Plain English with Derek Thompson - Ben Smith on the Future of News, How to Start a Media Company, and Why TikTok Is a Time Bomb

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

About a week ago, a new global news organization launched called Semafor. Ben Smith is its cofounder and editor-in-chief. We offer a brief history of news media in the 21st century and talk about why in some ways the news business is more like the 19th century than the 20th. We discuss what to say to investors when you’re trying to get their money to start a new media company, and debate why TikTok is the biggest undercovered media story in the world. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ben Smith Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yo, this is Rob Harvilla from 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, the world's greatest loopy and perverse and inaccurately named music nostalgia podcast. We're doing 90 songs now because there's too many songs. Pearl Jam, JZ, Jewel, YouTube, Cher, Hootie. These are just some of the names people yell at me on the internet because we're back. More great songs, more rad special guests, more loopy perversity. Join us once more on 60 Songs That Explain the 90s every Wednesday on Spotify. Today's episode is about the news media.

About one week ago, the new news organization Semaphore launched. Its CEO is Justin Smith, who was the CEO of Bloomberg News, and before that the president of the Atlantic, my company. The co-founder and editor-in-chief is Ben Smith, who's been all over the place and was most recently the media columnist for the New York Times. One thing that journalists love to do is talk about other journalists. And the truth is, we don't really, do a whole lot of that on this show. But what this episode supposes is maybe we should,

because media gossip is fun, sometimes stupid, but sometimes incredibly important. And Semaphore, which has global aspirations, has an interesting twist on its presentation of the news that I find particularly interesting and particularly deep in terms of the way that audiences consume news information. Semaphore's newsletters are meant to be down the middle, just the fax man reporting, but they have a section set aside for the author's opinion. When the first few newsletters came out, a couple of my friends who saw this said, huh, that's kind of weird, right? Like a mini op-ed inside of a news article? And I was like, no, I love this. I love it because it's something that I try to do on this show. Sometimes when there's a really complicated topic,

particularly a really controversial topic, I'll say, let's break this up into evidence versus interpretation. Part one, here are the facts that we can all agree on. Here are the numbers. Here are the things that happened in the physical world. And then part two, the layer of interpretation. Here's what I think this means. Here's who I think is wrong, who I think is moral and immoral, what I think is going to happen next. Reality versus interpretation. So today's guest, as you've guessed, is Ben Smith. We talk about evidence and interpretation. We offer a brief history of the news media in the 21st century. We talk about why in some ways the news business is more like the 19th century than the 20th today.

We talk about what to say to investors when you're trying to get their money to start a new media company and why TikTok is the biggest undercovered media story in the world. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Ben Smith, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me on, Derek. Ben, you just launched a new media company. company semaphore with Justin Smith, and I have to imagine that launching a media company

in late 2022 is one of the more stressful things that a person can do to themselves. So I think what we're going to do is we're going to start you off with the easy questions and we'll ladder up to the impossible questions about the future of media at the end, if that sounds okay to you. So for those who don't know you, who are you? What do you do? And what did you do before that? My name is Ben Smith. I've been a reporter, basically, for most of my career, came up covering politics and in New York and in Washington and sort of got, just happened to be around as blogs became a thing and got to be a blogger and sort of follow the twists and turns of the internet to Politico, started BuzzFeed News and was there for eight years. and then became the media columnist of the New York Times for a couple of years

before leaving in January to start Semaphore. And what is Semaphore? Semaphore is a new global media company rooted in really three ideas, transparent journalism, giving you a range of views and delivering global perspectives. So I was thinking about your career, and we've met a few times. I may have tried to hire you once or twice. Maybe once or twice. I remember, yeah, a few lunches in Flatiron.

