Eric Smalley, The Conversation and Matt Williams, The Conversation

The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 17, 2025, upheld a law requiring TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the video app by Jan. 19, 2025, or face a nationwide ban on the app. In a unanimous decision, the court rejected TikTok’s claim that the law violates its First Amendment rights.

The court’s ruling is the latest development in a lengthy saga over the fate of an app that is widely popular, especially among young Americans, but that many politicians in Washington say is a security risk.

The ruling is unlikely to be the end of the story. President Joe Biden said that he will not enforce the law in the waning hours of his administration. President-elect Donald Trump said he will reverse the ban and is reportedly considering an executive order to do so.

But why is TikTok controversial? Are the claims of it being a national security risk valid? And what will the case mean for free speech? The Conversation’s contributors have been on hand to answer these questions.

1. An agent of the Chinese state?

Politicians who wanted to ban TikTok, or at least sever its links to China, fear that the app provides a way for the Chinese Communist Party to influence Americans or use their data for malicious purposes. But how much influence does the Chinese government have on TikTok? That question is addressed by Shaomin Li, a scholar of China’s political economy and business at Old Dominion University.

Li explains that the relationship between TikTok, ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party is nuanced – it isn’t simply a matter of officials in Beijing telling ByteDance to jump and the parent company dictating how high its subsidiary will leap. Rather, as with all companies in China, employees are under certain obligations when it comes to advancing national interests. In China, private enterprises, such as ByteDance, operate as joint ventures with the state.

“Regardless of whether ByteDance has formal ties with the party, there will be the tacit understanding that the management is working for two bosses: the investors of the company and, more importantly, their political overseers that represent the party,” Li writes. “But most importantly, when the interests of the two bosses conflict, the party trumps.”

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2. Exploiting user data

The risks TikTok poses to U.S. users are similar to the risks posed by many popular apps, principally that the app collects data about you. That data, which includes contact information and website tracking, plus all data you post and messages you send through the app, is available to use or misuse by ByteDance and any other entity that has or gains access to it.

Iowa State University cybersecurity researcher Doug Jacobson writes that U.S. officials and lawmakers are concerned that the Chinese government could exploit TikTok user data to spy on U.S. citizens. Government hackers could use the TikTok data to trick users into revealing more personal information.

But if the goal is to counter Chinese hackers, banning TikTok is likely to prove too little, too late. “By some estimates, the Chinese government has already collected personal information on at least 80% of the U.S. population via various means,” Jacobson writes. “The Chinese government – along with anyone else with money – also has access to the large market for personal data.”

3. The security risks of a ban

Banning TikTok could also make U.S. users more vulnerable to hackers of all stripes. Rochester Institute of Technology computer security expert Robert Olson writes that many of the 170 million U.S. TikTok users could try to get around a ban on the app, with negative consequences for their digital safety.

If TikTok ends up banned from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, users could try to access the app elsewhere via sideloading. This practice of getting around the Apple and Google app stores leaves users vulnerable to malware posing as the TikTok app. TikTok users might also be motivated to circumvent Apple and Google security controls in order to keep the app installed, a move that would make users’ phones more vulnerable.

“I find it unlikely that a TikTok ban (is) technologically enforceable,” Olson writes. “This … legislation – aimed at improving cybersecurity – could motivate users to engage in riskier digital behavior.”

4. First Amendment concerns

In its legal challenge to the U.S. government, ByteDance claimed the government is violating its First Amendment rights. Technology law scholars Anupam Chander of Georgetown University and Gautam Hans of Cornell University write that ByteDance had grounds for its claim, and that the implications go beyond this case.

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TikTok is a publisher – an online publisher of users’ videos. Forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok is a form of prior restraint – the government preventing speech before it occurs, Chander and Hans write.

“By forcing the sale of TikTok to an entity without ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Congress’ intent with the law is to change the nature of the platform,” they write. “That kind of government action implicates the core concerns that the First Amendment was designed to protect against: government interference in the speech of private parties.”

