60 Minutes - 11/15/2020: The 44th President, TikTok

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

In an interview with Scott Pelley, former president Barack Obama says he's troubled by Republicans going along with President Trump's claims. Bill Whitaker reports on the popular Chinese-owned app that a senator says has ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What we've seen is what some people call truth decay, something that's been accelerated by outgoing President Trump. This sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn't even matter. Tonight, President Barack Obama on the state of our nation and insights from a new memoir about his own presidency. And I ask myself in the book, how much of this is just megalomania? How much of this is vanity? How much of this is me trying to prove something to myself. Unless you've been living under a rock,

you've probably heard of TikTok. Here's the problem with TikTok as it exists now. It is owned by a Chinese parent company that has direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party. And we also know that under Chinese law, TikTok, ByteDance, the parent, is required to share data with the Chinese Communist Party. Required. Required to under Chinese law.

American users, parents, teenagers, they have no way of knowing about any of this. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. On election night 2016, then President Barack Obama called Donald Trump at about three o'clock in the morning to congratulate him, even though Mr. Trump had lost the popular vote and took the Electoral

College by less than 1% in three states. Today, President Trump declines to accept the verdict of the voters, despite losing by greater margins to President-elect Joe Biden. Mr. Obama hasn't spoken of the election standoff until today. We spoke to the 44th president on the release of his new book, A Promised Land, a memoir of his early years and first term. What is your advice in this moment for President Trump? Well, a president is a public servant. They are temporary occupants of the office by design. And when your time is up, then it is your job to put the country first

and think beyond your own ego and your own interests and your own disappointments. My advice to President Trump is if you want at this late stage in the game to be remembered as somebody who put country first, it's time for you to do the same thing. In your view, it is time for him to concede. Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think it was time for him to concede probably the day after the election or at the latest two days after the election. When you look at the numbers objectively, Joe Biden will have won handily. There is no scenario in which any of those states would turn the other way and certainly not enough to reverse the outcome of the election. More than the courtesy of a concession, the Trump White House is declining to free up the usual funds and facilities for the incoming administration. President-elect Biden is

not receiving secret national security briefings as Mr. Trump did when he was president-elect. What, in your estimation, would our adversaries be thinking right now, Russia, China, about the fact that the transition is not moving forward? Well, look, I think our adversaries have seen us weakened, not just as a consequence of this election, but over the last several years. We have these cleavages in the body politic that they're convinced they can exploit. There's an old adage that partisan politics should stop at the water's edge, right? That when it comes to our foreign policy, that it is the United States of America, not the divided states of America. We met the former president at a symbol of America's past divisions. The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery was a hospital in the Civil War. Clara Barton and Walt Whitman cared for patients in the building

where the 16th president consoled his wounded. We joined Mr. Obama's peers in the gallery of the presidents to talk about his book. I'm curious about the title. I think a lot of people feel that we are farther from a promised land. Well, I titled it the promised land because even though we may not get there in our lifetimes, even if we experience hardships and disappointments along the way, that I at least still have faith we can create a more perfect union. Not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.

You write in the book, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of a crisis. What do you mean? We have gone through a presidency that disregarded a whole host of basic institutional norms, expectations we have for a president that have been observed by Republicans and Democrats previously. And maybe most importantly and most disconcertingly, what we've seen is what some people call truth decay, something that's been accelerated by outgoing President Trump. The sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn't even matter. What are these false claims of widespread election fraud doing to our country right now? The president doesn't like to lose and never admits loss.

