Front Burner - Understanding TikTok: From viral teen videos to Chinese political censorship
Episode Date: November 29, 2019This week, TikTok was in the news for pulling a video critical of China's mass detention of Uighurs. Most of the popular Chinese-owned social media app's users are children and teens who share lip-syn...cing videos, dance crazes and comedy skits. But in today's episode, Alex Hern, technology editor at the Guardian, explains why — behind the memes and music — there are some real concerns about censorship, privacy and foreign influence.
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Hey everyone, Jamie Poisson here with Alameen Abdel-Mamoud.
Hi Jamie.
Hello Alameen. Thank you so much for being here.
And you've been doing some guest hosting here at FrontBurner.
Thank you very much for that, my friend.
Absolutely, my pleasure.
Okay, so we're here right now because earlier this week you were around, obviously,
and working on an episode about TikTok that was supposed to run around Christmas time.
And you recorded this episode earlier this week, but news.
Yes.
Always gets in the way.
News happens.
So it felt like we should run this interview today instead of holding it for a few weeks.
So tell me what happened this week with TikTok.
Right. So there was this American teen, this 17-year-old,
who was locked out of the platform
after she posted what looked like a makeup tutorial video.
And then, you know, a few seconds after she starts talking
about curling your eyelashes,
she starts telling everyone to look up
how China is locking up Uyghur Muslims right now.
This is another Holocaust, yet no one is talking about it.
That got her banned from the platform.
And I will say that if people want to look up more about this subject,
we did a whole episode about the detention of the Uyghurs earlier this week
with The National's Adrienne Arsenault.
And I know TikTok has responded to this.
They have called this simple human moderation error.
Her account in the video is now back up,
but they can't shake the suspicion it was on purpose, right?
TikTok's parent company is ByteDance, and I know that there have been loads of accusations
that they censor content on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
So I know you're going to get into exactly what TikTok is for people who don't know it,
and we'll play this interview.
One of the reasons you're working on this piece is because of its increasing relevance, right?
Like everyone I know seems to be using TikTok below the age of 22.
Right. I mean, TikTok has been hanging around the top of nearly every app store for the past year or so.
It just has not gone down in popularity.
More and more people are downloading it.
And so we thought we'd take this opportunity to talk to Alex Hearn, who is a technology editor at The Guardian, about how TikTok got here and
what exactly TikTok is. Okay, so let's do that. Let's do it. This is Frontburner.
Hi, Alex. Hello. Okay, how do we, let's dive right in. How do we describe TikTok without
sounding like we are 70,000 years old. Because it's a video sharing
app, it's kind of difficult to describe without actually showing it. I'm going to give it my
best shot. So TikTok lets you create these 15 second videos that you can share with your friends.
You can add text over top, add lots of different moving images. And how did I do? Help me out,
Alex. I think one of the big things
that is really important
to the description of TikTok
is its musical basis.
You know, the thing that distinguishes it
from dearly loved Departed Vine,
a short form video sharing app
that Twitter released
about five years ago now,
is that TikTok in the West
spun out of an app called Musical.ly,
which allowed users, largely teens, to lip sync to
songs. And that very musical-focused backdrop has been caught the creativity that's grown up
on TikTok. And the type of people who are using it, it kind of tends towards a younger demographic,
right? It does, yeah. The vast majority of TikTok's users are under 25. In fact, it tends to such a
younger demographic
that the company has got in trouble several times,
both for failing to safeguard its users under 18
and for, in the US in particular,
collecting more data from users under 13
than is allowed under American privacy laws.
There is a record fine of $5.7 million,
claiming the app violated
the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
The FTC saying in a statement, this record penalty should be a reminder.
What does TikTok actually offer that's different than the social media platforms like Instagram
or Facebook or Twitter? What does it offer those young people that keeps them so engaged in it?
There's a few differences. One is simply that TikTok is a place where there are more young people than Facebook. You know, the lowercase social network where your friends are is always
going to be a better social network than anything else. I think there are a few key differences to
TikTok that do make it appealing, though. One is that the app is incredibly strongly
algorithmically curated. We hear that phrase all over social media.
Facebook is algorithmically curated,
so too is Instagram, so too is Twitter.
But none of those have turned up the dial
as much as TikTok.