5. What about the others?

Security and legal issues aside, the forced sale to a U.S.-based company or ban of TikTok in the United States is a questionable approach to solving the problems the law aims to address: potential Chinese government influence in the U.S., harm to teens and data privacy violations, writes Arizona State media scholar Sarah Florini.

The Chinese government – and other U.S. adversaries – have long used social media apps owned by U.S. companies to attempt to influence American public opinion. TikTok is hardly alone in posing harm to teens, as the Facebook whistleblower case amply demonstrated. And vast amounts of Americans’ personal data are already available to any buyer on the open and black markets.

“Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they are also not unique. Each threat posed by TikTok has also been posed by U.S.-based social media for over a decade,” Florini writes.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Sept. 16, 2024.

Eric Smalley, Science + Technology Editor, The Conversation and Matt Williams, Senior International Editor, The Conversation

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Anjana Susarla, Michigan State University

Meta’s decision to change its content moderation policies by replacing centralized fact-checking teams with user-generated community labeling has stirred up a storm of reactions. But taken at face value, the changes raise the question of the effectiveness of Meta’s old policy, fact-checking, and its new one, community comments.

With billions of people worldwide accessing their services, platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have a responsibility to ensure that users are not harmed by consumer fraud, hate speech, misinformation or other online ills. Given the scale of this problem, combating online harms is a serious societal challenge. Content moderation plays a role in addressing these online harms.

Moderating content involves three steps. The first is scanning online content – typically, social media posts – to detect potentially harmful words or images. The second is assessing whether the flagged content violates the law or the platform’s terms of service. The third is intervening in some way. Interventions include removing posts, adding warning labels to posts, and diminishing how much a post can be seen or shared.

Content moderation can range from user-driven moderation models on community-based platforms such as Wikipedia to centralized content moderation models such as those used by Instagram. Research shows that both approaches are a mixed bag.

Does fact-checking work?

Meta’s previous content moderation policy relied on third-party fact-checking organizations, which brought problematic content to the attention of Meta staff. Meta’s U.S. fact-checking organizations were AFP USA, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, TelevisaUnivision, The Dispatch and USA TODAY.

Fact-checking relies on impartial expert review. Research shows that it can reduce the effects of misinformation but is not a cure-all. Also, fact-checking’s effectiveness depends on whether users perceive the role of fact-checkers and the nature of fact-checking organizations as trustworthy.

Crowdsourced content moderation

In his announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that content moderation at Meta would shift to a community notes model similar to X, formerly Twitter. X’s community notes is a crowdsourced fact-checking approach that allows users to write notes to inform others about potentially misleading posts.

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Studies are mixed on the effectiveness of X-style content moderation efforts. A large-scale study found little evidence that the introduction of community notes significantly reduced engagement with misleading tweets on X. Rather, it appears that such crowd-based efforts might be too slow to effectively reduce engagement with misinformation in the early and most viral stage of its spread.

There have been some successes from quality certifications and badges on platforms. However, community-provided labels might not be effective in reducing engagement with misinformation, especially when they’re not accompanied by appropriate training about labeling for a platform’s users. Research also shows that X’s Community Notes is subject to partisan bias.

Crowdsourced initiatives such as the community-edited online reference Wikipedia depend on peer feedback and rely on having a robust system of contributors. As I have written before, a Wikipedia-style model needs strong mechanisms of community governance to ensure that individual volunteers follow consistent guidelines when they authenticate and fact-check posts. People could game the system in a coordinated manner and up-vote interesting and compelling but unverified content. https://www.youtube.com/embed/HsV6DHmC8UA?wmode=transparent&start=0 Misinformation researcher Renée DiResta analyzes Meta’s change in content moderation policy.

Content moderation and consumer harms

A safe and trustworthy online space is akin to a public good, but without motivated people willing to invest effort for the greater common good, the overall user experience could suffer.

