The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, TikTok is a national security threat and should be sold or banned.

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

TikTok is one of the most popular social media sites on the planet. But concerns have been growing over TikTok’s ability to collect massive amounts of information about its users, and its suspected ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Those fears recently prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill that would force the Chinese company that controls TikTok to sell it to American interests. If not, TikTok would be blocked on the app stores that an estimated 170 million Americans have used to download the app. But there are many critics of the bill who argue it should never become law. They say the evidence China is using TikTok for nefarious purposes is scant. They also question why the U.S. is targeting one social media app, while others who similarly collect large swaths of data get a free pass. And they accuse Congress of using the pretense of national security to target a rival of American owned-social media giants, setting a dangerous precedent for future international business relationships. Arguing in favour of the resolution is Scott Galloway, He’s a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and host of the Prof G and Pivot Podcasts. Arguing against the resolution is Julia Angwin. She is an investigative journalist, author, and contributing Opinion writer for the New York Times who writes about the impacts of technology on societies.    SOURCES: CNN, FOX News, NBC News, Tucker Carlson    The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths  Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 50+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Executive Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Senior Producer: Daniel Kitts Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Our goal is to arm you, the listener, with enough information, to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. TikTok is a national security threat and should be sold or banned. TikTok influencers, beware. House lawmakers have voted to pass the TikTok ban bill. If signed into law, it would give Chinese parent company Bite Dance just six months to divest TikTok or face the possibility of a ban on the app. It's one of the most popular social media sites on the planet.

It's also possibly a Trojan horse that the Chinese government could use to spy on Westerners and launch devastating disinformation campaigns. concerns have been growing over TikTok's ability to collect massive amounts of information about its users and its suspected ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Those fears recently prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill that would force the Chinese company that controls TikTok to sell it to American interests. If not, TikTok would be blocked on app stores, including for the 170 million Americans currently using the app. Here's U.S. Congressman Mike Gallagher, one of the sponsors of the bill to ban TikTok.

TikTok can continue to exist in the United States, as long as it's not effectively controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. That is the issue, and that will make for a better user experience. People won't have to worry about manipulation of algorithms. They won't have to worry about a hostile foreign adversary potentially manipulating the news that Americans consume. And I would say the pressure campaign. There are many critics of the bill who argue that it should never become law. They say that the evidence that China is using TikTok for nefarious purposes is scant. They also question why the United States is targeting one particular social media app,

while others are similarly engaged in collecting large swathes of data and violating Americans' privacy. Critics of the TikTok ban accused Congress of using the pretense of national security to target a rival company to the American-owned social media giants, setting a dangerous precedent for future international trade relationships between China and the United States. Here's Senator Rand Paul, who opposes the bill. There's always a national security for any excuse for anything you want to do. And so I don't think you throw out the Constitution when there's allegations of some kind of connection. You have to prove that before you take someone's stuff and before you. you take someone's First Amendment privileges.

On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved. TikTok is a national security threat that should be sold or banned. Arguing in favor of the resolution is Scott Galloway. He's professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and the host of the highly popular Professor G

and Pivot podcasts. Arguing against the motion is Julia Anguilwell. and she's an investigative journalist, author, and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, who covers extensively technology's impact on society. Scott, Julia, welcome to the Monk Debates. Hi, Rudyard. Nice to be with you. Hi, Julia, a big fan. Great to be here. Thanks so much. Terrific debate before us today, be it resolved. TikTok is a national security threat and should be sold or banned.

Scott, you're arguing in favor the motion. Let's get this debate underway. Thanks, again. Again, thanks, Julia. I'm hoping this will be more of a discussion just because I'm a fan of Julia's work, and I think there's a lot of common ground here. So I'd open with a question. How can we be this stupid?

We've decided that the CCP can implant a neural jack into 76% of our youth under the age of 25 and believe that they wouldn't do what we would do. And that is Radio for Europe, Radio America, Psiops of the Army, our job. is to distribute propaganda that is in favor of American interests while diminishing the interests of our adversaries. And then the issue then becomes, but Scott, there's no evidence that China is in fact doing this. Well, there is. It's codified into law that the CCP, any company in the PRC, has to comply with any data requests from the CCP. And if you look at several pieces of data, it's obvious something is going on.

