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TikTok is an AI app. Not an “ask a bot to do your homework” kind of AI app, but an AI app all the same: Its algorithm processes and acts upon huge amounts of data to keep users engaged. Without that fundamental, freakishly well-tuned technology, TikTok wouldn’t really be anything at all—just another video or shopping platform.

The app is set to be banned in the United States, following a decision by the Supreme Court earlier today. But the legacy of its algorithm will live on, as my colleague Hana Kiros wrote in an article for The Atlantic yesterday: “Although it was not the first app to offer an endless feed, and it was certainly not the first to use algorithms to better understand and target its users, TikTok put these ingredients together like nothing else before it.” The app was so effective—so sticky—that every meaningful competitor tried to copy its formula. Now TikTok-like feeds have been integrated into Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, X, even LinkedIn.

Today, AI is frequently conflated with generative AI because of the way ChatGPT has captured the world’s imagination. But generative AI is still a largely speculative endeavor. The most widespread and influential AI programs are the less flashy ones quietly whirring away in your pocket, influencing culture, business, and (in this case) matters of national security in very real ways.

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Internet Is TikTok Now

By Hana Kiros

There are times when, deep into a scroll through my phone, I tilt my head and realize that I’m not even sure what app I’m on. A video takes up my entire screen. If I slide my finger down, another appears. The feeling is disorienting, so I search for small design cues at the margins of my screen. The thing I’m staring at could be TikTok, or it could be one of any number of other social apps that look exactly like it.

Although it was not the first app to offer an endless feed, and it was certainly not the first to use algorithms to better understand and target its users, TikTok put these ingredients together like nothing else before it. It amassed what every app wants: many users who spend hours and hours scrolling, scrolling, scrolling (ideally past ads and products that they’ll buy). Every other major social platform—Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, X, even LinkedIn—has copied TikTok’s format in recent years. The app might get banned in the United States, but we’ll still be living in TikTok’s world.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

I’m scared of the person TikTok thinks I am: “TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is known for its accuracy and even its ‘magic,’” Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote for The Atlantic in 2021. “What does it mean if the videos it picks for you are totally disgusting?” Critics of the TikTok bill are missing the point: “America has a long history of shielding infrastructure and communication platforms from foreign control,” Zephyr Teachout wrote in March.

P.S.

Algorithmic feeds obviously have a profound effect on how people receive information today. That can be troubling in times of disaster and political strife. As Charlie Warzel wrote for The Atlantic yesterday, “The experience of logging on and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never felt more dispiriting, commoditized, chaotic, and unhelpful than it does right now.”

— Damon

The internet, a friend of mine once argued to me, is like a sprawling city: Everyone knows there are neighborhoods you shouldn’t wander into, but it would be wrong to prohibit people from entering them.

The problem with my friend’s view is that whereas one has to go looking for bad neighborhoods, the internet’s dangers—specifically and most perniciously, pornography—come looking for you, even if you happen to be a child. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that dummy accounts that specified their age as 13 were regularly served up soft porn by Instagram’s algorithms. Upon the accounts’ creation, Instagram began showing the imaginary users “moderately racy” content, such as women dancing seductively or dressed provocatively. Once these accounts lingered on such videos, Instagram began introducing more graphic videos and posts. “Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes,” the Journal reported. “After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.”

In fact, porn is so ubiquitous online that it’s tempting to dismiss the preponderance of porn available to children as mainly harmless in most cases—a rite of passage for kids growing up on the internet. But childhood exposure to porn is a public-health concern with serious, long-term ramifications for children. Their interests are essentially collateral damage in adults’ right to consume porn as they please, and a massive industry’s interest in preserving its billions of dollars a year in revenue.

[Read: The age of AI child abuse is here]

Some websites take greater care than Instagram or X in preventing minors from accessing sexual content, and recent legislation across the South has begun requiring age verification before a user can browse sites such as Pornhub. But whatever safeguards are in place to protect minors online, they don’t seem to be working. A 2023 report by Common Sense Media found that the average age of first pornography exposure in American children is 12, and another 2023 survey conducted for the Children’s Commissioner for England revealed that a quarter of British youths ages 16 to 21 had been exposed to porn for the first time in primary school. An Australian survey last year, meanwhile, placed the average age of first pornography exposure at a little over 13. Just more than half of the American minors surveyed said that they had encountered porn accidentally; 38 percent of the British young people surveyed reported the same. If safeguards are in place to protect children from coming into contact with porn, they appear laughable.

Childhood experiences with pornography can be distressing for children and can negatively affect their sexual development. Research presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychology Association in 2017 found that the earlier a man’s first exposure to porn was, the more likely he was to desire power over women, suggesting that contact with porn at an early age may contort a child’s sexual development. One 12-year-old interviewed for the British survey said that her boyfriend had strangled her during their first kiss—part of a trend teenagers I interviewed in 2021 also brought up. A Taiwanese longitudinal study of youths further found that early porn exposure predicted an earlier sexual debut and participation in unsafe sex. A third of respondents in the Australian study indicated that they relied on porn for information about sex, a concerning substitute for proper education—the sort provided by people who know and care for children, not by people attempting to sell them sex. Along with these specific risks, children are also subject to all of the usual problems cited with the adult use of porn: internalizing unrealistic standards for sex, developing excessive consumption habits, becoming desensitized to sexual violence. The main difference is that when porn use begins in childhood, it steps in to miseducate desires that have yet to fully form.

Proponents of porn use generally crusade under the banner of free speech—the Free Speech Coalition, an organization currently fighting a Texas law that would require porn sites to collect proof that users are over 18, is a porn-industry lobbying group. On Wednesday, the FSC argued against the state of Texas over these age-verification laws before the Supreme Court, claiming that these laws abrogate the exercise of free speech. (Pornhub, along with other major porn distributors, has already withdrawn operations from several southern states with age-verification laws on the books.) Even an FSC attorney admitted at the Supreme Court that the organization recognizes the government’s compelling interest in preventing porn from reaching minors.

My friend who analogized the internet to a city with good and bad neighborhoods perhaps failed to consider that the people traversing those streets are in many cases children, and in our society, children’s issues are especially fraught—see recent conflicts about which books should be available to children in their school libraries, and about whether children should be allowed to change their identity at school or their body. All of these debates really are, as the scholar Rita Koganzon wrote in a Yale Law Journal article published last year, “part of an ongoing culture war between factions of adults.” It’s unfortunate that arguments over how to protect children from exposure to porn are very likely to be proxy battles between adults’ differing views on whether porn is good, bad, or neutral—each debate deserves to play out separately, without the interests of children being made subordinate to the interests of adults. The risks associated with childhood porn exposure are real, and worthy of society’s special attention.