Offline with Jon Favreau - Should America Ban TikTok?

Episode Date: April 9, 2023

This week we’re bringing you the TikTok debate we wish we had from Congress. Featuring perspectives from V Spehar, host of TikTok’s Under the Desk News; Senator Mark Warner, lead sponsor of the RESTRICT Act; and Graham Webster, Chinese technology expert. Over three interviews, Jon and Max offer a smarter debate for and against banning TikTok. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

TikTok is a weapon and the Chinese Communist Party is able to use this as a tool to manipulate America as a whole. ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government. It's a private company. Dangerous algorithms and Chinese Communist Party are not good for America. Has ByteDance spied on American citizens? I don't think the spying is the right way to describe it. I have seen no evidence that the is the right way to describe it. I have seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data. They have never asked us. We have not provided. Well, you know what? I find that actually preposterous. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome

to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Offline. Today, we're talking about whether the U.S. should ban TikTok. You probably heard that last month, TikTok CEO Shou Zichu testified before Congress about whether the Chinese-owned app is a threat to national security. There were a few good questions here and there, but mostly the entire hearing left a lot to be desired. And I didn't come away with many answers to the big questions I have about TikTok, like what kind of data does TikTok collect? What are the chances that the Chinese Communist Party is using the app to spy on us or disseminate propaganda? And what are the consequences of

banning an app used by 150 million Americans? So today, we're going to try to give you the TikTok debate we wish we heard from Congress. This episode will be a bit different. First, you'll hear my conversation with V Spear, TikTok's most popular newscaster who strongly opposes banning the app. Then, you'll hear Max Fisher's interview with Graham Webster, a Chinese technology expert at Stanford University, who can shed more light on the privacy risks posed by a Chinese-owned company like TikTok. Finally, you'll hear from Senator Mark Warner, the lead Democratic sponsor of the Restrict Act, which would give the Biden administration the power to ban TikTok.

First up, my conversation with V Spear, a hugely influential TikTok newscaster who breaks down the day's headlines and easily digestible explainers. V has been an outspoken advocate against the Restrict Act. They've reported on it extensively, sat in the front row of the congressional hearing, and spoke at a Keep TikTok press conference last month with Congressman Jamal Bowman. I invited V on to talk about why they think a ban is a bad idea and what a ban would mean for the communities they and other creators have cultivated on the app. Before we get started, if you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please take a moment to rate, review, and share the show. Here's my first interview with V Spear. V Spear, welcome to

Offline. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. You have been called TikTok's number one newscaster. Your show, Under the Desk News, is hugely popular and a fantastic way for people to get simple, accessible explainers about the day's headlines. I've really enjoyed watching it. How'd you get started? And why did you gravitate towards TikTok specifically as your main platform? So I, like many people, got started in an early pandemic. Everything had kind of shut down. And prior to being a TikToker, I was the director of impact for the James Beard Foundation. So I'd done a lot of educating on the ways that chefs could leverage local governments and write their congressperson to advocate for better food policies and better work policies. And so I had a little bit of a

foot in politics, but mostly was on the entrepreneurship side. Pandemic came, shut down everything. And the rush to join was really driven by the lack of community that we had at that point. And my desire to like still teach chefs how to apply for the shuttered venue money is how to navigate CARES Act applications. So I was using the platform the way that I used to use webinars and in person and then just like making really goofy food and trying to just have some fun. So that's how I got started. So you literally had a front row seat to the hearing Congress held on TikTok a few weeks ago. What did you think of the members' questions? So I wanted that seat specifically because what I was hearing from Congress ahead of time was that, you know, they were looking at this platform TikTok as like the wires and the phone and the coding, and they weren't seeing the community. And as a very, like, comically recognizable member of the TikTok community,

I was like, I'm going to sit right behind them. Because I've met with these Congress people, some of them before, and I've made TikToks with some of these Congress people before, and I wanted to remind them that there was a community behind this platform. And so some of the questions I thought were incredible. I thought Rep Clark's question about are black and brown voices being suppressed? And if so, does that mean they're being cut out of financial compensation? I thought there was a great question about geo-targeting of women and could that potentially be dangerous to them out in the world. And then there was a bunch of just like silly, very out of touch questions that I think came from people who one, were unprepared, and two, had already made up their mind. And so that was disappointing.

Yeah, the NyQuil chicken questions and the Wi-Fi question. What was the Wi-Fi one? It was- Does it connect? Does TikTok connect to my home Wi-Fi? And he was like, if you make it, yeah. Tough. You know what? They never disappoint when it comes to asking questions of tech folks in Congress. They really thought they like got him to. I mean, you're sitting across from this person who's the CEO of TikTok, who you are painting to be the most dangerous, intelligent tech super villain of our

time. And then you're asking him questions like you're going to get him, like you're going to catch him up on something tech related. It was incredibly unusual and not very entertaining for me. Yeah, no. If you had testified and been able to respond to one of the members of Congress who wants to ban TikTok over national security concerns, what would you have said? So I would say, show me what those are. I think what Congress failed to do was show any sort of like tangible evidence of national security issues and where those issues are coming in and failed to prove how a TikTok ban would solve that issue. I want to see that. That would have been very interesting to me. So first, that would have been my question there. And then aside from that, you know, why the calling out of TikTok so specifically and not calling out all of social media generally or calling out video game chats, which are also part of often Chinese-owned companies.

So those would have been my questions for them. Do you think there are any merits to any of the criticisms being leveled against TikTok? Which in particular? That because ByteDance is a Chinese company and Chinese companies have certain obligations to the Chinese government under Chinese law, that there are privacy concerns, that there are concerns about the algorithm, you know, being used to both promote Chinese Communist Party propaganda, as well as sort of ban or hide topics that are uncomfortable to the Chinese government. I would say show it to me again. I mean, they were calling out, are you suppressing Tiananmen

Square content? Are you suppressing criticism of China content? And if you go on the app, you would see a lot of that stuff is there. So I would, again, I felt like the proof wasn't there. The homework wasn't done China is a monolith and all the people in it are part of that doesn't fly with a modern American public. We have Chinese co-workers. We have Chinese partners. We recognize every single thing in my office right now is from China. So it's very difficult, I think, to use that kind of like 1980s style hate for China, China hawk kind of rhetoric with a younger audience who doesn't share that same experience with the hate of that particular country. So in the two or so years since I downloaded TikTok, I have deleted the app and then reinstalled it multiple times. So it's fair to say that I love the app, but I'm like torn on the possible dangers. And here's what worries me.

And maybe you can walk me through some of this. So like, I know that US-based social media companies track my data because they're trying to sell me shit, right? I also know that if the US government wanted that data, they would have to go through courts to get it. That's the process. Allegedly, right, right. There's a

process. It's an imperfect process, but there's a process that they have to go through. It's not the case with Chinese-owned company like TikTok. They are required to turn over data to China's authoritarian government if asked. And in the case of TikTok, that can include, you know, browsing history, text messages, pretty much anything on your phone. TikTok has admitted already to tracking some journalists. I think there was four journalists, physical movements. Former employees have been have admitted to being told to highlight Chinese government propaganda and ban videos about topics like Tiananmen Square massacre or Hong Kong protests, even though, as you said, some of those still appear on the platform. But some of these this is a report that some of these employees have been admitted that they were told to do that. Like, does any of that worry you?

Well, I think we need to look at it from two different perspectives. Right. There's like the national security perspective, and then there's the national voice of TikTok, which is this community of 150 million Americans, 5 million businesses that use the platform to find safe spaces, to find communities. Absolutely. But I'm concerned about that happening through hacks and data breaches and all different types of avenues. I think what I would love to see Congress do is focus more on data privacy protections for Americans that are blanket protections that go whether it's an American company, Chinese, Russian, Iranian, whatever you want to say, and don't just target this one digital square that a lot of people have found platform on. So I think it's two different questions. Am I concerned? Sure, of course I am. I'm concerned that my bank password's gonna get leaked again as well. But I think when we're talking about

then what's the alternative, I think the American government needs to offer alternatives to folks who have built their community, their business, and their livelihood on this platform and sort of more gently deliver them to another opportunity, whatever that might be. I also think there's a difference in talking about what TikTok was three years ago and where they are now and where they're going. I would love

to know more about Project Texas. I wish they would have asked more qualified questions about this new data plan, which exceeds all other social media platforms. So I think I'm more interested in where we're going than maybe like how it was before show two was even CEO. Right, right. And I guess the other concern that I hear people raise a lot that's specific to TikTok is how powerful and opaque the algorithm is. So like, if you're getting news from Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, like, obviously, plenty of misinformation and disinformation on those platforms, famously so. You know, Russian government used Facebook famously in the 2016 election, right? Yeah, sure did.

