PERSUASIVE TECHNOLOGIESIt’s Not Too Late to Regulate Persuasive Technologies
Prominent Chinese tech companies are developing and deploying powerful persuasive tools to work for the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda, military and public security services—and many of them have already become global leaders in their fields. TikTok is only the tip of the iceberg.
Social media companies such as TikTok have already revolutionized the use of technologies that maximize user engagement. At the heart of TikTok’s success are a predictive algorithm and other extremely addictive design features—or what we call ‘persuasive technologies’.
But TikTok is only the tip of the iceberg.
Prominent Chinese tech companies are developing and deploying powerful persuasive tools to work for the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda, military and public security services—and many of them have already become global leaders in their fields. The persuasive technologies they use are digital systems that shape users’ attitudes and behaviors by exploiting physiological and cognitive reactions or vulnerabilities, such as generative artificial intelligence, neurotechnology and ambient technologies.
The fields include generative artificial intelligence, wearable devices and brain-computer interfaces. The rapidly advancing tech industry to which these Chinese companies belong is embedded in a political system and ideology that compels companies to align with CCP objectives, driving the creation and use of persuasive technologies for political purposes—at home and abroad.
This means China is developing cutting-edge innovations while directing their use towards maintaining regime stability at home, reshaping the international order abroad, challenging democratic values, and undermining global human rights norms. As we argue in our new report, ‘Persuasive technologies in China: Implications for the future of national security’, many countries and companies are working to harness the power of emerging technologies with persuasive characteristics, but China and its technology companies pose a unique and concerning challenge.
Regulation is struggling to keep pace with these developments—and we need to act quickly to protect ourselves and our societies. Over the past decade, the swift technological development and adoption have outpaced responses by liberal democracies, highlighting the urgent need for more proactive approaches that prioritize privacy and user autonomy. This means protecting and enhancing the ability of users to make conscious and informed decisions about how they are interacting with technology and for what purpose.
When the use of TikTok started spreading like wildfire, it took many observers by surprise. Until then, most had assumed that to have a successful model for social media algorithms, you needed a free internet to gather the diverse data set needed to train the model. It was difficult to fathom how a platform modelled after its Chinese twin, Douyin, developed under some of the world’s toughest information restrictions, censorship and tech regulations, could become one of the world’s most popular apps.