Your careers are really interesting mini history of media in the 21st century. And I was only just thinking about this in a few minutes before we hopped on to this Zoom. But when newspapers were really starting to understand the power of the internet and blogs, you went to work for Politico, a news organization that really understood the power of the internet and blogs. And then right after that, the social graph started to dominate news. And it became very clear to me, clearly to you, that the new homepage for news was Twitter and the world's homepage was Facebook. you went to a company that had very strong theories about social media. Then just at the New York Times is becoming this sort of like mini-monopoly of subscription first

journalism, you jump to the New York Times. And then the newsletter craze takes off and you go to semaphore, which among other things has a lot of newsletters about the world, tech, business here and specifically Africa, which we'll get to in a second. So to me, you seem to have effectively surfed several waves of media distribution trends. And I wonder, am I like retroactively applying a logic to your? career that you did not mean to have, or do you have this, do you think of yourself as having a nose for the next frontier of media? You know, I mean, I think to some degree it was timing. I mean,

my first journalism job was at the Indianapolis Star, which still had those old computers where it was this glowing green screen and just one computer that everybody had a physical pipe, like a metal pipe going from their computer to that computer. And on my first day, the editor got up on a chair in the middle of the newsroom and announced that they were shutting down the afternoon paper, the Indianapolis News. And I just think, you know, for reporters a generation above me, I'm in my mid-40s, it made sense to think, you know what, I'm going to spend my career in print in this relatively stable, if insane, industry. And a lot of those folks had the rug pulled out from them in a way that was awful and had nothing to do with anything, any mistakes they made

or anything they really could have seen coming. But I think for people just, exactly of my generation. Like I got out of college in 99, you know, you felt the, you felt print collapsing. You were consuming news in other ways. And I do think I've always loved news. Like, I've loved telling people things they didn't know. I've never been that attached to one medium or the other. Like, I love reading books. I like writing things on napkins and giving them people. I'm not like a, I don't really, I care more about the message than the medium in some way. And so I do think that I'm, and I also covered politics, which is fundamentally the communications business. Politicians are media companies. Politicians are obsessed with how to reach

people. They're not snobs. They just want to reach people. And so, you know, if there's email, they're going to use email. If there's Twitter, they're going to use Twitter. If there's all sorts of random stuff that doesn't even work, like Mirkat, you're going to find politicians on there. And so I think covering that political beat when I was reading a lot of blogs and I thought, like, wow, I wish I had a blog here in New York City Hall to write about all the stuff that even kind of semi-boring stuff, like the mayor had a press conference at 11 a.m. If you want to know, like, what happened, you've got to wait until midnight when the New York Times puts its addition online, and then maybe they'll cover it and maybe they won't. And so there was this

kind of insane arbitrage opportunity just to put information on the internet, like after lunch. And so saw that, how well that worked with blogs. And then I think what Politico did, what The Verge did, what some others, including the Atlantic did, was essentially professionalized the blogosphere. Like there was these reverse chronological publishing tools, but to be a blogger meant you were kind of writing typo-ridden long screeds about your opinion. In fact, when I broke a big story about Rudy Giuliani once, and the immediate response was that's just some blogger. It actually is very much what's happening with newsletters now, where he has a substack

means he's like rambling at length about his views on, you know, trans people or, or, you know, goldfish or something. But actually, no, email is just another way to deliver journalism, and it can be unedited screens, or it can be really tight, thoughtful articles, or photos, or whatever. And so I guess I always, I think, and similar with social media, which is in the middle of those two things, you know, I just saw, I was writing a blog,

I could kind of feel all the energy of my little political world being sucked away by Twitter, and so I kind of went there. That's a lovely answer. I've always been very interested in the fact that as we turn from purely ad-supported news to news that is more subscription forward or sometimes just more of a jumble, it's subscription, it's advertising, its events, it's marketing on the side for the New York Times, it's games, it's cooking, that in a way we're sort of returning to the 19th century origins of the modern news industry. This period where news was almost exclusively, funded by advertising is really an artifact of the middle of the 20th century. Before that, before the New York Sun, I think, in the 1830s, news was mostly substacks, except they were just printed on pieces of paper and handed out to, you know, the Irish of Brooklyn and, you know, some other ethnic group of the Bronx and some other ethnic group of, you know, of Manhattan.

And that's what the news was. It was a bunch of printed substacks, thousands and thousands of them that were supported by individual people. With all the eccentricity, vibrancy and kind of combat of that, right? And it was also, I mean, A.G. Salzberger said this to me the other day. It was in my first column. You know, the bundle, the digital bundle that they're trying to sell, he's like it's a newspaper, right? It has the crossword.