But at least if you're getting news from those, like, you at least know who you follow, where that news is coming from. And you can sort of, you know, if you're a discerning media consumer, you can sort of sort through some of that stuff. With TikTok, the algorithm really does choose for you in a way that it doesn't on some of these other platforms, right? Because you're just getting videos in your feed. And I think the concern there is if the Chinese government, right, which already censors content and for Chinese people, significantly, if they want to control the algorithm to feed people, certain propaganda or hide other propaganda from people, then they can do that. And if we're not, if the US isn't in control of that, then maybe there's a problem. Well, I think we have such a diversity of places that we get our information from that even if the Chinese government was in some way censoring what's what's platformed or how the algorithm works in this particular avenue,

we would still have access to the entire breadth of American journalism that is highlighting these different places. So then you log into your Instagram and you see it there maybe or you log into your Wall Street Journal account or you log into your Washington and you see it there maybe, or you log into your Wall Street Journal account, or you log into your Washington Post account, and you'll be able to read all of these stories. I think it's interesting how much of a focus they're putting on the idea that China could control the American conversation totally, when in fact we have such a diversity of places that we're reading and engaging with online,

TikTok being just one of them. The other thing that I think is interesting about the algorithm is it's been shown that Facebook put effort into studying their algorithm, what was going to keep the most eyeballs on the page, and they were promoting a lot of negative content, things that elicited anger. And as Shou-Chu testified, and as a TikTok user, I would say, at least on my For You page, this is what happens. There is a reward for positivity. There's a reason why I'm TikTok's favorite news anchor, and it's because I'm nice. I'm the nice side of the news. I try to present things in an inclusive and in a kind way. There's no snarkiness.

There's no, like, trying to make it too hard for folks. It's just very simple. And then people get curious, and then they get to go find other sources to chase down more of that story that they're interested in, you know? So I think it's – Need more of that news. A little bit more, yeah. We do good news every Thursday, you know? And I'm not the only one.

There are so many folks over the last three years who have found an interest in government and politics and journalism and in sharing stories, even in the citizen journalist arena where we have folks sharing first person narratives of just this little thing that's happening in their town that they care about that would have never hit the national news. But folks are learning from those activists oftentimes, let's say, in Georgia, of how they could do things better in Tennessee, or they're learning from folks in California about policies that they want to see in New York. And so I think that is really valuable. Let's talk about the Restrict Act, which is the bipartisan legislation supported by the Biden administration that would give the Secretary of Commerce the power to regulate or ban information and communications technology products and services like TikTok, but not limited to TikTok, that are owned by foreign adversaries like China. I think they've also listed Iran, North Korea, and some others as well, if they are deemed a threat to national security.

Can you talk a little bit about some of your problems with that bill? It's dystopian. It's authoritarian. It's a terribly written piece of legislation. And I'm honestly shocked that Mark Warner is wanting to be the face of it as a Democratic politician in Virginia. That's very not something I would have expected for him to be the champion of. And one thing about TikTok, at least that I can say from my community, is we've spent the last year training people how to read legislation, how to geek out about government and politics. So I think previously, something like the Restrict Act, if you compare it to the Patriot Act, folks were kind of in a different place post 9-11. We were in a very patriotic upswing at that time. We were in a very scared place. And they were able to use fear to gain access to Americans' telecommunications.

And now we're in a different place where Americans aren't just using their phone to communicate, but they're using all these apps. They're using video game chats. They're using encrypted platforms and whatnot. And so what does the government want now? Access to all of that information. And what I love about my community is the fact that people heard this bill is a TikTok ban, and then they printed out the bill and were like highlighting the different

sections in it and the different powers and the different areas of vagueness that they want accountability from their Congress people and senators on, like, what is a foreign adversary? You've listed five here. Are those the only five? What would qualify for somebody to be deemed a future foreign adversary? What is access to telecommunications? Will you have access to all of the shit I talk when I'm playing World of Warcraft and I'm just saying stuff, you know, because I'm in a game? Like, will that be used against me? So I think folks really saw this. Initially, there was panic about it being a TikTok ban. And there was a lot of people even on the right or the libertarian side of politics

that were like, yeah, whatever, ban TikTok. Oh, wait, oh, wait, this is the bill we're going to use to do it? I don't think so. I don't like that. So I'm proud of the way that people have taken understanding this bill into their own hands and had big conversations about it and are holding their congresspeople accountable to say you've got to tighten this way up before you're going to get our sign off on it. Yeah. So I'm going to talk to Mark Warner tomorrow about this. Tell him I said hi. I will. I will. And I'm going to try to pin him down on it because I have heard a lot of

these concerns about the language in the bill being vague and open to interpretation that could potentially lead to government overreach. He, I don't know if you saw his like very long tweet thread a couple of days ago about the bill, because he said there's just a ton of misconceptions about the bill. And so he sort of went through a bunch of like myths about the bill, what he calls myths, and then said facts. And the big ones he pointed out was, you know, the bill doesn't actually give the U.S. government any power to track what you're searching. It doesn't criminalize what you can say online.

And it's only focused on foreign corporations, not users. What do you make of those explanations? It's not good enough. It's not good enough. We know better. We've been through this before. And to the same point that they're saying, well, TikTok isn't – we don't have any proof that TikTok is doing bad stuff right now or is overreaching or is trying to control the algorithm, but we want to ban it anyway, just in case. I'm saying, we don't have any proof in the bill then, Mark. You're saying,

well, no, we wouldn't do that. But how do we know you wouldn't do that? You've done it before with the Patriot Act. And so I think this is something that we need to look at much more clearly. What I agree on, and I would say everyone I talk to agrees on, is that we want to see strong data privacy protections for Americans. Certainly, we want our data protected, but we don't want the government to be able to overreach so deeply into things like, if they wanted to, why not period tracker information? If they wanted to, why not game chat? We want to make sure that we're setting boundaries around some of those things that should be considered personal and private and part of a reasonable expectation of privacy under our constitutional rights. You got any questions for him that you want me to ask?

Why, Mark? Why? Why wouldn't you talk to anybody who's well-versed in this community before you came out so hot with this bill? There are millions of Americans in Virginia in his state that are on TikTok that have are on TikTok that have businesses on TikTok. Have you talked to your constituents about how they use the platform, what it means to their life, what it means to the economic stability of your state? I think you got to look at all that stuff before we just come out and say things like, oh, well, the kids like this app, but they'll just move to another app. That to me was one of the most ignorant statements up front. It was so deductive and

dismissive. And that is what is ringing in people's ears. So I would wish for him to sort of take a moment, him and my Senator Gillibrand, who I also tried to speak to about this, reflect on not just what is the platform from a tech guy's perspective, but how is this going to affect the community? How is this going to affect your constituents? And then try to balance that with the legislation you're writing. I want to ask you about two potential alternatives to the Restrict Act that could help solve some of these concerns. You mentioned Project Texas. Can you talk a little bit about what that is just for people who don't know? plan that was put together by TikTok and Oracle, I believe. And the idea is that they would take any data that was housed overseas in China or wherever else, and they would move it to servers run by Oracle in Texas. That's why it's called Project Texas. And there would be a firewall

between all Americans users and any other government that would be able to get this stuff. Not only would they house all of that data here and have it overseen by an American company, but they would create an advisory board that would be able to audit that data and audit that system whenever they wanted. And the government would be working together with TikTok to ensure that these data privacy standards were set at the highest level, far higher than Facebook or Snapchat or any of the other companies, and could become potentially a model for better data privacy. And so you support that? I would love to see more of it. I mean, I think we're in the initial stages.

