(iPoster) Client, Not Citizen: How TikTok Leveraged User Hardware to Avoid a Federal Ban

• In Event: Poster Session: Information Technology and Politics & Science, Technology, and Environment
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Information Technology and Politics

Abstract

We are now far removed from the early utopian visions of digital networks as emancipatory tools that would achieve democratic ideals online. Instead, we find ourselves caught in an age of techno-pessimism, increasingly aware of digital technology’s erosive effects on democratic norms. Digital technologies offer tools that promise to support democratic habits, pro-democratic language is ubiquitous on the Internet, yet democratic norms seem to be waning in the digital public sphere. Why, given such tools, are users of digital networks failing to meet expectations?
While much scholarly attention has been given to the negative influences of disinformation and algorithms, data alone cannot capture the whole story. Dynamics in the physical layer of the Internet help explain why user interactions over social media are marked by increasing anti-democratic attitudes.
I argue that anti-democratic digital trends can be traced to the lack of clear boundaries between public and private digital space. Centralized networks, though physically arranged into digital publics, design software to service the personalized computing needs of users. Such networks centralize computing resources and trap user devices into asymmetric clientelist relations. Platform authorities then shape the data consumption of users, as well as their means of data production, by optimizing user devices for the delivery for their software services.
As users become reliant on public-facing digital architecture to satisfy personalized needs, the boundary between public and private digital space becomes obscured and results in a weakened sense of user efficacy. Users subsequently experience few social pressures to develop the pro-social cooperative behaviors characteristic of democratic practice and instead develop entrenched reliance on -- and loyalty towards -- centralized network services. This combination of heavy reliance and inward turn contributes to digital conditions that inform and shape user behaviors. When such conditions are naturalized, users unknowingly adopt the digital habits of clients in expansive networks rather than of potential democratic digital citizens.
To illustrate the political effects of such centralized networks, in this paper, I will explore the case of TikTok and the strategies that it deployed to fend against federal attempts at banning the platform. I will discuss how TikTok secured access to user mobile hardware by strategically baiting and locking-in new users, how the platform was able to deploy region-specific political messaging by leveraging cell-tower location tracing, and how TikTok effectively held user data hostage as a means of forcing a public outrage campaign against Congressional calls for the company to divest. This study will highlight that TikTok’s (thus far) successful campaign to remain operational and unaltered is not attributable to a close curation of platform content, nor to optimized algorithmic feeds. Rather, it has been TikTok’s consistent ability to appropriate user-end hardware for its purposes that has proven decisive for the platform. Though TikTok can indeed be a platform capable of realizing goals of free expression, of pro-social interactions, and of shared community, that the platform can be at once wholly captured and utilized by corporate authorities to serve private goals is deeply concerning. Beyond well-known concerns about the exposure of user data, this plain lack of insulation between corporate interest and the public sphere does not bode well for sustained digital democracy.
This study would contribute to the growing literature on building digital democracy, and supplement ongoing conversations about the role of disinformation and misinformation in disrupting the digital public sphere. It is hoped that closer analyses of the hardware layer of the Internet, which underpins and enables the interactions of cyberspace, will grant us greater clarity about the pressures and factors that affect user behaviors, preferences, and ultimately commitment to democratic practice in cyberspace.

Author

• Jackie Chuan Yin Ku, University of California, Irvine