TikTok's Asymmetrical Advantage

How free and open societies must find irregular solutions to information asymmetries.

This just might do nobody any good. But I am persuaded that the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening. I have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard, the one that produces words and pictures. You will, I am sure, forgive me for not telling you that the instruments with which you work are miraculous, that your responsibility is unprecedented or that your aspirations are frequently frustrated. It is not necessary to remind you of the fact that your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.

Although the “TikTok” ban is stalled in the Senate, the House passed it with an overwhelming majority. The bill would require ByteDance to divest from the platform or face being barred from U.S. app stores. The reasons behind the ban are plentiful, ranging from national security concerns to the PRC wielding undue influence on “the youth.” There is also the fact that TikTok is an economic powerhouse, able to sell more advertisements based on longer user-engagement times than their peer platforms, although their active users are quickly declining. A ban could benefit TikTok’s American competitors.

At least in the context of spying, the national security argument seems to be overblown. China can get data on American citizens fairly easily and doesn’t need TikTok to do it. This isn’t to be dismissive of the threat, but TikTok is far from the only data privacy threat. This is probably why many of the pro-ban crowd have couched the national security concerns in the fact that an adversarial nation owns a platform where a lot of Americans get their news.

There is also an element of tragedy in this situation. ChinaTalk reposted an old piece presciently warning about the TikTok problem and also the mindsets of China’s Silicon Valley CEOs: “The proper mental model of a Chinese tech CEO under 40 is not that of a faithful Party member toiling ceaselessly to spread Xi Jinping Thought, but rather a nerdy engineer who worked in the Valley and daydreamed of building something as big as Sergey and Mark.” Despite the intentions of these tech CEOs and their perhaps disdain for the government they live under; it does not change the government they live under. “Would we,” someone asked me, “have let the USSR own MTV in the 1980s?”

But this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But in terms of information, we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.

Free and open societies contain intrinsic asymmetries that authoritarians can take advantage of. If an adversarial nation can flood a democracy—a democracy it is not officially at war with—with information, and that democracy censors that information, is it truly a free and open society? This catch-22 invites solutions that end up chipping away at the democratic ideals they try to protect or ignoring the threat altogether. Just as irregular warfare is an answer to battlefield asymmetries and irregular innovation is an answer to market failures, democracies must begin to think in terms of irregular solutions to answer the own asymmetry it faces.

One of the fundamental principles of a democracy is the free flow of ideas or free speech. The asymmetry our nation faces is an information asymmetry, a speech asymmetry. Speech is not spread equally across our population. It is not heard, read, watched, or otherwise consumed by personal, unilateral choice but by algorithmic recommendation. Speech that is either reasonably debatable or not agreeable “misinforms” and requires moderation. Speech that takes a proper position, a position inferenced from engagement time, likes, and shares, is fed to us more often. Rarely is their certainty on the speech’s origins, who the speaker is, or if they are even a human.

Can we solve the asymmetry of information our society faces with foreign influence in ways that do not restrict the information itself? In the asymmetry of anonymity, the solution may be simple—identifying the speaker. The problem is not what China tells Americans through TikTok and other platforms but the anonymity with which they speak and the lack of anonymity through which Americans listen. When the Athenians stood before the Melians, the Melians knew precisely who they were and could effectively weigh the consequences of the arguments and propositions the Athenians laid out. If the Melian dialogue had occurred under today’s circumstances, not only would the Athenians have owned the forum where they spoke, but they would have done so in a way that would have obscured their identity to the point where it was unclear who was issuing the ultimatum. The opinions of foreign nations are important pieces of information for citizens when making a policy choice, but that information must be complete.

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry's program planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is--an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

It is hard to pinpoint precisely how much TikTok influences America’s youth. For example, Do young voters sympathize more with the Palestinian cause because TikTok told them so? This line of thinking seems insulting to America’s young voters, insinuating they cannot consume information and make an informed policy decision of their own volition.

It cannot be ignored, however, that the information feed on all social media platforms, not just TikTok, is curated to increase user engagement. TikTok, in particular, has a history of putting its thumb on the algorithmic scale of content recommendation. Pro-Palestinian hashtags far outnumber pro-Israel hashtags on the platform. Black Lives Matter content was sunk in 2020, and a “Stop the Ban” phone-banking campaign was boosted just last week, which (deliberately or not) targeted school children. Shadow banning is a common practice across the entire industry.