The number of people under the age of 25 who are pro-Israel is 45, pro-Palestine 55, 45-55. If you look at the hashtags on TikTok, the ratio is 1.6% pro-Israel videos being served and 98.4% pro-Hamas or pro-Palestine. If you look at, when you think, well, okay, maybe that's just a function of the people on TikTok and what's gone viral. So let's use Instagram as a control group. We or Janiceide are free to bet has 600 times the number of hashtags on Instagram as it does on TikTok. If you look at any emotionally charged political issue that could divide Americans and the ratio of video served on TikTok does not foot in any way to public opinion, you know which way it's slanted by the following question. What would the CCP want on every issue that's charged where the ratio is dramatically out of skewed? Now, let's avoid that.

Let's say, Scott, you're being paranoid. In the U.S., our economy would collapse if we didn't have trade symmetry. Japan would like to tax general motor cars exorbitantly and not have any taxes and full access to our market. And we say no. When France says we're going to ban social media platforms or tech platforms, we say, well, then we're going to put oner's taxes on champagne and cheese. The European Union would rather not have any European company buy Boeing airplanes. We demand that they give us access to that market in exchange.

we continue to buy Airbus planes, creates jobs, creates competitive dynamics, lower costs, everyone wins. I believe that BYD should be allowed into the U.S. I don't think it's a security threat. They allow Tesla into China. I believe that Sheen should go public on the NASDAQ and the NYC. They allow Ralph Lauren and North Face into China. We let this dominant frame through which youth perceives America into the United States where they create

tens of billions of dollars in shareholder value. And now I'm going to list all the American media companies that the CCP allows into China. Okay, I'm done. And then finally, this regulation has been totally mischaracterized. It's not a ban. It's a forced divestiture. That's like saying that the 55 mile an hour speed limit is regulation on supercars. This says that within six months, if they don't divest to American interests, then the president has the right to ban it.

And there's a lot of gray area between there. There's a lot of light there. They could come to some sort of accommodation with two classes of six. stock where they hold on to their economic interests, they just don't have control or access to the data. So let's summarize. This, in fact, is a defense threat. They would be stupid not to be doing this. What would we do? What would the Mossad do? What would the GRU do? They would do what the CCP is doing, and that is promote their own interests. We have a situation where young people dislike America and feel worse about America than ever before. That's a variety of factors, but this is not helping, too.

We absolutely have total trade asymmetry here. And just on economic grounds, should demand they divest it or provide access to the Chinese community of our media companies, which they will not do. And finally, this ban has been totally mischaracterized. You are not going to lose your TikTok. This is a win, win, win. This is exceptionally smart by the Biden administration. If they, in fact, do pick up their ball and leave, that means they were using it for propaganda and surveillance. Otherwise, why would they leave and literally immolate $50 to $150 billion?

So I believe that this is, again, I'll end with where I started. How could we be this stupid? Thank you, Scott Galloway, for that opening statement. You're listening to our Monk debate on banning TikTok, the pros and cons. Julia, you are against a ban. Let's have your opening statements now. Great. Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here. And I think I'll borrow from Scott and say, how could we be this stupid? Because I think the real question is, what are we trying to accomplish here with forcing TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company? I mean, apparently there are two goals, protecting American data from the Chinese government and protecting Americans from being manipulated by Chinese propaganda. So let's take those in order. So first, let's start with the data.

The fact is that the US has no data protections for any of our personal data. We are one of the only nations on Earth. on Earth, actually, that has refused to pass a comprehensive baseline privacy law. And so there's a million ways that China can get our data. They can buy it. They can hack it. They can obtain it from a third-party reseller. We have Facebook and Google, you know, trafficking in all of our data.

We just learned this week that Facebook had hacked into Snapchat, read encrypted messages as part of its research into how it wanted to destroy Snapchat's business. So we have an unrestrained data market. Wacking TikTok and having it be owned by a U.S. company changes nothing about that. So then let's go to Chinese propaganda. So Chinese propaganda is definitely a thing, right? They have a very strong censorship regime in China. They basically wiped out the memory of Tiananmen Square,

and we certainly don't want that to happen here. And that's not the kind of thing that we would want any of our platforms to do. But I think we have to look at like where is the propaganda actually coming from, right? The real evidence, in fact, is from Russia. Russia has set up all these networks of influencers and troll farms, et cetera, to try to inject propaganda into our information ecosystem that happened on Facebook in 2016. And the interesting thing about it is they didn't have to buy Facebook to do it. The weird thing about social media is actually it's built for influence operations.

