The New Yorker Radio Hour - How a Tech Executive Lobbied Lawmakers for the TikTok Ban

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

David Remnick talks with a proponent of the TikTok ban that just passed in Washington. Jacob Helberg, an executive with the data giant Palantir who serves in a government agency called the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, was all over Capitol Hill in the run-up to the vote on TikTok, convincing legislators that it was an urgent matter of national security. The bill will remove TikTok from distribution in U.S. app stores unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it to some other entity—or unless TikTok prevails in its lawsuit against the U.S. government. With a China-based company, Helberg asserts, attempts to safeguard Americans’ data from the Communist Party are futile: “The Chinese government has a master backdoor into everything,” he says. “TikTok is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, and it’s also a vehicle for Chinese surveillance, which is a major national-security threat to this country.” For another perspective on the TIkTok ban, listen to David Remnick’s conversation with the journalist Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired magazine. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. You could probably count on just one hand the subjects where there's bipartisan support for anything in Washington. But one of those few subjects is the TikTok ban, which was just signed into law. The law will remove TikTok from the app stores unless its owner, Bight Dance, sells it to a competitor. Jacob Helberg worked behind the scenes to get the ban through Congress. He's a technology executive with Palantir, the giant data firm and military contractor, co-founded by Peter Thiel. And Helberg's also a member of a government agency called the United States China Economic and Security Review Commission. Helberg was all over Capitol Hill in the run-up to the TikTok ban, convincing one legislator after another that it was an urgent matter of national security.

The basic pitch is that TikTok is wholly owned by BATOX. Byte Dance, and Byte Dance does the bidding of the CCP. And we know that... The Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party. In fact, the Chinese embassy was directly involved in the lobbying against the TikTok legislation. Because Biden does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok is a vehicle for

Chinese propaganda, and it's also a vehicle for Chinese surveillance, which is a major national security threat to this country. Now, we should be clear on something for the record. bite dance has repeatedly denied that it does the bidding of the Chinese government, and the Communist Party itself does not own bite dance, which is something you may hear in this debate. So, Jacob, how do we know? How do we know that the Chinese Communist Party is using TikTok as an instrument of surveillance?

China has a national intelligence law that it passed in 2017, which requires any organization or citizen to, quote, support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work. Under that law, Chinese organizations and individuals also have to keep that compliance process completely confidential. So you could easily imagine a scenario where bite-dance employees based in China are complying with Chinese intelligence requests without even informing the U.S.-based offices of TikTok based in Los Angeles. You can imagine a scenario. Yeah.

Should we be in the business of imagining scenarios and then doing this? Well, okay, so we have laws in this country that prohibit the foreign ownership of traditional media in this country. I mean, you can make the same argument that that threat is hypothetical and yet we still have them because we don't want to be in a place where we have to imagine it. So here's the basic dynamic. We have a system in the U.S. that is based on Fourth Amendment constitutional protections against unwarranted searches and seizures. We have the First Amendment that gives us a right to free speech. Chinese laws requires total compliance with the Chinese Communist Party. It directly contradicts our legal protections to the First Amendment and to the Fourth Amendment.

So if you're TikTok, you can comply with American law, or you can comply with American law, or you can comply with Chinese law, but you can't comply with both because those two legal systems contradict each other. So tell me about your lead meetings with lawmakers before they, in the main, accepted the idea that TikTok was a real national security danger. We hear over and over again from various members of Congress, well, I've been briefed in private. I've been briefed under a national security code of secrecy. That's a source of frustration. That's a source of frustration. for somebody trying to figure out if you're wrong or you're right? There are two bodies of evidence related to TikTok.

There is evidence that's in the classified domain, of which it's obviously there because, as you know, the Department of Justice did hold classified briefings with elected members on Capitol Hill, laying out their evidence of why TikTok is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. But I will say, and the, conversations that I've been involved with, I've actually highlighted publicly available information

of which there is a lot. I serve on a bipartisan commission in Congress, and so I get prepped for hearing, congressional hearings regularly. In February of this year, we had a congressional hearing, which actually covered the issue of TikTok. In that briefing, you could look at a pattern of former TikTok employees who've left the company who've said that the Chinese-based offices have access to everything on the app. That includes microphone data. That includes geolocation. That includes data from your text messages, I Photos folder. If you look at what the TikTok CEO has said under oath in his testimony last year, he said, TikTok user data is on US-based servers managed by U.S. employees on American soil.

We know that last year there was evidence after the hearing that showed that the data of TikTok celebrities based in the U.S. was stored in China and when confronted on it, TikTok said, oh, we consider that to be a different

category of data. And then of course there were all the revelations of former TikTok employees that directly contradicted the statements made by the CEO. So I think at this point... Why don't you take one example by name and explain what that person said? There are multiple examples, but I'll just give you the latest one, because this happened right before the legislation passed.

In April of this year, an employee whose last name is Turner, I believe, from memory, his first name was wrong. This is Evan Turner. Evan Turner, I believe you're talking about. Evan Turner, that's right. He said that TikTok required him that he had a dotted line manager in China, which, by the way, totally. contradicts the whole idea of Project Texas. And that dotted line manager basically told him to send him large spreadsheets filled with data of hundreds of thousands of U.S.-based users to bite dance workers based in Beijing. And that data included names, email addresses, IP addresses, geographic and demographic information. Does that sound to you like U.S. servers on U.S. soil protected by U.S. individuals, that sounds like he, that the TikTok CEO committed perjury.

