The Tok of the Town

It's a new week. We have a new president. The vibes are not great. About a million and one things happened with TikTok over the weekend, so let's talk about them.

Here's what happened, somewhat chronologically

• In his final hours as president, Joe Biden essentially kicked the can down the road for the TikTok ban. He wasn't gunna be president on Monday, so he took his hands off.
• TikTok vowed to go dark Sunday, January 19. By the letter of the law, this was not strictly necessary. Apple and Google removing the app from their app stores that day was strictly necessary.
• Breathless quibbling about the rule of law ensues. On one side we have Congress, who passed a law and got it signed by the (now former) president. On the other side, we have Trump and the legions of people who don't want the app to disappear.
• Trump says he will direct the DOJ not to enforce the law, and says something to the effect that Apple and Google will not face penalty for allowing downloads of the app. Except that doesn't totally appear to be something a president can do? Here's a breakdown from The Verge:

It’s unclear whether Trump can legally pause the TikTok ban. The law allowed for a 90-day extension if ByteDance announced a sale to a non-“foreign adversary”-based company before the deadline. But not only has no such sale been announced, it’s also legally ambiguous whether the extension can be used after the 19th. Trump, in any case, isn’t so far using the deadline — he’s just attempting to override the law.

​Despite that reassurance, it still may not be enough to convince service providers covered by the law to reinstate TikTok. As many legal experts have pointed out, those companies could face up to about $850 billion in potential penalties for violating the law — which was passed by a bipartisan Congress, signed by former President Joe Biden, and upheld by the entire Supreme Court.

• So now the app is back to functioning, but with this kinda wild legal grey area. It's sorta up to the lawyers at Apple and Google, who as of this writing have not added TikTok back to the app store, perhaps out of hesitations surrounding the penalties they may face. By the letter of the law, these companies would face $5,000 fines for each individual person who accesses the app via the App Store or the Play Store.
• So if you've already downloaded TikTok, you can still use it and it should be functioning normally.

From where I sit

There are so, so many insane things happening here. The best way for me to fire off my hottest of takes is to answer some hypothetical and not-so-hypothetical questions.

Should TikTok have been banned?

So I've been on record in former entries to this blog that I think the TikTok ban is bad, done in bad faith, and deliberately strengthens Meta and Google. It basically boils down to: if we are so worried about China using our data, perhaps we should make it illegal for companies (in general) to sell our data to brokers of dubious provenance, both domestic and international.

But, in general, I am in favor of serious regulation of these companies on a few key grounds. While I would not go so far as to institute a ban for all Americans, I would require these platforms (by which I mean TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) to demonstrate radical transparency in their recommendation algorithms, showing us the metrics that they are optimizing for. If these companies want to continue to be places for free expression, then they need to spell out the ways they think that their apps actually do this. Because up until the point they are threatened with regulation, they seem to be content machines bent on getting you to watch ads.

This week I drew a metaphor about the nature of speech on these platforms, and the disingenuous "online public square" framing of their necessity. Imagine with me:

• In one situation, you are walking across a city plaza, perhaps going to meet up with your friend at the pizza place on the corner. Between you and the place is a loud, intrusive man, holding signs declaring how the end of the world is near and you must repent. This man gets in your face with a bullhorn, his signs say inflammatory things to get you to pay attention to him. You choose not to engage and just continue marching to the pizza place where you and your friend get to connect.
• In another situation, you are walking in a mall, going to meet up with a friend at a clothing store. Now, though, the owners of the mall have placed dozens of loud, apocalyptic fanatics in the hallways, bathrooms, and enclosed plazas. You notice dozens of people like you, though, who come to the mall to yell back at those guys. To get to the clothing store you pass multiple of these little squabbles in the foreground of your vision, and see the lit up signs of stores in the background. To meet your friend at the clothing store you've passed a number of buzzing conversations, so-called "debates" in the marketplace of ideas. Once inside you actually have a lovely time with your friend, but you had to hear a couple ethnic slurs on the way.

The owners of the mall in the second scenario are aware that littering the shiny floors with inflammatory speech and content meant to stoke engagement may make for a generally unpleasant experience for those who just want to shop and socialize there. But they also know that the more people they get in the mall doors, the more people will shop at the mall, boosting the store revenue and the mall value on the whole. Some people might just come to yell, but some will come to yell and leave with armfuls of shopping bags. Oh, and meanwhile the mall is tracking every move you make and selling it to governments and other companies.

