The following editorial originally appeared in the New York Daily News:
In a political stampede Wednesday, the House overwhelmingly approved a bill that would force the social media app TikTok to be divested from China-based owner ByteDance, or face banning. The Senate should have more sense and slow this down.
If the concern is that TikTok might become rife with propaganda, disinformation or anti-democratic junk, and the expectation is that this will be ameliorated by sale to a U.S. entity, we have some bad news. The site once known as Twitter has plunged into much of the same muck since its purchase by American billionaire and noted narcissist Elon Musk, who got rid of a huge swath of the trust and safety team and has dedicated himself to pushing racist great replacement garbage, jetted to the top of users’ feeds by an algorithm tailored to uplift his posts.
If what lawmakers fear is that enormous volumes of user data, particularly on youngsters, will be siphoned off, stored, sold off to third parties, used for marketing and political targeting and fed into AI training algorithms, then we agree wholeheartedly with that apprehensiveness.
That’s why they should commit to making up for lost time and start looking at an industry that has been allowed to grow over the last three decades into a series of dominant monopolies with little in the way of oversight or guardrails — not just ByteDance, but Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube; Apple, with its cornering of the devices market and iron grip on its app store; and so on.
