It’s Not Just TikTok — The Social Media Data-Mining Solution

Source: Patriot Post | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>

“Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.” —Benjamin Franklin (1722)

When Donald Trump was president the first time around, he signed executive orders in 2020 ordering the sale or ban of the TikTok app because of its ChiCom connection. It quickly became the whipping boy for all things wrong with social media platforms. The concern was not just data collection for user manipulation by the Chinese; it was and remains that the algorithms used to serve content to users, particularly children and youth, can be dangerous.

But Congress has the ability — and responsibility — right now, regardless of the TikTok issue, to protect Americans from the collection of their user data by the big social media platforms. I will explain how that can be immediately accomplished below.

As you recall, in March of last year, the House passed H.R. 7521 to ban TikTok unless its Chinese owners divested their interest. A month later, a modified version of that bill passed the Senate and was then signed into law by Joe Biden. The ban had strong bipartisan support, passing in the House 360-58 and the Senate 79-18.

Questions about the legality of the legislation were disposed of in a resounding 9-0 Supreme Court decision just days before Trump’s inauguration.

Yet Trump had already changed his views on TikTok not long after Biden’s election, saying that the ban would only empower Facebook, which he rightly claimed, under the control of leftist Mark Zuckerberg, had become the biggest suppressor of free speech on the planet.

“I don’t want Facebook … doing better,” Trump said then. “They are a true Enemy of the People!” And again, he was right. The Patriot Post can certainly attest to Facebook’s wholesale suppression of our free speech platform.

Of course, Elon Musk agreed with Trump’s assessment, purchasing Twitter in 2022 with the stated goal of restoring free speech to America. And we owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the speech-suppression racketeers.

In August of last year, as it became more apparent that Trump and JD Vance could defeat Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, Zuckerberg began cozying up with Trump. He launched a series of public relations ploys to project that Facebook/Meta was going to reform its ways.

After the Trump/Vance victory, Zuckerberg became a born-again Trump supporter, putting those reforms in high gear. He joined Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring — color me skeptical.

Three weeks ago, Zuckerberg even announced the elimination of so-called “fact-checkers.” But would you be surprised to know that Facebook issued a fact-check against an editorial meme on our site last week? Guess some fact-checkers didn’t get the memo.

On 18 January, hours before the TikTok ban went into effect, the app became unavailable across the country. But the next day, after Trump promised he would rescue TikTok, the app was back. In fact, Trump did just that, signing an executive order his first day in office (among a long list of other EOs, delaying the enforcement of the TikTok ban by 75 days.

In effect, Trump has not overruled the legislative and judicial branches but instead delayed the implementation of the ban. Regardless, the ChiCom data mining continues.

All the TikTok attention and Facebook contortions notwithstanding, as I wrote last year, the TikTok ChiCom connection is not the real problem, and Zuckerberg and Bezos know it. It’s a distraction from the fact that data collection by Facebook/Meta and Google is only one tiny degree different than data collection by TikTok — as if an app’s country of origin dictates to whom the data is sold.

Facebook/Meta is not only a behemoth free speech suppressor; it is the biggest data-mining operation in the world, and there is a massive arterial data bleed on Facebook as it generates enormous revenue.

A month ago, I urged that on day one, Trump restore free speech to Facebook and other speech-suppression platforms. Specifically, I noted, as I had previously outlined in 2018 under Trump’s first term, that Republicans must pass legislation modifying Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, itself an amendment to the antiquated Communications Act of 1934.

The Section 230 revision must eliminate the liability protection shield for online platforms to ensure they meet the prescribed high standards of “neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination.”

Because the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is an act of Congress, it is thus subject to the First Amendment prohibition that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or the press.”

Until Congress takes action to modify the Section 230 protections afforded these behemoth social media platforms, their selective suppression of speech will persist.

But neither Trump nor Congress needs to wait for the modification of Section 230 protections. Trump could initiate by executive order what Facebook and Google fear most.

Trump and Congress already have the responsibility and authority to protect consumer data privacy. In the case of Facebook and other aggregators of private data, that would involve explicit requirements regarding the collection of consumer data and profiles.

More to the point of the properly vilified TikTok data issues, Congress has thus far done nothing to regulate the collection and marketing of private user data on these platforms. For years, all that congressional testimony by Big Tech oligarchs has been little more than political stage propping.

Here is the basic protocol that Congress could require or that Trump could immediately implement by executive order, which would put the brakes on the data privacy pirates.

If Republicans actually want to protect consumer data, Congress already has the authority to do so by addendums to existing legislation regulating commerce. In the case of Facebook and other aggregators of private data (which should be classified as private property), that legislation should include explicit consumer permissions regarding the collection and dissemination of their data, as well as full access to any profiles created by the data aggregators.

When it comes to invasive data privacy violations — the collecting and marketing of individual profiles — the ubiquitous blanket “user agreements” posted by the platforms are woefully insufficient.

The vast majority of social media platform users have no idea of the extent to which they are actually the platform products, and the data collected from them is a primary revenue generator.

Congress should enact legislation requiring that social media companies and other aggregators of individual data, including Google et al., be required to obtain specific and explicit user permissions for each and every transfer of such data prior to the collection of any individually identifiable profiling information. The requirement would be for a platform pop-up in each case, whereby the user must authorize the collection of their personal data, and the platform must then disclose how that data will be used, including the transfer or sale of such data to third parties.

That prospect is what really has Zuckerberg and Bezos kissing the king’s ring.

Facebook and other data aggregators already collect enormous revenue from advertising based on user profiles.

The internal use of individual profile data to determine what ads and content a user might be more interested in may be a negotiable issue regarding the legitimacy of using that data. However, exporting private data on individuals, either individually or in aggregate, should require explicit permissions — and violations of data collection rules should be enormously costly to social media companies.

The aggregators will argue about what constitutes “private” — that the data they collect is not private. But by any reasonable definition, the individual data in question most certainly is private.

The proposal of such requirements would rapidly bring the big social media platforms to the table for negotiations, at which point Congress could also insist on lifting any and all speech suppression and shadow-banning tactics used by the platforms.

This will enrage the Demos’ Leftmedia protectorate and Big Tech propagandists, but if Trump and Congress are serious about restricting data mining, they can accomplish that today.

Meanwhile, Republicans errantly think they can grow their constituents without leveling the field — busting up these data-mining monopolies and disabling their ability to suppress conservative free speech.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.


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About the author

The man known as Bunker is Patriosity's Senior Editor in charge of content curation, conspiracy validation, repudiation of all things "woke", armed security, general housekeeping, and wine cellar maintenance.

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