Plain English with Derek Thompson - Should You Be Afraid of TikTok?

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

This week, the Washington Post reported that Facebook’s parent company Meta has been paying a Republican consulting firm to slime the reputation of its social media rival TikTok. According to emails shared between Meta and Targeted Victory, Facebook sought to blame TikTok for viral hoaxes that actually started on Facebook and then urged various journalists and politicians to amplify these hoaxes. Today’s guests are the journalists who broke the story: Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell. They explain why Facebook is afraid of TikTok; why the campaign to smear TikTok is so hypocritical and creepy; and why there are smarter reasons to be skeptical of an app whose owner has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Taylor Lorenz & Drew Harwell Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Today's episode is about lies, dirty tricks, hypocrisy, and creepiness among America's largest social media companies. This week, the Washington Post reported that Facebook's parent company, Meta, is paying a Republican consulting firm to slime the reputation of TikTok. According to emails shared between Meta and the GOP firm targeted victory, Facebook was seeking to blame TikTok for many weird viral hoaxes that actually started on Facebook, and then get various journalists and politicians to freak out about those

stories so that they would bring the hammer down on a social media arrival. Now, this is an incredibly juicy scoop with some really just delicious details you're going to hear about in just a second, but it sits on top of some really important and substantive questions, like what the hell is going on at Facebook? And should we be a little bit afraid of TikTok itself? Today's guests are the journalists who broke this story, Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell of the Washington Post. Now, first, a bit of background. Facebook is currently facing a triple crisis. Its stock and reputation are way down.

Its ad business is slowing down. And perhaps most importantly, it's losing young people to TikTok. This year, Facebook announced it lost users for the first time in its 18-year history. Then we have TikTok, which is not just the fastest-growing social media platform. This year, it became the single most popular web domain in the world, edging out Google, Amazon, and Facebook itself. And if you've ever spent any time on it, you immediately understand why. This endless algorithmic feed of short form video that grabs your brain's control center for dear life and doesn't let go. It is a bonanza of creativity.

It is a marvel of technology. And it is also owned by the Beijing-based company, Bight Dance, whose domestic business is minority controlled by the Chinese government. a government with a horrific track record on free speech and a deep history of propaganda. So Facebook's campaign to smear TikTok is laughable, creepy, yes. But if Facebook is offering up a bunch of fake and dumb reasons to worry about TikTok, my question is, what's the smart way to think about this app and what it's doing to our minds?

I'm Derek Thompson. this is plain English. Taylor Lorenz, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Drew Harwell, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. So, Taylor, let's start with you. Give me the headline news here.

What did you find in your investigation? So we discovered that Facebook had been running what essentially amounted into a massive nationwide smear campaign against TikTok that consisted of amplifying local news stories about dubious TikTok trends and seating letters to the editor and op-eds and local regional news outlets that painted TikTok as a danger to children and raised concerns around privacy and its ties to China. And when you contacted Meta about this and you reached Meta's spokespeople, did they deny what you had found or did they say, yep, you got us,

we are definitely in bed with a Republican marketing firm to drum up dubious stories about our competition. They did not deny it. They actually, and even I was kind of shocked by the statement that they gave us, which is something like, you know, TikTok deserves scrutiny. I mean, I think we'd all agree on that, but I don't know that I'd call this scrutiny. You know, they're paying this Republican lobbying firm a ton to orchestrate this campaign. But no, they confirmed that this was happening. And then they sort of were like, but also this is just normal PR. So why, you know, I would argue that, maybe.

maybe this is normal PR in certain circles around politics. I think it speaks to where Facebook is today, where they're at this level, where they're feeling like they really need to smear their opponents to get a leg up. Drew, you guys got your hands on some really, really incredible material on unreported emails between Facebook and Targeted Victory and also on a Google Doc,

on which Targeted Victory kept a list of TikTok memes that they could use to bash the company. I want to first talk about the emails between Facebook and Targeted Victory. What were the most outrageous, the most interesting, the most cringe-worthy things that you found in those emails?

It's hard to narrow it down because these emails, they just radiated with, like, boomer energy. They were so cringy. I mean, yeah, and to Taylor's point, you know, there is a lot of history to this kind of like negative political, you know, mud throwing.