It has some recipes. You know, digital media has a different dynamic and the crossword can be interactive and you can have 10,000 recipes. But fundamentally, the thing the New York Times is selling now is actually closer to what it was selling in 1980 than what it was selling. in the year 2005. And it's a really, I thought, interesting insight. But also, you know, media is not, media is not, I was just say, like, more broadly,

like, and this something took me a while to figure out, but, you know, media is not astrophysics. We're not trading credit default swaps. We're not inventing sort of complex technologies you can't understand. It's a pretty straightforward business. And this is a business where the pendulum swings between bumbling and unbundling, between people feeling like they want everything in one place, and then, I'm a business. oh, they're kind of delighted by the abundance of choice,

and then they're sick of the abundance of choice, and they actually would like someone to deliver them everything in one place again. And, like, I certainly go through those phases myself, and I think it's totally normal. And I'm not sure, you can kind of overthink it and be like, well, the, like, true permanent solution is subscription-based, direct, first-party digital, this and that. But, like, and people love that right now, but, you know, habits change and trends change.

And I think there's just sort of a constant swing of the pendulum. basically, and you can't get too ideological about it or too stuck on the kind of details of it. In some early podcasts that I did last year, I said that the history of media is the re-bundling of unbundled bundles, and I got a lot of people emailing saying, please never use the word bundle again, because I just kept saying that. So I'm not going to repeat that theory over and over again, but I think we are aligned when it comes to that sort of cyclical trend within media. I'm very interested for you to tell me how you pitched semaphore to investors and to writers. I think I have, I'm sure everyone in media has, at least for a moment, had a little bitty daydream about,

if I started my own media company, how would I pitch it in this marketplace of absolute abundance, where there are just so many people clamoring for investor money, for talent, for people who have to actually build the thing, the tech talent. What did you tell people this thing was going to be? Yeah, let's see. I mean, I think, I think, you know, I am new to pitching investors,

but have spent a lot of my career talking to reporters. And so in some ways, they're, you know, the, they're, so I think they, you know, didn't say exactly the same thing. Because for reporters, I think, right now, to start there, it's a moment when you see across,

again, the kind of media industry is very large, entertainment, sports, politics, you see a migration of, you know, really relationship with the audience from brands, team, studios over the last like 75 years here to individuals, which, you know, and if you say creators, influencers, brands, fancy journalists like us throw up in our mouths, but fundamentally it's the same trend. And so, but the kinds of reporters who do, you know, intense, sometimes really high-conflict journalism where they are picking big stakes fights, high-stakes fights with powerful people. It's hard to do that alone on a sub-stack. You can, but the legal defense, the editing,

the sense of sort of camaraderie, the fact that sometimes you kind of need to just need a brand to hide behind, or at least to sort of protect you. And I don't mean physically, although perhaps that too. But, you know, that's all stuff that reporters like me really love and care about and want. But at the same time, people, reporters feel like, wow, I'd love to have the, you know, direct access to the audience that is the way a lot of media works now. And so I think what we offer, what we've tried to offer people is the best of both worlds, is to say, we want to, you know, we don't think people are going to come solely for our brand. They're going to come for individuals and to follow and connect with individuals. We want to push you forward and your success and your sort of growth are our success and our growth and we're really aligned where the big newspapers. that you were working for fundamentally.

As Jill Abramson once said of the Times, the New York Times is the prettiest girl at the dance. And fundamentally, and it makes sense, you will always, you know, your name is always going to be a lot smaller, and there's a tension there, and that we aren't going to, and we don't feel that tension. To, you know, when we talk to investors, I've learned an enormous amount from my partner,

Justin Smith, no relation, who, you know, he was the, he ran the Atlantic. He was the CEO of Bloomberg Media. he's one of, I think he's probably the most, one of the most successful, capable news executives of I've ever met. And that's there's a, and he's just obsessed. I've kind of learned to be obsessed with the customer and with the consumer. And it's something that journalists is not what we came up thinking about in news institutions. If you say, I don't like what you're giving me, our impulse is to say you're an idiot and you're being lied to by bad people.

