Front Burner - What Trump’s threat to ban TikTok means for its users

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

U.S. President Donald Trump put TikTok on the clock this week. On Monday, Trump said that if Microsoft, or another U.S. company doesn’t take control of the Chinese-owned TikTok by Sept. 15 - he’ll shut down the hugely popular social media app in the U.S. Trump’s administration has expressed concerns about China’s influence and potential to demand data collected from the app - concerns that have also weighed on the diverse communities who use it. Today on Front Burner, MIT Technology Review senior editor Abby Ohlheiser tells us how TikTok users are grappling with the newest threats to their platform, and what’s at stake for them.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. So for the first time, I just downloaded the TikTok app on my phone. I put in what I'm interested in and now I'm scrolling through what seems like an infinite stream of videos. All right, well, here's one where

an inflatable unicorn on the back of a truck is whipping around in the wind, and it's overlaid with this song. All right, and this one, a woman is holding a tape measure up to her mouth and her person is rolling marbles down the tape measure to try and get them to land in her mouth. And there one is.

Okay, what I'm doing right now is what hundreds of millions of young people do every day around the world, swiping through this chaos. But according to the Trump administration, what I'm also doing is putting my personal data at risk. These Chinese software companies doing business in the United States, whether it's TikTok or WeChat, are feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party. Their national security apparatus could be their facial recognition pattern.

It could be information about their residents, their phone numbers, their friends, who they're connected to. That's U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arguing that TikTok's Chinese ownership makes the app a security threat. Over the weekend, President Trump threatened to ban the app. We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. We may be doing some other things. There are a couple of options, but a lot of things are happening. So we'll see what happens. But Trump didn't go through with the ban. Instead, he put TikTok on the clock.

On Monday, Trump announced that TikTok would shut down in the U.S. on September 15th unless Microsoft or another company buys the app. This back and forth has frustrated many U.S. users who socially and financially depend on TikTok. Today, we explain the proposed TikTok ban and explore why a generation of Americans are so attached to the app. Abby Ohlheiser is my guest. She's a senior editor at the MIT Tech Review, working on internet culture. I'm Josh Bloch. This is FrontBurner. Hello, Abby.

Hi there. So before we get into Trump's threats, I want to talk to you about the content on the app. As I mentioned, I'm late to the game. I downloaded TikTok last night and I think I fell down a wormhole. I think I lost a couple hours there. What's your experience of scrolling through TikTok right now? So I think you've stumbled across something that is pretty true for most users, which is that TikTok can be kind of a time vortex where you open it up and start casually scrolling through. I've been so bored during quarantine. All I've been doing is

playing Mario Kart and skating, which got me to thinking, what if I could combine the two and make a real life Mario Kart? So I did. And I thought I would share it with you guys. And I hope you like it. Anyway, first you go to the top floor of a parking garage. It should be empty because, Rona, to rev your engine, you walk your feet like this. And then, you know, suddenly an hour has passed. The thing that makes TikTok so appealing as a user to kind of spend time there is that there's this page called the For You page. This is what you're describing, that kind of endless feed of things.

And what TikTok is doing is it's learning as you look, it's learning as you like, it's learning as you comment, it's learning as you share. And it is then feeding you new things that it thinks you'll like based on those old things. And it's really, really, really good at it. I mean, I could open it up and tell you what's on my page right now, if that's helpful. Okay. Somebody who makes pottery and they've made a bunch of snails. Snails are huge on TikTok right now. What's next is two people duetting with each other. Okay. This is a Harry Potter one where someone's taking this filter that makes everything you pointed at that has a face have this like really creepy grin on it. And so they're just pointing it at a bunch of Harry Potter posters and making all the characters do this like awful monstrous grin.

Because the videos are relatively short and because it is so easy to consume lots and lots and lots of things at once. lots and lots of things at once. I think it makes you feel like you're part of some sort of community or at the very least that you understand like an in-joke really, really quickly. I asked her where her frozen pizza was. She told me it was cooking in the oven. I was like, you cook this entire pizza in the oven just for me to take it out? And she said, yes. I asked her why she didn't want to take out the pizza. And she said, because the pizza is too hot for her. I thought it was a little weird that my girlfriend found the pizza attractive. Fire pan. Llama. Llama. Llama. Cool flame fire pan llama. Llama, llama, llama, llama. Well, I want to ask you, like, what is it about TikTok? What is it that TikTok provides to young people? I mean, largely their users are under 25 that a platform like,

