TikTok says it will reveal its algorithm and wants Facebook to do the same.

Hours before the House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee hearing with testimony from CEOs of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, a blog post by TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer proclaimed that all platforms should “reveal their algorithms, moderation policies and data flows to regulators. ” and challenged the app’s competitors to do the same. This is a great call to arms, and it was obviously carefully timed.

In the post, Mayer calls for competition between social media companies and argues that TikTok could be a positive force for the United States, one that would protect its user data, with or without new regulation. And in that regard, Mayer also promised that TikTok would be more direct about its algorithms and content moderation. Ultimately, he said, TikTok would be a model for how other social media companies could be more transparent, a commitment that echoed recent calls for TikTok to become this same example.

The release comes as TikTok faces concerns about possible security risks related to its parent company, the Beijing-based ByteDance company. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even threatened to “ban” TikTok, although the Trump administration is unlikely to be able to do it alone; Joe Biden’s presidential campaign also recently instructed his staff to remove the TikTok app from their phones. Meanwhile, assessing the true risk of the application remains difficult. As Shira Ovide wrote in the New York Times earlier this month, “Politicians, like American tech bosses, engage in concern about Chinese technology so often that it’s hard to know when to believe them.”

TikTok, meanwhile, says that no foreign government plays a role in its restraint.

“Our content and moderation policies are governed by our team based in the United States in California and are not influenced by any foreign government,” a TikTok spokesperson told Recode. “In our Virtual Center for Transparency and Accountability, guests can see first-hand how we moderate and recommend content.”

After all, other American social media companies will benefit from the action against TikTok. Currently, Facebook is preparing to fully launch a music-based product called Reels with Instagram, and is even recruiting TikTok stars to promote the competition’s service. In his recent blog post, Mayer accused Facebook of carrying out attacks “disguised as patriotism and designed to end our presence in the United States.” Meanwhile, influencers who have gained massive audiences on the app are being seduced by other rivals, like the Los Angeles-based music app Triller.

But now, in an apparent effort to allay concerns about its platform, TikTok is on a quest to demonstrate that it is transparent about how it handles content. With Mayer’s request for all social media companies to disclose their algorithms, it is obvious that TikTok wants to appear more transparent than Facebook and others. However, it is not entirely clear that these efforts address the many other concerns about TikTok.

“TikTok has become the ultimate target, but we are not the enemy,” Mayer wrote in the post. “The biggest move is to use this moment to lead deeper conversations about algorithms, transparency, and content moderation, and develop stricter rules of the road.”

As evidence, Meyer pointed to the TikTok Transparency Center, which was announced in March. The Los Angeles center is supposed to provide some experts “with the real code that powers our algorithms,” Mayer said, and will also allow them to observe content moderation in real time. Mayer argues that this new initiative places TikTok “one step ahead of the industry.” That announcement was followed by a blog post in June that explained some of the basics of the company’s For You algorithm, which powers one of the popular parts of the TikTok app. The company is also opening another transparency center in Washington, DC, and hiring for positions intended to interact with the federal government.

It is unclear whether TikTok’s recent efforts will be enough to allay fears on the platform. Several experts told Recode that they questioned whether TikTok’s promise to reveal how its algorithms work will actually reveal a lot of meaningful information, such as what kind of content it chooses to amplify the company’s system.

“Revealing the code is useful and certainly more so than other platforms have shared in the past,” said Kelley Cotter, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University who studies public understanding of algorithms. “Revealing the code will not, in itself, tell us whether the algorithm has any influence.”

Others wondered if TikTok can reveal details about its algorithms without exposing its users’ personal data. According to Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a journalist at AlgorithmWatch, the machine learning algorithms used by social media platforms depend not only on the code that operates them but also on the training data that can influence their operation. “In the case of the TikTok algorithms, the training data probably contains very personal information from users, which should not be disclosed as such, even to researchers,” said Kayser-Bril.

Along with its push for more transparency around its algorithms and content moderation, TikTok is also working hard to distance itself from ByteDance and the Chinese government. TikTok made this case in a recent statement to Vox:

Protecting the privacy of our users’ data is of utmost importance to TikTok. There is a lot of misinformation about TikTok right now. The reality is that the TikTok app is not even available in China. TikTok is led by an American CEO, with hundreds of key US security, product and public policy employees and leaders TikTok stores US user data in Virginia, backed by Singapore, and we work to minimize access in all regions. We welcome conversations with legislators who want to understand our company.

However, not everyone is convinced that this new push for transparency is enough to allay concerns that TikTok could be used as a tool for foreign influence. After all, regardless of how much we know about how TikTok recommends content, the company is also collecting massive amounts of data on millions of users in an effort, some say, to make its AI even more powerful for a variety of purposes.

“From a national security perspective, there is concern about using that data for espionage purposes, blackmail,” Kiersten Todt, an academic at the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Cyber ​​Law, told Recode. “Artificial intelligence is as good as the data that makes it up. So if the Chinese government has the most data out of any other country in the world, then what it can produce from an AI perspective could potentially give it a tremendous advantage. ”

But regardless of TikTok’s true security risks, fear of the app may have set a new standard for what it means for a social media company to be transparent with its users. If TikTok lives up to its promises of transparency, other social media companies may feel pressure to follow suit.

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