Photograph courtesy of Flickr user Focal Foto.Next month, the Supreme Court will decide whether the federal government’s potential ban of TikTok violates the First Amendment. Thanks to lawmaker concern over the Chinese government getting access to American user data, those users could lose access to the app as soon as January 19 unless its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, sells to a US-approved buyer before then. If TikTok loses its appeal to SCOTUS—a lower federal appeals court already rejected the company’s First Amendment argument—there’s scant precedent for how the government would actually go about banning a social media platform. After all, our other digital domains of choice—Instagram, Facebook, hell, even X—are already American-owned. So what can we expect? Gabe Robins is a computer science professor at the University of Virginia. He specializes in algorithms—the mathematical processes that curate our social media feeds, fueled by personal information gleaned from our data. Washingtonian talked to Robins to get a sense of why the government is working so fiercely to get TikTok under the control of an American company, and how likely a ban actually is. It feels like almost nothing in the federal government these days garners bipartisan support the way that this bill did. Why do you think the TikTok issue managed to bring Congress together? There are those among US government officials that view China as potential adversary, economically or politically. China’s been getting some flak for certain things, and the TikTok issue is one of them. The main contention, as far as I understand it, is that TikTok is a Chinese-owned company—and in China, the line separating private enterprise from government functions is very blurry. China may not have all the checks and balances that the United States has in terms of due process and subpoena power and so forth. So the US is worried that if the Chinese government wants to compel TikTok to give it free and complete access to its data, to its user information, to the behavior and texts and private information and messages of its users, hundreds of millions of which are US citizens, then that can present possibly a national security issue for the United States. China, of course, has denied that and promised to not do that and put safeguards in place, and it has been a kind of back-and-forth battle ever since. Your expertise is in algorithms, so I imagine you know what sorts of data ByteDance needs in order to curate our TikTok content. Do you use TikTok? I’m not a big social media user in general, but I know algorithms very well, and it’s the algorithms that drive the content that gets presented to users based on their previous behavior on the website, such as clicks and likes and dislikes and purchase history of products and which ads they lingered longer on and responded to. You can garner a lot of information algorithmically by mining that data, mining all that information, and forming profiles on the users. And it turns out there’s lots of research out there, for many years now, that if you even have just a few data points on the user, you can tell a lot about them. So for example, if all you know about a user is their zip code, roughly what their age is, which books or products they purchased over the last few years, what news articles they liked or disliked as seen by their posts or comments on these articles, you can tell almost a shocking amount of information about that user—their health status, their sexual orientation, their political leanings, all sorts of things which are nominally private, simply because the data mining algorithms can find patterns and match it to other known patterns and make a lot of highly statistically significant inferences about these users. That’s a lot of information that leaks out in surprising ways, and most users would not be okay with that. And this is where the TikTok platform kind of becomes a flashpoint for these kind of debates or interactions. And it’s not just TikTok, by the way—I mean, everything I said applies equally well to Facebook and to YouTube and to Instagram, WhatsApp and many other websites. And so the question becomes, “yes, there’s a lot of leaks of information and potential use and misuse of all this aggregate data and data mining results for large sets of users all over the place, but one of them happens to be owned by a foreign government that the US currently views as somewhat adversarial.” These other companies—Amazon and Instagram and WhatsApp and Facebook—these are US-based companies, and they’re subject to US laws and regulations, such as subpoena power, for example. But companies owned by foreign governments are not necessarily subject to US laws and regulations and subpoena power, and even if they are by having a US subsidiary, it’s still the matter of potential national security issues if the foreign government has a direct access to their backend databases and information and user data in a way that’s not transparent and not controllable and not regulatable and that’s subject to the US laws and regulations. Do you think the data of American TikTok users will be better protected if the app is owned by an American company? That’s the argument that some of our American politicians are making. And the main reason for that is because it falls under the purview of American jurisprudence, American law. In other words, if the American government wants to have access to private user information or to your health records, let’s say, or to your purchase history, and seeing what books you’ve purchased and so on, and trying to figure out what your political leanings are, or whatever—the US government typically needs to go through a lengthy due process. Maybe get a judge to issue a subpoena, and then present the subpoena to the company, and only then the company may or may not divulge the data to the government. Having said that, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment here. You probably heard about the [Edward] Snowden scandal some 10 years ago, where an National Security Agency analyst disclosed that the US government itself was collecting massive amounts of data on people—in fact, compelling these companies to have backdoor access, unrestricted access to their to the databases and the user information. And by “these companies,” I mean Apple, Microsoft, Google, and others. And these companies somehow just capitulated to the government, to the National Security Agency