TikTok, the overseas version of Jitterbug identified by the U.S. government as a threat to national security, proposed this week the creation of a global coalition of social media companies to identify and remove harmful content as early as possible. Experts believe the move is a drunken attempt to turn passive into proactive and set the rules of the Internet.
TikTok’s interim head, Vanessa Pappas, sent a letter on Sept. 21 to the heads of nine social media platforms proposing a memorandum of understanding on content restrictions that would encourage the platforms to work together to address the issue of violent and bloody content. nine companies including Facebook, Photo Wall, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit.
This came at a time when TikTok was at the center of a political struggle between the United States and China, and the U.S. government was trying to remove TikTok from the Chinese context.
At the same time, the spread of violent content turned the public’s attention once again to the management of social media platforms.
In late August, a man’s suicide was broadcast live on Facebook, and the video was widely circulated on TikTok, Facebook, Photo Wall, and other social media platforms for several weeks.
Theo Bertram, head of European government relations and public policy at TikTok, was questioned by British politicians in the British Parliament this week about the issue.
Experts believe that it is because of this pressure that TikTok is proposing this global alliance in order to protect the company’s reputation.
Ainikki Riikonen, a research associate with the Technology and National Security Program at The Center for a New American Security, told VOA.
“I think they’re doing damage control. And they have good reason to do it, now that they have this life-or-death sale that may determine their fate in the U.S. to an even greater extent.”
Lindsay Gorman, Emerging Technologies Fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, said: “I think TikTok’s main intention is to show good faith, to show that they are open and transparent. It’s very consistent with a lot of the information we’ve gotten from TikTok.”
Some experts also believe that the proposal is geopolitically relevant. Abishur Prakash, co-founder of the Center for Innovating the Future, argues that TikTok is aware that its business model has been hijacked by geopolitics and banned or censored by multiple countries because Tiktok has not “embedded” itself in the “geopolitical” to these countries. This forced it to change the structure of its operations in the United States. “Now, through global alliances, TikTok is embedding itself into the operations of other social media companies.”
He said: “ByteTok is trying to lay the next foundation for the global social media industry. It wants TikTok to take a new leadership role. By controlling the standards and rules for online content, TikTok is preemptively tackling what could be very difficult issues in the future.”
While similar efforts to control harmful content are underway across social media platforms, and TikTok’s proposal seems beyond reproach, now that the future of the TikTok sale is uncertain, experts disagree on whether TikTok is fit to lead the coalition.
I think it might be positive to narrow the scope of what is considered harmful content,” says Rikkonen. But certainly, the Communist Party has a sense of voice, and they are trying to reach out to the world and decide who can speak, what issues to talk about, and what conclusions to make. So if Byte Tikvah is very active in this, it certainly raises some broader issues.”
Gorman argues that if TikTok becomes the leader of the coalition and sets the rules of the Internet, Chinese companies will have more power to set norms, consistent with Beijing’s string of initiatives to rewrite the rules of the Internet and reshape the international order so that its totalitarian values can be used to suppress content, including human rights and an independent press, on the grounds of national security.
“I think there is also an attempt by TikTok to use familiar liberal values and terminology to create these frameworks as a guise to whitewash the kinds of violations that are prevalent within China.”
If TikTok wants to succeed, Prakash said, it must take steps to distance the social media alliance from geopolitics and focus on the impact of such alliances on billions of social media users around the world.
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