I'm more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion. It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that's a dangerous path. We would never accept that out of our own kids behaving that way if they lost. I mean, if my daughters in any kind of competition pouted and then accused the other side of cheating when they lost, when there was no evidence of it, we'd scold them. over the last several years that literally anything goes and is justified in order to get power. And that's not unique to the United States. There are strongmen and dictators around the world who think that I can do anything to stay in power. I can kill people. I can throw them in jail. I can run phony elections. I can suppress journalists. But that's not who we're supposed to be. And one of the signals, I think, that Joe Biden needs to send to the world is that, no, those values that we preached and we believed in and subscribed in, we still believe. President-elect Biden won in this election

more votes than anyone in history. And yet the 2020 vote wasn't a repudiation of Donald Trump. It was more like an affirmation. He received 71 million votes, 8 million more than he did in 2016. What does that tell you about our country today? Well, A, it tells us that we're very divided. And as I said, it's not just the politicians now. The voters are divided. It has now become a contest where issues, facts, policies per se don't matter as much as identity and wanting to beat the other guy. That's taken priority.

I do think the current media environment adds to that greatly. This democracy doesn't work if we don't have an informed citizenry. This democracy doesn't work if we don't have responsible elected officials at other levels who are willing to call the president when he's not doing something right. Call him on it. It seems, though, Mr. President, that Americans have gone from disagreeing with one another to hating one another, a problem that this man had. And I wonder how... You know, he's a good example of somebody who I think understood deeply the need to be able to see another person's point of view. How do we overcome where we are today?

Well, there's no American figure that I admire any more than Abraham Lincoln, but he did end up with a civil war on his hands. I think we'd like to avoid that. I do think that a new president can set a new tone. That's not going to solve all the gridlock in Washington. I think we're going to have to work with the media and with the tech companies to find ways to inform the public better about the issues and to bolster the standards that ensure we can separate truth from fiction. I think that we have to work at a local level.

When you start getting to the local level, mayors, county commissioners, et cetera, they've actually got to make real decisions. It's not abstractions. It's like we need to fix this road. We need to get this snow plowed. We need to make sure our kids have a safe playground to play in. And at that level, I don't think people have that kind of visceral hatred. And that's where we have to start in terms of rebuilding the social trust we need for democracy to work. Mr. Obama is speaking after four years of virtual silence on Donald Trump.

He followed a traditional commandment largely observed since Adams succeeded Washington, thou shall not criticize your successor. In A Promised Land, he wonders if that was a mistake. In your book, you ask, quote, whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth, too cautious in word or deed. Many Americans, Mr. President, believe you were too cautious, too tempered. Yeah, and I think that's a legitimate and understandable criticism. At the end of the day, I consistently tried to treat my political opposition in the ways I'd want to be treated,

to not overreact when, for example, somebody yells, you lie in the middle of me giving a joint congressional address. I understand why there were times where my supporters wanted me to be more pugilistic, to pop folks in the head and duke it out a little bit more. Was it a mistake that you didn't? Every president brings a certain temperament to office.

I think part of the reason I got elected was because I sent a message that fundamentally I believe the American people are good and decent and that politics doesn't have to be some cage match in which everybody is going at each other's throats and that we can agree without being disagreeable. There have been worse presidential transitions than 2020. The southern states seceded while Lincoln was president-elect. Still, we couldn't help but notice outside the National Portrait Gallery, businesses are still boarded up against the fear of political violence. What should President Trump do on this next inauguration day? Look, there are a set of traditions that we have followed in the peaceful transfer of power.

The outgoing president congratulates the incoming president, instructs the government and the agencies to cooperate with the new government coming in. You invite the president-elect to the Oval Office. How are you? And then on Inauguration Day, the president invites the president-elect to the White House. There's a small reception, and then you drive to the inauguration site,

and the outgoing president sits there, is part of the audience as the new president is sworn in. And at that point, the outgoing president is a citizen like everybody else and owes the new president the chance to do their best on behalf of the American people. Whether Donald Trump will do the same thing, we'll have to see. So far, that's not been his approach. But, you know, hope springs eternal. There's a promised land out there somewhere. Two hours after Mr. Obama said that, President Trump tweeted from the White House, we will win, even though no state is reporting fraud or errors that could change the outcome. We'll be back with Barack Obama on other crises in our country and one in his own home.

