In each of the separate lawsuits state regulators filed, dozens of internal communications, documents and research data were redacted — blacked-out from public view — since authorities entered into confidentiality agreements with TikTok.
But in one of the lawsuits, filed by the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, the redactions were faulty. This was revealed when Kentucky Public Radio copied-and-pasted excerpts of the redacted material, bringing to light some 30 pages of documents that had been kept secret.
Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, those “news” pages that show up when you open a new browser tab in Edge, Xitter, Snapchat, and anyone else using an algorithm designed to drive engagement so they can shovel ads at you is 100% the same or worse than TikTok.
The problem is, as you said, is that TikTok is “evil Chinese company stealing our kids’ data” and all of the rest are “brave American captains of industry” and boy, we can’t possibly do anything that could possibly have our captains of industry making even one less cent than they do now. Why, that’d be communism!
So uh, here we are.