you know, Instagram or YouTube doesn't provide. When I talk to people who are on the platform, either as, you know, creators or just users, there's a couple common threads. One is just that the For You page is really, really, really good. So the experience of scrolling through TikTok is unlike scrolling through any other app. You know, other platforms have different reputations of the sort of content you might find there. So TikTok seems to be a place where people feel more comfortable being themselves and talking about, you know, their identities, talking about their beliefs, you know, confronting people who they may disagree with, or they believe or have seen

doing things that are harmful in the world. You know, a really good example of the way in which this works is that TikTok is super popular with people who work in food service and retail jobs, where there's a lot of content where people are talking like kind of behind the scenes. I just put non-type milk in there, ma'am. It literally tastes like sugar. It tastes like sugar. I know what that makes me feel like. I can remake it. I come here every single day.

I come here every single day. Especially now during the pandemic, this kind of ongoing endless series of confrontations we've seen between people who refuse to wear masks and people who are, you know, potentially putting themselves at risk in order to work at that store. That's really interesting because, you know, there's obviously you have these like stars and big influencers on TikTok who are making a ton of money. But as you pointed out, there is clearly this deeper layer to the app as well. I'm glad you brought that up because I think that a lot of people think that TikTok is just dance challenges or just kind of these particular groups of often very white American teenagers who have become super, super famous on the app, like the next generation of online stars, the kids who have moved to L.A. and live in places called like the Hype House, right? It's a content house. It'd be like living in a movie set. It never stops. content house. It'd be like living in a movie set. It never stops. This group of 20 talented content creators is part of a growing trend of young social media stars snapping up big real

estate so they can physically be together to make videos 24-7. Obviously these people are very popular on this app, but there's also a lot of people who, like one thing one creator told me is that the barrier to finding a huge audience really quickly is very small as long as you're making good content which isn't really true anywhere else so to start a youtube channel right now is really really hard it takes a lot of work to get noticed and it takes a lot of luck and it takes a lot of existing connections the way that way that TikTok works is a little bit more random in terms of who you might see on your For You page. And so people with relatively small followings can suddenly blow up if they make kind of the right video at the right time.

A lot of content that has blown up has been about Donald Trump, both from supporters and detractors of Trump. Tell me a bit about how TikTokers have gone after Trump's campaign in the past. Yeah, so while there are plenty of conservative Americans on TikTok who have followings, TikTok has gained kind of a reputation lately of being anti-Trump because of a few pretty high-profile situations, let's say. I think the main one is Trump's Tulsa rally. At the end, the president was a bit of a bust in Tulsa.

Campaign quickly dismantling one venue, that other venue, about one-third full. Tulsa's fire department saying about 6,200 people showed up in an arena that held 19,000 for the president. There is this old kind of meme in anti-Trump American internet, particularly on Twitter, where people encourage each other to sign up for Trump rallies and then not attend. The idea being that if you make him think the crowd's

going to be much bigger than it actually is, then that will make him angry or make him look stupid. Right. So this idea found its way to TikTok before the Tulsa rally, actually through a 50 something year old woman. So not a teenager, but she posted this idea on TikTok. It spread rapidly. People started picking up on it. They were signing up for the rally and they were like posting their receipt to show that they actually did it onto TikTok. Eventually the K-pop stands got involved and they started posting that they had figured out how to sign up like dozens of times for the rally. And even though it's like unclear from like, you know, a factual perspective, whether any of this actually impacted the crowd size, because, you know,

there's also a pandemic happening right now. It did sort of become this very popular meme about like the quote, like TikTok teens and the K-pop stans, like taking down Trump. It's interesting, because I think there's these stereotypes of Gen Z as being an apathetic or apolitical generation. What kind of picture of the generation do we get from TikTok? Oh, the opposite, which I think is the correct picture. When Trump first said on Friday that they were going to ban the app, there were people, particularly on Twitter, who were saying, like, maybe this will cause the TikTok teens to go vote, like the ones who can vote. The reaction to that, which I think was correct, is that like, if you believe that, then you haven't been spending any time on TikTok. Because the political content on TikTok is

extremely popular, and extremely passionate and well researched. This is a history of police brutality. Wait, no, no. This is a history of police brutality. Wait, no, no. This is a history of Black unity and perseverance. In the early 1900s, a lot of Black African Americans moved north when it was called the Great Migration. When I was younger, I always thought that in 2020, we would have flying cars or have holographic phones or something like that.