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Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. During Barack Obama's first inauguration in 2009, unknown to the public, there was intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. President Obama had at the podium instructions he would read to the crowd should there be an evacuation of nearly 2 million people from the National Mall.

This is one of the insights in Mr. Obama's new book, A Promised Land, a memoir of his early years, his historic election, and his first term. We spoke to the 44th president about battles past and present. Did you watch the video of George Floyd's strangulation? Of course. It was heartbreaking. Very rarely, though, did you see it so viscerally and over a stretch of time where the humanity of the victim is so apparent, the pain and the vulnerability of someone so clear. And it was, I think, a moment in which America, for a brief moment, came face to face with a reality that African Americans in this country, I think, had understood for quite some time.

And I was heartened and inspired by the galvanizing effect that it had on the country as a whole. The fact that it wasn't just black people. It wasn't just so quote-un unquote liberals who were appalled by it, reacted to it, and eventually marched. But it was everybody. And it was a small first step in the kind of reckoning with our past and our present that so often we avoid. But Mr. President, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, why is this injustice never overcome? Well, for a couple of reasons. One is that we have a criminal justice system in which we ask oftentimes very young,

oftentimes not very well-trained officers to go into communities and just keep a lid on things. And we don't try to get at some of the underlying causes for chronic poverty. So if we're going to actually solve this problem, there's some specific things we can do to make sure that our contracts with police officers don't completely insulate them when they do something wrong, putting money into budgets for training these police officers more effectively, teaching police officers not to escalate, but to de-escalate. But it's important for us not to let ourselves off the hook and think this is just a police problem. Because those shootings, that devaluation of life is part and parcel with

a legacy of discrimination and Jim Crow and segregation that we're all responsible for. And if we're going to actually put an end to racial bias in the criminal justice system, then we're going to have to work on doing something about racial bias in corporate America and bias in where people can buy homes. And that is a larger project in which all of the good news is all of us can take some responsibility. We can all do better on this front than we've been doing. Scott, how are you? Elbow bump? I'm well, Mr. President. We joined the president this past Wednesday behind masks and then kept our distance as the U.S. counted 143,000 known COVID infections that day, a new record.

Mr. Obama had also faced an outbreak in his first term, a new flu, H1N1. I was terrified of it and very quickly mobilized a team to figure out how are we going to take the best possible approach. And from the start, I had some very clear criteria, which was, number one, we're going to follow the science. And the second thing was, let's make sure we're providing good information to the American people. But H1N1 was not as contagious nor as lethal as COVID. It ultimately killed 12,000 Americans. Other battles in his book include the financial crisis, passing the Affordable Care Act,

the decision to kill Osama bin Laden, and leaving eight years of work in the hands of another. You begin the book by writing about the day that you left Washington, quote, to someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for. That may be the one thing that Donald Trump and I agree on, is that he doesn't agree with me on anything. I don't see him as the cause for our divisions

and the problems with our government. I think he's an accelerant, but they preceded him and sadly are going to likely outlast him. You write in the book that Republicans had a battle plan to, quote, refuse to work with me regardless of the circumstances, the issue or the consequences for the country. Now, the same might be said of Democrats in a Republican administration. I wonder if today you think that Democrats and Republicans are no longer capable of compromise. First of all, I don't think this is just a plague on both their houses here. So the Democrats opposed George Bush on a whole bunch of stuff. But Ted Kennedy worked with George Bush to pass a prescription drug plan

for seniors. Nancy Pelosi, who adamantly opposed the war in Iraq, time and again voted, even when her base was angry about it, to make sure that our troops were funded once the decision to send in troops to Iraq went in. Mr. Obama blames gridlock on something old and something new, the Senate's filibuster tradition which allows whatever party is in the minority to block legislation, and non-traditional media. The media landscape has changed. And as a consequence, voters' perceptions have changed. So that I think Democratic and Republican voters have become much more partisan.