I'm speaking with Jacob Helberg who works for Palantir, and we'll continue in a moment. I've listened to Scott Galloway, for example, who teaches at NYU and talks about TikTok. He's very anti-Tick-Tac as you are. And he said that basically TikTok is an instrument to reach into the gray matter, particularly of young people in, particularly in the United States, and influence them in propagandize them. You agree? Sure. Do you not think the same of Facebook and many other social media apps? We should have that debate. That's a great debate to have. That is a separate debate than the national security issue. Jacob, again, I want to be clear on one thing. You work for

a huge technology firm, Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, who's a major figure in Silicon Valley and on the right. And it's important for us to establish how your company would gain from a forced sale of TikTok. A lot of people might be suspicious about Palantir going to such lanes to drive this lobbying effort against a potential competitor. Is Palantir doing this out of the goodness of its heart? Out of a sense of ideological mission. David, Palantir is not involved. David, Palantir is not involved. It's, I have been doing this since 2020. It's, I mean, if you say it's important to establish how Palantir would benefit, you're making a claim that I'm not making. And so if you want to make that claim, to your point, I would love for you to present evidence and articulate

how Palantir would benefit because they wouldn't benefit, is the truth. It is completely orthogonal to their business. Who would benefit? Let's say this had to be sold. Who would buy it? Who would benefit? I think the way that the benefits and costs would fall really depends on the terms of the sale. It depends on how much it sells for and to who. So obviously, there's a lot of, you know, Steve Mnuchin formed a group to try to buy it. This is a former Treasury Secretary under Donald Trump. Exactly. But look, four years ago when we had, with the last time we had this go around of a force of, you know, discussions around a force of esoter, Oracle was interested. There were even rumors that Walmart would be interested. The reality is TikTok is an extremely profitable business, and a lot of

people in the United States would be interested in buying it. And doesn't its diminishment, doesn't its diminishment stand to benefit imitators and rivals? Potentially they say that, but I think that is operating on the assumption that those rivers or imitators would directly gain everything that TikTok has built. And I just don't know that that's necessarily true because the reality is TikTok has gained so much momentum because their algorithm is really good. And so I think in order to get that kind of user traction, you need to have an algorithm that's as good. Jacob, do you see big political consequences among young voters especially about this?

They're going to go blame Joe Biden for this, right? Not necessarily. The reality is this was one of the most bioccurals. bipartisan issues of our time. 80% of the House voted for the bill. I mean, I can't think of another bill that's gotten this large of a majority. You know, you've called TikTok, quote, the most potent espionage operation that China has ever carried out against the United States. So far as I know, when it was launched, TikTok was a karaoke app.

Is there evidence that this was truly an act of intentional espionage or to just turn out to be fantastic for the Chinese Communist Party and its intelligence apparatus? Well, I still believe that. I think TikTok's reach into the cell phones of 170 million Americans is unprecedented when you think about the influence that that gives a foreign adversary government. And ultimately, that was the biggest reason why I have been so passionate about trying to get some sort of,

legislative, you know, policy resolution to this national security issue. Meta and X, formerly Twitter, also have every ability to steal user data and manipulate their algorithms for all kinds of purposes. Should the government be protecting us from American social media companies more rigorously than they already do? We already have in the U.S. the California privacy law, which was modeled after the European in GDPR. It doesn't make sense to have a patch. GDPR is, stands for the general data protection rule in Europe. And it doesn't make sense to have a patchwork of 50 different laws at the state level in the US. So the way that tech companies work is they basically create a system that complies with the

lowest common denominator, California being, you know, a very large state, where a lot of these companies are based, they apply the California data privacy law federally at the federal level. It's the de facto law of the land. Why not have a federal privacy law that basically has a federal preemption that has a single privacy rule for all 50 states? I'm in favor of having that discussion. I just think that's different than the national security issues. What about the First Amendment ramifications here? During the Pentagon Papers situation, many years ago, it was decided that you can't cry national security in order to overwhelm the First Amendment prerogative. How does that figure here? It's true that that was an issue that a lot of

opponents to the TikTok legislation raised as a concern. TikTok is not a free speech platform. It is a algorithmically controlled platform. It's not a public square. It is a newspaper. If you look at platforms like Instagram or Facebook that are friends-based. So the content you get on Instagram and Facebook is derivative of the people you follow and are friends with on those platforms. On TikTok, it's algorithmic-based. So TikTok decides what content you might be interested or want to see and then pushes that content to you.

That means that they effectively have complete editorial control over what they amplify and suppress on the platform. The NCRI, the Network Contagion Research Institute, which is a thing tank, has actually published research, statistical research, that shows that TikTok does editorialize in a way that matches China's censorship and propaganda laws. That's number one. Number two, we have a long legal precedent and history in this country of taking, of restricting. foreign commerce and restricting foreign entities when national security is at stake. We put

sanctions on Russian oil companies. We put sanctions on Chinese telecom companies like Huawei. And so it's not actually that uncommon for the United States to restrict the foreign ownership of a given company when national security is at stake. How do you think China might retaliate? They could potentially retaliate against a number

of our hardware companies. They've already banned a lot of our software companies in China, especially our content platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, and the like. But for economic development and national security reasons, they allow hardware manufacturers, American hardware manufacturers, to operate in China, like Tesla, Apple, and so forth. And so they could try to retaliate against them. It will ultimately be very interesting to see how this plays out and if they do resort to some sort of retaliatory measure against Apple or Tesla. Well, that's my last question. So this bill has passed by Dance still owns TikTok. What happens now? I think the bill is ultimately unassailable. I think it's very well thought through.

Ultimately, if and when that case gets dismissed by the courts, which I think it will, the clock will, you know, the clock has already started ticking for them to start the divestiture. Everyone hopes that they will proceed with a divestiture. But if it runs out without a divestiture, it will be banned. Jacob Helberg, thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me, David. Really enjoyed it. Jacob Helberg is a policy advisor for the technology company Palantir.

And he serves on the United States-China Economic and, and Security Review Commission. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard,

Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccat. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.