When you download the app and open it for the first time,
immediately, without you having to do anything,
follow anyone, make friends with anyone,
you are presented with a feed of, of generally incredibly funny short-form comedy.
Having a manual is so fun but whenever you hit traffic and you're downtown you
don't go zoom zoom you go one two you go one two and one two!
That makes it super sticky for users you can just endlessly scroll through it and always see
something new and engaging and fun and it also makes it quite good for younger users who for obvious reasons don't have as developed a
social network if you're 15 and your friends are all in the same small group of you know people
you know through school that's not necessarily the end of the world in fact quite the opposite
social media might be a very important way for you to reach out and meet people you've never spoken
to before and i think that that sort of really gets to why that algorithmic timeline is
such a positive for younger users now it's been around since 2017 why would you say 2019 was the
big year where it broke out well partially that's a really blunt thing about spending tiktok is owned
by and backed by a company called bike dance which is popularly
known as china's largest startup the company is still privately held and is worth somewhere in
the order of 75 billion dollars reportedly bike dance has spent over 1 billion us dollars
advertising tiktok on actually on facebook and instagram It's throwing money at the problem and it certainly gets users and installs because of it.
I want to talk about the big sort of breakout culture moments that happened this year because
a few items, sort of memes, crazes started on TikTok and then
they migrated to the culture writ large.
I'm thinking here of Lil Nas X, of course.
Absolutely. writ large i'm thinking here of lil nas x of course absolutely yeah so lil nas x and old town road is really the absolute moment when you could not deny that
tiktok was enormously culturally relevant uh the song created by this then
completely unknown rapper became popular as a 15 second clip of music to choreograph videos on
tiktok too and then it snowballed it grew and it grew and it grew and then the full two minute
version of the song started becoming popular on youtube and on Spotify. And now Lil Nas X is a bona fide pop star.
Nominated for six Grammys.
Exactly.
And there are aspects to the song that are kind of incredible touch points for sort of what we see of TikTok's influence on the wider music industry.
A clear hook, a clear chorus and one that can be very easily choreographed
to, there is a dance to Old Town Road. And what that means is that rather than simply sharing
the one clip that goes viral, you make your own, you remix it. And that's the ingredients for a
TikTok hit. We had an election here in Canada this year, and sure enough, we started seeing
some political TikToks from normal people, but also politicians like our NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh.
He started doing a TikTok meme based on the song by the rapper E-40.
How much political content do we actually see on TikTok?
So we see some, but one of the things that I find really fascinating about TikTok is that it's almost sort of Teflon coated for hard politics.
The structural features of the app mean that you can't really use it in the way that politicians really would like to use an app like TikTok.
If you film a 15-second video of yourself talking to camera about your policies,
or, you know, in the UK political context,
if Boris Johnson were to film a video of himself saying,
vote for me and we will get Brexit done,
then the algorithm would crush it because no one would engage with it
because there's nothing really to engage with in that TikTok way.
It wouldn't show up on any of the curated feeds
for the songs that it used.
You wouldn't really be able to remix it.
It would just die.
And so what you've seen instead with politicians
is them jumping on the trends of the app.
TikTok is enormously trend-driven
and if you make a video that is one of the trends,
then firstly, that helps the distribution
because you show up on the search pages for those trends.
But also it's just it's sort of a way of signifying that you get it.
You mentioned TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance.
Can you tell me a little bit more about this company?
So ByteDance is a Chinese startup. Its two biggest apps in China are built purely for an
internal audience. One is essentially the app we know in the Western world as TikTok. Within China,
it's called Douyin, and it is not quite the same. It has a slightly different set of features,
and crucially, it has a completely different set of features and crucially it has a completely
different social network. The two don't overlap. Content that goes viral on Douyin does not spread
to TikTok and vice versa. And of course Douyin is much, much, much more heavily censored.
The other app that is extremely popular in China came to the West as TopBuzz. It's a news app. I
try and say that with inverted quotation marks around it,
you will find an awful lot of viral videos of animals being rescued from lakes. You will not
find many political news stories. All this content can get complicated. That's why TopBuzz is here,
learning what you like and helping to show you more of the things you want to see.
Here's the thing. What I'm curious about is that you can't be a company of this size without having some kind of close eye to the Chinese state. We've
heard some concerns about Huawei. What do we know about the relationship between ByteDance and China?