It's certainly a conversation. I don't think we should just take like an off-the-rack plan from anyone. I think we should have our legislators. We've got some incredibly talented legislators. They're coming out of the top law schools in this country, constitutional geniuses. Like I want Jamie Raskin to look at it. I trust Jamie Raskin to look at it. I trust Jamie Raskin. Take a look at Project Texas and show me like where you think it needs improvement. But let's work on it instead of just doing what America so often does, which is we're

scared of something. Let's annihilate it. Let's not annihilate it. Let's work on how we sort of protect and fix something that people really use and care about. Some people have argued that the best outcome would be forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company. I think that's what the Biden administration strategy seems to be by saying that they sort of support the Restrict Act. But, you know, if ByteDance sells, then they'll be good. What do you think about that potential outcome? Sell to who, John? I want them to finish the sentence.

Sell to who? I think we get to know that, right? So sell, sure. Where else in the world has anyone ever said to an American company or anyone else, good job building your incredibly productive business. Now give it to me. That's not how democracy or American enterprise or capitalism is supposed to work, right? So, but if we are going to do a forced sale, sell to who? Which one of the billionaires is

the lucky boy who gets to buy TikTok? Is it Elon? Is it- I don't want that. No, is it Mark? Is it Larry Ellison? I don't want that either, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, who's it going to be? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it the guy from Walmart? Like, that's my question. Sell to who? Show me. Show me the money, Joe.

Show me the guy. Show me who it's going to be. And then we can start to work towards, you know, what does that look like? Okay. Should TikTok be a public utility? Is this the one that we test in that way? And we create some sort of like governing board that has like a citizen's input. I don't know.

That'd be pretty cool. But yeah. Sell to who? As like a citizen's input. I don't know. That'd be pretty cool. But yeah. So most polls about this show that most Americans favor ban on TikTok with the unsurprising exception of younger Americans, most of whom oppose the ban, though a majority of younger Americans still say they're concerned about the privacy risks. For people who don't use TikTok, who aren't as familiar, what would you say about what it means to you personally and the community you're part of thanks to the app? You've talked about this a couple times in the interview. So I think that Pastor Sarah, who's a good friend of mine and a TikTok collaborator,

said it best, which is even if you don't belong to this community, you can recognize that there are people that find this deeply important to them and to their survival. And for her in particular, she talks about the online ministry that she has built through TikTok over the pandemic when in-person services were not a possibility, and how many other faith leaders from different religions, Christian included, were able to build these really robust ministries. And something like a TikTok ban coming in would be tantamount to burning down her church and saying, well, there's a synagogue next door. It's the same thing, right? House of worship. Who cares? Go over there. And I think that has been helpful for me explaining it to some of my parents, friends, some other people who are on TikTok.

And they get that. They're like, okay, yeah, that makes sense to me. We can't just expect that we can just take something like that from someone and move it over here. And I certainly wouldn't want that to happen to me. So like, what can we do so that, you know, other constitutional rights aren't being infringed upon, because we're in pursuit of this like perfect security solution. So I want people to think about it that way when they think about TikTok. It is not a children's dancing app. One in four Americans get their news from TikTok. And I'm going to tell you why that shouldn't scare you, why that's a good idea. If you look at the TikTok news, oftentimes folks are doing either original reporting from their small town about something that's happening to them, or you see screenshots of where they read the article because they're standing in front of it because that's TikTok culture. So look at it.

You're seeing Fox News. You're seeing CNN. You're seeing Wall Street Journal. You're seeing Washington Post, New York Times. You're seeing The Guardian, the Al Jazeera, you're seeing all of these other outlets that we want people to believe are trusted media, that are legacy vetted media, incredible journalists. And they've read those articles, and now they're telling their friends on this platform about that article. And then you could go back and read that article, or they're putting the bill up, and they're saying right here in the bill, it says this, you could go on congress.gov and read those bills. So I think that's an important thing for folks to remember and to be gentle about. Okay. V Spear, thank you so much for coming on offline. Under the Desk News is fantastic. Everyone should go check it out and come

back again soon. This was great. Thanks so much, John. I appreciate being here. Welcome back. Next up on Offline's TikTok Hearing, Chinese technology expert Graham Webster. Here's Max Fisher's interview with Graham. If you want to understand whether TikTok poses a special danger to Americans, you need to look at the technical side of the story, the way that your data is moved around and stored and how it could be exploited, which all works a bit differently than you might have heard. But you also need to understand the unusual nature of Chinese tech companies like ByteDance, which owns TikTok, and the particular pressures and obligations they face from operating in China. Graham Webster is an expert in both of these subjects. He's a research scholar at Stanford where he studies and writes about China's tech sector, as well as Chinese law, policy, and foreign relations around technology. Graham, welcome to Offline.

Thanks for having me. So Graham, we're going to talk about what merit there is or isn't in American concerns about TikTok being exploited by the Chinese government and the company's proposed solution for all of this. But I wanted to start on a very basic level with the two main charges against the service. The first is that TikTok could send data on American users, things like their physical location or browsing history back to the Chinese government, which could pose a privacy threat, as well as a potential national security threat if it's gathering data from Americans who work in sensitive fields. And the second concern is that TikTok could use its algorithm, the thing that chooses what videos and topics its users see, to push certain ideas or narratives to its 150 million U.S. users or to suppress or censor topics in ways that could serve the interests of the Chinese government. We're going to get in a minute into the thornier

question of how likely it is that these things could happen. But first, could you tell me what we know very concretely about whether or not they are happening now? Right. Yeah. So this is, these things are not actually that clear and it's not unreasonable to be concerned about them in the long term. But one teams in Beijing at the parent company ByteDance and the US slash international operation. So quite reasonable to have a concern that either through just leaning on an engineer or some formal mechanism, the Chinese government might try to get user data out of TikTok for some priority that it has. Now the company has been moving that US user data into servers that are in the United States under control of Oracle, and they have a whole plan that they say would have it be more supervised. On the censorship issues, there have been a couple

of documented cases where it seemed as if certain topics that were unfriendly to the propaganda authorities in China were being suppressed or things that were, you know, Chinese government friendly were being boosted. But these are documented from months ago, at least, and in previous years. And again, this is a thing where TikTok is trying to convince the world that it has ways that it can implement to confidently prevent this from happening in the future. So, you know, they're rational concerns. The size of the risk is really hard to nail down. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I want to read to you from a technical assessment of TikTok made in 2021 by researchers at the University of Toronto, because I think it's helpful here.

TikTok, quote, does not appear to exhibit overtly malicious behavior similar to those exhibited by malware. We did not observe TikTok collecting contact lists, recording and sending photos, audio, video, geolocation coordinates without user permission, end quote. In other words, they couldn't find evidence that the TikTok app was doing the sorts of nefarious things that lawmakers and others have accused it of hypothetically being able to do. But the research director behind that report has since objected to TikTok holding up their conclusions as necessarily exonerating. The research director, Ron Divert, said last week, quote, broadly speaking, we found that it was similar to other social media apps, a vacuum cleaner of personal data. This is not a good thing, end quote.