Like it's a perfectly designed. system for influence operations. You don't need to own one. In fact, the only evidence that the national security community in the U.S. has presented against TikTok has been that they set up fake accounts on TikTok to target some of the politicians in the 2022 midterms. But you don't need to own TikTok to do that. And they did not allege that TikTok had used its algorithm to boost those accounts. So let's go into the algorithm because, of course, that's where everyone really alleges that this harm is happening. Right. So Scott talks about the hashtag disparities, and I'll tell you later how those have been debunked. But the reality is that

the algorithm could well be promoting some agendas over others. And I think that is definitely, we don't have any evidence that TikTok is doing that, but I think we should just assume, let's just say, okay, fine, that could happen. Well, the question I have is, how do you stop that? Right. because it's not like TikTok is the only one that is doing that, right? If you look at X, formerly Twitter, the owner of that platform downranks or deletes the accounts of people who are critical of him, journalists, other critics. He definitely uses the algorithm to push his own agenda and to promote the accounts of his friends and people who pay for promotion.

Or we have Facebook where, thanks to the whistleblower Francis Howgan, we know that they are boosting posts that are outrage porn, clickbait, even when they know it's going to lead to a genocide like it did in Myanmar. So algorithmic amplification unchecked by any of these platforms is extremely harmful. And the interesting thing is we know how to solve it. Europe has already passed a lot ground baking law that would require transparency of algorithms, auditing of algorithms, offer users a choice of algorithms. And so we could take that road, or we could just keep playing whack-a-mole

with the ownership of social media companies. Julia, thanks for that great opening statement. This debate is shaping up beautifully. Now let's move on to rebuttal. So, Scott, your opportunity to react to what you just heard from Julia. Sure. So thanks for that. A couple of things.

So Julia's key points are the need for privacy legislation that algorithmic elevation is not unique to TikTok, that algorithmic manipulation is ubiquitous and that every platform engages in that and that we need systemic, industry-wide privacy legislation. There's real common ground here. I agree. We absolutely, one, I agree,

there's algorithmic elevation manipulation and that we need sweeping privacy legislation. We've had 40 congressional hearings on child safety, and we've had zero legislation. But the notion somehow, that that should get in the way of regulation against a foreign adversary just makes no sense to me. If I went into the hospital with a broken leg and they also took my blood and said, Scott, you have type 2 diabetes.

And then the doctor said, we're not going to put a cast on your leg until we treat the diabetes. I would question that logic. It makes no sense to me to think that we can't walk and shoot gum at the same time. I would argue that if we actually show we can do anything around these companies, that creates some level of momentum, But the notion that somehow we need to address all of this before we talk about the national security threat that is TikTok, it just seems to me just not a rational way to conduct foreign policy or to conduct regulation or legislation. And then again, there's common ground here. I agree GDPR was sort of flawed, but at least it was a start. Some of the legislation being proposed in Europe, I would argue, as innovative and that we should think about tweaking and adopting to our own market.

Julia, we're siblings from another mother regarding the need for privacy legislation across. social media, I just don't see that why it needs to be sequential and that we shouldn't address this either concurrently or first. And then the notion that China can get this data anyways, I would push back on that. So Biden essentially passed a law earlier this year saying that it's illegal. Now, could they get it? Probably. But that's like saying we shouldn't pass legislation on age gaining for social media, which I believe we should do because a 12-year-old can figure it out anyways. I think what we've got to do, you know, we've got to do what we can to try and stop this, what I call this, security threat. So I don't, I don't, I think the call for broader

privacy regulation is just a misdirect. We can agree on that. But at the same time, I don't see what that has to do with a unique situation around a foreign actor and adversary, trying to get access and create the frame through which our youth see every issue on a CCP controlled or influence platform, and two, the notion that they could get this data anyways, I don't think that holds water. Again, Biden passed a law in February making it illegal for this. Could it happen? Sure, but at the minimum, it seems like we should make this more difficult. Thank you, Scott Galloway for that rebuttal. You're listening to our debate on TikTok. Julia, your chance now to come back on Scott's opening statement or what you've just heard now.

Great. Thank you. And I'm glad that we all agree. on privacy legislation and algorithmic amplification regulation, because those are really important things. It's important that we need a moral outrage around all of this, because it is incredibly toxic to live in this world right now, where we don't have either one of those things. But I want to talk about Scott's allegations on national security risk, because the reality is there's absolutely no evidence of that right now.

