, U.S. speech protections make blanket bans of content very difficult to enforce, and most First Amendment speech protections apply to both minors and adults.
It is instructive to contrast the range of legislation in the United States with legislative developments in the European Union, where two major pieces of legislation, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, have recently come into force. The sweeping legislation aims to limit the power of six “gatekeepers” – five Americans and one Chinese – who control large swaths of the internet market. The full impact of these laws will not be immediately clear until we see the implementation, enforcement and challenges of the relevant legislation. But initial expectations are that Google and Apple may need to offer alternatives to their proprietary app stores and let users choose which default web browsers they use on their phones. A similar ban could force Amazon to stop favoring private brands in search results. For researchers like me, perhaps the most interesting element is the promising (albeit vague) assurance that researchers can access the data they need to apply for external review, a series of tweaks that could reverse the current major social The trend towards opacity within media platforms.
It is worth asking what vision of the Internet these different legislative proposals embody. What do these laws tell us about the internet, 30 years after it escaped the physical laboratory and took over pop culture?
U.S. legislation states that we believe the Internet is dangerous and out of control: not suitable for children, even though they often understand and use these tools more fluently than their parents. The United States embraces the idea that social media is a powerful political force that must be kept out of the hands of foreign adversaries — a view that contradicts the reality that we also distrust American companies, at least when it comes to them so. Child welfare. It’s a vision that evokes both alarm and regret: After a decade of almost complete inaction to limit the influence of these new media companies, there is now a desperate rush to protect Americans from the extreme behavior of social media.
The EU’s stance is less alarmist and more explicitly protectionist. Powerful companies from outside the EU are believed to operate in ways that violate European values. The new standards will not be developed to treat any EU company as a gatekeeper, so none of them explicitly aim to increase transparency and regulation – which is entirely coincidental. But implicit in the EU’s vision is the hope that a more transparent and competitive internet can create space for new platforms to emerge within Europe.
Both of these views of the internet are negative because they both focus on saying “no” to contemporary excesses. America’s leaders are demanding an internet that’s safer for kids, but we’re not suddenly being inundated with government money to study what kind of digital communities are healthy for young people, or to fund trials that can help them cope with anxiety and The new network of anxiety. social pressure.
The EU’s vision envisions an Internet in which the United States and China are no longer central players, but this vision is not accompanied by the investments we might want in experiments to build platforms centered on European values of privacy and user autonomy. Small-scale experiments with community-led events and platforms such as PublicSpaces and PubHubs in the Netherlands, as well as the recent interest in Mastodon from German developers, herald a future of more open and inclusive European-rooted platforms. Unfortunately, there is currently no sign of a sustained challenge to the centrality of existing multi-billion dollar platforms.
At a time like this, it might be worth looking at Tim Berners-Lee, who got us into this mess in the first place. On the 35th anniversary of his invention, Berners-Lee published an open letter to the Internet, imploring us to address “a degree of concentration of power that contradicts the spirit of decentralization I originally envisioned.”He offers a simple diagnosis of how we got here: “Hindered by a lack of diversity, leadership has abandoned the tools of the public good [towards] Instead, it is subject to capitalist forces, leading to monopoly. “
Berners-Lee offered his new digital architecture, Solid, as a possible framework for a new internet, based on the idea that users should own and control their data, rather than having it locked away in the servers of big businesses. Whether Solid will be able to solve many of the current Internet’s problems, real or imagined, remains a lengthy discussion. It’s encouraging that 35 years after technological changes brought the web into homes and workplaces around the world, its creators are still able to advance their positive vision for the future. As we seek to address the excesses of the modern web, we should challenge ourselves to imagine alternatives as broadly and optimistically as Berners-Lee did.