But these were so specific in terms of like, you know, we, the quote was, we need to get the message out that while meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned own app that is number one sharing data. So it's like, you know, it's so overt that they're saying like, you know, take meta out of the spotlight. We don't want to be pummeled anymore. Let's throw somebody else in front of. in front of us. The one that's really stuck out to us, I think, was one where they were saying,

let's find, you know, the worst, most egregious TikTok trends in your market. Our dream would be to get stories with headlines like from dances to danger, how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids. And it's just like, that just jumps off the email, because from dances to danger is such a, it's like such a ludicrous thing to look for. And it's also such a good representation of like they were looking for the, the, the most salacious, just most totally out there thing that they could pin on TikTok just to get themselves a leg up in the market. I thought it was so interesting the way that you uncovered Facebook and this marketing firm essentially astroturfing letters to the editor around the country.

Like when I think of letters to the editor, I think of those as being among the more organic representations of ordinary people's concerns, right? Like they take time out of their busy day, to craft paragraphs and send it to their local newspaper. And Facebook and Targeted Victory, I think, noted that. They noted my assumption that this looks really organic. And so they placed letters in the Denver Post and the Des Moines Register trying to, raising concerns about fears about TikTok, from dances to danger, as you summed it up. So let's talk about some of the dangers that Facebook wanted to elevate about TikTok.

Targeted Victory tried to drum up negative TikTok coverage, in part by using a Google Doc that you guys uncovered with the title Bad TikTok Clips. And it included, among other things, a trend known as the Devious Licks Challenge on TikTok. Taylor, tell me a little bit about devious licks and what people were trying to say about TikTok by referring to Devious Licks.

Yeah, so there are a couple. There was Devious Licks and Slap a Teacher and some other ones. These are all pretty dubious trends to begin with and actually started on Facebook. There's this Facebook police officer, a meme guy or something. He had posted, you know, a screenshot of alleged TikTok trends that went so viral within parenting groups and concerned, you know, police departments and stuff, school districts that actually they shut down schools in certain districts because of these trends for, you know, children were missing education for several days because they were scared of these alleged TikTok trends. which consisted of, like we said, slapping a teacher,

trashing school property, bringing a gun to school. You know, these are not legitimate trends, but once they go viral enough, it's a little bit like the Tidepod thing, right? Once something goes viral enough or alleged challenge goes viral enough, people will do it ironically for views.

And so that's kind of where the harm comes in as well. Like, you know, slap a teacher challenge, that's not real. Devious licks, we saw actually kind of people engaging in that stuff because it was so viral on Facebook. Just to be clear, so Devious Licks is kids acting out in school, and it's them like, whatever, taking letters off of, like, school signs and taking signs off of that. Right, exactly.

So Devious Lix is essentially an epidemic of vandalism throughout the country, theoretically, and then slap a teacher that's very obviously a supposed meme about slapping your teacher. And your point is these were trends that targeted victory in Facebook were trying to trying to say we're spreading on TikTok, but in reality, they were totally overblown. These things weren't actually happening at nearly the scale that targeted victory in Facebook were representing. Exactly. I mean, some of them were completely non-existent.

Some of the trends that they were purporting to support, right, like didn't exist. Devious Licks, it's unclear if maybe there was one video or a couple of videos that started, but what really got it going was actually the Facebook outrage about Devious Licks, not the challenge itself. Right. And true, what I thought was so interesting, and this was in your piece, but also definitely highlighted in the reaction to your piece, is this enormous irony that Facebook is accusing TikTok of spreading harmful memes that may very well have started on Facebook rather than TikTok. There was one report in Insider that came to the conclusion that slap a teacher,

that TikTok challenge or faux TikTok challenge, was actually first documented on Facebook. It started on Facebook. There was another investigation by Anna Foley at the podcast network Gimlet that found that the rumors of this devious licks thing that Taylor and I have been talking about, that also seemed to have started on Facebook.

So the trend here seems to be, part one, fake teen mayhem trend starts on Facebook, and then part two, Facebook pays this PR firm to convince people that the trend actually started on TikTok. Like, it's unbelievably twisted and weird.

Yeah, and it just shows how silly it all is because it's like, you know, Pepsi dinging Coke for selling soda. It's like, you both do the same thing. And it just goes, you know, targeted victory was not wrong to realize like, hey, we can pray on parents, older folks' fears about this newfangled thing that the kids love by inspiring these moral panics, acting like this is, you know, causing. the teens to go wild. And we can pray on that.