We have not been shown a single example of a national security risk relating to TikTok. The hashtag study that Scott refers to has been debunked. Essentially, first of all, studying hashtags is not a particularly scientific way to go about looking at algorithmic amplification because it doesn't tell you, it tells you about prevalence, but it doesn't tell you about reach, how many people saw it. So, you know, as you know, I can post a video on TikTok and nobody could see it. It depends on whether the algorithm boosts it. So the thing about that study was that they compared Instagram to TikTok, but they didn't control for time. So Instagram has been around like twice as long as TikTok. So there's just literally twice as many hashtags on all sorts of topics on Instagram as there are on TikTok.

And so that particular study just, I don't think, tells us anything important about whether China is interfering with the algorithm. There was a BuzzFeed investigation many years ago where they did say that there were some videos of Uyghurs that had been suppressed on TikTok. And TikTok apologized, said it would never do it again. And to be honest, right now, during this TikTok ban, one of the fun things people do on TikTok is they make videos all the time about Tiananmen Square and Uyghurs. to see if it'll be banned and they never are. And so we don't have any evidence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out a threat assessment in February

that said that the only allegation they had was that TikTok had set up accounts. There were PRC, sorry, People's Republic, the Communist Party basically had set up some accounts on TikTok to sort of try to make allegations against some candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. As I said in my opening statement, And they did not allege that there was any algorithmic amplification of those accounts.

There's no need to own TikTok to set up an account on TikTok. And so I think if they had had that evidence, they would have shared it. Lawmakers who have gone to the classified briefings about TikTok have emerged and said on the record that there was nothing alleged in those classified briefings that was different than any other social media network has done. So I just think we need to really be clear about the fact that there were. may well be a national security threat, but there is literally no evidence for it right now. But let's assume that they are completely terrible national security threat. I think you have to

then go to this issue that Scott talks about about symmetry, right? Just because China bans U.S. companies doesn't mean that we should ban theirs. We are a country that values free speech. We have incredibly different morals than China. We have a different society. We value dissent. We want a plurality of voices. We want to hear from people in other countries want to hear the Chinese agenda. We didn't want to have it piped into our brains, in a way that we can't control, but we want to hear all the voices. That is a very different posture than China.

So I don't think we want to make an argument that they did it, so should we. That is a road to ruin. And I think also it's just worth pointing out that a lot of First Amendment scholars say that this ban would not hold up. In Montana, they did try to ban TikTok, and it was rejected by the courts on First Amendment. ground. So there is a very strong question about whether this ban would ever be legal. Thank you, Julia. Let me join the conversation now with some questions that would be top of mind to our listeners tuning to this terrific debate. I appreciate the kind of civility and substance that both of you are bringing to the conversation today. And Scott, let me come to you first and just pick up on

one of Julia's points right there. I think it would be helpful for listeners to hear a bit more about your concerns regarding the national security. risk because I guess there's there's no knowns and known unknowns to kind of paraphrase our good friend Donald Rumsfeld, a knot, but can you lay those out for us just so we could try to better understand your particular concerns here first on the security front? Yeah, sure. I just want to push back on one thing. The Montana case, my understanding was rejected because the decision was essentially that state

court should not be making national security decisions. that those should be left to the federal government. And also, I would just challenge Julia or anybody else to find an emotionally charged issue that could potentially divide Americans. It is totally out of whack from public opinion. And again, use a litmus test of what would China want and find any instance where that is not how the ratio of videos plays out

or hashtags or any other metric that indicates viewership. In terms of the national security threat, we are raising a generation of civic nonprofit business and I don't know, public leaders that just dislike America. And if you're China, I mean, the reality is really weird is that America is kicking China's ass. The Chinese stock market has shed $6 trillion in the last three years. Seven companies have added $4 trillion in the last 24 months in the United States. We are food independent.

We are energy independent. We're producing more energy than Saudi Arabia or Russia. No one is lining up for Chinese or Russian vaccines. the unemployment rate under the age of 30 in China is 25%. They have stopped releasing economic data because they are in such trouble. We are spending less of our GDP on the military than in almost any point in the last 50 years, and yet we spend more because of the strength of our economy on the military than the next 10 biggest economies combined.

