The data collection horse is out of the barn, has legitimate uses, and is an incredibly thorny issue to legislate appropriately. And will be adjusted for the next 20+ years.
What needs to be done now is to say that (1) at a certain user count ("too big to democratically ignore") then (2) production recommendation algorithms must be auditable.
Allow the details of audits to be kept secret from public record, but the DoJ should be able to go to Google, Facebook, Netflix, or TikTok and say "Show me how this works, now."
It's burying your head in the sand to suggest this doesn't have a clear impact on democracy and is currently solely in control of private companies and completely opaque. And it's the opaqueness that's the biggest danger.
Fundamentally, modern media/social is different from everything that came before because of the economic feasibility of microtargeting. Newspapers couldn't afford to track their customers individually & print a unique paper for each of them, which resulted in an auditable public record. All of the companies above can do exactly that, without leaving any public record.
Let's say we had this. We had some ML/AI team go up to Congress/DoJ and show them some tensors, some "back propagating LSTM" horseshit. How does that help the people that don't understand how the ad model works?
Hell, I bet there is _no one_ using AI or tensors or any of that shit that can tell you _why_ their model output Foo instead of Bar.
If explainability is a problem (e.g. "We don't know why our algorithm recommends higher-interest rate loan products to African Americans"), then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
agreed and I was flippant to make a point. I did not mean to say there aren't smart people in government. But I would venture to say that people who understand ML/AI are _not_ working in the government. Or put more correctly, the _odds_ of a person working in government being up to date on how LSTM works today is such a low number, that I would be fair to say it is extremely unlikely that anyone on any board would be smarter than Sen Hatch _in this domain_.
> then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
Agreed and is the larger point I was trying to make: we currently, no matter how smart you are, have _any_ way of knowing what your "algorithm" is doing. Or if you do, it's a rule-based system and isn't AI/ML. We should though! And I think pursuing that will give us much higher rate of return than our black-box strategy everyone seems to be using.
This should be measurable.
If a foreign nation's service uses algorithms to promote its interests and quell that of its adversaries or attempts to alter election outcomes to be favorable, then we're in for trouble.
Imagine social media creating worker strikes, riots, getting certain politicians elected, influencing the next generation of kids to prefer limits on free speech, influencing kids to not pursue science and engineering, etc.
This is a complicated issue.
The algorithm can be used for warfare.
Beyond that, I'm not sure how easy it would really be to detect. Seems like the method for that kind of thing would more likely be to have networks of users/bots/whatever that take advantage of facially neutral recommendation algorithms. So would you catch that by auditing the algorithm?
I said measure. We need to understand if we're being manipulated, and if so, figure out what an appropriate response should be. Maybe it's as simple as releasing a report and letting the media talk about it. Knowing gives us the ability to develop a response.
Filter bubbles are relatively new, and it's not yet clear the extent to which they can be used to shape a democratic society.
We don’t need to find that out because we are being manipulated. These are algorithms designed to maintain attention and sell ads. It is impossible for that to not be manipulative. The goal shouldn’t be to understand the algorithms, but to stop them from ruining our lives.
My understanding (vastly simplifying) is that the current standard is: does not infringe on rights of protected classes, does not incite imminent violence, & subject to national security concerns.
All of which are fuzzy lines, subject to court interpretation on a case by case basis, as they should be. (Even national security, which courts have traditionally granted wider latitude to)
All three are plausible rationales under which to bring a hypothetical "antidemocratic" case (to use a catch-all term that encompasses what people seem to be implying).
At core, and first principles, what "we" probably want as a nation is a sliding scale that moves from primacy of shareholder / owner to primacy of public, according to user count & market percentage.
Aka if you're a 10,000 user app, and you think (non-inciteful) racist content will make you the most money, that's your (terribly immoral) business.
But if you're a 100,000,000+ user multi-app company, then public and democratic interest takes primacy over your shareholders. Don't like that? Spin off some products.
I've had this same argument with military friends lamenting the prevalence of ex-military citizens among right wing nationalist groups. IMHO, "make people attend classes to fight indoctrination" is too easily repurposed by a future administration to do the exact opposite.
I can't see exactly how we do all this, but the root cause of many a social ill is that corporations are taking over social roles from government. This must be arrested, somehow, or we'll sleepwalk into the dystopian future of every damn 70s scifi film.
That metaphor means that there is no stopping it, you can't get the horse back in the barn. How is data collection like that? Why can't we make a law stopping it? The EU limits data collection. Apple restricted it. Nobody told them we couldn't put the horse back in the barn.
A good thing about 'software eating the world' is that it's not like saying, 'train rail gauge should be 1 meter wider', which would take incredible capital and labor. The software can be quickly and easily changed.
Many countries ask this of US companies, so there's no reason we shouldn't adopt a similar stance.
It's the same as Facebook now threatening to leave the EU if they have to comply with EU data protection laws.
A US company operating in China under its own international brand is a sucker who fell for a pretty blatant con.
2) On "China didn't ban ...", that's the case for Google and Linkedin China, but it's actually a kind of "soft" ban that the cost to meet the regulatory requirements is too high to afford even for biggest companies in the world.
