Last night’s GOP primary debate got its headline moment when Nikki Haley called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” after he pointed out her daughter uses TikTok even as the former U.N. ambassador calls for a ban of the app. Setting aside questions of personal character, it’s not surprising that the topic piqued their emotions. TikTok has been a locus of paranoia in recent years due to its ownership by the Chinese-founded company ByteDance, and what critics call questionable privacy practices. That fear has been especially pitched on the right after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) argued in an essay last week, cited by debate moderator Hugh Hewitt, that the Chinese Communist Party is directly using the platform to influence youth opinion in favor of the Islamic militant group. “If you doubt that the CCP would introduce bias — against Israel, against Jews, against the West, or anything else — into apps under its de facto control, consider that on October 31 The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese web platforms Baidu and Alibaba have wiped Israel off the map… The two most widely used mapping programs in China show the outlines of Israel’s territory but do not label it as Israel, and may not have for some time,” Gallagher wrote. His argument contains some persuasive context but precious little proof of his chief accusation. That very lack of proof, however, points to the forest the GOP hopefuls missed for the red-scare trees: No one really understands how TikTok works, save its engineers. Like its fellow social media platforms and most of the powerful generative AI tools now transforming society, TikTok’s inner workings are not available to the public. That means we have no idea who is shaping our information landscape, or how they’re doing it. As these tools become more powerful, pervasive, and intertwined, fears like Gallagher’s and Haley’s will continue to shape American politics in the same way TikTok shapes young minds. When I spent an entire day mainlining TikTok news content for POLITICO Magazine earlier this year, I experienced the full ideological and factual spectrum of propaganda, not some one-sided lecture on decolonization, or Tokyo Rose-style engine for American demoralization. (Personal demoralization is another story.) Researchers in 2020 described how the full spectrum of political expression is present on the platform, to varying degrees of accuracy and effectiveness. Some data about TikTok’s algorithm, which closely tracks the amount of time users spend watching each video, did leak to the New York Times in 2021 — but the company remains highly secretive. Large social media platforms generally keep their algorithms close to their chest, only occasionally, and partially, making them available to select researchers for analysis like in a sprawling study published this year in Science. Laws like the European Union’s Digital Services Act have taken steps to force greater transparency for these platforms, but ultimately there’s only so much information that regulators can force out. That same fight is now raging in the world of AI, where open-source advocates like the Mozilla Foundation argue that algorithmic transparency is necessary to both instill public trust in powerful AI tools and to prevent them from running amok. The algorithms that power social media are, of course, a form of artificial intelligence in their own right, but the introduction of text or image generators adds an entirely new level of persuasive power to what are for the most part closed systems. Governments know this, which is why almost overnight AI policy has become such a massive global focus. But the sheer financial power of the largest tech companies has so far insulated them from any efforts to force greater transparency on how social media platforms work, and it’s unclear if not doubtful at this point that AI will be any different. To return to the GOP field’s complaint, young people are likely seeing plenty of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok because young people were already more sympathetic overall to the Palestinian cause before the Oct. 7 attacks, and the golden rule of social media is to give the user more of what they already want. That isn’t to say that one’s TikTok feed lacks the power to persuade, but that it requires a level of pre-established interest from the user in order to cast its secretive algorithmic magic. Haley and her allies might fear TikTok casting that magic because of its ties to China, but the same mystique that guards that platform applies to those based in the States and across the globe. Even if lawmakers did manage to ban it, the future of media, technology, and how they shape American society will remain just as opaque as TikTok is now, barring a total transformation of the relationship between government and the tech industry.
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