TikTok Ban Reveals a Need for an Algorithm (Slave/Sin) Tax
H.R. 7521, the TikTok 'ban' bill has passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. But the real issue isn't foreign adversaries, but the addictiveness of its platform.
On its face, H.R. 7521 is primarily concerned with protecting American users, and their data, from 'foreign adversaries'. It does so through banning TikTok from app stores and web hosting services unless the Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests from ownership over the social media app. As Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican Congressman who introduced the bill stated bluntly: "America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States. TikTok’s time in the United States is over unless it ends its relationship with CCP-controlled ByteDance.”
Yet, this claim of undue influence on American lives or the American political and protest landscape is nothing new, and neither is the U.S. government's strong-arming the divestment from Chinese owners of a popular social media app.
This appeal towards protecting American lives from foreign and domestic agitators has a long history. In the Information Age this rhetoric has been unquestionably 'upgraded'. The modern population of 'Americans' whom the government ostensibly seeks to protect however, is as it always has been, predicated on a fundamental question, central to Americans and their politics:
Who is an American?
Or rather, who is an American person?
An American person, or U.S. citizen as the founding fathers hotly debated it, was not defined precisely in the original Constitution or in the initial Bill of Rights. At the founding of the nation, an 'American' from a Constitutional perspective was only vaguely mentioned as one of Natural birth. The founding document also kept vague the other kind of persons making up a huge percentage of the country's total 'population', who were chief factors in one of the countries powerhouse of economic engines: chattel slaves.
For starters, "slavery" itself, nor the word "slave" does not appear in the Constitution. However, there are indirect references to the practice throughout the founding document.
The "Three-Fifths Clause", a compromise brainstormed between the assembled Founding Fathers during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, which resulted in the creation of the U.S. Constitution, allowed for the counting of 'all other persons' not Indians, as 'three-fifths of a perso'n. The exact text, found in Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution reads as follows:
“Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.”
This non-definition of slaves, understood at the time to be the verbiage 'all other persons', granted slave-owners two benefits. First, it allowed 3/5's of a state's 'non-person', i.e. slave population, to be counted for legislative representation. Second it served to limit how much of a tax burden these non-people would contribute to the amounts levied state-wide from the Federal level.
The effect was to give slave-holding states, which were predominately Southern, over-representation in the nascent Congress, but it also limited their overall tax responsibility to their fellow sister-states by not including slaves as full American 'persons'.
This 'compromise' was necessary at the time in order to appease Southern states and bring them into the fold of the newly formed nation. This was despite the fact that which of the inciting 'fathers' were more than a little uneasy over the inclusion of a practice seemed at odds to a revolution whose Declaration of Independence stated "all men are created equal".
Yet compromise they did.
It was a compromise that danced around slavery similar to another clause of the original Constitution -
"Article I Section 9:
Clause 1 Migration or Importation
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person."
This section was a more direct attempt to cripple the institution of slavery by those who opposed it, but at a transactional level.
Once again, the idea of American personhood was one not explicitly defined, but inferred by the line tax on importation "for each Person", i.e. - slaves. In other words, all imported slaves were considered 'taxable'. And while apple pie may not be as American as we like to think, American's aversion towards government and taxation, certainly is.
Despite a revolution ostensibly birthed by a rebellion against British duties and tariffs, the use of as a social imposition against activities the U.S. government perceives as harmful or costly to the rest of society has been baked into the nation from its founding. And these taxes have a name you might be familiar with - sin taxes.
Sin taxes are levied on products or services as a means to decrease both there revenues and their consumption. In the case of slavery, Article I Section 9 was a means to attack the import of new slaves, an attempt to stop the slave trade from reaching the American shore.
I think it's important to note at this point, American slaves were not products or services. They were human beings.
But in the face of the Founding Fathers inability, or rather, unwillingness, to directly confront slavery, or the fact that slaves were most certainly not taxable goods, this work-around quasi-sin-tax was an attempt, and also at the very least, recognition of the societal ills that slavery had on the whole of the American population. Even if at the time, they largely perceived the population of American persons as 'non-slaves' and even more narrowly understood to be landowning men of a certain 'complexion'.