It does not appear that there are sort of formal links between ByteDance and China,
because that's not really how the Chinese state operates. In fact, the Chinese state doesn't really even operate
in terms of sending down formal commands
to companies that otherwise have informal links with them.
Instead, the way censorship and really state control in China works
is through an inculcated belief
that companies and individuals will second-gu guess themselves because they know that if they
overstep the mark they will be censored or blocked or at the extreme ends disappeared
without explanation without your day in court so you go further than anyone asks you no one ever
even needs to ask you if you are a well-behaved
chinese company what that means in the case of bite dance is that doyen has an awful lot of
moderators for an app and for a company which is around the size that facebook was five years ago
maybe perhaps even 10 years ago and it's done that way way earlier in its
corporate history because if your social network becomes known as a place where dissent can grow
that's the end for your company and in fact it's not even dissent any app service website community
that offers the chance for people to build social ties outside of the view of the
Chinese state. One of the first stories that made it out into the West of how big Douyin had got
within China was when users, essentially in a real-life meme, started honking their horns and
turning their lights on and off in beijing
traffic it was a completely harmless thing there was no political intent it was simply
everyone saying en masse hey are you a are you a doyen user i'm a doyen user as well beep beep
honk honk lights go on and off but it clearly terrified the authorities because it showed
how powerful doyen was for organizing.
And the thought that ran through the Chinese state was quite clearly, oh, God, they're organizing to do this now.
But what if the next thing they organize is protest?
What if it's dissent?
And that led to a real clampdown of control and public apologies from ByteDance leadership.
and public apologies from ByteDance leadership.
The big question that we all have now is how much of that attitude is being exported with TikTok.
What have you learned about how TikTok approaches censorship?
So the big thing that I've learned
came from a leak of some moderation documents
that I received this summer.
They showed that tiktok moderators were advised to remove
whole swathes of content which effectively violated uh china's foreign policy so they
were told to remove content that mentioned tiananmen square they were told to remove
content that promoted the independence of taiwan they were told to remove content that promoted the independence of Taiwan they were told to
remove content that mentioned the forbidden religious sect Falun Gong those were not
presented in the moderation documents as rules that were about China instead they were all
presented in a wider context so for instance the rules that banned you from discussing taiwanese or
tibetan independence also banned you from discussing northern irish independence and
were a a blanket ban on uh uh controversial independence movements the rules that banned
tiananmen square banned misinformation that harms the national character. So the documents were all written with a view to
trying not to be focused on China, but instead sort of working backwards from, okay, well,
clearly we're not going to be able to have this content. So what are the generally applicable
rules that would allow us to ban this worldwide? I should say now in TikTok's defense, the company
says that those moderation documents were withdrawn from use in May this year. So withdrawn from use
before I'd even seen them. And that the new moderation documents are written by teams based
in the countries where TikTok operates. So when we talk about moderating that content, what in
effect does TikTok actually do to the videos that go up?
So this is one of the things I find most interesting. In some cases, particularly with the example of Falun Gong, for instance, TikTok does delete the content and may block the user.
But with most of the categories I just described, as well as a huge swathe of other things that
moderates, it sets the video as visible to self.
So it makes it so the video stays on your feed.
You can see it.
You can see that you posted it,
but no one else on the app will ever see it.
That's particularly interesting,
given what I was saying earlier about the algorithmic feed on TikTok.
The plus side of the algorithmic feed as a user is you open up the app
and you get
endless content given to you by the machine. The downside as a creator is that any video you post
may never be seen by anyone because the algorithm goes against it, or it may be seen by two people
who immediately scroll past it and then the algorithm decides it's useless it's really hard to tell as an end user
whether or not the video you've posted was banned and marked as visible to self and broke tiktok's
rules or if it was the app still allows you to
post your video but just like not put the extra effort into sort of dumping it into the algorithm
i would say it is still censorship particularly for an app like tiktok that doesn't really have
anything but the algorithm but it's something that i find very interesting when you compare it to
sort of western critics of companies like facebook one of the popular lines used to attack facebook
recently is that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach that is that you should be able to post
anything you like on facebook but that the company should have some responsibility for what it
promotes on its algorithm tiktok obviously takes to its logical extreme. If the app is entirely the
algorithm, then to a certain extent, freedom of reach is freedom of speech. A great example of
this conflict is this video that we mentioned earlier. It was posted by a 17-year-old girl
from the US. It starts off looking like a makeup tutorial, and then a few seconds in, it pivots and
it becomes a strong
critique of China's treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs. So I'm going to teach you guys how to get long
lashes. So the first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes obviously,
then you're going to put them down and use your phone that you're using right now to search up
what's happening in China, how they're getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in
there. Now TikTok originally blocked her and then they apologized and blamed a, quote, human moderation error for the reason that the video was taken down.