Like reform yourself. Whereas in any other normal business, you say, wow, how could we do better? And I think and so our pitch was not like here is a set of competitors and we found a tiny little lane among them. It was people really are unhappy with a lot of what

they're getting. They feel really overwhelmed. They don't know what to trust. We want to kind of run very directly at those problems. And we also do see this real global opportunity that where, you know, whether you're in Singapore or in the Gulf or in Lagos,

you can read the New York Times, you think, wow, this is like incredibly high-quality journalism. The digital product is really good. And if I want to know about what's going on with Donald Trump, it's unbeatable. But if I want to know what's going on in Lagos, like it's an occasional feature about some colorful thing that isn't news to me and isn't serving my interests particularly. But there isn't a local media with the sort of technical qualities or the investment in journalism that the big Western places have. And so there's this space there. And there's this huge growing,

educate class of people who went to college in English, have degrees in English. And we're not talking about business class travelers. We're talking about therapists and lawyers and journalists and doctors and people who are interested in the world and interested in the news. And there are big, big audiences there

that when that was, I guess, the other half of our pitch and is the other half of our pitch. Yeah, I'm interested in the pitch to investors and also the pitch implicitly to readers. Obviously, the New York Times exists and has lots of international reporters. The Wall Street Journal exists and has a bunch of international reporters. AP exists. The economists exist.

Financial Times exists, not to mention all of these local news organizations that I might not be as familiar with in Lagos. So when you're talking to investors or making the implicit pitch to readers, how are you differentiated there? Why read you rather than someone else? Oh, well, I mean, I actually think, like, if you look at, I mean, there isn't, there aren't, I mean, unless then I don't want to sort of, I'm just trying to think, I don't think there are New York Times and Washington Post journalists who write about Africa for Africans particularly. I think they write for an American and global audience. And, you know, our team there led by this great Nigerian British editor, Yankata Gogaoka, you know, is, the point is to find an audience there. And then other people who are interested in, you know, checking in on that conversation. But it's not, you know, but, but, but. But, but. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. but we're not re-explaining constantly who the political, you know, just the stuff that you get from foreign correspondence. Who are these people and what are the political parties and what's the history

of the country? I mean, we're writing for people who we assume know that. And that's not you and me, by the way, right? In there, it is, it is you and me in the United States. And I think, and so, yeah, and that's my last question about coverage. Let me just, let me just jump in there. My last question about coverage is, is, is your reporting from Nigeria for me, or is it for Nigerians. And is you reporting in America for Nigerians? Oh, so it's reporting in Nigeria for Nigerians and reporting in America for Americans. First and

foremost, obviously there's going to be some bleed over for international. And the world isn't that neat. And the biggest stories in the world almost like particularly over the last few years, if you think about like COVID, the rise of the right, social media, you know, they're fundamentally global stories that people deeply

misunderstand when they cover them as sort of City Hall stories or White House stories. Not that there aren't huge decisions and choices and parts of those stories that but you know you guys cover this so intensively and the global you know these real global trends and it's hard to something can be hard to see those stories clearly if you think of them as national stories so it's I mean it's not I don't think it's sort of always one or the other but ultimately journalists have to know who they're writing for and you know we're writing for people who are super interested in and

focused on and kind of connected to the subjects and so and you know and for their big global beats climate, finance, technology, some of which have their kind of beating hearts in the United States, certainly finance, but whose audience isn't really defined by borders. When I read your first column about James Bennett and the New York Times, which I definitely want to talk to you about, when it comes to formatting and semantics specifically, I had two observations. The first was that I did not like the fact that you bolded the first sentence of every paragraph, and that was something that you changed within 45 seconds.