But it just, you know, when you see how a lot of this stuff arose, you realize, like, this is just a function of the Internet. This is the stuff that people have been shouting at Facebook for for years. And so for Facebook to turn around and use that as their own kind of ammunition, it really just, in our minds, like, it kind of was just such a symbol of how afraid meta is of TikTok, how worried they are about losing that cloud, that audience, that they'll go to this totally desperate playbook of dinging, you know, social media, dinging a platform that young people use when really Facebook would kill to have

what TikTok has right now, would kill to have that kind of leverage and mindshare and attention that TikTok has gained over the years. Yeah, and it's important to say here, you know, TikTok isn't like Cub Scouts. TikTok has its own witch hunts. TikTok has its own witch hunts. TikTok has its own bad memes and problems in many ways, as you said, it suffers from the same maladies as Facebook. But meta has no choice here except to sort of try to lay waste to the very territory it hopes to conquer, right? Like, look how bad social media is. We're also a social media company. The metaphor that I thought of before Pepsi Coke is kind of like, it's like Coors doing ads about how drinking too much bud light can lead to unsafe driving, except the advertisements

only use examples of course consumers drinking too much, right? Because all these things actually started on Facebook rather than on TikTok, which is just so unbelievably ironic. So we have to talk here about, all right, if this is so stupid, if it is so self-defeating, if it is so much self-sabotage, why is Facebook doing it? What is Facebook's motivation here? Taylor, why don't you take that?

What's Facebook's motivation? Well, I mean, I think that they are, Mark Zuckerberg has shown that he's willing to do anything to really squash the competition. and I think that this is just also showing that they're willing to engage in these kind of dirty tricks, I guess, and slimy PR stuff. I mean, the irony is that they've, you know, made TikTok, like with all this story coming out,

they've kind of made TikTok seem like the victim when TikTok is actually on top and an ascendant. And that's what Facebook is so threatened by is that relevance that it has among young users. I mean, Facebook just recently lost users, I think, for the first time ever. So they're definitely kind of getting nervous. Yeah, it seems like if you put a lot of things together, Facebook is in a really, really tough spot.

They are losing users. Their profit is being dinged by, among other things, changes to iPhone privacy. TikTok, as you mentioned, is eating their lunch in terms of new user acquisition. And they're pivoting to the strategy, the metaverse, that's like 10 years out. So they're trying to escape from this island that's sinking into the sea. But the landmass that they are trying to build the bridge to, that bridge is going to take 10 years to build. So they're like, what can we do in the meantime? We can try to, it seems to me, get the government to come to our side and attack TikTok. Drew, do you see that as somewhat the strategy here is to enlist the government, which is in the present day against Facebook, right, with their sort of antitrust regulations,

making it hard for Facebook to acquire new businesses. They're saying, let's take the government and use it to hurt our competitors, TikTok. Is that part of the motivation? Yeah, I think that's it. And, you know, part of it is, too, that a lot of people in Facebook feel like they get too much scrutiny. They feel besieged. They feel like, you know, we have been in the hot seat for so long.

And they have, you know, it's been since 2016, really, that there's been this huge conversation of we need better regulation, we have questions about disinformation or privacy or what have you. So they feel like, you know, we've been tardished with this for so long. Now there's this up-and-comer that hasn't really dealt with any of this. Maybe we can use that against them.

I think that's got to be part of it. So I want to do a pivot here that might catch the listeners by surprise. I want to scrutinize TikTok because I don't think it's correct that Facebook is grimy and old and bad and TikTok is fun and new and totally perfect.

I think that TikTok has problems. It has problems that are endemic to social media, like witch hunts, but it also has a very unique ownership structure and relationship with the Chinese government. So, True, tell me about TikTok's ownership structure and why, unlike slapping teachers, this might be a reasonable place to worry about TikTok. Yeah, so the basic part of it is that TikTok is owned by a company bite dance that's based in Beijing. It's a Chinese company. We've never really had an internet juggernaut that has become big in the West before TikTok. And that is problematic because we know a lot about how companies have to work inside China to remain a company inside China.

You have to follow some really strict guidelines run by the Chinese Communist Party. You have to give up some data that, Western companies would never be asked to give up. And so there's a big tension there because you have this extremely interesting cultural product in TikTok. You have so many creative people using it as this new platform. And it's a good platform, right? There's a lot of people who love the algorithm, they love the content there.

And yet there are some really legitimate questions over how are, you know, Americans' data going to be protected when it's going to a company whose developers are based in Beijing, who have to abide by certain rules set by China. You know, we've always kind of taken for granted that a lot of the social media companies we have used. We're made in the good old USA, right? There's in that kind of assumption of a freedom of speech, even if it's not always a reality. But now we're kind of having to realize what it's like to have a real global product, a real product that comes from a place where the rules are very different to us. And now I have to step back and say, TikTok knows all of this.

