Pinterest is best known for pretty posts for wedding planning or meal inspiration, but it also has policies to weed out false information about vaccines and steers people to reliable sources when they search for terms related to self-harm. Roblox is a silly virtual world, but it also takes precautions – such as exhorting people to “be kind” – in case children and young adults want to use the app to do harmful things such as bullying someone.
Whether TikTok is more or less effective at managing humans than Facebook or YouTube is open to debate.Credit:Bloomberg
TikTok knows that people use the app to discuss politics and social movements, and with that comes the potential risks. On Wednesday, TikTok laid out its plans to protect the 2022 US elections from harmful propaganda and unsubstantiated rumours.
Maybe more so than other apps, TikTok doesn’t start with a presumption that each post is equally valid or that what becomes popular should be purely the will of the masses. TikTok creates trending hashtags, and reporters have found the app may have tried to direct people away from some material, like Black Lives Matter protests.
(TikTok is owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. And posts on Douyin, ByteDance’s version of TikTok in China, are tightly controlled, as all sites in China are.)
Whether TikTok is more or less effective at managing humans than Facebook or YouTube is open to debate. So is the question of whether Americans should feel comfortable with an app owned by a Chinese company influencing people’s conversations.
“As long as there have been rules, people have been breaking them. But that doesn’t mean platforms shouldn’t try to mitigate the harm their services contribute to and try to create a healthier, rather than unhealthier, public sphere.”
Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School
To put it frankly, it stinks that all apps must plan for the worst of the human condition. Why shouldn’t Twitch just be a place to enjoy watching people play video games, without fans abusing the app to stalk its stars? Why can’t neighbours coordinate school bus pickups in Nextdoor without the site also harbouring racial profiling or vigilantism? Can’t TikTok just be for fun?
Sorry, no. Mixing people with computerised systems that shine attention on the most compelling material will amplify our best and our worst.
I asked Douek how we should think about the existence of rumours and falsehoods online. We know that we don’t believe every ridiculous thing we hear or see, whether it’s in an app or in conversations at our favourite lunch spot. And it can feel exhausting and self-defeating to cry foul at every manipulated video or election lie online. It’s also counterproductive to feel so unsure about what to believe that we don’t trust anything. Some days it all feels awful.
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Douek talked me out of that fatalism and focused on the necessity of a harm reduction plan for digital life. That doesn’t mean our only choices are either every single app becoming full of garbage or Chinese-style government control of internet content. There are more than two options.
“As long as there have been rules, people have been breaking them. But that doesn’t mean platforms shouldn’t try to mitigate the harm their services contribute to and try to create a healthier, rather than unhealthier, public sphere,” Douek said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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