I would often hear this from Republicans during my presidency. Some of these folks had been colleagues of mine. I served in the Senate. Some of them were friends of mine. And they would confess to me. I said, look, Mr. President, I know you're right. But if I vote with you on this, I'm going to get killed. I'll lose my seat. Because what had happened is their voter base had soaked in so much information that was demonizing me, demonizing the Affordable Care Act, that it becomes very difficult, even for folks who want to cooperate to cooperate. And that's why I am somebody who does not blame the current partisanship solely on Donald Trump or solely on social media.

You already saw some of these trends taking place early in my presidency, but I do think they've kept on getting worse. The former president also writes about his unlikely rise, including the obstacles at home. You're surprisingly honest in the book about your wife's opposition to you running for president in 2008. You quote her as saying, the answer is no, I do not want you running for president. God, Barack, when is it going to be enough? Did I get the tone right? It was a little sharper than that, but it was pretty good, Scott. And then she walks out of the room.

Why did that not stop you? Look, it's a legitimate question. Keep in mind the context here. We had just two years earlier I had run for the U.S. Senate in an unlikely race. Two years before that, I had run for Congress. In a race you lost. In a race I lost. A couple of years before that, I had run for the state Senate. We've got two young kids. Michelle's still working. And I ask myself in the book, you know,

how much of this is just megalomania? How much of this is vanity? How much of this is me trying to prove something to myself? And over time, she made a conclusion that I shouldn't stand in the way of this. That she should not stand in the toll it takes on families is real. I think it's only after you emerge from an all-consuming job that you realize that everything you hold dear is thanks to the one you love? I think I actually realized that even while I was in the job. The fact that she put up with it and forgave me was an act of grace that I am grateful for, and I'm not sure I deserved it.

The goal here, Scott... Today, at age 59, Mr. Obama is working on his presidential center. So this is going to be on the south side of Chicago in historic Jackson Park, and it's the place where Michelle and I met, where I first started in public life. His team brought this model to show us. Mr. Obama's foundation has raised from private donations a little over half the estimated $500 million cost.

It'll take about four years once they start. It's going to be a place where we have the standard model oval office and Michelle's dresses, which will be very popular, no doubt. But also a whole host of facilities that allow us to provide classroom training to young people who are interested in public service and to beautify a park that can serve a whole bunch of young people who've been underserved in the past. In his last moments in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama left a note in the president's desk for his successor. It read in part,

We are just temporary occupants of this office. It's up to us to leave the instruments of our democracy at least as strong as we found them. On that last day, the emotions really focus on the team that you've been working on. And it's very rare, outside of maybe wartime where you get a collection of people working together in a sustained way under that kind of pressure and stress. And so there's a melancholy to it. There was also, though, and I write about this, a satisfaction in knowing that I had finished the job, I had run

my stretch of the race, and I could say unequivocally, despite regrets and disappointments about some things not getting done, the country was better off when I left than when I got there. The Trump administration was set to ban TikTok, the wildly popular Chinese-owned mobile phone application, until Friday, when the short-form video service was granted a two-week reprieve by the U.S. government to find an American buyer. That means TikTok will keep running on 100 million American devices,

and that's been the administration's worry, claiming that TikTok, quote, automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees, conduct corporate espionage, or even blackmail. President-elect Biden has called the Chinese-owned app a matter of genuine concern. TikTok says that's all unfounded, that it's a platform for creativity and free expression. So we wanted to know if TikTok is merely a pawn in the great power rivalry between the U.S. and China, or a genuine threat. This is TikTok.

It bills itself as the last sunny corner on the Internet. 50 million Americans spend nearly an hour each day scrolling through a never-ending parade of short videos made by other users. They may be lip-syncing popular songs or performing them themselves. TikTok is a stage for preening and dancing. But like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, TikTok's real business is keeping you engaged as long as possible in order to collect your data.