Yet here we are in 2020, fighting for our lives and protesting something that shouldn't have even been an phones or something like that. Yet here we are in 2020 fighting for our lives and protesting something that shouldn't have even been an issue in the first place. It's so sad. And as Martin Luther King said, there comes a time when silence becomes betrayal. And I do not want to be silent. So like the impression you get once you start seeing political content is of a generation that is extremely politically engaged

and are sort of just ready to take charge now. On Friday, President Trump basically declared that he was going to ban the app, possibly as soon as the weekend. And there's been a ton of speculation as to what's behind this move, whether it's about him standing up to China or making it easier for an American company to buy the app, or whether it was actually retaliation against the anti-Trump voices on TikTok. Explain to me, what is the Trump administration saying itself about why they see TikTok as a threat? Yeah, so they're framing this completely in terms of security. Over the weekend, Secretary of State Jair Mike Pompeo said that he was concerned that they're feeding data directly to the Chinese government via TikTok's parent company, which is ByteDance.

So info of American users on TikTok is stored in the U.S. and in Singapore. And ByteDance denies that this data is getting sent to the Chinese government. But the concern is that the government there could simply order the company to turn over the data. That is the way in which the conversation is being framed and also the way in which the government is attempting to enforce kind of this deadline for ByteDance to either shut down TikTok or sell it to an American company. Let me start and speak directly to the mothers of America here. First of all, it's about 10 a.m. The Chinese Communist Party may know where your children are. That's essentially the problem. The entire committee agrees that TikTok cannot stay in the current format because it risks sending back

information on 100 million Americans. And how real are these concerns about data privacy? I mean, this is a tricky question, partially because it's involving, you know, a bunch of entities that are not necessarily known for being the most transparent in the world. TikTok, like any other app, does collect vast amounts of user data. That is, you know, information that could potentially make people vulnerable. But it's not solely because the app is owned by China. Because third parties can buy that data. I mean, if people are concerned about China getting access to this information, they could access it whether or not it's owned by a Chinese owned company. I think one of the things that people don't really understand is that people who use TikTok

are already aware that using an app like that isn't a completely private experience and that they're giving the app a lot of data. The sort of orientation I get when I ask questions about this is that Facebook and Google are also collecting vast amounts of information on Americans that could be sold or could be misused or could make them vulnerable. you know, be sold or could be misused or could make them vulnerable. And that, you know, they're concerned about all of it, but also like it's pretty impossible to live without those companies. So what do you do? Officials in the Trump administration have also referred to censorship on the platform as a concern. Tell me more about that. There have been issues in the past with the way in which TikTok chooses what content makes it in front of lots of users. So, for instance, there have been sort of leaks of moderation guidelines that were in use in the past.

Recently, The Guardian got hold of some moderation guidelines that showed that certainly the parent company ByteDance was thinking about, you know, censoring videos that might be, that might cause offense to the Chinese government and other regimes. That showed that moderators were discouraged from, say, promoting content from users who were disabled or looked too old or were overweight. It was framed by TikTok in terms of an anti-bullying kind of initiative, but it had the effect of silencing voices that arguably need the app more than others. More recently, there have been a lot of conversations like pretty openly on TikTok among Black American users about the extent to which the algorithm does or does not kind of

promote content by Black creators. These are not completely unique issues. But what is unique about the TikTok situation is the Chinese ownership and the potential for intervention by the government. How has TikTok responded to these claims? First off, ByteDance, the parent company, has denied that they're giving information to the Chinese government. They've appointed an American CEO. They've said that their data is being held in the U.S. and Singapore. Recently, they've also offered to become much more transparent. To educate policymakers about what the app is and how we're different is vital. And the company's putting new policies in place to be more transparent. We announced a new transparency

center that I believe will be in LA. And then we'll have another one in Washington, DC to let policymakers come in, look under the hood. They've also, if you open TikTok now, there is a reassuring message from the company about how the app isn't going anywhere. So they're taking some steps to assure users as well, that TikTok is here to stay. It's interesting, because it sounds like there's a real tension here. I mean, you described before how TikTok users are really politically engaged and quite astute about the content they're putting up and about the nature of the app. How have they responded to these kinds of issues around censorship on the platform that they love and that they use? You know, one thing I've seen people do is calling it out on the app.