I was like, wow, tweeting gets results. I'm not suggesting that it was my tweet specifically that didn't. You were not the only one who noticed that. Look, I like the fact that you guys are willing to pivot very, very quickly on day one. The second thing that you're doing is the more interesting one,

which is that you seem to be breaking up articles into what I would call news and opinion within the article. So you seem to have within the newsletter, someone giving me the facts and then bucketed or bracketed off of that factual article, sort of Ben's take or Derek's take, within which I can read what the journalist actually thinks about the story that they're reporting on. I think this is really subtly interesting, or maybe not subtle, just interesting. Tell me why you think this is an interesting way

to move the dial forward on journalism in this age. Yeah, well, I always I'd say, I mean, the way we think about it is that we're sort of stripping the news article, which is this sort of atomic unit of news just down to the studs. And that is what's in it. You have a set of assertions. Some of them are statements of fact, which better be true and if the reporter is really pinned down. Some of them are the reporter's view. Some of them are kind of institutional view. In the grand newspaper tradition, some of them are just total bullshit that are sort of like stapled to every article. And I think readers, there's a kind of uncanny valley quality to news articles where you're like, where is this coming from? Is this a fact or is this somebody's opinion? If so, whose opinion? And I think our view is that, and you can deal with that one of two ways. You can say, you know what, we're going to strip, all we're going to have is a dry recitation of facts. Or you can say we're going to be really transparent. We're going to say, and we're going to have the reporter say, in their own voice, hear are the facts I found. And here's what I think it means. And if you have a reporter who is

working at a really high level, digging up interesting new things, usually their point of view on it is pretty interesting. But if the analysis is provocative, if it's interesting, there's some chance it's wrong. And so you want to be humble. You want to sort of leave open that possibility and sort of think about are there other legitimate views on these same facts that are worth taking to account. And this is, by the way, like literally when you ask people, what drives them crazy about the news? They say, I can't tell where the facts begin and the person's view ends. And I think Sometimes it's worth just listening to people's complaints and trying to address them in a really direct way. So that's what we're doing.

I think it's a fantastic idea. It's something that I try to do on this podcast, sometimes when there's a really controversial topic, I try to say, I'm going to break this into evidence and interpretation. I'm going to tell you what I think is true with as little interpretation as possible sprinkled into that. And then I'm going to draw a line in the sand and say everything that comes after this is just me spilling on the facts that we commonly understand. Because I absolutely agree that sometimes if those two things are broken, you know, rated together, it can so distrust. But I also wonder whether you are worried whether this strategy is also going to breed a similar kind of distrust, because let's say some of your

great reporters, Dave Weigel, reports and some wonderful story from Wisconsin, Ohio, wherever, and then the little Dave box, Dave gives his take, and people are really offended by his take who otherwise might have appreciated the article without it. So going forward, they start to think, wait, what am I really getting from these Dave articles, even the part that isn't bracketed off into his own take? It seems like a challenge to preserve people's trust in you as a factual reporter, even as you are serving them,

the little dessert of your closely held opinion. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd say two things. First, it is, as you say, a very normal way to tell a story. It's how people actually say, hey, I saw this thing and here's what, like, what's that about? Well, here's what it's about. It's just a very normal interaction with a human. being to say, hear the facts and here's what I think about it.

It would be bizarre to do it the other way. I mean, if you try to read, try reading a newspaper article aloud to someone sometime. Like, it's a pretty weird experience. The, but I would say also, like, you know, we've thrown around the words, I love evidence and interpretation. You know, I think view, take, opinion, these all, you know, each of those words, it sort of has like subtly different valances. And I, you know, we are trying to fundamentally hire people who are really interested

in gathering facts, who have informed analysis, but who fundamentally aren't that committed to the analysis, who are journalists who want to learn, who are open to being wrong. And I think to me that's, I think that if a great factual report were followed by some real kind of bombast, demanding that you agree, that would be incredibly annoying. And that's not, and that's really not what we're trying to do,

is not the kind of reporter we're trying to hire, although there are lots of incredibly committed bombastic writers who I love, But that's not, that's sort of not where we're trying to add value and where we're trying to sort of enter. Because I agree that you could really alienate somewhat if you're kind of lecturing them about the facts you've just discovered. Your first column was about the New York Times and in part about the firing of James Bennett, who was the editorial page director at the New York Times. He was previously my editor at The Atlantic. What don't people understand about the New York Times that you were surprised to learn? when you worked there.

Oh, my gosh. Where to start? I mean, I should say, I was there for less than two years, and I started in March 2020. So I was always really kind of an outsider. I mean, I just literally didn't go into the newsroom. And very quickly, I kind of tossed myself out of all the slacks because people thought I was a spy.