And he went on to say that the researchers had no way of knowing what happens to user data once it goes back to TikTok servers, which is not proof that something bad is happening, but as reason for concern. And he also added that the Chinese government could potentially use, quote, unconventional techniques to obtain TikTok user data through pressure on ByteDance. So, Graham, TikTok's owner ByteDance is actually trying to address both of these concerns, and you alluded to this, about what happens to user data once it lands in their servers, and about the potential for government pressure from China through something it's calling Project Texas. Can you walk us through what that is and how it would, at least in theory, address these concerns? Yeah, so the proposal is called Project Texas, and fundamentally, it does a couple of things. For those who might see the video, I've got this

diagram of the best explanation in public about it. It's a pretty complicated proposal, but fundamentally, US user data would be stored in the United States in servers operated by Oracle, the US data company. And a new company would be created called US Data Services, USDS, which would have a whole network of different types of audits under the supervision of the United States government and looking at questions of who has access to user data and making sure that that is limited to people who are trusted. Looking at questions of whether the engineering of the app itself meets cybersecurity standards,

looking at questions of how data moves in and out of US users, because of course, TikTok isn't just a US platform. And we're going to want to have, if you're going to have this solution, American users are going to have to be able to interact with people around the world. And there are a ton of details here, but fundamentally, it's a bunch of auditing relationships on specific security risks. And many of them in the proposal would be auditors looking at what TikTok's doing in the United States with its new USDS and Oracle solution. And then those auditors would be reporting to CFIUS, this American interagency security group. Now, some of this very expensive process, because of course, they're going to have to pay Oracle a lot of money to do this and pay a bunch of other auditors, is already underway. We don't

know how much. TikTok has given briefings to journalists and think tankers to try to, you know, socialize and get the word out about their plans to address these security concerns. But it's kind of unclear how far they've gone already. And it's very unclear whether this will satisfy the US government after the best public account of this plan was made public after some of these briefings. The Biden administration has indicated that it's basically interested in forcing a spinoff, a sale of TikTok, or at least the US unit, to a non-Chinese company, and that that ownership shift is what would address US concerns. So between that and the noise machine on Capitol

Hill and just the general ongoing controversy, it's really uncertain whether this mitigation plan called Project Texas will really have a chance to take root and be given a shot. just the general ongoing controversy. It's really uncertain whether this mitigation plan called Project Texas will really have a chance to take root and be given a shot. But the basic idea, and tell me if I have this right, is that US user data and more than that, a lot of the moderation of the app, a lot of the backend code for the app, in theory, the algorithm for the app, although I'm a little skeptical of that personally, but all of these elements would be housed, not just in the US, but they would be housed with Oracle, an American company, and it would be under a set of audits and layers of supervision in which CFIUS, this US agency, would also be involved in things

like reviewing the code for the TikTok app and reviewing how the data is stored so that, at least in theory, what TikTok and ByteDance are trying to convince us of is that so much of how the app works and our data is held would be in the US and under US supervision that we wouldn't have to worry as much about the concerns that people have about the company. Is that right? Right. Fundamentally, this is a proposal where TikTok is finding, they're trying to find a way to credibly commit that they're taking measures to put blocks up that prevent those security risks that we were talking about. And they're trying to make that credible through, like I said, a pretty expensive process. I mean, this is not the most

efficient business process if you're just trying to run a mobile app. You'd have a code auditor that, again, looking at my diagram, it'd be reporting directly to CFIUS. And it would be, the code auditor itself would be approved by CFIUS, although it would be nominated by Oracle, and it would be examining the code inside of the USDS system. There's all these sorts of details that, frankly, would need to be evaluated to have a really good understanding. that if you're really simply concerned about these specific security risks, something like this ought to be enough to convince a reasonable observer that the risks are mitigated. Because there's never going to be no risk in data. And there's also numerous other ways that an adversary like the Chinese national security state can get at personal data of US users or can try to press propaganda or other sort of persuasive campaigns internationally. So this would be about trying to both shut down

those potential risks and do it convincingly in a way that satisfies the decisive people in the US government. Right. The point you made about credible commitments is an important one that I want to come back to because, of course, part of ByteDance's challenge is they can make a credible commitment on behalf of ByteDance, but it's harder for them to make a credible commitment on behalf of the Chinese government, which are, even though this doesn't always get made clear in American coverage, those are very separate entities. But first, I wanted to ask you about something else. You wrote recently that it's easy to imagine China wanting to exploit TikTok to spy on Americans. But when you consider the actual concrete scenarios for how this would work in a world of Project Texas-style protections, it feels a little bit less likely. So can you explain those scenarios and how they would actually work? Yeah. So there's a big difference from when all the user data was available in Beijing, and you might just lean on one engineer to say, extricate everything on one user or on a set of

users. Under a Project Texas-like solution, first of all, if they wanted all of the data on American users, this would just be an absolutely colossal data exchange between servers. And it would be the type of thing that any competent cybersecurity department of a company, certainly Oracle, would be capable of observing that. So they wouldn't be able to just pull everything across in the way that some people say is already a fact. And then there's the question of, could they target individuals? And I think if you're a really determined national security operator and you work to try to compromise individuals in a company, yeah, it's always going to be a risk. The insider threat risk is real in any company. And even a sort of Oracle slash Project Texas arrangement wouldn't

prevent that if they compromise somebody one way or the other, paying them off or blackmailing them who's working in a secure role. Now, those people would be vetted to some extent and Project Texas has arranged to make that harder. But then you're wondering, what are they actually going to get on an individual user if they go through that level or on a set of users if they're targeting dissidents or if they're targeting people that they think pose special threats to Chinese interests? And there's some pretty intrusive stuff in there. There's a bunch of location history. There's what people have been browsing on.

There's a bit of social graph, other users that they follow and interact with. But this is not really kind of revolutionary data in most cases, if you're an intelligence agency really targeting individuals, because you could also target them through other apps, things that would not be under this scrutiny, such as TikTok is. There are just dozens and dozens and hundreds of apps on the major app stores that have trackers, advertising trackers, other sort of data trackers.

This is how the whole digital economy works in the United States, where apps collect information about you. They collect information across apps and websites to the extent possible. Apple's tried to cut down on this a little bit, but it's still just a thriving market. And people are supposed to be de-identified, but they're easily re-identifiable. If you know where somebody lives and where somebody works and you see that their dot goes there and there. And this type of data science is demonstrated to be quite easy. So if you're

targeting individuals for that type of information, location data, some browsing data, why would you bother breaking into this sort of highly scrutinized Project Texas TikTok versus trawling around the data broker economy, using a bunch of ad networks? It's not a zero risk. It's a real thing that could happen. But it's harder to understand how TikTok specifically in a Project Texas arrangement would be especially enabling the Chinese authorities. Right, right. I mean, there's I know there's so much of our data is already available on the kind of like dark web digital black market, which is not a case for saying like, well, we should just throw it all privacy whatsoever. I mean, that's a catastrophe from my perspective. I mean, it's really awful. We ought to be doing things about it. Yeah.

Right. But it's just to say that we sometimes talk as if TikTok is the only possible vector by which a Chinese spy agency could get data on Americans. But in fact, there are many demonstrated tools that they have to get that data if they are determined to do so. And in fact, TikTok under Project Texas Style Protections is one of the less attractive avenues for them to do it. So the kind of way that we overtly focus on it is a little bit misleading. And it kind of sounds like to me, if you're someone who is potentially a very, very high interest to the Chinese government, like say you work in a sense of military or foreign policy job, you do probably want to delete TikTok from your phone. Or if you're a Chinese national who fled China, especially for political reasons or because you belong to a persecuted Chinese minority groups that have been very aggressively targeted by China, even within the US, you probably want to delete TikTok from your phone. And it's not for nothing that a number of governments have already banned the use of TikTok for government officials because Chinese authorities have certainly demonstrated, you

said that they're willing to get quite assertive in targeting those sorts of people and so could conceivably go the extra mile to grab up their TikTok user data. But for everyone else, probably your TikTok data, if it's put under strong enough protections like those ByteDance is proposing, and if those proposals kind of hold up to scrutiny, it's not super likely your data is going to end up on Xi Jinping's desk. Not because we trust Xi Jinping, but just because this wouldn't really make a ton of sense as a vector for them for spying on Americans. But I want to talk about the other category of concerns about TikTok, that ByteDance could be made to use the app to influence what Americans see in service of the Chinese government. Because after all, there have already been a number of social media influence operations in the US linked back to the Chinese government, although those have been through things like Twitter bot networks and not through, as far as we know, any manipulation of