So if you can't beat us kinetically, you can't beat us economically, here's an idea. Let's divide them. And that is exactly what I believe they, and as Julia said, Russia are trying to do. the problems ailing the United States were a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. And we are raising a generation of Americans who feel less positive about America than any previous generation in history. And that's not just a function of TikTok. I want to acknowledge that. That's a lack of opportunities. That's too little competition. That's an increase in prices of education and housing and a weaponization of our universities that create this rejectionist exclusionary culture,

a lack of purchasing power, whether GDP or their wealth as a percentage of the GDP of people under the age of 40 is going to cut from 19% to 9%. We've decided effectively with every economic and legislative policy to transfer money from people in their 20s and 30s to people who are my age. Having said that, it does not help to have an adversary essentially be the frame through which all youth see the world. And you are where you spend your time. And the security threat or the analogous security threat would be, we are in a Cold War with China.

We were refusing to send them chips. They have acknowledged. They have surveilled, bite dance officials have acknowledged. They have surveilled journalists at Forbes. We are in a Cold War with China. So let's go back to the last Cold War. Would we be down with the Kremlin owning CBS, NBC and ABC in the 60s and 70s? Because that's not hyperbolic, because the dominance and marketing,

share an influence that this Chinese-owned CCP-influenced and maybe controlled platform has over youth in America is more dominant than those networks had in the 60s or 70s. And this notion of First Amendment, I think, does not stand on solid ground. We push the First Amendment aside all the time for security reasons. Rupert Murdoch had to become an American citizen. An American company or a foreign entity can't own more than 20 percent. of any broadcast company and no broadcast company has the influence that this online digital platform has, no other nation would allow this except for us. Why? Because one of our great

advantages as Americans is our optimism, but that turns into our Achilles heel with the following, and that as Americans are much easier to fool than convince we've been fooled. And we don't like to believe that we've been manipulated. And I think every piece of evidence around viewership on these platforms when it comes to emotionally charged issues that could potentially divide Americans leads one way that we are being had that we are being stupid that we have been fooled Julia let's just talk for a moment about these common sense arguments because again trying to convey a listener tuning into this debate and what's kind of on top of their mind and there are obviously factual elements of this debate that you and Scott can and probably will

continue to debate and as we should. But just from a common sense argument, China is an adversary. The United States and China are in a battle for the commanding technological, military, and economic heights of the 21st century. On these grounds alone, that this is not an ally, this is not a fellow democracy. As you've said, Julia, this is not a country that particularly shares the morals and a worldview of the liberal Democratic West, why not simply on those grounds do we not ban TikTok? It's an interesting question, right? We're talking on Zoom right now.

The owner of Zoom is Chinese, and his company was found not just spying on Chinese dissidents, but actually interfering. So Chinese dissidents would try to set up a Zoom call to talk about some issue in China, not even inside of China. It's some people outside of China. And they would shut down those Zoom calls. The Department of Justice just prosecuted them. So we have a lot of Chinese ownership of different companies,

and we use their technologies. And so the question I have is like, where's the line? You know, I mean, that is an incredibly egregious thing that we found on Zoom, and we're still here talking on it right now. And so I think we also have to think about who's going to buy TikTok, right? So the dream here is somebody's going to purchase it so they can divest from China. Well, we know who's first in line, Stephen Mnuchin.

He was Treasury Secretary during the Trump administration. This is somebody who has a political agenda and is likely going to infect the algorithm with that agenda. So we're just trading one agenda for the other. And I don't think that that is a world we want to be in. I don't think we want to be in a world where every platform is owned by some oligarch who basically just tells us and steers us towards the content that they want. I think that the reality is that China, I mean, this is an unfortunate thing to say,

but China's agenda is actually not particularly anti-U.S. The Cold War analogy is something that has been constructed inside the Beltway as honestly a defense of U.S. companies, right? It's a very corporate story. The companies who make in Silicon Valley use this story. story all the time to say, don't regulate us. Because if you regulate us, then we won't be able to compete with China. And so this is a protectionist move to protect US industry. And the fact is, US industry isn't serving us that well.

So I would like a diversity of different apps. I don't get all of my information from TikTok. Nobody does, right? We are on all of this platforms. So no one is getting just a propaganda stream through one app. And that's the only thing that they know. We're reading a diversity of opinions out there. And so I think we need to keep all of these different platforms out there because we don't want to concentrate them all in just one group of tech billionaires who want to convince us with the woke mind virus is the actual problem in the U.S.