and other government agencies, and just fed massive amounts of information to the government, and the legality of that was very questionable. There were no subpoenas or work orders. It was done surreptitiously, and that’s why, when Snowden revealed that that’s going on, that’s been going on for years, it was such a big scandal. So the bottom line here is that as a country, the United States is sort of implying and accusing China of wanting to do what our government’s already done, as revealed by the Snowden documentation and scandal. So nobody’s immune from that. Governments, whether it’s us or other governments, are very tempted to use whatever data they can get ahold of to further their political agendas and national security and self-interest issues, regardless of who it is. I wish that wasn’t true, but I think all governments have some blame to bear in this arena, including our own. In addition to protecting our data for national security reasons, lawmakers behind this bill have also expressed concerns about a foreign company having so much influence over our information environment. For that reason, the DC Court of Appeals ruled that they actually view the ban as a means of protecting free speech. Do you think that algorithms really have that much power over our ability to think independently? Absolutely. It’s obvious that algorithms have tremendous power over what we see and hear—and eventually, what we believe. Just as an example, your own publication—what you decide to put on the front page of your website, you decide as an editor what you will promote. So even newspapers have a lot of power and their algorithms are kind of implicit. It’s what the editor thinks is important that day or that week that gets top billing, and that’s what most people will see. Now, when it comes to websites like Google and Facebook and other big news websites or information dispersal websites, it’s even more pronounced because the decision not only depends on what some editor or some executive thinks to promote that day or that week, but the algorithm to track your own behavior in the past. It can look at all the things you’ve clicked on in the last three years, let’s say, and it can choose to give you things are similar to what you’ve already clicked on, whether it’s political stories or gossip columns, and it tends to reinforce what it thinks you already are interested in based on what you already clicked. And it tends to send you down rabbit holes quite often, where most of what you see is stuff that you’ve already seen before and reinforces your belief that that’s true and that’s valid and that it’s a major story. It should occupy a lot of your mindset, and you kind of become almost radicalized towards something. It could be something as mundane as Taylor Swift music, but it could be something more nefarious, such as some terrorist organization. And the algorithms drive all that by feeding you things that it thinks will engage you more. And why do they do it? Simply, that’s where the money is. If you’re more engaged and you read more articles that you like, you’ll linger longer on these websites and you’ll see more of the ads that are being projected on every page of these websites. Maybe you’ll click on some of the ads and somebody will make more money, and you’ll get more hits and more likes on the websites. And advertisers will pay more to put ads on websites that have more engagement from users. More users see it, more users spend more time on these websites, and that translates into money very quickly through ads. Newspapers have been doing that for centuries. That’s exactly what they do, and with algorithms, you can do it even more effectively than an editor sitting in a room making daily decisions about what news stories to promote each day. So yes, back to your question, do algorithms have power? Absolutely. They have enormous power. Let’s say the Supreme Court upholds the ban and ByteDance refuses to sell. What’s next? Can the government really shut down a social media platform?   Absolutely. It can happen within minutes, actually—minutes to hours, not even days. Sometimes you go to a website and it says, “Notice: This website has been confiscated by the FBI.” I’ve seen several of those, actually, and all they have to do is go to the domain name servers and tell them, “Anytime you get traffic to this website, instead of sending them to the actual website, send them to the FBI page notifying them why this website is shut down.” In other words, the FBI just took over your website, and that’s it, and nothing you can do will change that because the FBI has subpoena powers and they can get a court order. And they can go to the tech companies that run these internet servers and routers and tell them, “Look, this website is now ours. We should get all the traffic to our address at the FBI,” or the Justice Department or whatever. So technologically, it’s trivial to do. In fact, let me give you another ironic tidbit here: China does this all the time. They block websites from the west. Google is not accessible in China. Neither is Facebook, neither is YouTube, neither is the Washington Post or the New York Times. And so one of those little ironies in this case here is that if TikTok loses this case in the Supreme Court, all the US government has to do is use the very same technology that China has already used for years to block US websites in China to block TikTok in the US. Donald Trump met with the CEO of TikTok earlier this week and has said that he’d consider stymying a ban once he’s back in office. Would he actually be able to do that?  