I mean, right, not totally wrongly. Correctly so. You want some media reporter wandering around your slack. So in Taylor Lorenz. Plus, you just wrote your first article about the New York Times. So they were fresh in that regard. Yeah, and at some point somebody said that they felt unsafe in the slack, because I was lurking, I mean, we're fair.

So in any case, Taylor Lorenz created a quarantine slack for me, where people could talk to me, you know, if they felt like it. So I'm not really at times like insider. I wouldn't say, I reported on a lot. I know lots of people there. I mean, let's see. I mean, I think I'd say a couple of things that people don't totally understand. It is a large institution like other large institutions.

and, you know, the sort of dynamics of internal competition and, and sort of institution, the difficulty of changing an institution are sort of often really, like, it's just a huge place. Like, it's 1700 journalists. Like, it's a management challenge. The other thing I would say that I think I always knew, but I guess realized more deeply, is it is a, you know, it is a family-run business in which A.G. Salzberger, his cousins, you know, really fundamentally run the place.

Not that they don't take, not that they don't kind of revere journalism and journalists and have incredibly strong relationships with their executive editors and others. But I think I hadn't really realized before I worked there, the extent to which, you know, this has largely been a huge asset to the institution.

It is a family-run business. I was in an event once where Dean Beke, the former executive editor, and I think Agee Halsberger was in the audience, and he stood up and thanked the same, Salzberger family for choosing to be merely rich rather than fabulously rich and for standing by the times. Sort of a lovely thing and interesting thing to say. But it also... What did that mean? You know, that it wasn't the best investment in the world, that they could

have found higher ROI uses of their capital. Yeah, that's interesting. Why did you think that an expose or a revisiting of James Bennett's firing would make an appropriate first or interesting first newsletter for semaphore. I mean, I loved it. I'm a journalist. And so I'm interested at the degree to which you see it as a national or even global story. Yeah, I mean, I guess I think that the two most important media institutions in the United States just obviously are the New York Times and Fox News.

And so it made sense for me to write about those two in my first two columns. You know, I just left, you know, media, writing about media is such a weird thing to do. It's all, you know, inevitably, it's you're writing. about, you know, there's some line that all journalism is autobiography, but when you're writing about, when you were a media employee, executive writing about the media, you sort of just have to roll with the strangeness of it. And I had written my first Times column about the Times. I thought there was some symmetry about my writing, my first semaphore column about the Times. And the column was really about what is the Times now, but its identity crisis about these pressures from Wall Street

for it to become something that is less about news and more really rich digital bundle where you don't absolutely have to connect to the news. You know, and that, but there are other, you know, and I think, and where the sort of Wall Street thinking about it kind of can run aground as well, like, as somebody said to me, it's a business wrapped around a church. And the sort of deep identity, you know, issues inside that church have massive implications for the business. And that's where the family's heart really lies.

And so, yeah, and that I think, I think it's a great story. And I think it's an incredibly important, it's a global institution. From a talent perspective, it seems like one of the issues that the New York Times has had in the last few years, and certainly one of the issues that animated James Bennett's firing, is that there has been more efforts to unionize, more roiling among staffers. I mean, you're starting a news organization that theoretically you want to keep even keeled. How did your experience at the Times sort of affect your theory of hiring? More roiling. So much more roiling. Yes. And I'd been running BuzzFeed News immediately before, which was like a, for a long time was kind of a happily royaled place.

Like there were a lot of internal conversations spilling onto Twitter, but they were kind of earnest and open. The, yeah, the Times, I mean, I would say this is, I would go back to just like the Times as an institution like any other. And I'm not sure like PepsiCo or the Atlantic or the Metropolitan Transportation Administration were less royal. old in the summer of 2020 than the New York Times. I just think that these media things tend to play out in public, but I think lots and lots of workplaces were wrestling with questions of race and, I mean, Amazon, right, and questions about labor. So I think that was one of these things where media institutions become sort of symbolic, but really, like, there were just broader things happening in society, and these institutions are ultimately part of them,

but part of that. My last question for you actually is, I heard you on another podcast, talk about what you think is the biggest undercover story in all of media. And you said it's TikTok. I think a lot about TikTok. It's been a while since we had a TikTok episode. But I wonder, frankly, whether a divided government after the midterms

might find that one of the few things that Democrats and Republicans agree on is that they really, really don't like the Chinese Communist Party. And one of the ways that you can show your distaste for your distaste for the CCP is not only by punishing them on semiconductors, but also maybe moving against TikTok.