Fascinating points to you're this. Let me come back to Scott on this. Scott, you know, there is no move to freedom here. You're just, you're going to supplant one owner who has one set of interests with an owner who's got another set of interests. We're being overly paternalistic. You're not trusting people to be able to figure out. and choose for themselves and verify facts. People do occasionally, I think, still do that. They try to find out what is actually real versus what's kind of propaganda. So come back on that, Scott. Is banning TikTok really going to achieve the outcomes that those in your camp who do think

bite dance should divest will? Let's hear that case. Well, first off, there's precedent for this everywhere. This isn't some dramatic action that threatens First Amendment. We banned Grindr because a Chinese company bought it. Grindr has 13.5 million active users. TikTok has 170 million active users. And also, I want to draw sharp relief between political interests and defense interests.

The owners of your company, Julia, the Salzberger, some people would argue, have a political agenda. Rupert Murdoch clearly has a political agenda. But they are not, in my opinion, at least knowingly, trying to, well, maybe Fox, trying to divide America and promote the interests of an adversary. So I don't think the analogy between a political bias towards the left or the right in the United States and ownership of media companies by people who have a political sensibility that's not as balanced as we would like to see on both sides is somehow analogous to the interests of the CCP or the GRU. the diversity of opinions here, first off, you're not going to lose your TikTok. And if they pick up their ball and go home and are willing to emulate tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars, that just proves that they were using this for other reasons, specifically either surveillance or propaganda. When Jack Ma criticized China's financial system, he disappeared for three months.

I mean, there are, the Business Insider reported, there are 11 executives who, media executives and China, who when they began criticizing the CCP, either disappeared or were jailed, and somehow we believe that having TikTok in here creates a diversity of opinions, this is how this plays out. The quote-unquote regulation results, and when they wake up and see that Biden could ban this,

first off, they get six months to divest ownership. If they don't, then the president can sign an order saying that it cannot be presented, it cannot be updated on U.S. platform specifically the App Store and the Google's Android App Store, they will decide to divest certain ownership or come up with two classes of stock. You still have your TikTok.

You still have the quote unquote First Amendment or free speech, which we violate or compromise everywhere for national security reasons. And it's a win-win, win, economic growth. And by the way, the senior management of TikTok wants to see this thing divested. Why on Earth has TikTok? TikTok is the...

Fight Dance is the largest technology. platform in the world that hasn't gone public. Why is that? Perhaps they don't want scrutiny. Perhaps they don't want the SEC knowing having rights to data, rights to how the company operates. Why on earth are they not public? So this is, there is no analogy between domestic political biases. The First Amendment issue, in my view, the diversity of opinion that TikTok is bringing there, I agree. I don't like the idea of Instagram or YouTube garnering more share, but I don't think that will happen. There's plenty of examples of benevolent billionaires buying media to try and help it. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. I would like to see someone else buy it, but the reality

is investigative journalism, long-form journalism is a shitty business, and unless you have hopefully a benign billionaire funding it, it doesn't work, or it's very difficult to sustain. But the notion that we're somehow going to lose diversity of opinion, that's the whole problem. We have right now a frame through which our youth is getting their information and it can be tweaked by an adversary. So, Julia, why not take the win? Maybe it's not how you'd like to see a social media company brought to heal, but it may not obviously going to happen. It's not happening clearly to Meadow or some of the other platforms.

But in this case, there's an impulse here to regulate. Why not celebrate that and move forward? and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I mean, I think if I thought it was a win, I would definitely say that. But, like, I don't really see taking out the biggest competitor to Meta and Google and dismantling them, cutting them off at their knees as a win, right? That only strengthens these companies that are already unregulated. And so I just, I'm not sure that this improves anything.

And I also would just want to push back on this idea that, like, TikTok is what's devalued. America? Are you kidding me? It's not the book bans. It's not the health care system that's robbing us all and the wealth inequalities and, you know, the fact that there's one political party that wants to dismantle democracy. Like, none of that has anything to do with TikTok. And the fact is there is a lot of unwritten criticism of TikTok that really has to do with what Scott started this debate with. People don't like the fact that it's a kind of a platform where young people are expressing their dissatisfaction. So is the answer here to take away their right to express their dissatisfaction? Or is it to listen to them and say, you know, let's address that. It might be that

these polls are saying that people are like 50-50 on Gaza and on TikTok they're not. But TikTok is the youth. And the youth is very upset about what's happening right now in Gaza. And this is a huge political issue for Biden. I don't think it's a coincidence that like this is the moment that they want to ban this, right? But I think that real political answers is address it. You're not going to get these voters if you don't address that issue. You can't just shut down speech in order, because you don't like it. And that's honestly what is happening right here. And I would just like to say in Montana, that case, the judge did say it was a First Amendment issue. He did not say the states can't rule on a First Amendment issue. So, and the ACLU leading a First Amendment attorneys have said there

are very important First Amendment questions. And so I think it's an, I don't think we can close that that this is actually going to be constitutionally challenged. If you're enjoying the Monk Debates podcast, come over to our website at triple-w monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and check out our free monk membership. As a complimentary monk member,

