Oracle Now Reviewing TikTok Algorithms And Content Moderation Practices

Overhype

from the how-much-do-you-trust-oracle? dept

As you may recall, back during the Trump administration, after a bunch of kids on TikTok trolled Trump into believing one of his campaign rallies would be massively attended (which it was not), Trump decided to take out his anger on TikTok by issuing an almost certainly unconstitutional executive order demanding that TikTok’s owner, the Chinese firm ByteDance, sell TikTok to an American company. While a few potential buyers lined up to pick up the increasingly popular social media company on the cheap (due to the forced sale nature of it), White House insiders revealed that they would only approve the sale if it went to a friend of Donald Trump’s (this, of course, is corrupt nonsense, but hey, no one cares about that any more). That left precious few options, as Trump wouldn’t approve the sale to the few companies that actually wanted to buy the whole thing outright: namely Microsoft and Walmart.

In the end, Trump wanted the company to go to his buddy Larry Ellison’s Oracle. Of course, there was a problem: Oracle had no use for TikTok as a subsidiary. Oracle does enterprise stuff, not social media. But, what Oracle does have is a cloud hosting offering that is way down the list behind industry leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and others. So, Oracle and the Trump administration cooked up… a hosting deal for Oracle.

Basically, Oracle would get TikTok’s US hosting business with some vague promises of protecting data privacy, while Trump would get to help out a friend (Ellison) while pretending he’d actually accomplished something (even though it wasn’t at all what he initially demanded). Of course, this was all about posturing and headlines, so not much came of the deal for a while.

But, with new (somewhat questionable) claims about US TikTok data being accessible to ByteDance employees making news, the company apparently (two years later) has started to make good on the deal and in June announced that all of its US data was routed to Oracle.

However, there was more to the original deal, including some vague promises that Oracle would help protect that data, so now it’s coming out that Oracle is now “auditing” both TikTok’s algorithms and its content moderation practices.

It’s not exactly clear what this means in practice — and we’ll remind folks that there were reports last year claiming that Oracle had Chinese law enforcement customers, which raised at least some questions about its actual commitment to protecting data from the Chinese government. Also notable: Oracle has spent years gleefully trying to undermine basically all content moderation by funding groups to advocate against Section 230. Oh, and I guess we should mention, that for all the claims of TikTok being controlled by the Chinese government, remember that Oracle got its start… as a CIA project. There is something richly ironic in the idea that Oracle is somehow a trustworthy partner here.

Given all that — what exactly does it mean for Oracle to be “auditing” TikTok’s algorithms and content moderation? Given that the company doesn’t have the best track record on privacy and has worked to undermine content moderation for years now, the whole thing is… just kinda strange. Oracle’s explanation is not very clear at all:

The reviews give Oracle visibility into how TikTok’s algorithms surfaces content “to ensure that outcomes are in line with expectations and that the models have not been manipulated in any way,” the spokesperson said.

I mean, what does “manipulated” even mean in that sentence? Of course they’re manipulated. Someone wrote the algorithm. If they mean “not manipulated to promote Chinese propaganda” or “not manipulated to suppress anti-Chinese content” then… maybe say that. Because “manipulation” on its own doesn’t mean anything reasonable here.

There is nothing in Oracle’s history or experience that suggests the company has any useful insight into how TikTok handles recommendations or content moderation. There are plenty of reasons to think that Oracle might actually be problematic in this role.

The whole setup seems quite strange, and really feels like everyone just sort of making it up as they go along. TikTok needs some sort of US oversight to appease people who are freaked out that a Chinese-owned social media company is successful in the US, and Oracle was right there to say it would do it, in exchange for a lucrative hosting deal for its lagging cloud offering. This also feels vaguely similar to how the US has been accusing Chinese firms like Huawei and ZTE of using their tech to snoop on people… when that’s actually exactly what the US government has been doing via Cisco for years.

Also, what kind of precedent does this set? Will we be okay if other countries demand that their own favored companies have to audit US firms’ algorithms and content moderation practices? Because… that is going to create quite a mess.

Filed Under: algorithms, audit, china, content moderation, us
Companies: bytedance, oracle, tiktok