Examining social media algorithms

Oracle, a tech company, is checking TikTok's algorithms to see if the Chinese Communist Party has been able to change them.

Axios reported on Tuesday that Oracle, an American tech company, is checking TikTok's algorithms and rules for content moderation to see if they were changed by the Chinese Communist Party. The investigation is part of the parent company ByteDance's ongoing efforts to clear its name after former president Donald Trump threatened to ban it from the US completely.

The move is part of "Project Texas," which is the company's answer to a BuzzFeed report that said some employees in China had access to data about TikTok users. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said that the goal of the project was to "help build trust with users and key stakeholders by improving our systems and controls" and to "make significant progress toward compliance with the final agreement with the US government that will fully protect user data and US national security interests."

TikTok said that some Chinese employees could access its data but that this was "subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our US-based security team." The company has also said that its AI will learn in Oracle's cloud and that all US users' data will be moved to servers in the US that are run by Oracle. After the BuzzFeed scandal, the company said in a statement that it would delete users' private information from its own servers and "fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers in the US."

BuzzFeed's article brought back anti-TikTok feelings on both sides of the aisle and led Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, to ask Apple and Google to remove the app from their app stores, saying that its "pattern of secret data practises" poses "an unacceptable national security risk." He said that ByteDance is "an organisation that is beholden to the Communist Party of China and is required by Chinese law to follow the PRC's surveillance demands."

US tech giants have reason to worry about TikTok, which has nothing to do with any possible ties to the Chinese government. The app gets more engagement from users every day than similar apps made in the US, like Instagram and Snapchat. When you consider that TikTok's algorithm is praised in the tech press for "knowing users better than they do themselves" and that the app has become famous for being able to guess users' sexuality, find past traumas that may or may not exist, and even cause mental illness, it's easy to see why American Big Tech wants to know how it works.