The whole gig of the Supreme Court is that they are supreme—nobody can second-guess them. There’s no appellate courts that can override the Supreme Court. What they say goes. But by the time it gets Supreme Court, of course, it went through a whole bunch of other litigations and lawsuits and legal actions and appeals, and appeals of the appeals. So if the Supreme Court renders an opinion that a certain company or website needs to be shut down, and they even put a date on it, they can give a grace period of 30 days or 90 days or a year or whatever to make it a little more palatable or make the transition smoother. Once they issue Supreme Court decree, the rest of us have to live with it. That’s it. I don’t think even a US president can can change this. Having said that, let me back off and say a couple other things that help mitigate that harsh reality of the finality of the Supreme Court decision. A president can negotiate with a company or the CEO of a company or the board of directors of a company into some resolution of a situation such as TikTok. So if a president can convince TikTok to sell its interest in the US to some US company for market fair price—let’s say $100 billion, I’m just making up a number, it’s probably close to reality. The company says, “Okay we don’t like it, but $100 billion is a lot of money.” So reluctantly, [ByteDance] takes it and shuts down operations in the US and transmits all that data and servers and users to whoever is the purchaser, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon or whoever. And that’s not a terrible outcome, right? They still make a huge amount of money. The users can continue operations. They don’t have to shut down their own individual accounts or something. It’s just the owner changes, right? This happens all the time. There’s over a billion users on TikTok globally, and maybe a couple 100 million in the US. It’s huge. So you don’t want to just shut them down arbitrarily without doing anything else because all of a sudden you’re gonna have 100 million angry US citizens, many of which are teenagers and young adults, and if all of them start writing to their congressmen and senators, there’s going to be political chaos in Washington. Imagine 100 million angry teenagers. That’s not going to be a pretty sight. So we need to provide them with a soft landing. We need to make it ideally transparent to them, so an owner can change and the users may not even know that an owner changed. Nobody wants to piss off hundreds of millions of people all the same time. That’s never a good strategy. There’s these big server farms that occupy entire warehouses, that cost billions of dollars to construct and maintain, and some of these servers of TikTok are already on US soil. It’s not like they’re gonna move them from China to the US. The data is already sitting on servers that are already sitting on US soil, in some facility in the US or multiple facilities in the US. So the new owner can just walk in their own employees in a gradual fashion, and take over these positions of technical engineers that run these servers and maintain these servers, and programmers and so forth that construct new versions of the apps and replace them with US employees, or even the same employees can work for the US company rather than the foreign company. So even on the technical side, inside these server farms or cloud installations, not a whole lot needs to change. You’re gonna have to just make sure that access is not supplanted by the wrong people, and you need to make sure that there’s no kind of Trojan horses left behind in the software that somehow can allow, in the future, somebody to come into a back door into the database and nefariously gain access to information that they should not have access to. But that’s relatively straightforward, too. All you need to do is hire some software engineers to pore over the source code for the app and for the back-end servers and cloud facilities. Going forward, it’s a process. It’ll take some manpower and some months to do, and a good number of engineers to do it, but it’s pretty straightforward, and you can do it in a gradual fashion without disrupting the hundreds of millions of users that are using the app on a daily basis. Back in April, you told Cardinal News that you think TikTok users will quickly migrate to other social platforms should a ban come down. Do you still believe that? If the Chinese see that their platform will be shut down unilaterally, unless they reach some sort of a deal, I don’t know why they would decide to pass on, say, a $100 billion payday to shut down operations in the US? That’s pretty good compensation by any measure. Again, I’m making up a number, but some number will be reached where it’s worth their while to cut a deal and then they will cooperate in making a smooth transition that most users wouldn’t even feel. Now, having said that, in the case where for whatever reason they decide to put their foot down and make some sort of a hard, philosophical statement and not agree to some deal, then a hard ban is implemented technologically by blocking all their internet traffic. Again, this is an extreme scenario we’re talking about here—pissing off hundreds of millions of their users. Then, yeah, that can theoretically happen. But in practice, a deal is almost inevitable. It’s horse trading and backroom deals and coming to some understanding that benefits most parties in most of the ways that they expect, if not all, and some compromises reached. And my expectation is that’s what will happen with TikTok, regardless of how the Supreme Court decision lands. Keep in mind: They already capitulated to the US political winds by moving some of their servers to the US and saying that data about US users will be stored on US servers on US soil, handled by US employees and so forth. They already made a lot of concessions along those lines, but apparently, for some US politicians, it’s not enough. TikTok is a business. And they’re making a lot of money, and they want to continue to make a lot of money that they’re not interested in losing hundreds of billions of dollars just for the sake of making some political, legal statement. I assume that’s not the case. That’s not the case with any company that I can think of. So business is business, and I think the business interests will eventually prevail and help all of us build a path forward that it’s not too terrible for anybody, including the users. So it sounds like Americans can rest assured that their TikTok addictions will be able to endure. Yeah, because their phone addictions are supporting a multitrillion dollar industry collectively. With a multitrillion dollar industry, you can rest assured that nobody’s going to shut it down completely, or even to some great extent. The money needs to keep flowing. There’s too many interested parties. I mean, you and I have retirement accounts that have stock through mutual funds. You and I and everybody else own, implicitly, stocks in Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and WhatsApp and even TikTok potentially. And these mutual funds have hundreds and hundreds of companies that they own stock for each mutual fund. So we are all beneficiaries of these social media companies, whether we are aware of it or not.The post Is The US Really Going to Ban TikTok? first appeared on Washingtonian.