What were your thoughts when you first saw this video?
I mean, it's a really lovely example of using a platform's restrictions against it.
It's typical in terms of the subversive nature of every attempt to do politics on tiktok
and it's also typical in that sadly she's had her account suspended so although a video like that
seems pretty effective at getting past the first stage of censorship at getting past the review
perhaps i i am speculating here but perhaps because reviewers watch the first two seconds
and go okay yep this is this is makeup tutorial i don't because reviewers watch the first two seconds and go, OK, yep, this is this is a makeup tutorial.
I don't need to watch the end. Clear it and move on. Right.
But certainly once it gets viral, once it's seen by many people, it gets caught again.
And in this case, it went viral on platforms other than TikTok as well, which will have absolutely served to draw attention to it.
Mark Zuckerberg has really called out TikTok. He's positioned it as
this foreign influence arm. And he's saying that they definitely engage in a measure of censorship
that Facebook doesn't engage in. While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters
and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese
app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these same protests are censored, even here in the US.
What do you make of him publicly calling out TikTok like that?
What he says is true. TikTok is absolutely a social network which exports Chinese values overseas.
Chinese values overseas the thing the issue I do have with Mark Zuckerberg is well I'm not American you're not from the United States I believe yeah I do not like the idea of viewing Facebook use as
some patriotic thing I do not like the idea of being forced to choose between the u.s social
network and the chinese social network because i am neither and i do not feel a particular need
to help facebook succeed in an intercontinental trade war and mark zuckerberg is famously paranoid
you know if there is one way one lens through which we can understand Facebook,
it's that Zuckerberg as founder and CEO is always afraid of the company, the app,
the startup that will make Facebook irrelevant.
So there have also been a few national security concerns raised about TikTok's international user base and its Chinese ownership.
I think there are reasons for any country to be afraid of a very popular social network being owned by a company based in a country that it considers, if not an actively hostile foreign power, then at least an untrustworthy sometimes ally
you're getting into the realm of hollywood thriller right but it's really not hard to look at the
state of information security the sort of stuff that gets posted on tiktok and to go okay could
you recreate a 3d map of the inside of a military base from tiktoks that have been posted by american
soldiers can you be certain that every child of every senior employee of the cia of the nsa of
the fbi that none of them are using tiktok inside the home to be clear that there is absolutely no
evidence that tiktok is doing this but it would be possible for a social network to find out a huge amount about any one of its users
and even more about its users in aggregate,
which would be useful militarily.
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Given all of this, what do you think will come next for TikTok?
Most of its fears are exactly the same as any other company in that position would be.
It's trying to ensure that it's not a flash-in-the-pan novelty.
But the political problems are here to stay. As much as it can protest, it doesn't feel like the company has the freedom to turn around to the Chinese state and go,
we are going to allow videos protesting in favor of the democracy movement in Hong Kong or against the concentration camps in Shanshing.
general tendency of the algorithm to push popular videos towards frivolous fun and harmless creativity and away from biting political statements it can hope that that tendency will
allow it to censor less but every time it censors something it's going to revitalize this argument
and this awareness that TikTok is a Chinese company and that that means that to a certain
extent it is constrained by what China will allow Chinese companies to do, whether
domestically or abroad. Alex Hearn, thank you so much for this. Thanks for giving us the lay of
the land. It was really fascinating to listen to. Thank you very much. It's been fun.
That is all for today. Jamie, let's do credits.
Okay, let's do them.
Front Burner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts.
The show is produced by Imogen Burchard, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, Ashley Mack, and Derek Vanderwyk.
Sound design this week was done by Billy Heaton.
Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound.
The executive producer
of Frontburner
is Nick McCabe-Locos.
Thanks for listening.
And Elamin,
you'll be here with us
next week too.
I sure will.
Wonderful.
Okay.
Everyone have a great weekend.
Bye.
Bye.
For more CBC Podcasts,
go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.