TikTok's algorithm. And Beijing, of course, has been getting more aggressive about pushing even American companies to censor what they say about topics that China cares about, like Taiwan or Hong Kong. So it's not hard to imagine them pressuring a Chinese company like ByteDance over the same thing. And it's possible I might be a little bit more worried about this than you are, but you have smart reasons against totally panicking about this possibility. And one of them is related to how the Chinese government actually works and the fact that the agency that oversees tech companies is very different from the parts of the Chinese government that oversee propaganda

and censorship. So can you talk about that and about what it tells us about how we should think about this risk? Yeah. So, fundamentally, this is again an area where I don't think the risk is zero, but I think it's way overblown in the current discussion that we're having. A lot of this discussion is premised on the idea that a malign actor could successfully, intentionally change the algorithm in a way that would achieve their goals in terms of changing the views of Americans. And that science of persuasion in general is already, you know, pretty tough. So just getting it right, even if you had full access and achieving your goals, it's not clear that that's super easy for a malign actor. But the reason that it's a bit more complicated than we often hear in the US commentary, is they say, well,

ByteDance operates at the pleasure of the Chinese government. And that's definitely true, especially for ByteDance's domestic Chinese platforms. Douyin is the Chinese domestic version of TikTok. They operate another platform called Toutiao, which is a sort of news feed app that is very addictive and full of trashy, flashy headlines. But these apps have to follow the very strict content censorship, user monitoring, et cetera, regulations that any company inside China has to follow. And they're subject to enforcement by primarily the Cyberspace Administration of China, which is an agglomeration of different authorities for both public safety and public security, as well as censorship and propaganda. They receive regular updates as to

what topics are not to be discussed on the Chinese platforms. They have independent responsibility to try to avoid runaway rumors or anyway, cascades of information that the government doesn't want that could cause trouble from the perspective of the government. It's a very tough compliance regime. And this is something that all Chinese platforms have adapted to. This is different from the groups of people who go about putting together influence campaigns and botnets abroad. That sort of foreign propaganda role is wrapped up in cyber operators across potentially the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, the Ministry of State Security, the sort of foreign intelligence arm. There's obviously some function of trying to change people's views about China

from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And then there's the sort of sometimes misunderstood, but still fairly active United Front element of the party state that tries to align people's views abroad with party state goals. So it's not as if the CAC, the Cyberspace Administration of China, gets on the phone with ByteDance and says, okay, we're not going to discuss this embarrassing thing that happened to a Chinese diplomat on the Chinese internet. And also, by the way, just go right over to TikTok to more systematically affect discourse abroad. And I think that its efforts, including botnets and including more overt foreign propaganda have been getting, I don't know about more widespread. There's been a lot of efforts over the years. I think they might be getting a little more savvy year by year. But when you look at the stuff and you look at the botnets that get taken down by companies like Twitter and Facebook, and then researchers go through them. I mean, they don't get much engagement. The content is pretty

schlocky. It's not very slick foreign propaganda at this point. And so, my estimate of how effective the Chinese government would be at trying to use alleged, and not to my knowledge actually existing, special access to the TikTok algorithm, I just don't think they're ready to do it effectively. So at most, it's a longer-term concern. And again, I don't know if Project Texas as proposed would effectively head all of that off, but I think that it ought to be possible, if people are willing to do it, to set up an auditing and monitoring regime that would fairly confidently make that very ought to be possible, if people are willing to do it, to set up an auditing and monitoring regime that would fairly confidently make that very difficult to achieve.

One other, I think, point of concern is that Xi Jinping has in the past couple of years really emphasized within China that private Chinese companies can't just focus on making money anymore, that they need to ensure that they are actively promoting the core national interests of China. And the word that Xi hammers over and over again in defining those interests is security. I know there are a couple of ways to read that. Would it be a misreading to see that as a reason to worry that the Chinese government could or might seek to push ByteDance to leverage TikTok towards these kind of Chinese national interests? I don't think we think that Chinese companies are shrugging this off and saying, we can just ignore the old man. So it's a question of, and I would think what we

have to worry about is, how are the people at ByteDance reading it when she comes out and says, you, a Chinese tech company, now have to focus on security and the core national interests of China. You can't just make money. Right. I mean, so fundamentally, the way I think they read that is domestic security. I mean, this is a, it's quite clear that just as a general analyst of Chinese politics over the years, the national security concern is fundamentally about how is China doing at home? Is the communist party-led political system secure from threats, both external and internal? Is it effective and continuing to provide enough benefits for people

that it prevents major opposition? and is repression effective enough to prevent opposition that does exist from flowering into a real threat. So I think, you know, to some extent, I mean, if you really talk to Chinese business people, you know, they read from the hymnal, they'll go to the meetings, they'll repeat the stuff, but like, I'm sorry, but they know it's bullshit. Like it's not like everybody's like, oh, you know, the top leader is talking about security again. It's just how it works. I mean, people in the Communist Party, people throughout society are used to these grave intonations. And they're also used to looking for, well, what does this actually mean for me?

And recently, I think it means don't act out of line. Don't question when your sector is being regulated in a way that, you know, Jack Ma from Alibaba and Financial had this experience a couple of years ago. You know, don't push beyond what they want to do in financial regulation, for instance. So, you're looking for boundaries, but taking everything too literally, it would provoke a chuckle among people who actually work in the Chinese system. Sometimes I get made fun of by my Chinese friends and colleagues and universities and think tanks for reading so closely and translating. This is what we do in

our Stanford project is we translate Chinese tech policy and commentary and speeches and that type of thing. And, you know, they'll tease me for, for focusing so much on, on what the, you know,

the top leader said in one of these things. So that they say, Oh yeah, you really know the, you know, the score. And it's, there's a sense of people have a sense of humor about it.

I mean, I think sometimes, especially now that we're very isolated from one another since the COVID period, there's a tendency to forget that Chinese people have a sense of humor. They live under these conditions. They've noticed freedoms decreasing. They know some of it's BS. They also know some of it's dead serious. And analysts abroad, I think, need to be careful about that and not just take everything literally. It's an important admonition that we need to try to listen to this, not as Americans, but to listen to it and hear it within the context that a Chinese tech company will hear.

We're not the audience for this, really. Right, right. And we need to understand the context in which these messages are being sent to ByteDance in order to know what they mean. So I think that where I am left with all of this, and tell me if you think this is fair, is that on the one hand, we don't really have evidence that China is using TikTok to spy on Americans or to manipulate American public sentiment. And there's meaningful if circumstantial reason to doubt whether China even would do this, not because we trust China, but because the technical provisions of TikTok's proposed plan for operating in the US would make spying, at least on mass via TikTok, not very attractive as an option. What we know about the Chinese state's priorities and its oversight of tech companies like ByteDance may be points away, at least at the moment,

from Beijing wanting to wield TikTok as a tool of explicit overseas influence and propaganda. But on the other hand, if, like me, you feel that social media companies in general already have access to way too much personal private information on Americans and that social media already wields way too much influence over our society and politics to the point that platforms like Facebook and YouTube can sow mass conspiracies and extremism without those companies even intending to do so, then why would you tolerate even the possibility, even if we think it's remote, that an adversarial foreign government could intentionally wield that power in hostility against us? Because even if we believe ByteDance is unlikely to want that,

and they are going to great lengths, like you said, to try to signal that they don't want that, we know that it operates in an environment where companies are expected to serve China's national interests at a time where we've seen the ferociousness of the Chinese government spying and censorship and media manipulation, certainly domestically, also in places like Hong Kong. And we know the Chinese government, whether you think this is China's fault or America's fault, sees itself as increasingly in conflict with the United States. So is that kind of a fair way to balance the kind of cases for and against worrying about this, do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's still, there's a bit that we we don't know. And, you know, a couple of things that push in the direction of being skeptical of TikTok. One is that the company has a bunch of documented bad behavior in the last couple of years, notwithstanding the efforts that they're trying to put together on Project Texas. I mean, these are efforts that are being built out of a period where it was exposed that engineers in Beijing had more access than was probably reasonable to user data. It was exposed that the company worried about leaks, used TikTok account data from a journalist or two or three to try to figure out who their source was, right? And this is the company spying on people. And that's, you know, it shouldn't be acceptable. And this is the company spying on people. And that's, you know, it shouldn't be acceptable. They're not the only company to do that. There was a case where Uber did this when they were being particularly disgusting a few years ago, too. My point is that TikTok is not a great case study for this question of US and China doing business together despite distrust. And one more reason that some people might just want to throw in the