Algorithms on social media platforms aim to maximize engagement. However, given that policies that encourage engagement can also result in harm, content moderation also plays a role in consumer safety and product liability.

This aspect of content moderation has implications for businesses that either use Meta for advertising or to connect with their consumers. Content moderation is also a brand safety issue because platforms have to balance their desire to keep the social media environment safer against that of greater engagement.

AI content everywhere

Content moderation is likely to be further strained by growing amounts of content generated by artificial intelligence tools. AI detection tools are flawed, and developments in generative AI are challenging people’s ability to differentiate between human-generated and AI-generated content.

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In January 2023, for example, OpenAI launched a classifier that was supposed to differentiate between texts generated by humans and those generated by AI. However, the company discontinued the tool in July 2023 due to its low accuracy.

There is potential for a flood of inauthentic accounts – AI bots – that exploit algorithmic and human vulnerabilities to monetize false and harmful content. For example, they could commit fraud and manipulate opinions for economic or political gain.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT make it easier to create large volumes of realistic-looking social media profiles and content. AI-generated content primed for engagement can also exhibit significant biases, such as race and gender. In fact, Meta faced a backlash for its own AI-generated profiles, with commentators labeling it “AI-generated slop.”

More than moderation

Regardless of the type of content moderation, the practice alone is not effective at reducing belief in misinformation or at limiting its spread.

Ultimately, research shows that a combination of fact-checking approaches in tandem with audits of platforms and partnerships with researchers and citizen activists are important in ensuring safe and trustworthy community spaces on social media.

Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Min Joo Lee, Indiana University

South Korea finds itself embroiled in an all-out gender war – and it keeps getting worse.

The animosity between Korean men and women has reached a point where some women are outright refusing to date, marry and have kids with men – a phenomenon known as the 4B movement.

As a Korean feminist scholar living in the U.S., I’ve followed this gender war from afar as I conducted research on contemporary Korean gender politics.

However, I also became embroiled in it myself after my research on Korean masculinity was published by CNN.

The article described foreign women who traveled to Korea after becoming enamored of the idea of dating Korean men from watching Korean television dramas. I pointed out that since the tourists’ fantasies were based on fictional characters, some of them ended up disappointed with the Korean men they dated in real life.

The article was about racial politics and the masculine ideals. But some Korean readers thought that I was simply criticizing Korean men for not being romantic and handsome enough. One enraged Korean man commented that I was an “ugly feminist.”

But this was tame in comparison to what women living in South Korea have endured in recent years.

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Extreme misogyny and a feminist backlash

Over the past couple of decades, there have been flash points in this gender war.

In 2010, Ilbe, a right-wing website that traffics in misogyny, started attracting users who peppered the forums with vulgar posts about women.

Then in 2015, an online extremist feminist group named Megalia arose. Its goal was to fight back by demeaning Korean men in ways that mirrored the rhetoric on sites like Ilbe.

A year later, a man who had professed his hatred of women murdered a random woman in a public bathroom near a Seoul subway station. He was eventually sentenced to decades in prison, but the lines were quickly drawn. On one side were feminists, who saw misogyny as the underlying motive. On the other side were men who claimed that it was merely the isolated actions of a mentally ill man. The two groups violently clashed during competing protests at the site of the murder.

A backdrop of digital sex crimes

However, none of these events have elicited as much public controversy as the steep rise in digital sex crimes. These are newer forms of sexual violence facilitated by technology: revenge porn; upskirting, which refers to surreptitiously snapping photos under women’s skirts in public; and the use of hidden cameras to film women having sex or undressing.

In 2018, there were 2,289 reported cases of digital sex crimes; in 2021, the number snowballed to 10,353.

In 2019, there were two major incidents that involved digital sex crimes.

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In one, a number of male K-pop stars were indicted for filming and circulating videos of women in group chatrooms without their consent.

