In Favor of Free Speech, Will Online Boycotts Work?
STARTLING DEVELOPMENTS IN THE WORLD OF ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA have left several platforms in uncharted waters, as repercussions from the recent election bear out in real time. As a nationwide ban on TikTok, which has over 170 million users in the United States, looms near on January 19th, unexpected responses have surprised even the most astute watchdogs and pundits in the social media space.
The position of the United States Justice Department has been that the threat of China extracting data (and weaponizing it) about Americans from TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, is a national security concern and reason enough for the ban.
TikTok has radically changed American lives in two ways: allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive, pumping approximately $24.2 billion into the U.S. gross domestic product in the last year, and providing unfiltered access to citizen journalism and news outside of legacy media outlets. This, millions of TikTok users believe, is the real reason behind the ban, not concerns about national security.
Under Mark Zuckerberg’s direction, perhaps the most controversial development has been Meta pivoting from using fact checkers in favor of community notes in its platforms
(Facebook, Instagram, and Threads), which is a much less rigorous set of standards around free speech and journalistic veracity. This will, many fear, allow for hate speech and propaganda to proliferate rapidly and undermine trust on these sites.
All of this has led to a week long boycott of all Meta platforms, to begin on January 19th, and the controversial action taken on Monday, January 13th, of over 700,000 Americans decamping their data from TikTok to join Red Note, (AKA Little Red Book) a Chinese app similar to TikTok, signaling users’ displeasure at the TikTok ban.
The TikTok ban is now being reconsidered by members of congress, with a new bill that will postpone the ban.