3) FB case was a bit different. It was never given any opportunity to operate in China, so FB didn't "chose" to leave. We would never know what FB would do if given the chance. Maybe leave all user data there inside the great wall, as Apple does in its special version of iCloud in China.
Also, Google actually has a sizeable office in Beijing. I'm not sure what they do specifically since it's not easy to access any of their public services without an obscure VPN (the most popular ones get blocked pretty quickly).
It's not like others are better, but those three are the worst when it comes to spying shaping public opinion only because they are the biggest and most powerful.
If I had to choose who will influence the public in my country, let it better be some company (or government) that has my country interest first, and not China or the USA interests.
Because there's a rule of law, legal records, required disclosures, all subject to investigation and enforcement by an independent judiciary that creates a public record.
We can bemoan that wealthy people control a majority of assets or that some exceptions slip through the cracks at smaller scale (e.g. offshore shell companies owning assets). But by and large there's no question as to "Who owns Exxon? Or Google? Or Facebook?"
China does not have that.
Why should we ban people voluntarily using a short video service that shows them things they like and whose business model is virtually identical to every other social media company?
The NSA listens.
TikTok listens, engages, and suggests new content and ideas to millions.
TikTok shows you 80s commercials and clips from industrial films after figuring out that you want to see 80s commercials and clips from industrial films.
Based on the ads that I get, which are pretty unintrusive, easily identifiable and always skippable, it doesn't seem like their analytics are that advanced. Besides random major brands, who are essentially broadcasting ads, I get ads for diesel mechanic tech schools and random wish products.
Trump admin tried to restrict its use, at least among government/military, and perhaps predictably he was accused of racism/sinophobia...but the threat was just as real then as now.
In the US it really does matter how you do things. Just the whim of the president is not enough for it to happen.
Trump had no legal basis for his order. He liked to act like he was doing things with grand strokes, many of them were doomed to fail. I'm not convinced that he or those around him even cared if they did or not.
I don't think you can read much into an amateur hour / foolish attempt.
I don't think its so clear cut. In any case its hardly the first time that a president made a potentially unconditional to be ruled upon by courts later.
Not sure what we're talking about at this point. Trump's executive orders about tiktok that were thrown out of court were something different.
Trump or just the department who owns a given device can of course say "don't put X on government phones" and so on, but that's way different than what Trump tried and failed to do with tiktok.
Regarding Huawei , Trump basically told the Commerce Department to take action, Huawei was already (or was in the process of being) blacklisted by the commerce department, the commerce department does have the legal right to do that given the nature of Huawei's products and sensitivity of communications equipment.
The commerce department doesn't currently (although I believe lawmakers are looking into it) have the authority to simply blanket ban an app like tiktok on a whim / order. They simply can't do that for any old reason the POTUS says.
As I noted in another comment, in the US it does matter HOW you do things, the courts are independent (compared to say China) regardless how "right" someone might be they need to follow the law.
But as far as tiktok until someone gives the commerce department or someone else new powers, so far that seems out of reach.
Granted, I believe there are efforts to give them that option.
I thought it was the judicial branch and an injunction that stopped it.
>> On 23 September 2020, TikTok filed a request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the app from being banned by the Trump administration. This request was filed with the District Court for the District of Columbia. The preliminary injunction was approved by Judge Carl J. Nichols on September 27.
Then, the current President rescinded it and ordered an actual review of the risks. Something we probably should have done prior to the attempted banning.
>> In June 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration ban on TikTok, and instead ordered the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it poses a threat to U.S. national security.
I'm confused on exactly what you think happened.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_...
As the wiki article you shared lays out, there was a decent amount of nonpartisan momentum behind narrower limitations on Tiktok, along with serious consideration of it as a national security threat. Trump's threat of an outright ban immediately polarized the conversation and deflated much of that momentum, helped along by the fact his specific approach and messaging were typically incautious instead of incremental.
The courts did indeed issue an injunction against Trump's EO, and I don't have any reason to believe they were wrong to do so. Biden, again typically, _has_ taken the first steps of an incremental approach towards assessing the risks that tiktok poses. But as implied by the Wikipedia page you linked, we're nowhere near the level of Congressional and institutional attention that we were at in 2019 and 2020, and it's pretty reasonable to attribute this to Trump's engagement with the issue reorienting the political valence of the conversation. Specifically, the "Trump vs tiktok" association is so strong that (eg) a Senator that makes too much noise about it will now be loaded with an association that he may not want.
I actually don't have a strong opinion about tiktok's ban, see risks in both courses of action, and am a fan of the Biden admin's ostensible careful approach. I just resent the degree to which the idiocy of the public drives so many issues further away from thoughtful engagement with reality and towards partisan sportsball.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok_v._Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_co...
Doing anything else means that Chinese companies have the ability to build international platforms—where both Chinese and US citizens can participate—and US companies do not. Furthermore, those international platforms could potentially be made to enforce the CCP's standards for speech, setting the tone for conversations about Uyghurs and Taiwan worldwide.
Facebook is not allowed to operate in China not because they are American, but because they do not want to comply with Chinese law.
TikTok does follow US law, so instead of flat out banning it, the reasonable thing to do would be to enact sensible privacy legislation... But oh wait, then tech giants can't exploit the local population anymore.
For a generally accepted instance, see the EU GDPR.