> While Facebook and Instagram might be 'evil', they're considered 'our American evil'.
Yes, the business operations of Facebook and Instagram are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not. That accountability is imperfect, indirect, and weaker than it should be, but it is a different situation than TikTok.
Despite a lot of hullaballoo, I think it would be exceedingly difficult for any one person to purposefully (!) tweak the Facebook algorithm to benefit a preferred political viewpoint. Someone—an engineer, a shareholder, etc—would notice and blow the whistle.
By contrast, there is no doubt in my mind that the CCP can make ByteDance e.g. downrank messages in support of Hong Kong. ByteDance is a private company in an authoritarian nation whose government explicitly has this legal power! I don't think it's jingoism to believe the CCP should not have control over a major American media platform.
>
Yes, Facebook's and Instagram's business operations are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not.
No, they are accountable in the same way. You pass laws that restrict corporate behaviour, and then you fine/ban applications that don't follow them.
What you don't do is write a 'TikTok sucks so it's banned' law, while permitting the same problematic behavior from other vendors.
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The major problem with TikTok[1] is that it disrupts an American oligopoly on public mindshare, and the US is afraid of it for the same reason that CCP is afraid of Facebook, or the CCCP[2] was afraid of jazz music and Hollywood.
[1] The other major problem with TikTok is that Facebook and Twitter and another major tech company are scared of it, and instead of competing, are very interested in lobbying until it goes away.
> I also think voters continue to wield significant power.
I disagree. Have you seen this famous study?
"Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all."
"The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
> Facebook's and Instagram's business operations are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not
Also, and perhaps more relevantly here, American lawmakers are accountable to and American voters are thereby subject to Meta's owners in the way they are not to TikTok’s.
Would it be easier for the US govt to "throw the smackdown on" FB or Tiktok? Nobody is even talking about banning FB, despite the known bad shit we know about it. Half of US adults would ban TikTok goes to show how much more accountable TikTok is than FB. Zuckerberg/FB has spent millions buying political favor. There is no way the Chinese ownership of TikTok has anywhere the kind of political access and influence of Zuck/FB.
In "the Twitter Files" we learned that American social media companies actually manipulate public opinion on sensitive political topics (censoring content based on hypothetical "Russian involvement"). And they haven't been held to account.
Meanwhile, there is no actual evidence of TikTok doing this in the West. I'm sure Chinese Douyin complies with government censorship for their domestic product, but there is no evidence that the American-managed product has done this. If it is happening and we just haven't found the evidence, the effect isn't there: Americans hate China more than ever.
I understand you wish to believe the opposite, because it would make us feel fuzzy inside about how great America is and evil the chicoms are, but there simply isn't evidence to support your comment.
It is honestly mind blowing that americans still believe that big social media companies and our glorious three letter agencies aren’t in cahoots, and that we only ever influence other countries.
The problem is that "The Twitter Files" is yet another propaganda op, framing the centralization problem in terms of the de jure government so that you continue ignoring the longstanding elephant in the room of centralized corporate control. In your terms - most power structures are roughly in cahoots, and directing focus towards a mere few seats at the table is a distraction. The vast majority of censorship is done for banal business reasons, including executives scratching each others' backs, regardless of whether one thinks it's justifiable based on the outcome or not.
Yes, the business operations of Facebook and Instagram are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not. That accountability is imperfect, indirect, and weaker than it should be, but it is a different situation than TikTok.
Despite a lot of hullaballoo, I think it would be exceedingly difficult for any one person to purposefully (!) tweak the Facebook algorithm to benefit a preferred political viewpoint. Someone—an engineer, a shareholder, etc—would notice and blow the whistle.
By contrast, there is no doubt in my mind that the CCP can make ByteDance e.g. downrank messages in support of Hong Kong. ByteDance is a private company in an authoritarian nation whose government explicitly has this legal power! I don't think it's jingoism to believe the CCP should not have control over a major American media platform.