This program is easy to use
This program is user-friendly and simple to operate. industry in 1947 and it’s easy to see why the movie industry was a prime target for McCarthyism movies were a powerful tool to shape public opinion after all and the fear was that communists were using their influence to spread their ideology and influence the minds of the American public
There is a new growing threat to freedom and liberty everywhere, and it’s not climate change, nuclear war, or AI turning us all into glorified surfs. It’s TikTok. Calls to ban the absurdly popular platform reached a fever pitch when it was put under the microscope at a recent Congressional hearing. It was a wild sight as politicians of all stripes were practically foaming at the mouth as they interrogated CEO Shouzi Shu.
One Congressman even noted that the hearing made for a truly rare and beautiful moment of unity for America’s broken two-party system. Politicians were talking as if young people watching deep fakes of politicians playing video games were being indoctrinated to become super soldiers for the Chinese Communist party.
The focus of the hearing was TikTok’s practice of collecting and selling user data, which is something all social media platforms do. But the only thing that really makes TikTok distinct is that it’s owned by a Chinese company located in China, which is governed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Some have compared the recent outcry to the Red Scare, a two-wave 20th century American anti-communist hysteria. The US government and other entities went ham trying to root out communist threats, including a fierce campaign against suspected subversives in the federal government and Hollywood. Thousands of accused folks who had past or present ties to various leftist movements saw their lives ruined.
The movie industry was a prime target for McCarthyism because movies were a powerful tool to shape public opinion, and the fear was that communists were using their influence to spread their ideology and influence the minds of the American public. angle the promise of rooting out subversives to the public and so the Blacklist was born
Subpoenas were issued to over 40 actors, screenwriters, directors, and others in Hollywood to discuss the alleged Communist infiltration of the industry. Ilya Kazan was one of the few who snitched on their former colleagues, while the Hollywood 10 refused to testify and were subsequently indicted and imprisoned. Initially, the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) publicly supported the Hollywood 10, but days later reversed course, denouncing and suspending them without pay. According to scholar John Lewis, this decision would change Hollywood forever.
The MPAA then created the Hollywood Blacklist, which banned anyone deemed to be a subversive from working in Tinseltown. Jack Warner of Warner Brothers famously said that Communists were “pests”, and offered to donate to a “Pest Removal Fund”.
John Lewis argued that the Red Scare and Blacklist were not a torturous interlude for Hollywood, but instead saved the industry. At the time, box office revenue was slumping and television was posing a new competition. By promising to weed out subversives and remove leftist sympathies from films, the MPAA was able to gain certain aspects of self-regulation.
The prominent Jewish population in Hollywood came under attack, including through anti-Semitism openly expressed in Congress. This had real ramifications, as at the time only three percent of the U.S population was Jewish, but 40 percent of the blacklisted Hollywood folks were. Lewis argued that corporate New York interests were able to exploit post-war anti-Semitism to combat the unions and force out the first generation Jewish Studio Moguls. The industry was then able to develop and adopt a corporate model more suited to a future new Hollywood. ns of data privacy regulations and protection
**Wisecracks aside, it is worth noting that Tick Tock is seriously flawed as an enthusiastic participant in what scholar Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed “surveillance capitalism”–the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. The company has been dishonest in the past about how it managed U.S. user data and its parent company was caught monitoring the locations of U.S. reporters who criticized the company. It absolutely mines the heck out of your data, however, as we mentioned, it doesn’t seem to be demonstrably worse than its competitors, except that it’s owned by a Chinese company, which opens the threat that the Chinese government could order it to turn over data. But even that isn’t specific to Tick Tock; as expert Philip Napoli told PolitiFact, the Chinese government could get the very same information it could get from Tick Tock via the third party data broker industry, estimated to be worth $257.16 billion in 2021. These big data firms have purchased unfathomable amounts of user data from other American-owned apps. Napoli asks, “Would they have any qualms about selling that data to the Chinese government? Probably not.” And what’s more, there’s nothing to stop them, as Jen King, privacy and data policy fellow at Stanford University, explains: there are no federal laws protecting American consumer data from being sold to foreign entities.
Importantly, the Tick Tock data that theoretically could be obtained directly by the Chinese government would likely be of higher quality and cleaner than that purchased through third parties. So Tick Tock’s risk is very real, but even with that said, there are other enormous Chinese-owned companies with similar practices, like fast fashion giant Xi’an, which is currently trying to raise $2 billion for its public offering and is certainly not being called to testify before Congress about its data collecting practices.
While the anxiety about Tick Tock and the Chinese government mining U.S. data is obviously politically charged, it also speaks to a larger issue: the enormous unchecked power of Big Data. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his book Psychopolitics, Big Data is a vast commercial enterprise, where personal data are unseasonably monetized and commercialized–now people are treated and traded as packages of data for economic use, that is, human beings have become a commodity. Han argues that in practice, data mining takes the classic panopticon prison and internalizes it within each of us: the digitalized, networked subject is a panopticon of itself, because digital surveillance can peer into the human soul itself. He argues it becomes a highly efficient form of control, via things like micro-targeting.
In his view, Big Data has gotten so big that it no longer just collects information about our behavior and thoughts, it actively shapes them and thus influences the course of our lives–and we just sort of let it happen. In the face of real anxiety about the power of Big Data, Tick Tock has become a strategic distraction from an industry-wide phenomenon that has basically gone unchecked. Banning the one Chinese competitor in the social media market might feel like a win for our safety, the same way rooting out supposed commies in Hollywood did, but as with Hollywood’s blacklist, this might arguably just act as a smokescreen for the industry at large to fend off meaningful regulation. Evan Greer, director at the tech activism organization Fight for the Future, argues that every day that lawmakers waste hand-wringing about Tick Tock is another day that we don’t have a national privacy law in the United States.
Rather than singling out Tick Tock, then, maybe we should be talking about why Big Tech has been able to profit off of our personal data and our lived experiences with basically zero government intervention. Scholar Aaron Schin Reich explains that the U.S. is way behind most other industrialized nations in terms of data privacy regulations and protection.