And they have said, you know, we're taking all of these steps to distinguish, you know, TikTok USA from ByteDance. BightDance actually runs a TikTok in China called Doyenne that has, you know, supposedly a separate kind of infrastructure, separate data privacy rules. And yet these are real questions. these have been questions for several years. There's been questions of, you know, were they censoring the Hong Kong protests on TikTok?

You know, how are Chinese government rules around censorship and suppression of topics that the Chinese government doesn't want to see. How are those playing into how the algorithm runs? Yeah, I just think we should be careful, too, just to note, like, a lot of these are questions, and we don't have the answers yet. Say more about that.

Well, I think, like, I mean, this is what's so insidious about this Facebook campaign, is like these are really legitimate questions that deserve more reporting. Like Drew's noting, we've never had a Chinese tech conglomerate have such cultural stronghold. But there's no smoking gun. So it's really hard for lawmakers or people sort of interested in regulating this stuff to kind of point to something like, hey, look, we've been able to see this. And TikTok has gotten out ahead of this by sort of, you know, offshoring their data, their data centers, you know, and sort of like setting up these structures that they claim protect U.S. data. But I think without that proof, it's just hard and there's lots of speculation.

And so it's very easy to kind of inflame that space, I guess. Yeah, Taylor, let me ask you about this. I have heard two different categories of concern about TikTok, the privacy concern and the disinformation concern. The privacy concern says, oh, TikTok is owned by bite dance, bite dance, minority owner, Chinese Communist Party. What if American teen data is shared with the Chinese Communist Party? would be bad. That's the privacy concern. Then there's disinformation concern. What if, in a top-down kind of way, China wants certain kind of messages to be amplified, to go viral on TikTok? Couldn't they, theoretically, in the future, make that happen in such a way that American teenagers would be downstream

of a propaganda effort instigated by our geopolitical foe, China? Which of these concerns strikes you as the most important, the privacy concern or the disinformation concern. I wrote a bunch about this around the TikTok ban, actually. And it's very much in these our tech companies' interests to say, oh, look at TikTok. They're the bad data privacy guys, right? And yes, there are serious concerns there. But also, we have huge data privacy issues with Facebook and other American tech platforms.

So I think by painting TikTok as the bad guy, American, you know, tech conglomates are escaping widespread data privacy rules, which I think would put us in a stronger position undeniably across the board. The misinformation, like you said, Derek, I think is really important and overlooked. I think people think of it more of this top-down thing of, ooh, China's spreading, you know, propaganda. That's not really how things play out. As we know with Facebook, too, it's actually, it's much more organic. I would say users on TikTok have almost zero media literacy. I've never seen an app with such a...

It's terrifying. People will believe anything they see, and it's presented to them visually in this way that is just so much more visceral. And, you know, people follow influencers there. It's a content creator-driven platform. We know that people are more likely to trust influencers over, you know, news organizations.

So I think it's a huge problem. And we're already seeing... I mean, we're already seeing propaganda run rampant on it. It's just more individual. influential influencers that are susceptible to these views instigating those campaigns. TikTok has sort of done certain things that they say to downrank it. I would say there's just no, it is like Lord of the Flies on that app. You know, Twitter, there's tons of media people and journalists and academics that can

kind of squash rumors. Facebook, it's obviously it's a huge problem, but also they've had such a spotlight on them that they're kind of, and there's a level of transparency as well because it is American. TikTok, everyone will believe every single thing they see in every video and there's no like academics. There's no way to kind of like squash things or fact check things very well in real time.

So just, I mean, the Wayfair rumor is a perfect example. If you guys remember that, you know, there was this rumor that children were being sex trafficked on Wayfair because they were selling these large cabinets with women's names. That took off and I cannot tell you, I mean, there was videos with millions and millions and millions of views where you, even to this day on TikTok, you cannot convince people that that was not true. Interesting. So you're adding a third category of concern for TikTok. There's number one, the privacy

concern. Number two, the hypothetical propaganda concern. And then number three, you could call it the old-fashioned social media concern. Social media is generally a place where media literacy goes to die. All these platforms are basically funhouse mirrors. And it's what makes them enjoyable, but it's also what makes them confounding when you rely on them for learning important truth about the world. Is that a misunderstanding of what you're saying? No, definitely. I mean, I think that's it. They do have controls. They do have like, you know, they prevent misinformation around certain things. If you're posting anti-vax information, it theoretically should be taken down. Of course, we know that these are never perfectly enforced. But I just think there's something about the nature

of the content that makes people, and the fact that the for you page is the primary way that people are consuming content, you don't have to opt into anything. And when one of these conspiracies go viral, it's all over. I mean, it will just, it reaches a level of the masses that it would take weeks to reach on Facebook. Right. So, Drew, taking into consideration both what you wrote and what Taylor just said, because it seems like you guys are on a similar page here, how would you clearly disentangle the wrong way to worry about TikTok and the right way to worry about TikTok here? We'll start with the wrong way, right? Because that's probably the easiest. The wrong way is to commingle a lot of these very different issues into one big scare tactic.