A few months later, Koreans were shocked to learn about what became known as the “Nth Room Incident,” during which hundreds of perpetrators – mostly men – committed digital sex crimes on dozens of women and minors.

They tended to target poorer women – sex workers, or women who wanted to make a few bucks by sharing anonymous nude photos of themselves. The perpetrators either hacked into their social media accounts or approached these women and offered them money, but asked for their personal information so they could transmit the funds. Once they obtained this information, they blackmailed the women by threatening to reveal their sex work and their nudes to their friends and family.

Since sex work and posting nude images of yourself online are illegal in Korea, the women, fearing arrest or being ostracized by friends and family, complied with the perpetrators’ demands to send even more compromising images of themselves. The men would then swap these images in chatrooms.

And yet a 2019 survey conducted by the Korean government found that large swaths of the population blamed women for these sex crimes: 52% said that they believed sexual violence occurs because women wear revealing clothes, while 37% thought if women experienced sexual assault while drunk, they are partly to blame for their victimization.

In other words, a significant percentage of the Korean population believes that female sexuality is the problem – not the sexual violence.

Government policy lays the groundwork

Digital sex crimes are too widespread to lay the blame at the feet of a handful of bad actors.

To me, part of the problem stems from the long history of “gendered citizenship.”

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Korean feminist scholar Seungsook Moon has written about the ways in which the government created one track for men and another for women as the country sought to modernize in the second half of the 20th century:

“Men were mobilized for mandatory military service and then, as conscripts, utilized as workers and researchers in the industrializing economy. Women were consigned to lesser factory jobs, and their roles as members of the modern nation were defined largely in terms of biological reproduction and household management.”

Although these policies are no longer officially carried out, the underlying attitudes about gender roles remain embedded in Korean life and culture. Women who veer from being mothers and housewives expose themselves to public and private backlash.

The government has created gender quotas in certain industries to try to unravel this system of gendered citizenship.

For instance, some government jobs have minimum gender quotas for new hires, and the government encourages the private sector to implement similar policies. In historically male-dominant industries, such as construction, there are quotas for female hires, while in historically female-dominant industries, such as education, there are male quotas.

In some ways, this has only made things worse. Each gender feels as if the other is receiving special treatment due to these affirmative action policies. Resentment festers.

‘The generation that has given up’

Today, the sense of competition between young men and women is exacerbated by the soaring cost of living and rampant unemployment.

Called the “N-Po Generation,” which roughly translates as “the generation that has given up,” many young South Koreans don’t think they can achieve certain milestones that previous generations took for granted: marriage, having kids, finding a job, owning a home and even friendships.

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Although all genders find themselves discouraged, the act of “giving up” has caused more problems for women. Men see women who forgo marriage and having kids as selfish. And when they then try to compete against men for jobs, some men become incensed.

Many of the men who have become radicalized commit digital sex crimes to take revenge on women who, in their view, have abandoned their duties.

Ultimately, the competitive dynamic created by the Korean government’s embrace of gendered citizenship has stoked the virulent gender war between Korean men and women, with digital sex crimes used as ammunition.

The 4B movement, whereby Korean women forego heterosexual dating, marriage, and childbirth, represents a radical escalation of the gender war by seeking to create an online and offline world devoid of men. Rather than engaging in altercations, these women are refusing to interact with men, period.

Digital sex crimes are a global problem

To be sure, digital sex crimes are not unique to Korea.

When I teach my college class on digital sex crimes in the U.S., I’m surprised by how many of my students admit that they’ve been victims of digital sex crimes, or knew of it happening at their high schools. And at the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference in 2022, I watched feminist activists and scholars from all over the world present their findings about digital sex crimes back home.

Since each country has its own cultural context for the rise in digital sex crimes, there isn’t a single solution to solve the problems. But in South Korea, continuing to unravel the system of gendered citizenship could be part of the solution.

Min Joo Lee, Postdoctoral Fellow, Indiana University

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.