Tell me a little bit about why you think TikTok might still be the most important undercover story in media. I mean, I just think, you know, it's a huge place where youth culture lives in America right now fundamentally. And, you know, that's a moving target. And it may not be forever.

But right now, it's just, you know, it is where young people, you know, get ideas and shape their ideas and talk to each other and make memes and from which memes spread. And I actually think that's, and of course where adults freak out about all the things that young people are doing and describe all sorts of sinister, you know, occasionally accurately,

for sure. Young people are insane. But like, no more, no less than, you know, than anybody else than they ever were. And, you know, and also concoct, you know, fake moral panics, but then there are also really scary things out, you know, all the usual stuff. But it's this incredibly generative, interesting,

place where all these where lots of American young people are. And then overhanging it is what I think is basically a latent a very, very powerful, latent concern that the United States main

geostrategic rival could use it. I mean, there are two different strands. One is that they might like look inside your TikTok and like know which kind of fitness instructor you think is really attractive and like use that to manipulate you. That honestly seems a little far-fetched to me.

I bet they could figure that out from your Instagram and there's so much information out there already. I've never really full or that they might track you. I don't know. Maybe occasionally, but it seems to me like there actually have been no reported cases of that being useful

and there are so many sources of personal data out there. They could in fact just buy your credit card records, which would be really, you know, tell them a lot too. The second thing is that you know, it's a major, major platform. for information, for politics, and the notion that, you know, that, I mean, I don't, I mean, I doubt people would be, I mean, people get upset when, like, German or Japanese companies by the,

by major media companies. And I think it's hard to imagine that the U.S. federal government in the medium term, if it's functional at all, is going to wind up letting a Chinese company control control just a huge, huge media like that, not because they're doing something bad now, but because in case of a conflict, they could. And I think that's, And it's a hard thing to talk about because it's not really, like, it's not like a reporting question. There just isn't a lot of evidence they're doing it. They have occasionally messed with stuff around Uighurs. But right now, if you search Uighur and Uighur activists, you'll find them on TikTok.

But I think it's a huge latent threat that's really hard to get around. It is a Chinese company run out of China. And if you work at that company, you're taking a lot of meetings that start at 9 p.m. Because that's when they wake up in Beijing. And there's like, there's not really a way around that. I mean, and so I think there was going to be a lot of pressure probably a forced sale to a American company, but the Chinese government may not let them go through with a forced sale, may create a huge standoff.

But like you, I kind of agree that this is probably not a politically tenable situation. I think it's frankly bizarre. I think it's utterly bizarre. There's no way that the U.S. government would allow a Russian television station to become the most important, most influential news station in America at the same time that we were engaged to geopolitical struggle against them? Honestly, they wouldn't do it.

They wouldn't let, you know, a neutral, like they wouldn't let a Indonesian company or a Kirt by NBC News, right? Like there's just, it's very, like, forget the struggle. Like even, yeah, it's a, I mean, it's a very strange situation that, but on the other hand, I think you have to sort of draw a line between their real national security implications.

It's a crazy situation. And is what is happening on TikTok today with like 13-year-olds, like, arguing about, you know, gender identity and, like, pouring bottles of juice over their own heads or whatever today's meme is? Like, is that fundamentally sinister and different from youth culture in the past? Like, no, I don't think so. TikTok is great at serving people things that they like to watch. Is that addiction?

I don't know. I'm very skeptical of honestly. I don't think it's addiction. I think that latent threat is the perfect way to encapsulate it. Ben Smith, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck with Semaphore. I'll keep reading and hope to have you back soon. Thank you so much, Derek.

I hope people will sign up for our newsletters at semifor.com slash newsletters. Thank you very much for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you have a comment, a concern, a question, an idea for a future show, please email us at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space, English at Spotify.com.