And that's kind of what you saw with Facebook, where they were mixing a lot of dubious, you know, slap a teacher stuff that had no founding with some, you know, reasonable concerns that we need more information on. So, you know, I think we need some nuance here. The thing about TikTok that people who don't use TikTok may not realize is so core to what is interesting about. it and what the big paradigm shift is what Taylor was just talking about, the for you page, right?

On other social media, it's all about who you're following. You know the personalities that you're following. You get a sense of, I'm following the New York Times or the Washington Post, so I'm going to get news. I'm following, you know, this person, so I'm going to, um, TikTok is stream of consciousness. It is the for you page. It's, it's all based off this black box algorithm of stuff the platform thinks you're going to like based off what you've already shown you like by watching it. So that can make it really, really interesting because it's a bunch of stuff that you never would have thought to identify as something you're interested in.

It makes it so much more dynamic, so much more creative. But there's also a lot of reasons for a concern of that, right? You have this system that's choosing information for you to look at that you don't really know why it's being chosen for you. And that goes to the big concern about, you know, the Chinese influence, right? And this would be an issue with wherever it was coming from. One big picture conclusion that I have from this is that in an ironic way, the meta question that Facebook is asking is kind of a good one. Shouldn't TikTok the most popular web domain in the world have a certain amount of scrutiny when it is essentially an algorithmic black box that

has certain relationships with the Chinese Communist Party. But Facebook is going about asking those questions in like the creepiest possible, most hypocritical possible way, essentially doing the bud light thing of accusing cores of being a company that leads to drunk driving and using only examples of itself. Taylor, am I being unfair there in saying that the meta question that Facebook is asking is it's actually a reasonable one, but it's the tactics that that are so bizarre and and distasteful. Yes, exactly.

And it's, it's, it's so hilarious because they're kind of undermining themselves by engaging in these tactics. And now they seem like, you know, now TikTok seems like the victim in all this. And it's like, no, guys, we need to, like you said, these are reasonable things to push TikTok on.

But you've gone and created this entire nonsense distraction. out of it. I want to put my cards in the table here and give you my TikTok take, which fair warning is not exactly a pro TikTok take. I think Americans would be concerned if any large U.S.-based social media company had an intimate relationship with one political party. Like, imagine if Snapchat were partially owned by the Republican National Committee, I think it would be like, that's weird. Not sure about that one.

I think that's pretty bad. Well, in the case of TikTok and bite dance, the minority owner is the Chinese government, a one-party authoritarian state. Like, our geopolitical adversary has a relationship with a popular social media app whose equivalent we would feel icky about here in the U.S. And that, I think, should make us critical and skeptical.

So, Drew, how do we weigh this alongside Facebook's creepiness here. Facebook is poisoning the well by conflating all of this with slap a teacher crap. Like, you know, they are taking what should be something that, you know, TikTok is raising questions that are bipartisan. You know, there are ongoing federal reviews of TikTok. And all of the questions you raise are, like, good ones.

Like, are there technical things we should know about TikTok? And yet now Facebook has not just undermine themselves and made themselves look like the bully yet again. They've also, I think, taken a lot of air out of the balloon of these questions. Like they have made anybody who's going to ask about these question whether they're on the right side. So yeah, I think it's all just really alarming. And this is why you don't do these kinds of smear campaigns. Jump in, Taylor.

Yes. Can I say one other thing, too, is like, I mean, just two things really quickly. One is that we should be asking questions of all of these companies, like data privacy issues, as we've seen with things like GDPR and stuff. We need to question all of these companies, American and foreign. And I think we are, like you said, this is the first time that a foreign company has really gained, you know, foreign social media has gained relevance.

I think we're learning what it's like to not really hold the reins. You know, for years, Facebook has faced criticism, you know, in the global south were places like Myanmar, right, for not cracking down on certain things. for and I think now we're suddenly seeing when this big tech company comes in reshaping our culture and we don't we don't you know we don't hold the reins yep slap a teacher fake the case for scrutinizing TikTok real that's the conclusion I'm taking away super real Taylor drew thank you so so much I appreciate it thanks having us plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by devon mansy if you like what you hear please follow rate and review us new episode

on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.