The New Yorker Radio Hour - What’s Behind the Bipartisan Attack on TikTok?

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

A ban of the Chinese social-media app TikTok, first floated by the Trump Administration, is now gaining real traction in Washington. Lawmakers of both parties fear the app could be manipulated by Chinese authorities to gain insight into American users and become an effective tool for propaganda against the United States. “Tiktok arrived in Americans’ lives in about 2018 . . . and in some ways it coincided with the same period of collapse in the U.S.-China relationship,” the staff writer Evan Osnos tells David Remnick. “If you’re a member of Congress, you look at TikTok and you say, ‘This is the clearest emblem of my concern about China, and this is something I can talk about and touch.’ ” Remnick also talks with the journalist Chris Stokel-Walker—who has written extensively about TikTok and argued against a ban—regarding the global political backlash against the app. “I think we should be suspicious of all social media, but I don’t think that TikTok is the attack vector that we think it is,” he says. “This is exactly the same as any other platform.” 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. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Given the level of partisan rancor between the two major parties, and honestly, ranker feels like a huge understatement at this point, you would think that the parties share absolutely nothing in common. But that isn't exactly the case. Here are two points of agreement between many Democrats and Republicans. an increasingly hard line toward China and a general suspicion or hostility toward tech companies. So the idea of banning TikTok,

which is owned by a Chinese company, is getting real traction in Washington. A ban had been floated during the Trump administration, but at the recent congressional hearing with TikTok's CEO, members of both parties were in full display of performative outrage, even members who wouldn't know TikTok if they saw it on their screens. So if I have a TikTok app, on my phone and my phone is on my home Wi-Fi network. Does TikTok access that network?

You will have to access the network to get connections to the internet. That's not enough for me. That's not enough for the parents of America. Can you say with 100% certainty that TikTok does not use the phone's camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the algorithm? Can you tell me that? The Chinese government, the Chinese government, government has that data. Congressman, I have seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data. They have never asked us. We have not provided. I've asked that question. I find that actually preposterous.

We're going to talk today about the U.S., China, and TikTok. Joining me a little later is our Washington correspondent Evan Osnos. But I'll start with the journalist Chris Stokel Walker. Chris, where are you? I'm based in Newcastle, England. So I'm 300 miles north. Stokel Walker writes frequently for Wired and he's the author of two books,

YouTubers and TikTok Boom. TikTok's parent company, Bite Dance, which of course is Chinese, says it has 150 million users in the United States. Can give us some context around that number? How much of a hold does that app have on its users? Yeah, the average user spends pretty much as much time on TikTok in a given day as they do the average feature film exists. So this is kind of like a,

you spend 90 minutes or so on TikTok every day if you are the average TikTok user. Okay, timeout. A hundred and fifty million people are spending an hour and a half, two hours a day on TikTok? Yeah, because you just, you get sucked in, basically. The way that the app is designed is engineered to try and keep you going. So you open the app and it is significantly different experience to lots of other social media platforms. It is full screen. It is immersive. It is vertical video.

You are thrown headlong into an endless torrent of videos that scrolls past you without stopping. Core, core. What is it? And why is it suddenly taking over TikTok? It's kind of the world's cinema playing all of the different genres possible. Guys, I figured out the reason why I'm single. Here's 10 movies on Netflix that you've never heard of.

but should totally watch. This one is an absolute banger. Woodchuck by Huddy. How much wood would a wood suck if a wood suck was a bad? This is what you need to be doing in 2023 to go viral on TikTok. A lot from 2022 has changed,

so make sure you lock into this right now. Roe v. Wade, in what happens next in under 60 seconds. The Supreme Court just overturned federal. Second Earth has just been discovered by NASA. Here's what you need to know. You're a user of TikTok. What are you particularly enthusiastic about

watching or looking at? I like the fact that you can express yourself much more on TikTok than you can on any other social media platform. I wrote a book on TikTok, but before that, two years before that I wrote a book on YouTube, but I kind of have made it my job to study digital creation. The idea of how you express yourself on the internet in this world, which is increasingly now how you express yourself in life, full stop, online and offline worlds have blended together for all. intents and purposes. In the kind of, you know, 20 plus year history of online creation and

online expression, there have been huge barriers to entry. You know, you needed good equipment, you needed good internet connections, you needed good cameras, good microphones, you needed time to edit videos, you needed photogenic looks, you needed to be having a winning personality to sustain an audience over a 10, 15, 20 minute video, TikTok breaks down those barriers. And that is a large reason why it's so successful, why 1.5 billion people worldwide use it, is because the app allows you to just pick up and create.

It doesn't require a lot of thinking. It doesn't require a lot of effort. It doesn't require a lot of equipment. It has made creators of all of us, which is good in one way, but bad in another way. But I think more than any other platform that has gone in the past, it allows us to dip in and out. Let's get to the politics of this. The main concern that we're hearing from the Biden administration and many members of Congress is security.

