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The road to hell is paved with good intentions — and so is the path to a potential surveillance state.
After losing its high-profile case in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last week, TikTok is now one step closer to being outright banned in this country.
If the Chinese-owned app fails to find a political ally in the incoming Trump administration by Jan. 19 (or new domestic ownership), mind-numbing scroll sessions and moronic viral stunts will soon be unavailable for its 170 million American users.
While many may view the Biden administration’s actions as overreach, a ban on TikTok would be an act many American parents are desperate to see: the restriction of social media for their children.
The harmful effects of predatory algorithms on young people are now as obvious as the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
Last year, the US Surgeon General warned the nation that young people who engaged in “more than 3 hours per day on social media faced double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes including symptoms of depression and anxiety.”
However, protecting our children from Silicon Valley (and China) isn’t as simple as banning cancerous apps. It’s a reality being demonstrated right now in Australia.
Late last month, the Land Down Under passed ground-breaking legislation to outright ban social media for anyone under 16.
The new rules toss TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X, and Instagram onto barbie and fine those companies up to $50 million AUD (about $33 million) for failing to restrict kids from their content.
Parents cheered the law, with polls showing that 77% of Australians approve of the government’s new rules. In theory, I do, too. I immigrated to Australia from the US in 2022 and am now the father of a true-blue Aussie ’roo. Like many parents, my wife and I began planning our family’s approach to “screen time” at conception — and a world where scrolling is simply not an option seems like a better one.
Unfortunately, Australia’s “fair dinkum” (or cynically political) attempts to woo parents like me are not as straightforward as they might seem. And they won’t be in the US, either.
“I think many parents are struggling,” says Lisa Given, an information studies scholar at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. “They see [the ban] as the government trying to do something. But at the end of the day, the question is, ‘How is this going to be policed?’ “
In fact, no one knows how Australia’s ban will function in practice once it begins in the coming year. All social media users could now be asked to log on with a government-issued ID such as a driver’s license (which the government has said it won’t require).
Or worse still, and perhaps even more likely, social media companies will begin using facial recognition or biometrics to confirm a user’s age (although initial reports suggest this approach is less successful for kids who are not Caucasian).
The third approach is “pattern recognition” — tracking a user’s overall internet activity to make a guess at their age. That would require a high level of general internet surveillance and open the doors to privacy issues a la mode. Welcome to China.
“I don’t think this will be successful if you are thinking about it as a way to protect children from harm,” says Given. “Many children will still be able to access content, whether they’re using a technical workaround like a VPN, or just a shared device in the home . . . What we actually need to combat are things like image-based abuse, we need to target the algorithms.”
And, of course, where there is a will, there’s a way: Teens still vape, they still sneak booze and they’ll still find a way to meme dankly.
It’s hard to believe the ban isn’t, on some level, subterfuge to monitor and censor every Australian’s internet activity. Even if it isn’t, the ban leaves the door wide open to government snooping.
Worse still, we already know that there is a better way: Tech companies have the ability to modify their algorithms so that they aren’t force-feeding negative content to their users.
But they won’t if the government, namely the US government, doesn’t force them.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual, greed over good. Sorry Australia, the dingo ate your baby.