This is an asymmetry of choice. The choice of what information gets presented is that of the social media platform alone, but the choice of the user in what to receive does not exist. The problem isn’t that all a young user sees is pro-Palestinian content on TikTok; it’s that it’s all they can see. How can a marketplace of ideas exist if there is only one idea? The solution here isn’t to moderate the ideas or ban platforms from competing in the marketplace but to ensure access to a wide variety of ideas. The choice to consume information, to turn away from it, to seek other opinions, is inseparable from the right to speak. Choosing what to listen to is half of the freedom of speech. The irregular solution is to regulate the algorithm.

For if the premise upon which our pluralistic society rests, which as I understand it is that if the people are given sufficient undiluted information, they will then somehow, even after long, sober second thoughts, reach the right conclusion. If that premise is wrong, then not only the corporate image but the corporations and the rest of us are done for.

Algorithms are not inherently good or bad. The tools that recommend my music on Spotify or my TV shows on Hulu make my life easier. Spotify, however, is not the town square and is not a key vendor in the marketplace of ideas.

TikTok, Facebook, X, Reddit, and probably a few others are the marketplace of ideas situated firmly in the town square. Intentioned or not, they are the marketplace simply by their de facto function. Without these major platforms, it is nearly impossible to reach a wide audience. Even with the platforms, recommendation algorithms, combined with shadow banning, make it nearly impossible to reach a divergent, pluralistic audience.

Algorithms do not need to go, but they cannot control the free flow of information. It is clear TikTok has abused them, although they are not the only ones. Recommendation algorithms should be opt-in by default. They should be customizable in multiple ways, with users retaining the right and ability to modify the weights and parameters on the recommendation. They should be able to be reset the algorithm, just like the cache and cookies in an internet browser. If I can choose which newspaper to buy, which news channel to watch, and even which neighbor to engage with on politics, why can I not have these choices on the internet? Why would we allow a tool that can so clearly instigate and divide our citizenry through algorithmic restriction of information to be used by nations that wish to see us fail?

The rebuttal to these solutions will no doubt be from the social media platforms lamenting the technical difficulties and impact on advertisement revenue. They may possibly be correct, but feasibility is “easily and often [conflated with] profitability.” A democracy-protecting regulation should not be discarded simply because it is expensive.

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

There is probably value in forcing the sale of TikTok. No nation has the right to interfere in another’s elections through speech, money, or other means. The forced sale, however, won’t magically fix the marketplace of ideas. PRC propaganda has many other accessible avenues to vector their information, all of which have the same fundamental flaws as TikTok.

Content moderation is not a silver bullet either. In a sobering rationalization of censorship, The New York Times quoted Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It is worth quoting in full from the original story featured in Wired.

“We now live in a world where we talk about alternative facts and post-truth, which I think is really, really dangerous.” This ability to “pick your own facts,” she said, is particularly corrosive in election security. She’s combating this corrosive element through a misinformation and disinformation team, with a fact-checking site, Rumor Control. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure,” she said, “and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.”

I have a lot of respect for Jen Easterly, but I disagree with this approach. That said, her view is a regular response that can be expected of a government used to fighting conventional information warfare: There is a problem of authoritarian states trying to influence American voters. This information should be countered (marking it false) and contained (censoring it).

But the asymmetrical problem we face can’t require regular solutions because those solutions water down the ideals we are founded on. Democracies always have been and always will be at a short-term disadvantage to authoritarianism. If our system is superior, however, if the free flow of people, capital, and ideas creates a diverse ecosystem in which the best of all rises to the top, then the answer is to lean into those values and find irregular opportunities and solutions to strengthen the values, not create exceptions around their inconveniences.

It is every citizen’s job to “keep the machine of [democracy] running as it should, to make sure the channels of political participation and communication are open.” We live in a world where this gets harder and harder to do, and we are seemingly faced with zero-sum options: to ban TikTok or let it operate unhindered, to moderate content because it is harmful to someone, or be “free speech absolutists.” These are certainly options, but not great ones if you want to maintain a democracy. It is time to view these problems in a new light, make the entering argument the preservation of liberal ideals, and fight the irregular war the enemy’s asymmetry demands.¹

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of [speech] could be useful.

1. The pull quotes in italics are from Edward Murrow’s “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech. The have been lightly edited and rearranged. The full speech is linked here and is well worth a read.