towel and get rid of TikTok is just disgust. I mean, there's a sense that some people have that doing business with China simply isn't worth it because it legitimizes authoritarian rule, it legitimizes repression, it legitimizes crimes against humanity or genocide or however you want to define it, what's been going on in Xinjiang, especially a few years ago, but still ongoing in different ways. And that sense of disgust and desire not to be involved, I think, is reasonable. But that comes with risks, right? Yeah, the risk is if we just give up and ban TikTok and say we're not going to deal with the specifics of the risks of TikTok, we're not going to consider whether this elaborate and expensive supervisory arrangement could actually just eliminate those risks and allow us to continue doing business in this way, that sets a precedent for just tearing up connections further and further at a time when we've already been doing that across much of the economy,

for instance, with semiconductors, with other things. And this decoupling trend is ongoing. It's not going to be turned back. But that engages some broader risks, which are basically that one way or the other, like it or not, Americans and Chinese are going to have to live with each other on earth. Whether or not there's geopolitical conflict, some degree of even mutual disgust among the population, or just at least differences of opinions, we're sort of stuck with each other. And that's the stuff that, to me, keeps me going, studying and trying to provide knowledge in English on a field that, frankly, can be pretty depressing. I mean, a lot of it's going badly. So, why study all this stuff? Why spend all this time on these issues that aren't going well? Well, it's because we're going to have to confront it.

And just saying, ah, well, I'm not going to deal with it. Let's ban it. Maybe that's the right answer after careful consideration and looking at the risks and saying, now we just can't mitigate these risks. And they really are strong enough that as a society, we think they justify severing these ties. But to do so kind of rashly, as would be the case if it went forward right now, I just think it would be another step in the wrong direction and kind of putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we can just ignore each other. Graham, thank you for joining Offline. Thanks for having me. And finally, my conversation with Virginia Senator Mark Warner.

Senator Warner is the author and lead sponsor of the Restrict Act, a piece of legislation that gives the United States government the power to take action against tech companies like TikTok that are owned by foreign adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. That action could involve restrictions or an outright ban, though it would still involve a long process, and as Senator Warner says, TikTok would still have its day in court. The bill has generated bipartisan support, but also some vocal opposition from Democrats, Republicans, civil libertarians, and people like V. I wanted to talk to Senator Warner about what's in the bill and why he feels so strongly that we

need it. Senator Mark Warner, welcome to Offline. Thank you, John. We are trying to solve the great debate over whether or not it's time to ban TikTok on this episode, which I know you found yourself in the middle of. So I thought you could make the case for the Restrict Act, which gives the Commerce Secretary the authority to take action against tech products and services owned by foreign adversaries that they deem national security threats. But before we get into the details of Restrict, can you walk us through the story of how you first became so concerned about TikTok that it led you and Senator Thune to write this legislation? Well, John, thanks for the question. And let me give kind of two lead ups. First of all, you know, TikTok is just one more example over the last few years where we've seen

foreign based technology from adversarial nations. And the law defines those adversarial nations as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, where we really have not had any rules-based approach that could stand up in court to take on these issues. Seven or eight years ago, it was Kaspersky, a Russian software company, took us years to get it off the government acquisition list. A few years back, people may have heard of the concerns about Huawei and ZTE, the Chinese telecom companies that were pretty shown to have a backdoor where somehow your communications could be somehow siphoned off into China. Now it's TikTok.

But we thought we needed something that rather than this whack-a-mole approach where it's one-off, raise a red flag, figure out how to make the case, that was rules-based that still gave any of the foreign-based technology their day in court where the Intelligence Committee, and I'm chairman of the Intelligence Committee, has to disclose more so it's not just trust us. So that's one precedent that we wanted to deal with. The other was, and people have said as I've gotten a lot of incoming, well, you know, yeah, TikTok's got a problem, but what about Facebook? What about YouTube? And let me be the first to say, there's a lot of problems with American social media. And Congress has done squat over the last six or seven years. I think about when we first discovered some of these problems with Russian interference in the 2016 election. So I strongly support a national privacy bill. I strongly support a kids' online safety bill. I strongly support a bill that would reform Section 230 so these Facebook or YouTube don't

get a get-out-of-jail-free card regardless of the content. I strongly support things like something banning dark patterns, malicious activities, or data portability and interoperability. I was a telecom guy, so I'm a little bit of a tech nerd. And those ought to go forward. We've not been successful, but we need legislation to those areas. But there is something different when we're talking about an entity that at the end of the day, TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is a Chinese company. The Chinese changed their law in 2016, 2017 to make a requirement that at the end of the day, every Chinese company has to answer to the

Communist Party of China, not to shareholders, not to customers. And that's just the law. And the potential for abuse, I think, is great. Now, what's the potential abuse? Remember, 150 million Americans use TikTok on average about 90 minutes a day. So that means a lot of folks are using it two and three hours a day. And there are two huge concerns. One is an enormous amount of data is being collected by TikTok. And ultimately, if the CCP, and let me be clear here, my beef is with the Communist Party, is with President Xi's leadership, authoritarianism. It's not with the Chinese people. It's not with the Chinese Americans or the Chinese diaspora anywhere in the world. But the ability of the CCP to obtain that data, and there have been plenty of press reports that they have been doing this, ought to scare folks. I mean, if you're a young person and part of the magic of TikTok is figuring out what you like, maybe even before you know it, to have that data point reside somewhere that could be potentially used for blackmail or other nefarious purposes ought to be concerning. The second is this whole question of content manipulation and propaganda.

You've got 150 million Americans watching this distribution model, you know, 90 minutes a day. If Xi Jinping says, all right, I want to start floating in videos that reinforce the notion that, you know, I want to help my buddy Vladimir that reinforce the notion that, you know, I want to help my buddy Vladimir Putin. So let's make clear that Ukraine is really part of Russia or that, you know, Taiwan really has always been part of China. So the ability to subtly put in misinformation, disinformation or propaganda, I believe, raises it to that level of concern that this is a national security risk. And I also believe that, you know, if we were to take action, whether it's through a divestment that actually gives up the

source code or actually a prohibition, that the market will create another entity because there's a lot of creativity on TikTok. I've met with a lot of people who make their living as social influencers off of TikTok. And I think that ability should and will be preserved in the marketplace. I just want to go back to the personal data point. Like what kind of personal data are we talking about here? Because I've seen a bunch of different reports on this. Is it like data that it gathers from the app, like your phone number or contacts or what topics you're searching for in the app? Or could it also potentially see your keystrokes,

text messages, things you're doing on the phone when not using the app? Or don't we know? Well, I think the potential of all of the above is there. And I think that the question becomes we fully don't know and we don't know how dramatic and draconian that giant data suck could be.

I would point out that this is not just something that's happening in the United States. Remember, we banned TikTok off of military phones two or three years ago. We banned it off of government phones more recently. But this is not an American-only phenomena. Canada has banned it off of government phones. The Brits have. The Europeans have.