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Scott, before we're going to move to closing statements soon, but I just want to have you kind of riff a bit more on the economics of this. Because earlier, you know, I thought you made a convincing case here for the importance of, you know, the Adam Smith's invisible hand and how, you know, different countries and businesses provide us with services that we want to need and we reward them by using those goods and services. So how is banning TikTok furthering, you know, the cause of, you know, diverse, sophisticated global freer market that fashions you and me with the goods and services we want? Doesn't it court a counter ban from China? Doesn't it encourage other countries to start unilaterally banning different platforms because they don't like them? I mean, Europe's no fan of Google and meta. We know that.

And yeah, the United States can use its muscle to say, we're not going to buy your cannon bear and Vue Clico. Maybe at some point that argument doesn't work in the face of the precedent set by a TikTok ban. Everything you buy, Rudyard, there's a, I don't know if you live in a. US, I live in the UK, everything, almost everything you buy is going to be more expensive and you're going to have less economic opportunity for your kids if we allow the trade asymmetry that takes place here. We have a fantastic commerce secretary, Giur Romundo, that basically looks at these types of trade agreements and says, if you don't provide access to your market, we're not going to provide access to ours. That is the basis of international trade.

If you want to talk about establishing a bad precedent, we've established it here. Although they do have a version of TikTok in China, and it's populated with child prodigy pianists, Chinese astronauts training, great heroic stories of Xi. They get the spinach version. We get the opium version. So thank God we don't have, at least across most of our industry, this weak, weird and asymmetric viewpoint that you can ban our companies, but we can't ban yours. If we were to adopt the same trade standpoint, an economic viewpoint, we've adopted around Bightance, where they have unfettered access to our market, and we have zero access because we are capitalists, and we believe in diversity of opinion,

then John Deere goes out of business. Boeing goes out of business. I mean, we have access to these markets only because if they want access to ours, they have to provide access, and they can't levy on fair tariffs. So just based on underlying economics, economic growth, our prosperity, our jobs, our ability to create taxes to pay for our Navy and our food stamps, on trade symmetry alone, we should regulate this company and say, if you are not going to provide access to our media companies, there is no way they're going to let our media companies into that. They let our media companies in just long enough to steal our IP, prop up a local entrepreneur, and they capture all the economic value and then essentially ban and kick out the company. But we should provide unfettered

access to the U.S. market for by-dance. So distinct of the First Amendment market argument, which doesn't hold as foreign ownership we restrict all the time. When we see a security threat with things like Grindr, we don't allow it. All Western democracies have limits on foreign control of broadcast, but for some reason we've decided the dominant platform should not be subject to the same risk. This should be absolutely divested based solely on trade symmetry and economic parity such that we can continue to grow our GDP, provide jobs for our youth, and create tax revenue. But the notion somehow that there's any sort of reasonable argument, this is a free market, that this gets in the way of the free market, the only way we maintain our economy is with

some sort of systemic, unilateral, symmetric trade policy, which is not the case. here. Julia, I'm going to allow you a quick response to that, but then I want you to go to your closing statement for us so that we can wrap this terrific debate up on time. Great. Well, I do want to just say that, like, I'm not ignoring the legitimate questions of foreign ownership. There is a process that we have in the U.S. for assessing the risks of foreign ownership of U.S. companies. It's the Committee for Foreign Investment in the U.S. companies. It's the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States run by the Treasury Department. They are the ones who did the investigation into Grindr,

and they actually proposed some solutions that Grindr didn't want to follow, and so Grindr sold. And similar process happened with TikTok. TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States have been in negotiations for a couple of years, and TikTok and the committee came up with a plan, which was to put all of the data from TikTok about U.S. people

