Alan Rosenstein
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alan Rosenstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But it remains true that this law will not solve the data privacy problem, even with respect to China. But it's very rare that... Any piece of legislation can comprehensively solve an entire problem. The question is, can it make a meaningful difference in that problem? And is that marginal improvement worth the cost to free speech? That's the data privacy issue.
On the content manipulation issue, I think the concern there is that, let's say the United States and China get into a shooting war over Taiwan, right? Right. Do we want a situation in which China then modifies the algorithm so that 170 million Americans, including many young Americans, many of whom get the bulk, if not virtually all of their news from TikTok.
And people aren't reading the New York Times as much. They're tragically not listening to NPR as much, right? As much as I wish they would. I mean, a lot of them are just getting their news on TikTok. Do you want to wake up that morning and have their news feeds flooded with anti-American, anti-Taiwanese, pro-Chinese propaganda?
So the government can ban the use of TikTok on government devices. And in fact, there are some states that have done this. I don't think that really poses many First Amendment problems. Of course, if the government tried to ban anyone working for the government from using TikTok, I mean, that's a lot of people. And that would actually raise its own First Amendment concerns.
That would be quite similar to the concerns raised by the law more generally. And there's also a concern that even if you keep government users from using TikTok, if the family members of those users are using TikTok, a smart intelligence agency like the Chinese has can still glean a lot of information.
And then when you take that and then you add the content manipulation concern, it just becomes a lot cleaner to ban the whole app.
So Project Texas was this very elaborate and, as far as I can tell, quite well thought out and in good faith attempt to assuage some of the national security concerns.
Because for years before this law was passed, TikTok was in negotiations with a government entity called CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which deals with these national security issues when foreign entities invest in the United States and have a large U.S. presence.
And as part of that, they came up with this elaborate plan that they called Project Texas, which, as you point out,
would create sort of a special US-only Oracle cloud in which the US data would be held and actually which the algorithm would be held and that there'd be all these rules and procedures to separate TikTok from ByteDance and that there'd even be a board partially appointed by the US government that would oversee this.
And so it's hard to know all the details of that and it's particularly hard to know how that would have actually played out in practice. The TikTok's position was that that would have assuaged all or nearly all of the government's concerns, and therefore something like a ban is unnecessary, especially given the First Amendment cost of that ban.
The government's position, and this was something that Congress agreed with and also that the court agreed with, was that – there would still be too much of a residual risk because at the end of the day, right, unless you have an actual divestment, you still have TikTok being controlled by ByteDance. You still have the algorithm, even if it's
in some sense, held in the United States, it's still getting, it's still being updated from China itself. And we know that because the whole problem that ByteDance is pointing out with the sale is that the Chinese won't let the algorithm fully exit the United States. And that even if you have a good system, it has to be monitored, right? You have to make sure there's no cheating involved.
That's very hard to do, right? That would involve the government in this ongoing process of looking at this. And, you know, if what you're concerned about is In a real moment of international emergency, right? Again, the example I think of always is the US and China get into a shooting war with Taiwan.
That no amount of procedures and corporate barriers will prevent the Chinese government from exercising control if it really wants to, short of an actual war. separation in which the Chinese government doesn't even have the capability of control. But it's ultimately a judgment call of how much risk are you willing to tolerate?
Congress was not willing to tolerate essentially any risk, and the courts were not willing to overturn that judgment from Congress.
I think TikTok, I don't have the exact numbers of how the 170 million American users stack up to the global TikTok user base. I think it's very important. I mean, America is a massive market always, but it's also such a culturally central market, right? I mean, if you want to be on a global platform and that platform does not have the United States, it's kind of not a global platform anymore.
So while I suspect TikTok will, even if it's banned in the United States, even if it loses its presence in the United States, it will still continue to exist. It'll certainly be weakened. And the network effects of TikTok, and this is the idea that social media platforms exist. gain their value to their users in part because other users are using them.
Those network effects will take a huge hit and will put TikTok not just in the United States, but also globally at a pretty profound competitive disadvantage relative to other competitors like Instagram Reels, like YouTube Shorts, that will include, in addition to other countries, the very important, the culturally very important user base of Americans.
Thanks for having me.
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