They're not providing a platform for music videos out of the goodness of their heart, right? They're making money by providing really deep insights into their user base. Klon Kitchen spent 15 years working for the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, and now is director of technology policy at the Conservative Heritage Foundation. What makes TikTok particularly concerning is its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, the government of China. The Chinese have fused their government and their industry together so that they cooperate to achieve the ends of the state.

And TikTok is a factor in that? Yeah. But when you look at it, it just seems fun and innocuous. Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning and you saw a news report that China had distributed 100 million sensors around the United States, and that any time an American walked past one of these sensors, this sensor automatically collected off of your phone your name, your home address, your personal network, who you're friends with, your online

viewing habits, and a whole host of other pieces of information. Well, that's precisely what TikTok is. It has 100 million U.S. users. It collects all of that information. And more. Like many U.S. social media companies, TikTok asks users for access to their cameras, microphones, photos, videos, and contacts. More obscure data, like keystroke patterns, are collected from everyone using the app. Keystrokes, what does that tell them? The patterns and the rhythms of the way that you strike the keyboard, it can basically say this device belongs to this user. And you can do a lot with that if you are a foreign government. It's very, very invasive.

Kara Frederick knows the power of big tech. She helped set up Facebook's counterterrorism program after spending six years at the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, and as a targeter for special operations in Afghanistan. Gen Z lives on this. Gen Z is going to grow up someday. Do we want all of that information sort of hanging out there for nation state adversaries to scoop up, to integrate with other data sets. But is it different from what other apps collect?

So a lot of applications do collect these, you know, fulsome, comprehensive digital profiles. They collect your digital behavior. However, TikTok is owned by a Beijing-based company called ByteDance. ByteDance is a $140 billion Chinese company founded by this man, 37-year-old Zhang Yiming. Known as an AI or artificial intelligence savant, Zhang created the cutting-edge, AI-driven algorithm that fuels all of ByteDance's platforms, like Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, with 600 million daily users.

Both apps use the same logo and similar algorithms, which analyze exactly how long users watch a video, experiment with new offerings, fine-tuning until it seems to be reading users' minds. TikTok is the first foreign-based application, social media application, that has taken off in the United States. Nobody else has been able to do that. Why? Because their artificial intelligence, their algorithm, is so good. At 40, Republican Josh Hawley is the youngest member of the U.S. Senate and a former attorney general of Missouri.

A staunch supporter of President Trump, he's earned bipartisan support for exposing the excesses of big tech. Google, Facebook and Apple have all been in his sights. Now it's TikTok. So we'll start off then with I'll kind of frame it, and then we'll go into the TikTok questions. We were with him last March as he prepared to chair a subcommittee hearing that he called Dangerous Partners, Big Tech and Beijing. But TikTok and Apple were no-shows. Executives from TikTok, they will never come and take the oath and testify in public. That I think is unusual, and I think public. That, I think, is unusual.

And I think it begs the question, what is it they have to hide? TikTok will tell you that it's a platform for free expression. And they sort of market themselves as the sunniest place on the Internet. Here's the problem with TikTok as it exists now. It is owned by a Chinese parent company that has direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party. And we also know that under Chinese law, TikTok, ByteDance, the parent, is required to share data with the Chinese Communist Party.

Required. Required to under Chinese law. That's not a matter of speculation. That's in the law. American users, parents, teenagers, they have no way of knowing about any of this. China is also notorious for using its big tech companies to track and predict the behavior of its own citizens, as seen in this 60 Minutes report from last year. China's stated goal is to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030.

Senator Hawley fears China is doing the same thing here. Just last February, the Department of Justice charged four Chinese military hackers with stealing records from the credit reporting agency Equifax, affecting 145 million Americans, almost half the country. China has been caught hacking the second largest American health insurer, the agency that stores information about all government employees, even records from the Marriott hotel chain. Hawley says TikTok is just the friendly face of Chinese data harvesting. So what would the Chinese Communist Party do with all this information? Build dossiers, build files on every American who they can get their hands on.

