How delicious is political hypocrisy.\u00a0 Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity.\u00a0 Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States.\u00a0 Much of this seems based on an assumption that foreign companies are not entitled to hoover up, commodify and use the personal data of users, mocking, if not obliterating privacy altogether.\u00a0 US companies, however, are.\u00a0 While it is true that aspects of Silicon Valley have drawn the ire of those on The Hill in spouts of select rage, giants such as Meta and Google continue to use the business model of surveillance capitalism with reassurance and impunity.<\/p>\n
In May 2023, the disparity of treatment between the companies was laid bare in a Congressional hearing that smacked the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pinchai with little result, while lacerating TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.\u00a0 \u201cYour platform should be banned,\u201d blustered Chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.<\/p>\n
The ongoing concern, and one with some basis, is TikTok\u2019s link with parent company ByteDance.\u00a0 Being based in China, the nexus with the authoritarian state that wields influence on its operations is a legitimate concern, given national security laws requiring the company to share data with officials.\u00a0 But the line of questioning proved obtuse and confused, revealing an obsession with themes resonant with McCarthyite hysteria.\u00a0 On several occasions, the word \u201ccommunists\u201d issued from the lips of the irate politicians, including regular references to the Chinese Community Party.<\/p>\n
Alex Cranz, writing<\/a> for The Verge<\/em>, summarised the hectoring session well: \u201cBetween their obsession with communism, their often obnoxious and condescending tone, and the occasional assumption that Chew was Chinese, despite his repeated reminders that he is Singaporean, the hearing was a weird, brutal, xenophobic mess.\u201d<\/p>\n TikTok, for its part, continues to tell regulators<\/a> that it has taken adequate steps to wall off the data of its 150 million users in the US from ByteDance\u2019s operations, expending US$1.5 billion in its efforts to do so.\u00a0 A January investigation<\/a> by the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, however, found that \u201cmanagers sometimes instruct workers to share data with colleagues in other parts of the company and with ByteDance workers without going through official channels\u201d.\u00a0 How shocking.<\/p>\n Cranz might have also mentioned something else: that the entire show was vaudevillian in its ignorance of US government practices that involved doing exactly what ByteDance and TikTok are accused of: demanding that companies share user data with officials.\u00a0 If he is to be forgotten for everything else, Edward Snowden\u2019s 2013 disclosures on the National Security Agency\u2019s collaboration with US telecom and internet companies on that point should be enshrined in posterity\u2019s halls.<\/p>\n The PRISM program, as it was called, involved the participation of such Big Tech firms as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Apple in sharing the personal data of users with the NSA.\u00a0 Largely because of Snowden\u2019s revelations, end-to-end encryption became both urgent and modish.\u00a0 \u201cAn enormous fraction of global internet traffic travelled electronically naked,\u201d Snowden remarked in an interview<\/a> with The Atlantic<\/em> last year.\u00a0 \u201cNow it is a rare sight.\u201d<\/p>\n The US House of Representatives has now made good its threats against TikTok in passing a bill that paves the way for the possible imposition of a ban of the app.\u00a0 It gives ByteDance a six-month period of grace to sell its stake in the company, lest it face a nationwide block.\u00a0 Whether it passes the Senate is an open question, given opposition to it by certain Republicans, including presidential hopeful Donald Trump.\u00a0 Other politicians fear losing an invaluable bridge in communicating with youthful voters.<\/p>\n On March 13, however, the righteous were shining in confidence.\u00a0 The House\u2019s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, claimed<\/a> that the bill would lessen \u201cthe likelihood that TikTok user data is exploited and privacy undermined by a hostile foreign adversary\u201d while Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher declared<\/a> that the US could no longer \u201ctake the risk of having a dominant news platform in America controlled by a company that is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.\u201d\u00a0 The subtext: best leave the despoiling and abuse to US companies.<\/p>\n The blotted copybooks of such giants as Meta and Google have tended to only feature in morally circumscribed ways, sparing the model of their business operations from severe scrutiny.\u00a0 On January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave a farcical display<\/a> of rant and displeasure over the issue of what it called \u201cthe Online Child Exploitation Crisis.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Pet terrors long nursed were on show: the mania about paedophiles using social media platforms to stalk their quarry; financial extortion of youth; sexploitation; drug dealing.<\/p>\n Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) made much of Zuckerberg on that occasion, but only as a prop to apologise to victims of Meta\u2019s approach to child users.\u00a0 The Meta CEO has long known that such palliative displays only serve as false catharsis; the substance and rationale of how his company operations gather data never changes.\u00a0 And the show was also all the more sinister in providing a backdrop for Congressional paranoia, exemplified in such proposed measures as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).<\/p>\n The Electronic Frontier Foundation has rightly called KOSA a censorship bill<\/a> which smuggles in such concepts as \u201cduty of care\u201d as a pretext to monitor information and conduct on the Internet.\u00a0 The attack on TikTok is ostensibly similar in protecting users in the US from the prying eyes of Beijing\u2019s officials while waving through the egregious assaults on privacy by the Silicon Valley behemoths.\u00a0 How wonderfully patriotic.<\/p>The post Prejudicial Bans: Congress Tosses over TikTok<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How delicious is political hypocrisy.\u00a0 Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity.\u00a0 Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States.\u00a0 Much of this seems based on an assumption that foreign companies are [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Prejudicial Bans: Congress Tosses over TikTok<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58018,190,725,728,579,11508,71819],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1552566"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553020,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552566\/revisions\/1553020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1552566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1552566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1552566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}