Institute of Politics<\/a> event at Harvard Kennedy School, two experts discussed TikTok\u2019s present and future in the U.S., debating how the government could best protect national security without sacrificing civil liberties.<\/p>\nJim Secreto, who served in senior national security roles in the Biden administration and formerly lived in China, began by emphasizing the changing nature of national security concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you think about national security today, I don\u2019t want you to just think about tanks or bullets or guns,\u201d he said. \u201cTechnology, and particularly cutting-edge technology, is really a huge part of how we protect ourselves and how we conduct ourselves in the world.\u201d What\u2019s unique about TikTok, he said, is the role of ByteDance, a Beijing-based Chinese company, and the leverage the Chinese Communist Party has to collect data from China-based businesses.<\/p>\n
Jennifer Huddleston, senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said that during debates about TikTok, she often finds herself taking the free-speech and innovation point of view versus someone coming from a national security perspective. She said the disagreement lies in finding the appropriate balance between the two \u2014 and, ultimately, what role the government has in deciding that balance. In some ways, she said, \u201cThe debate over TikTok isn\u2019t any different than the debate over social media platforms in general.\u201d<\/p>\n
She emphasized that while the language behind the TikTok ban identifies just the one app, \u201cthe law is drafted in such a way that it could be applied to other companies.\u201d She worries whether the executive authority has appropriate checks and balances to prevent the ban from applying to other companies and countries that the U.S. considers foreign adversaries. She also said that the language of the ban punishes American companies, like Apple and Microsoft, which are penalized if they host TikTok on their app stores, versus TikTok and ByteDance themselves.<\/p>\n
Though Secreto agreed that national security laws should take civil liberties into account, he argued that TikTok \u2014 and other recent technological advancements like artificial intelligence based on large-language models \u2014 are more threatening than past technological advancements. \u201cWe are addicted to our phones,\u201d he said, \u201cand we are not evolved to be able to handle what is coming. What we have before us are some profound choices about regulation, about free speech, and the role of technology in our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huddleston mostly pushed back on the uniqueness of today\u2019s technology, skeptical of Secreto\u2019s argument that the Founding Fathers would have \u201cno conception of this technology and the power that it brings to what people see on their phones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though some authors of the Constitution would certainly be amazed and terrified, she said, \u201cThey did understand this. They understood the importance of anonymous speech. They understood that young people might have different points of view. The technology was different from ours, but those core values still apply.\u201d<\/p>\n
She stressed that banning TikTok, and other similar networks, could harm America\u2019s standing abroad. \u201cIf we start saying it\u2019s OK for governments to restrict access to speech, to information, to innovation because of these fears, what happens when our adversaries start doing it to Americans?\u201d she asked. Countries that are not following democratic norms could use the U.S. example to further limit the rights of their citizens.<\/p>\n
Secreto agreed that the government should mitigate national security risks in ways that most narrowly affect free markets and free speech. The difficulty, he said, is finding that balance. He talked about the idea of \u201csmall yard, high fence,\u201d a policy to limit trade of critical technologies with countries like China while allowing broader trade to continue. \u201cThe problem is,\u201d he said, \u201cnobody could agree on how big a yard and how big a fence.\u201d The same problem applies to drawing the line between national security and free online speech.<\/p>\n
While Secreto praised certain elements of TikTok, he expressed more hesitancy about the technology than Huddleston. \u201cI personally believe that it\u2019s hard for us as humans to compete with the algorithm,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is something that knows more about you than you know about yourself \u2014 and that\u2019s scary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though Huddleston acknowledged having some problems with TikTok and other social media companies, she worried more about government overreach. When it comes to divesting from or banning TikTok, she said, the decision comes down to erring on the side of trusting the government and its argument for national security or on the side of freedom of speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TikTok has been banned, un-banned, semi-banned, and brought back. As the U.S. government considers its relationship with China,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[25392,23,28,3048,8649,2420,9746,3,108,21212,21,19,22,20,25,24,113216],"class_list":["post-462483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-a-i","tag-america","tag-business","tag-computers","tag-democracy","tag-government","tag-law","tag-news","tag-social-media","tag-u-s-politics","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-world-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}