in a place in Texas that Oracle, a U.S. company would oversee and that Oracle would actually oversee the algorithms and Oracle would flag the U.S. on the national security risks of those algorithms. And that was agreed to. TikTok went and briefed everyone on the hill on it. And so I just want to point out that this wasn't unsupervised. It's not like just China just came in and did this. This has been something that like the U.S. government has been working towards for a lot. long time. What's very confusing is why we didn't just go with that plan that was put together under the Trump administration and agreed to by TikTok. And then suddenly Congress decided, okay, we actually just want to ban it. And their first round of trying to ban it last year

failed. There's lots of legal issues with the bill they proposed. It came up in the new bill this year. And they have not provided any evidence for why this divest. solves any of the problems that they claimed that it would solve and why the proposal from TikTok wasn't enough because it offered both of the things that they wanted, which is control of U.S. data and control of the algorithm. Now, that plan would have been a great improvement over this divestiture because the divestiture is going to leave us with some other billionaire, probably not benevolent, owning TikTok, using it for their own means, manipulating it for their own means. And if you don't think that these billionaires are subject to foreign influence, I think you have some thinking to do.

Because we know, for instance, that Elon Musk has a lot of foreign investors and seems to be very persuaded by some of the arguments from our adversaries. And he is using his platform to promote their agenda. So I think we already know that this is a risk. And so we aren't solving any of it by forcing the divestiture of TikTok. and we are just exacerbating a situation where we can then all these Congress people will go around saying, oh, we solved everything. We don't have to do anything. And I think what we want is them to have their feet to the fire to solve this for all of us, that we should not be subject to algorithmic manipulation. We need some laws just like other countries have. And so I think this is a great

opportunity to take the unity we saw in Congress around this ban and move that towards a more productive solution of privacy laws and algorithmic amplification. regulation. Great closing statement. Julia, thank you. Okay, Scott. As per debate tradition, the person brave enough to argue for the motion gets the last kick at the can. So take this debate home for us. Look, there is trade policy here. There's a national security threat. And the notion somehow that we're going to lose our TikTok, I think, is just not accurate. I think this, we can have it all. We can solve the potential or the very real national security threat

that the ultimate propaganda tool represents for national interests. We can create shareholder value. I think we can have it all. I think this gets spun to U.S. interests. And I agree with Julia that we absolutely need systemic broad-ranging privacy regulation. Having said that, I don't see why. I just don't understand the notion that we have to wait until we solve one problem before we solve another. And what I would just close with is the following.

I'm holding up a message that my son got on TikTok, my 13-year-old son, and it says, stop a TikTok shut down. Call you're representative now when you're connected, say where you're from, and tell them to vote no on the TikTok ban. Don't let the government strip 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression. a band will damage millions of businesses destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country and deny artists and audience. And it says, call now.

And if you press this button, you're immediately geolocated and it calls your congressperson. And one congressperson in Florida claims the 900 teenagers called his office and that the words they used were so profane that they had at a protocol to report it as a national security threat.

So you literally had tens of thousands of teenagers calling Washington. And the question I would put forward and close with And to me, this kind of poses the problem, is are we down? Are we okay with 13-year-old American boys being weaponized by a CCP or a Chinese own company to start calling Congress? This ban is regulation. We need more regulation.

I agree with Julia across all of these platforms. But the notion that we're going to continue to let a CCP influence, and by the way, there's no argument that it's influenced. It's codified into law there that they have to share all their data. with the CCP. Why would we take that risk? Why would we allow a foreign adversary to have this kind of dominance and frame across our young people when a regulation, in my view, will obviously result in a divestment, and there's a lot of opportunity to come to some sort of accommodation that will create shareholder value and maintain some reasonable semblance of trade symmetry

and reduce or eliminate this threat while maintaining active debate, active, you know, I love TikTok. I'm addicted to it. I don't want to lose it, and I don't think I'm going to lose it. What I am not down with is a CCP influence company weaponizing my 13-year-old son

and turning him into a foot soldier. And I think it only gets worse from here. We do not ban TikTok. That's not what this is. We regulate it. It's forced to divest. Shareholders win. Americans win.

U.S. industry wins. Thank you, Scott Galloway. Thank you, Julia. That was a terrific debate. I learned so much, and we covered all the important points that I hoped we would. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community,

are 100,000 plus strong members. Thank you so much for coming on the program today. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Julia. A big fan. Thank you, Scott. Same. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Scott and Julia. They certainly gave us a lot to think about.

If you have questions or feedback on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monk debates.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of civil and substantive debate. One conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe. wherever you get your podcasts.

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