This idea of taxation on goods and services to prevent the use of harmful goods and services has been updated but still remains in the modern landscape on things like alcohol, tobacco products, fast food and many other items. And as the digital age continues to unfold, the emergence of non-physical goods and services have arisen with negatives part an parcel of their production and use that many-times, may outweigh their benefits.
Things like social media.
Now, there are definite benefits to social media such as the ability to connect the world and as magnifiers of social movements. Yet the emergence of these types of positive macro-changes are often in spite of and not because of the intent of the businesses that run platforms that have emerged with Web 2.0. And now that harmful effects of these platforms have had a chance to be studied and documented, and the difficulties of getting regulators to actually regulate giants like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, many agree that curtailing their use are of concern to the broader society.
And yet, perhaps we can look to the U.S. Founding Fathers to help solve this dilemma.
Just like the original framers of the Constitution were hesitant, rightly or (obviously) wrongly to tackle slavery head-on, the idea of an alternative means of regulating the harmful effects of social media, may have a tax solution.
Because while these platforms may be somewhat nebulous in terms of what product or service they provide, and thereby obfuscating their broader less discernible external effects, they all run on essentially the same thing:
Social media algorithms are a set of computer guidelines that channel users towards and away content, content that is most appealing, i.e. addictive, to a user. In theory, the more effective the algorithm, the more addictive the platform.
TikTok's algorithm is incredibly addictive. And like addictions, social media ones have consequences. Singular and personal consequences like mental illness but also macro consequences like political radicalization. And yet, for most of these consequences, politicians are to date largely unable or unwilling to confront.
Sound familiar?
And just like the quasi-'sin' tax meant to combat slavery, an indirect tax on these algorithms may be a way around this hesitancy. Because algorithms are part of an economic activity that delivers clear and present deleterious effects on the broader society, yet their taxation may be a backdoor into clamping down on these platform's negative externalities.
Because just like slavery, the complexity of digital social media platforms, or rather the enormous economic benefits to the owners of these platforms, present a legislative hurdle, one that may be served by 'avoiding' the externality issues of free speech, digital privacy, radicalization, democracy and foreign influence.
So instead of confronting these items head-on, a better approach, perhaps at least in the short term, is to sidestep these issues altogether and focus solely on addiction, and the algorithms creating it. Taxing this addiction, similar to other 'sin' taxes on gambling, lotteries, sugar and yes, tanning salons, may be a way to mitigate the harmful effects of social media platforms, indirectly.
While the modern American political landscape may lack the sine qua non of its founding fathers, it certainly has its own vast array of civic-minded tech giants. And just like the founders, these titans of industry have enormous sway over how society operates, with some of them, already seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to artificial intelligence and the average worker.
Bill Gates for instance has proposed taxing robots, demonstrating that once again, those with business and political savvy understand the economic and societal impacts of a completely servile 'worker'. Or, in a perverse historical callback to the politically opaque jargon of founding U.S. politics, a 'non-American person'.
While we may be a long way off from creating a robot with enough intelligence to resemble the likes of a fully functional android like Star Trek's Data, we do have highly advanced algorithms and bots that are playing increasingly oversized roles in a good deal of American politics, and not in a good way. And the majority of these algorithms are on social media platforms that unlike TikTok, are owned by American businesses, and thus, are under the purvey of American businessmen - and regulators.
And while some of these platforms include algorithms that are 'open source', such as portions of Elon' Musk's Twitter, China, one of the foreign adversaries listed in the new H.R.7521 bill to ban TikTok, is leading the way in at the very least, forcing its native businesses to reveal how their own algorithms work.
It may be a first step, but recognizing and cataloguing these algorithms could lead to a more democratized understanding of their addictive nature, thereby allowing regulators a systematic approach to taxation. And such an approach may lead to greater public debate over the innerworkings of a technology and how it may be taxed. That is, unless the 'real' Americans, such the tech giants and their massive followers push back once more in favor of their economic and political self-interest.