India banned it outright three years ago. And then you've got countries like Britain again and the Dutch, for example, that have said to all of their journalists, hey, get off TikTok because chances are the Chinese Communist Party are monitoring you. Just this week, Australia took an action to ban. So this is not an American-only phenomena. And there have been evidence, plenty of stories, BuzzFeed stories, other stories, TikTok whistleblowers, who've indicated that regardless of what TikTok says, Chinese engineers are getting access to this data. And there's been a particular focus on journalists. It seems to me that one of the big challenges here is that everyone keeps hearing that TikTok could be a national security threat, but the strongest evidence to support that claim seems like it could be classified intelligence. Is that right? Yeah. I think the intel community and everyone, the FBI has said,

shouldn't be on, CIA, NSA, you name them, all the three-letter agencies have in public testimony say this is a security concern. We need to do a better job of forcing them to disclose. But I will tell you that even with the disclosure, there'll be more evidence. But the greatest problem here is not what ByteDance is requiring TikTok to do today. It is this potential harm. And so I may not ever convince i mean you know libertarians and free speech at you know free speech you know on the edges um but i think about it took us a number of years to convince a lot of people about wallway what finally kind of i think pushed the the needle

where everybody said holy heck was when you look at where Huawei, which is pretty decent equipment for wireless communication, pretty decent equipment, was selling these systems at a greatly reduced rate in the United States. They were selling them to small telcos, and it was almost 100% match with where our intercontinental ballistic missile systems were. So there was an aha moment where they said, well, maybe that's a little weird, and maybe we shouldn't wait until a conflict comes

and then all of the phones don't work around our missile systems to kind of make the case. Some members of Congress have asked for classified briefings before they take a vote on this bill. Is that something you think? Yeah, I think we ought to be doing classified briefings to anyone he wants. And remember, we've got on this bill, and John, you know the sausage making process where I work. I mean, I got 26 senators, 13 Republicans, 13 Democrats. It kind of crosses the agenda, conservative to liberal in both caucuses. The administration has been supportive.

But I don't underestimate the fact that this is still going to be a slog. We have not done any technology regulation of American or other entities, literally in the last seven years of any meeting. Individual states have done some stuff, but the federal government hasn't. And we are now seeing TikTok spending $100 million in lobbying. There is not a political publication around that hasn't had TikTok sponsor them in the last couple of weeks. And somebody said the other night they were watching TV and on three different programs, they saw three different TikTok ads. So we're going to fight this, but it does say something that if the lobbying efforts and the misinformation and disinformation coming from a Chinese-owned entity can make Congress kind of cower, that doesn't speak very well about how we're ever going to grapple with some of the very real, I think, mental health issues for kids from Facebook and

YouTube and American entities. We've been talking a little bit about Project Texas on this episode, in particular to Graham Webster, who's an expert in Chinese tech at Stanford. He basically said that in a scenario where Project Texas is operational and those protections are in place, a determined Chinese spy agency could probably still get sensitive user information, but that going after TikTok user data specifically would actually just not be that attractive of an option to the Chinese. What do you think about that and just Project Texas in general, if that were to happen? Project Texas.

Project Texas and the devil's definitely in the details here. And I'm not enough of a technology expert to make sure everything is buttoned up. I can tell you when TikTok first talked to me and they brought in their team and I had my experts there, it didn't pass the smell test. But let's assume for a moment that you can guarantee, and nothing says about what happens to the data that China has already acquired, but on a going forward basis, I mean, I can believe hypothetically that you could have a big enough firewall that American data is protected. So that's issue number one. But issue number two, if the source code, the algorithm that's a special sauce that makes TikTok so addictive still resides in Beijing, and that source code is always being, an algorithm is always being

improved, and those updates are still being sent to phones on users in the rest of the world, that's a vulnerability about the ability to still be a propaganda tool. So if there was a Project Texas and a divestiture, and the Chinese are willing to give up the source code, then you got me really interested that we've sealed off the problem. But so far, at least, the Chinese government has said they would rather see TikTok banned than give up the source code. And I hope for people who are wondering, well, is this really a malicious issue, that that might be a bit of an argument, a convincing argument as well. But so the source code is an issue with the propaganda problem, not necessarily

the personal data problem, if you had protections in place with Project Texas. Right. Agreed. The data problem, I think, is easier to wall off than the propaganda issue if the source code still resides in China. Because no matter what kind of software you have, think about on your phones how many times you get an update and you got to have that update. That's just the nature of software. and my fear is that if that updates are continuing to come from Beijing, the possibility of malicious activity coming with those updates is a very real threat. Let's talk about the Restrict Act, which, as you mentioned, has both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition, freaking out a lot of civil liberties advocates like the ACLU.

I've seen some people call it the Patriot Act on steroids. Why is the Restrict Act not the Patriot Act on steroids? We have taken the underlying law. It's called IESA. It was back in the 1970s and 80s. It gave the government power to go after, again, certain foreign-based technology. There is going to always be a higher standard with communications technology. Again, let me be clear.

TikTok, if we have this bill becomes law and the Commerce Secretary tries to make the case, TikTok will get their day in court, number one. Number two, the idea that this is somehow going after individual Americans is a flat-out lie. This is part of the disinformation campaign that's going on. We are going after foreign owned corporations from these six countries and potentially their executive leadership, but there is no ability for restrict to go after an individual American user. What I've heard is these propositions, you ban TikTok, somebody still wants to get on, they use a VPN, they kind of go around any barrier and still get access to TikTok. There would be no penalty to individual Americans.

Is there something in the language? Because I've seen some people, I know that there's probably, TikTok's probably pushing this as well, but I've seen some other people just look at the language in the bill and say, well, it says any individual or person who goes on the BAM website. The penalty provision we took from IESA, which is existing law, and there was actually another law that got passed. I'm spacing any member right now that got 89 votes just a few years ago. But I'll be the first. If there are ways that we can make more explicitly clear and double underline and put an explanation point in the legislative process to make clear we're not going after individuals and that's not the intent, I'm wide open to that. You know, that's one of the reasons why the bill ought to get marked up. The bill ought to go

through the normal legislative process. And if there are improvements, you know, let's have at it. We think that what we need is something that is not, you know, what I would feel right now is you've got the potential for government action that's arbitrary, or you've got the potential, which I don't think is a good precedent, where we go out and name in a specific law, a specific application. Some of my colleagues have got that approach. I think that even raises constitutional issues about a bill of attainder. I think that also clearly invites specific retaliation. You name company X, we're going to name company Y. And I think we need a rules-based approach.

Frankly, we knew we'd never probably get the ACLU, but for people who are advocates of free speech, and I put myself in that category the last time we have this thing. Think for a moment, one of the things that has kind of gotten me freaked out right now is the rapid movement forward of artificial intelligence. I think many people have seen chat GPT and how quickly that's moving. You really, at least from a national security standpoint, if China runs the table on AI and all of their authoritarian values are built into your AI responses, in my mind, that is a huge national security risk. And if we don't have a framework to deal with that, and we're dealing with this whack-a-mole arbitrary approach, that's not a good place for our country. There's also a concern I saw that this bill may give the U.S. government

more power to surveil Americans or collect data? Is that true? I have heard that charge. No one has pointed to any specific lengths. I think that we are seeing, and increasingly more from some of the right-wing media, they are throwing everything they can up against the wall and are seeing what might stick. And, you know, it's my job and those who are advocating here to rebut that. But, you know, this has nothing to do with surveilling individual Americans. I think that does not make sense. I don't think those tools ought to be increased. And, you know, this is, again, foreign-based technology owned and controlled, owned and then indirectly or directly controlled

by the governments of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. One test of anything that expands executive power at all for me these days is, would I be comfortable with this power in the hands of Donald Trump or another Donald Trump? Would you? Would you be okay with that if there's a Trump administration who has the power of the federal judiciary. Now, I'm glad we've got a number of more fair-minded judges on, but the notion that we're going to do nothing, what I would be more afraid of is an arbitrary action by some future administration that is not at all based in rules, that it doesn't have any kind of due process to it, that says, okay, I'm president. I can do whatever I want, and I'm just going to decree this is bad. So I spoke to V Spears, who's a hugely popular TikTok newscaster. They wanted me to tell you that, sure, they and other TikTok users, they have privacy concerns. They want privacy protections, but they really value the community they found on TikTok. You know, it's not just dance videos. There's so many young people who get their news from TikTok. There's a lot of young people who make a living on TikTok.

And more importantly, they said it's not so easy to just transfer the community they've built on TikTok to some other app. What would you say to V and the other 100 million or so American TikTok users, most of whom are supporters of yours, President Biden, Democratic Party. Yeah. And listen, I met with a young woman the other day who was from the disability community, and she had both made a living and TikTok had completely changed her life. Interestingly enough, she was Taiwanese heritage, know she was the first to say that you know she's against the communist party of china and so the what she said was yes there are problems she wants the ability to still make a living and still have this creativity at the end of the day she was was not though willing to say that she trusted the CCP

and that if there's a way to make this transference, and it doesn't have to be an American company. Let me be clear. If it was an Indian company, a Brazilian company, any company from any country that is not one of these six authoritarian regimes, I think there is an opportunity. And again, this is not going to happen overnight. We got to pass this. You got to go through a process. If this is where things are headed, and divestiture with moving the source code could be a solution set.

