Tiktok and the Fediverse

Today, the United States House of Representatives voted to require the Chinese company Bytedance to sell its stake in the popular service Tiktok. If the company does not comply, the bill would ban the use of Tiktok in the US. The bill still needs to pass the Senate and get delivered to President Biden’s desk, but there are a lot of really interesting parts of this decision that I want to unpack.

Foreign companies own shares in all kinds of entities in the United States. There are some interesting restrictions on domestic transportation (listen all of y’all: it’s cabotage), financial services, atomic energy, and real estate. All of them have pretty strong justifications in terms of domestic security — that some level of domestic independence would be lost if all our railroads were owned by Chilean investors, for example.

But we don’t have restrictions on selling foreign-owned magazines or newspapers or movies, or serving foreign-owned Web sites, in the US. You can read Pravda or Al-Jazeera or China Daily on an iPad in the comfort of your lovely American home. It’s not universal — copyrighted information illegally shared and terrorist recruitment content are often blocked or the domains are just plain taken over. But for the most part, the US is pretty OK with you reading or watching content from other countries, even if it has a strong editorial slant against the US government’s current policies.

So, why is Tiktok different here? Realistically, most American viewers aren’t watching Chinese-made content on their Tiktok apps. They’re watching short videos made in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia or other, y’know, “western” countries. But the videos are curated by an algorithm provided by Tiktok, which if it is partially-owned by Bytedance, is somehow entangled with China’s interests.

The House bill, then, is an acknowledgment that algorithmic curation of feeds is a powerful feature that can have a major influence on individuals and society. It at least makes the point that allowing a foreign company, under its own government’s influence, to have some level of control of the algorithm, is a potential danger for domestic security.

This raises a few really important questions. First, for everyone outside of America, it raises the question of algorithmic feeds created outside their own countries. Is the Internet a nice, friendly post-national free-trade free-speech zone, or is domestic control of this technology important in France, Guyana and New Zealand, too?

In addition, for Americans, it should probably give us pause in thinking about our domestically-controlled networks. Does Congress think that algorithmic feeds under domestic control are equally powerful? If so, who’s making the decisions on how they’re used, and what connection is there between different factions who want to influence opinions or behaviour through curation?

I think the Fediverse provides some interesting answers here. The Fediverse is a federated network of social networks — a social internet or social web — connected by the ActivityPub social standard. The networks can be owned by all kinds of different entities — governments, private companies, community groups or individuals. Each network has its own local control mechanisms, but users on one network can follow, reply to, and otherwise communicate with people on any other network. Content created on one network gets published out to all the other networks depending on how many followers are there. Mastodon is a common example of software on the Fediverse, but new platforms are joining all the time.

For the international question, countries can consider implementing domestic social networks that federate with ones in other countries. This allows content to be received and sent across borders, but algorithmic feeds to be managed locally. If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem.

Within a country, it raises one potential solution for people concerned about the influence of algorithmic feeds, namely, running social network services under your own control, and following users from other networks. The home feed you read can be curated by an algorithm built into the server, or built into the client, or you can even leave it uncurated — just in chronological order. The Fediverse allows pushing the control of algorithmic feeds closer to users, who can make their own decisions about how content is prioritized.

Federation provides the possibility of some interesting changes in the locus of control in social networks. If we are starting to acknowledge how powerful this curational control is, we should start structuring our social network infrastructure to allow experimentation in whose hands are on the levers.