This is not an organic "public square;" this is a tightly controlled environment in which the owners of the platform are incentivized to make money, not promote democratic values or connection between friends. In the first scenario, the pizza place on the corner is not carving out a little spot on the sidewalk for the fanatic to speak their mind. In fact they might want him gone so that people are unobstructed getting into the business. In the first situation, you are not forced to reckon with people you don't know spouting off about things you might not care about. You can put your headphones in, cross the street, whatever. It is, after all, a public square. In the second situation it is everywhere, and being deliberately carried out by the mall owners to get bodies into the mall. As far as I know, city officials don't drag and drop obnoxious street preachers to areas where they want more people to shop.

Problem is that our internet is made up of a bunch of malls.

I think all of this should be illegal or highly regulated. I think if a company wants to genuinely promote free speech then they should be required to demonstrate that in technological disclosures. I think if a company wants to platform inflammatory speech to get eyes on ads, then they should be required to disclose exactly how they do this, and should not be available for children.

So do I support the TikTok ban? No, not in its current iteration. But I do think that we need rigorous privacy laws, ironclad disclosure requirements, and a healthy ecosystem of options for expression that do not require playing by the mall rules.

Where else is there to go?

Speaking of a healthy ecosystem, we don't really have one. Right now there certainly are other platforms that are not TYFIX (TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X). Places like Bluesky and Mastodon, but they are not nearly as large. Why? Well a big reason is that, because they are not profit machines, they do not receive a lot of investment like the other platforms. This is why avenues for free information, like Wikipedia or ProPublica, are constantly asking for donations. Legitimate discourse doesn't pay, "THE END IS NIGH" does.

Currently I am aware of two projects attempting to recreate the Instagram and TikTok feature sets on the ATProtocol, the open, decentralized platform on which Bluesky was created. They are called Flashes and Skylight. I believe so, so firmly that these places will be more like the open-air city plaza where you met your friend for pizza than the profit machine of the mall. Might they still have ads? Might they still have insane rhetoric on them? Yes, but the entire idea is that you will get to choose whether of not you engage with these things. Not have them force fed to you so a product manager in Menlo Park can reach the KPIs that ensure their bonus.

What if the US Govt bought TikTok?

On Truth Social, Trump made this ludicrous suggestion that the US government should buy a controlling majority of TikTok. I'm not going to sit here making excuses or pretending that Donald Trump is a good and decent man, but in all sincerity...I think governments should be investing in their own social media platforms.

This is not a new concept, I am finding arguments as far back as 2018 that we should consider nationalized or municipal social media.

While several other countries, including some of our best pals in the West, have robust public media and entertainment systems, the US falls devastatingly behind in its government support of journalism, news, and entertainment. Often arguments in favor of increased funding to PBS, NPR, or the National Endowment for the Arts are panned as "socialist." And yet here Trump is, advocating for the US government to spend potentially billions of dollars for some state run media.

But imagine a perfect world for a moment. I know. It's hard, but just try. Imagine a social media platform where the founding charter was to be non-commercial, to deliberately promote the freedom of information, as is much of the founding ethos behind the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as created by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.

Imagine a sort of Trip Advisor/TikTok/Twitter crossover for the city of New York. Imagine the business it could draw in, the investment. Imagine the ability to spread useful information. Imagine the new creators who might pop up, like how the CPB and Public Broadcasting Act gave rise to Sesame Street (New York), Mr. Rogers (Pittsburgh), or Nova (Boston).

I hear the concerns. I certainly do not want to hand over records of my interactions and tastes to the US government. I certainly would not want Trump, or anyone, to weaponize a platform such as this for political gain, oppression, or rigid societal structures. But we have multiple Supreme Court cases and a long legal history of battles against government restrictions on free speech in the public arena than we do the private one. I believe we could get so much more positive out of a nationalized social media than our current set up of private ones.

At the end of the day, I do not think social media is bad. I think algorithmically enhanced social media with a profit incentive is bad.

I'll cut it off there

This has turned into one of my longest posts yet. I have so much more to say about these topics, but hopefully what I've written gives you a sense for what we are really dealing with when we confront social media companies and users. Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear anything thoughts you might have.