January 21, 2025
Allison Stanger, Distinguished Senior Fellow at CNS
The following is an excerpt from The Atlantic.
In ruling Friday on the future of the social-media app TikTok, the Supreme Court understood it was dealing with a novel issue. “We are conscious that the cases before us involve new technologies with transformative capabilities,” the justices declared in a per curiam opinion. “This challenging new context counsels caution on our part.” When the nation’s Founders enshrined freedom of speech in the First Amendment, they couldn’t have imagined phone apps that amplify information around the world almost instantaneously—much less one controlled by a foreign power, as TikTok is, and capable of tracking the movements, relationships, and behaviors of millions of Americans in real time.
The unanimous decision upheld a federal law intended to force the sale or shutdown of Chinese-controlled TikTok, and the justices’ arguments focused on that platform alone. But a window has been opened for acknowledging that, as a matter of law, protecting human expression is qualitatively different from enabling algorithmic manipulation of human attention.
Platforms such as TikTok and its American-founded counterparts Facebook, Instagram, and X aren’t mere communication channels; they’re sophisticated artificial-intelligence systems that shape, amplify, and suppress human expression based on proprietary algorithms optimized for engagement and data collection. TikTok’s appeal lies in showing users an endless stream of content from strangers algorithmically selected for its ability to keep people scrolling. The platform’s algorithm learns and adapts, creating rapid feedback loops in which even factually inaccurate information can quickly spread around the world—a mechanism fundamentally different from traditional human-to-human communication. Meta and X, which have copied some features of TikTok, raise similar concerns about dangerous virality. But TikTok’s control by a hostile foreign power introduces an additional variable.
Continue reading at The Atlantic.
