A respected media critic has sounded a stark warning about the impact of TikTok on society.

“I think TikTok is one of the greatest espionage operations ever conducted and it’s being conducted in broad daylight,” former US advertising executive Bob Hoffman told The Front Page podcast.

“It’s very dangerous, but I don’t know how you can stop it unless you can prove that it’s a danger to national security.”

These comments mirror the stark warning issued by NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway, who earlier this year told talk show host Bill Maher that governments needed to keep a close eye on the company.

“We have essentially, with TikTok, the most powerful propaganda tool in history,” said Galloway.

“It’s the most ascendant platform in history. It’s gone from 600 million to [billions of users] … If you look at age and how people feel about America, it’s inversely correlated. And the negativity around America is positively correlated with the consumption of social media and TikTok. "

Galloway elaborated on this point in a podcast, explaining the incentive in pushing the audience one way or the other.

“If I were a member of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] … I would just take my thumb, very elegantly and insidiously, and put it on the scales of content that reflects America in a bad light … I think it would be stupid not to do this.”

These concerns are significant enough for the Parliamentary Service in New Zealand to ban MPs from having the TikTok app on their phones, amid similar moves made by governments abroad. TikTok has been approached for comment on the concerns raised by both Hoffman and Galloway.

In the US, the governor of Montana recently signed a bill to ban TikTok from the state entirely – although enforcement remains a big question mark.

But Hoffman isn’t concerned only about TikTok. He warns the likes of Facebook and Meta are constantly tracking user information to drive their advertising-funded business models. Governments are trying to crack down on this issue, but Hoffman says there’s a real opportunity for a small country like New Zealand to take a leadership role.

“It’s probably easier for a country like New Zealand to regulate Facebook and Google than it would be in the US, even though the US is the home of these companies.

“New Zealand could say, we want you here or we don’t want you here under these terms, and here’s what you have to do if you want to stay here.”

Asked about the risk that these companies could decide to pull out of New Zealand, Hoffman says the risk is overstated.

“Another company could start up here and do search. It might take a while for it to catch up to the quality of Google search. And another company could certainly duplicate what Facebook does. Facebook doesn’t provide much in terms of public service, so I don’t think it would be catastrophic.”

Asked what a good form of regulation would look like, Hoffman is emphatic.

“The most important regulatory change that could be made, not just to Google and Facebook, but to the whole ad tech industry, is to ban tracking. Tracking is terribly dangerous for individuals and it’s a terribly dangerous thing for society.”

So what information do they hold? How can this be used? And why should we be worried about this information falling into the hands of the wrong government?

Listen to the full episode of The Front Page to hear more on this issue from Hoffman.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.

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