But if this is where this is headed, I guess I still believe there's a ton of money to be made here, and that someone will create a similar like-kind platform with the still ability to make money and make it easier to port your followers. I mean, if we had data portability, which should be the law for all social media, and for people wondering what that means, I'm old enough to remember when it was a real pain in the ass to move from one telephone company to another. Me too.

Now you can move number portability. It makes the market more competitive. If we can move your data easily and move your followers easily, and that would produce more competition in the market. We need that as a law for both, not just TikTok, but for American platforms as well. But I firmly believe the market will create this opportunity because you are seeing, I'm not sure I can walk through Washington right now without bumping into somebody that's on TikTok payroll. Yeah, I know, I've heard, I've read the stories.

Senator Mark Warner, thank you so much for walking us through all this. Appreciate the time and thanks for joining Offline. And again, John, thank you. And what I say to everybody, I don't want to push anybody off the creativity or making their living. We can work through this, but please take a moment and think about both. Do you really want your data residing in Beijing? And do you really want to be subject to the kind of manipulation, in particular, as we see with deep fakes, the ability to manipulate propaganda

is going to exponentially grow. So I appreciate the chance to make the case. And if your listeners have got other comments, fire them away at me and we'll try to respond. Excellent. All right, take care, Senator. Thank you. All right, I'm here with Max Fisher.

Hey, Max. Hey, pal. Now that we have heard from V, Graham, and Senator Warner, I thought maybe we could sort of sum up where we stand now on the great TikTok debate. How did you come into this and have your views changed at all? I am really glad we did this because I feel a lot differently than I did before. And I came into this thinking, if you had asked me, should we ban TikTok? I would have said, it doesn't matter because it's never going to happen because the reasons for it that we heard at that congressional hearing were so stupid.

The national security case seems so flimsy. I now think it could happen. I will tell you where I came up, but I'm kind of curious how you came into it. So I came into it thinking that a ban on balance was probably a better idea. Partly, this is colored by the conversation I had about a year ago on the show with Scott Galloway. Sure. And I sort of like went deep into TikTok and the propaganda dangers and all that kind of stuff. And also just hearing so many people at high levels of government, especially people

with national security jobs being like, oh yeah, absolutely get that off your phone. So I thought, I came in thinking maybe a band was a good idea having talked to v and then listened to your interview with graham i now think that like i think that we can solve some of the privacy concerns if project texas gets off the ground yeah i think that the propaganda concerns are harder to fix but also we have propaganda concerns with a host of other social media apps it's true even if you take foreign actors out of the equation we're not doing so hot ourselves right spreading misinformation and propaganda right um so i think that's a that it's a serious problem i've thought about i've thought that for a while but i don't know that the benefits of an outright ban outweigh the, you know, what it would do. In talking to V,

it's like, there's a lot of people in this country who make a living off TikTok, find community off TikTok, and get their news and information from TikTok. And as V said, there's a lot of really great, honest, truthful reporting coming from it. Right. We do often skip over, is there actually an upside from this app just in terms of like, it brings people enjoyment day to day. I think I came out in a similar place to you. I think on the, I kind of separated my mind, the like privacy concerns and the foreign influence concerns. And I think on privacy, the risk that China could access US user data, I came out against a ban with a small caveat. And then on the influence question, I came out against the ban with a big caveat. And on privacy, like you, I was really kind of persuaded digging into the details and talking to people

about Project Texas, the set of safeguards that TikTok would set up that it really looks pretty robust. And it's kind of the like JCPOA, like the Iran nuclear deal of like privacy protections. Like it's not that we trust them. It's just that like, there's so many safeguards, there's so many layers of oversight that it would be so onerous and difficult and obvious to spot if they stole huge amounts of user data that I really pretty persuaded that it would, in most cases, head that off with the small caveat being that something everybody said is that TikTok, like any social media app, just hoovers up a catastrophic amount of your personal data. And once a company has that data

and it exists somewhere, it's possible for a really determined foreign actor to get it. So I think that for most of us, it's not a privacy risk. But if you work in a sensitive field, like if I were reporting someplace really sensitive, I didn't want governments to know who I was meeting with. I would delete TikTok off of my phone, but I would do the same thing for Facebook and Instagram. I was just going to say, I think that I understand the government ban on phones. And I think if you're a government employee, I think if you work at a company that's connected to national security, it might be good for a ban. And I think if you're a government employee, I think if you work at a company that's connected to national security, it might be good for a ban. And I think if you're a journalist, it might be good to get it off your phone.

I think that's true, but I think that's true of Facebook apps, too. Not because Mark Zuckerberg is going to give your data to, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei, but just because, like, once a big company takes it, it's easy for someone to, like, go out and grab it. I also thought it was interesting that Senator Warner said that he could be persuaded that Project Texas would solve the privacy data concerns. His wording was very interesting. Yeah, it's not so much the propaganda, but the privacy data. So I do think that Project Texas has to work. If it doesn't, I think we're in a whole different spot.

But I think that's true. But it looks pretty effective. On influence, I was thinking a lot about something that Graham said to me off mic, which is he said, look, in 2016, malign state actors, these like Russian hackers, tried to use social media to influence the election. And we know it didn't really have that much of an effect. And I was kind of thinking, well, that's true. But at the same time, we know that the platforms themselves had a huge catastrophic impact on that election and have continued to ever since. And that's not with anyone even trying to use the Facebook algorithm, like anyone in Facebook or YouTube trying to use the algorithm to influence our politics. But just because those algorithms decided on their own to promote division and misinformation, it had this huge effect. So the risk of a hostile foreign government,

especially in a potential conflict scenario, having that power and intentionally wielding that, I think the risks of that happening are really low. And I think Project Texas means that it would be easy to spot. I think also Chinese overseas propaganda is very clumsy. So it would be very obvious. Much like Russian propaganda. Yeah. And even more so. They're just not as practiced at it. And I think we would see it if it happened. But the risk of that and handing the kind of power that Facebook and YouTube already have over our society and saying, what if that power was also potentially in the hands of Xi Jinping is pretty scary. So I think where I came out is thinking

that a proactive ban is not the right move there because it's such an extreme step, but that you maybe do want to have the legal and technical mechanisms in place for a big, like in case of Chinese influence operation, like shut down TikTok. Well, that brings me to like, having said all of this, I also came away thinking that the concerns about the restrict act and the accusations that the restrict act is like a patriot act on steroids are way overblown yeah and i just think that like the government does the federal government does need some kind of a process right with which to handle right potential national security threats from tech owned by foreign adversaries. And it seems like they do not have the tools to do that right now. And I think putting in place a process where they have those tools, not just, you know,

and can't just wield them unilaterally. But as Warner said, even if this legislation is passed, TikTok would have their day in court, right? Having some level of judicial review, having different layers of protection there. But like, it does seem like the government needs, because it's not just going to be TikTok right right having some level of judicial review having different layers of protection there but like it it does seem like the government needs because it's not just going to be tiktok here like whether it's chinese tech whether it's some other adversary like we're gonna we're gonna need the tools to to mitigate right and legal regimes for um regulating foreign owned media companies

are incredibly common in the democratic world like Like Canada has very, very tight and restrictive rules for foreign-owned media. So I think the mere existence of laws to think about foreign-owned media companies in our country, I think is not in itself cause for concern. I agree with that. All right, so we solved it. Okay, nice job. We figured it out. I want to thank V Spear, Senator Mark Warner and Graham Webster for joining this episode. And also, if any of you have thoughts, opinions, concerns, you want to weigh in on the TikTok debate, please email us at offline at cricket dot com. We would love to hear from you. And thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau.

It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Thank you.