You know, there was this, I think, pretty successful movement to address bias against Black creators. There's so many organizations that you can be donating to right now. There's so many petitions online that you can be signing. There are so many books and articles for you to read to educate yourself further on what is happening. As a person who has been given the platform to be an influencer, I realized that with that title, I have a job to inform people on the racial inequalities in the world right now. Where a bunch of creators decided essentially to only kind of engage with and elevate and support black content on the app for a day. So users who weren't black were changing their user icon to a specific symbol.

users who weren't black were changing their user icon to a specific symbol. They were declining to post that day and instead were, you know, kind of purposefully liking and commenting and watching and doing all these things that tell TikTok that you're interested in this content. I was watching over the course of that day and a lot of black creators were saying over the course of the day and the next day that they were gaining followers because of it and that people were then seeing more of their content. You know, I talked to some TikTok creators several months ago who were trying to run experiments to see if, say, the app was censoring content about Uyghur Muslims or any anti-China content. 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. Following the posting of her three-part tutorial, the American teen's TikTok account was suspended. ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of TikTok, apologized for the suspension, Byte Dance, the Beijing-based owner of TikTok, apologized for the suspension, blaming a human moderation error.

Not everybody is engaging in this way, but there are definitely people on the app who are trying to sort of test what TikTok is or isn't doing and speak out when they feel that the app is doing something that kind of needs to be changed for the app to remain a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Trump isn't banning TikTok just yet. He's giving Microsoft until September 15th to buy the app

because they say it'll keep all the data in the U.S. Here's the deal. I don't mind if, whether it's Microsoft or somebody else, a big company, a secure company, very American company, buy it. I set a date of around September 15th, at which point it's going to be out of business in the United States. And I should say that that would also affect its Canadian operations. But, you know, this is also a story about the millions of American users on this platform. You've spent a lot of time in

recent weeks talking to those users. How are they reacting to the potential ban? So first off, they've been reacting to it for a few weeks because the government said they were looking into this a few weeks ago, and that sort of caused this initial moment of panic on TikTok. So there's first the questions of lost income, where even though TikTok isn't actually that great at directly helping people make a lot of money from being a content creator, if it's the place where you're mainly famous, it's your main connection and claim to be able to get, say, sponsorships or to get your music if you make music sort of out there, all these things.

So people will lose income if it goes away. And what do you think might be lost in terms of those communities that we talked about earlier who have really found a space on the app? I'm thinking about the LGBTQ community, for example. It's really tough because I can't think of anything that provides an equivalent space, particularly for LGBTQ users.

The presence of that community on TikTok is enormous and prominent and very supportive, you know, particularly say for young LGBT people who are growing up in situations where they don't have access to supportive adults in their lives or feel in danger because of their identity in communities where, you know, that identity is something that is unacceptable. A lot of people in those situations have found kind of support and really practical advice through TikTok about what to do and how to become independent. If you have a preference, if you prefer boys over girls, if you prefer girls over boys, that's okay and you're still valid. Don't let other people question your sexuality based on their own idea of what that should be. You are valid. And so there are lots and lots of stories like that of sort of the app having a concrete effect on someone's life. And that's not exclusively true for TikTok, but it feels like a place that people know to go for support now.

If TikTok is shut down, where will that energy go? Where will these users end up? Oh, I mean, your guess is as good as mine on that. You know, one possibility, like the closest analogous situation is when Vine shut down several years ago. Vine, kind of like TikTok, was this like playful space where people posted short videos that incubated a lot of talent but didn't know how to help them monetize kind of their burgeoning careers. And a lot of the people who became really famous on Vine then shifted to YouTube and became extremely famous. But I'm not in the game of trying to predict exactly what the next hot app will be. Abby, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Yeah, thank you. Before we go today, some devastating news out of Beirut. You'll see the smoke rising thick and black in the distance. A huge explosion near the center of the Lebanese capital has killed close to 80 people as of Tuesday night. Thousands more are injured. Footage from residents that was shared on social media showed a column of smoke coming up from the port district. It was followed by a huge blast that sent a ball of smoke and a fireball into the sky. We're seeing injured people everywhere. Some of them are being ferried in in cars. Some of them are walking. Medics are going through buildings near the sky. We're seeing injured people everywhere. Some of them are being ferried in in cars. Some of them are walking. Medics are going through buildings near the side. Lebanon's interior

minister said that early reports show that highly explosive material previously seized and stored at the port had blown up. We'll be continuing to track this developing story. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.