![]() “I don’t think there’s any way to frame this as a general data privacy issue without going after every other tech company,” Fiesler told TechCrunch. She commands an audience of over 100,000 followers on TikTok, where she explores issues like the nuances of content moderation and other topics that might come up in her graduate courses. “The risk seems to be entirely speculative right now, and to me, I’m not sure how it is substantially worse than all of the things that are troubling about social media right now that the government has not been focusing on,” Fiesler said. Casey Fiesler, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of tech ethics and policy, believes that the national security concerns about the app are overstated. Tech ethicists and creators alike share this frustration. “Congress made clear that they don’t understand TikTok, they don’t listen to their constituents who are in the community of TikTokers - and are using this TikTok hysteria as a way to pass legislation that gives them superpowers to ban any app they deem ‘unsafe’ in the future,” Spehar said following the hearing. Vitus Spehar, host of the TikTok channel Under The News Desk, hosts a live stream during a news conference outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, March 22, 2023. They participated in a press conference on Wednesday afternoon hosted by Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a rare dissenting voice in Congress who raised questions about what he described as the “hysteria and panic” surrounding TikTok. this week to advocate on TikTok’s behalf - and against the looming threat of a national ban. ![]() Spehar is part of a group of TikTok creators who travelled to Washington, D.C. “It’s not just banning the app in the United States it means disconnecting American citizens from Canada, the UK, Mexico, Iran, Ukraine and all of the frontline reporting you see from those countries. “I think it’s really concerning that a government is considering removing American citizens from the global conversation on an app as robust as TikTok,” Spehar told TechCrunch. But in this week’s news cycle, they’re front-and-center (literally: they sat right behind the TikTok CEO as he testified). TikTok creator Vitus “V” Spehar, known as Under the Desk News, has amassed 2.9 million followers by sharing global news in an approachable way. ![]() During a tech hearing two years ago, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) created another notorious viral moment by asking Facebook’s global head of safety if she would “commit to ending finsta.”Īs entertaining as these lapses in basic knowledge are, TikTok creators have serious concerns about the future of an app that’s given them a community and, in some cases, a career. Zuckerberg responded, “ Senator, we run ads,” failing to stifle a smirk. At a high-profile hearing in 2018, the late Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) infamously asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook makes money if the app is free. The ignorant questions weren’t unique to the government’s interrogation of Chew. Chew responded, bewildered, “Only if the user turns on the Wi-Fi.” In one instance, Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC) asked Chew if TikTok connects to a user’s home Wi-Fi network. In the aftermath of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s brutal five-hour Congressional hearing on Thursday, TikToker and disinformation researcher Abbie Richards summed up what so many creators were thinking: “It’s actually remarkable how much less Congress knows about social media than the average person,” Richards told TechCrunch.Īcross TikTok, users mocked congresspeople for misunderstanding how technology works.
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