We could ask the same question about the Equifax breach. Why would the Chinese government be interested in the financial history of hundreds of millions of Americans? What are they going to do with that? Well, clearly, they thought it was very, very useful. Hawley says TikTok shouldn't be allowed to operate in the U.S. unless it separates completely from its Chinese parent, ByteDance. A deal to sell a piece of TikTok to Walmart and the U.S. software giant Oracle is in limbo because China is blocking the export of TikTok's proprietary algorithm. Bloomberg News likened that to selling KFC without the kernel's secret 11 herbs and spices.

I want to see the actual terms of the deal. The platform, the app platform, has got to be rebuilt because right now it's been built by Chinese engineers. They have control and access to how the platform works, to how the algorithm works. Otherwise, you're just changing the label. Despite all the suspicion, TikTok's popularity is booming worldwide. It's been downloaded two and a half billion times in more than 150 countries. Here in the U.S., it's become a go-to platform for creators of all stripes. Everybody breathe and some people are sneezing.

Including celebrities, influencers, and more and more older users. I think the one thing that connects all of these videos, outside of them all being less than a minute in length, is really this idea of authenticity. Vanessa Pappas is interim CEO of TikTok. A former YouTube executive, she inherited the top job in August, just in time to face all those thorny questions about China. She spoke to us from TikTok's new office in Los Angeles.

What is your understanding of why the president wants to ban TikTok? was delivered, we very much came out and said that we disagree with the characterization, which was done without due process and was not based on facts. Your parent company, ByteDance, is a Chinese company. Yes, so ByteDance is founded by our Chinese entrepreneur, Yiming Zhang. And at the same time, though, ByteDance is a privately held company. Do you report directly to him? Yes, I report to him. Is it fair to say that ByteDance engineers created the TikTok recommendation algorithm

and that they helped to update it and maintain it? So we have engineers around the world. TikTok actually has people in 48 countries around the world. Certainly we have engineers in China as well. Tell me about ByteDance. It's a massive social media company in China, but it's also billed as an artificial intelligence company. Yes, they use AI to power a number of their products.

But again, I don't know how much else I could share about that since my day-to-day is really focused on TikTok. Papa says her focus is on TikTok's content, not the technology behind it. And like many big tech executives, she downplays the amount and usefulness of data the platform collects. If you were trying to find information on somebody, TikTok would not be the first place. It wouldn't be the hundredth place and it wouldn't be the thousandth place. Your critics, they point out that under China's 2017 cybersecurity law, Chinese-based companies are required to provide the Chinese government with access to their data. TikTok does not operate in China.

The U.S. data is stored here in the U.S. and with backup in Singapore. And we have strict data access controls. If a government were to request data, we will put that in our transparency report and tell you. And certainly the Chinese government has not requested data. And if they did, it would be an emphatic no. Former CIA officer Klan Kitchen says in China, no big technology company is independent of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. The national security and cybersecurity laws of China require them to operate and build their networks in such a fashion as to where the government

has unfettered access to their data. And so, no, the CCP doesn't ask them for information. They don't need to. They have access to the information. It seems to be a great disconnect. I mean, the American people, at least the kids who are on TikTok, have no concern about what we're talking about here.

That's right. They just think it's fun. And for them it is. They want to make a dance video with their friend. I don't begrudge them that. But, you know, their ignorance of the threat does nothing to diminish it. In the mail this week, comments on last Sunday's stories. About our story counting the vote.

A suggestion for people complaining about the vote counting process. Sign up to work at the polls for the next election. It's a good way to learn about the procedures and safeguards in the process. David Martin's look at Operation Warp Speed drew this skeptical response. Why didn't you run the positive story on the vaccine management before the election? Hmm, can you say media bias? And Scott Pelley's portrait of documentarian Ken Burns brought this. Ken Burns could do a five-part series on the history of soup and I would watch it. And it would be awesome. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.