TikTok says it offered the US government the power to shut the platform down in an attempt to address lawmakers’ data protection and national security concerns.
It disclosed the “kill switch” offer, which it made in 2022, as it began its legal fight against legislation that will ban the app in America unless Chinese parent company ByteDance sells it.
The law has been introduced because of concerns TikTok might share US user data with the Chinese government - claims it and ByteDance have always denied.
TikTok and ByteDance are urging the courts to strike the legislation down.
“This law is a radical departure from this country’s tradition of championing an open Internet, and sets a dangerous precedent allowing the political branches to target a disfavored speech platform and force it to sell or be shut down,” they argued in their legal submission.
They also claimed the US government refused to engage in any serious settlement talks after 2022, and pointed to the “kill switch” offer as evidence of the lengths they had been prepared to go.
Tiktok offered us the ability to shut them down? To avoid being shut down. By us. Woe to the vanquished I guess.
The idea is that with the “kill switch” the US Government would take any blame for the shutdown. Right now the Biden Admin and Congress have successfully switched that around so TikTok looks more unreasonable. There’s no demand that they “shut down”, just that ownership be located where they are subject to US law.
We embedded third party auditors in that crypto exchange so I’m curious exactly how inscrutable tiktok really are.
I mean the accusations are that they’re too beyond oversight and we can’t confidently audit the data, so giving us a button to stop them when we can’t see what they’re doing would be a joke. But I’m skeptical that it’s as difficult to lock down their data as we make it seem.
That was about money, this is about controlling speech.
Didn’t they already reveal their source code to American companies, like Oracle ? If people say they’re worried China can manipulate the algorithms, then Oracle will let the US know. What else can they do?
Chinese spyware: 🙅♀️⛔️❌️🤬🤬😤👿✊️💣🧨💣💥💥💥
American spyware: 😊😊💖😍🐰🐱😻😻🌸🌹🌷
The government is so fucking stupid sometimes. I think both ideas are bad, but a kill switch would be so much better strategically than selling it to a third party who could just send the data to China anyway and still be influenced by CCP demands.
It’s not about sending the data to China it’s about not allowing a hostile power maintain control of a major lever that directly impacts a huge swath of the us demographics.
Hate it or love it but TikTok algorithms hold an insane amount of power to influence a gigantic age range and the goal here is to get those in control of said algorithms under US law so it can be regulated properly.
Yes, us bad, but there is logic and value here. No it’s not the perfect solution but we can’t do nothing either. TikTok showing oracle the source code doesn’t do shit to address these issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/tiktok-china.html
And a kill switch wouldn’t have made that not an issue?