What is their fear exactly? Their fear is that TikTok is sending all of your data to China where it is sucked up and monitored and wiretapped by some Beijing-based. spy for the central Communist Party of China, that essentially they are learning all about you, through your habits, through your interests. I personally don't buy it. I think that actually, you know, there are several different angles to this. Number one is if the Chinese Communist Party was actually interested in your preference for baseball versus football or your choice of different types of music or your, whether you like knock-knock jokes or whether you like carefully constructed satires on society, it could get that information from any number of other

Western social media platforms where you provide exactly the same data. I think that the difference here is one of perception, which is that the app has that in XRibble link to China, so much so that the parent company bike dance prefers to say they're based in a known tax haven. Before we're too dismissive, before we're too dismissive this, it's been shown in previous years that, in fact, American-owned social media has not been such an innocent player at all. So why shouldn't we be suspicious of TikTok and with the added dimension that it's owned by the Chinese, which we'll get to in a second with Devonosos who spent a hell of a long time in China? Go ahead, Chris. I think we should be suspicious of all social media, but I don't think that TikTok is the attack factor that we think it is. How do we know?

Well, we don't, but this is the challenge. How do you disprove a negative? It's that classic journalistic question of when did you last beat your wife? David Remnick, when did you last beat your wife? By asking that question in that way, I am supposing and presenting a kind of negative viewpoint of you. But there is one instance that's been documented of TikTok employees tracking a journalist data. It stands out, at least to my innocent years, as an example of what's possible. If the company is tracking other journalists or politicians, would we ever know for sure what's going on?

No, I don't. And I come to this in a sort of relatively unique position in that, you know, I am not based in the U.S., I am not born in the U.S. I'm 33 years old. I've spent my entire online life living by the rules designed by a small cadre of people in Silicon Valley who think that this is the way that the world should work. And so to me, as an outsider from outside the US, I'd love to say to you all, this is what it's like for the rest of us. You know, you are encountering for the first time what it is like to be the taker of the social norms on these platforms. from an entirely different country. And, you know, there are these concerns.

You're right. We can't overlook the fact that, you know, this company spied on journalists, which is absolutely abhorrent. We can't also overlook the fact that it is a Chinese company. It has origins in China. But you're asking us to overlook at that fact, aren't you? No, I'm saying that this is exactly the same as any other platform. Now, as I understand it, though, the concern is not just the tracking of user data,

but the algorithm itself, the idea that TikTok could be used as a sort of propaganda machine favoring opinions sympathetic to China or critical of the U.S.? Yeah, this is one of the interesting pillars of the argument against TikTok and for banning it, which is that the Chinese state could be surreptitiously feeding us pro-China content that could essentially program us to rise up when they choose. against our governments and overthrow capitalism in favour of Chinese communism. It is an interesting idea, and we certainly know that state-sponsored propaganda and prompting of users through social media happens. We have lived through the 2016 US presidential election, where Russia was shown to have interfered in our democracy and to have seeded ideas about the way that the US worked through social media platforms like Twitter. And it's that precedent, I think, that nullifies the concerns around TikTok

and the idea that this is being ceded with propaganda. Because ultimately, even if we were to ban TikTok and say the Chinese state cannot use those platforms, they do this already on other platforms. We know of state-sponsored interference through Twitter, through Facebook, through Instagram. All of those platforms are used and would be used, even if we decided that TikTok couldn't be. We should also add, just to round out the picture

where social media is concerned, Twitter is already banned in China as our other apps. How come the Chinese ban Twitter and those other apps? I mean, they banned it because they dislike the idea of free speech, which is what's so curious about the push

to ban TikTok now is it seems ironically quite Chinese to kind of crack down on something because we're worried about it and we're worried about the kind of content that is shared on it. So on one hand, the Chinese are worried about social media from abroad for free speech reasons. We're worried about it for surveillance state reasons. Yeah.

And I think it's, it is interesting to see that we're going down that line because TikTok has been banned in other countries before. In India, they banned it in India. They banned it in June 2020 over a border dispute with China, where the government at the time in India said, we are banning this because of a geopolitical problem. And what this is, essentially, to me, it seems, is a sort of longstanding, very angry geopolitical disputes that is being trust up in sort of national security clothing because we feel more comfortable saying that rather than just coming out and saying this is actually we dislike China. China flew a spy balloon over North America two months ago, and we think that that is a problem. We just had a congressional hearing which the CEO of TikTok sat in front of a congressional panel and took pretty much of a beating, it seemed to me.

What did you think of that spectacle, Chris? I thought it was reflective of a lot of the big tech hearings that we've seen in the past, but there was this added venom. suppose, which I do think comes from that China connection. We have diagnosed here the problem, which is that we share a lot of information on social media that we shouldn't, but we've kind of misdiagnosed it as China. And it was, I think it was disappointing as someone who has been kind of scrutinising this company and this app for many, many years to try and find that smoking gun and I'm not the world's best journalist but I'm also far from the world's worst and I was hoping to hear in this hearing some sort of evidence of that bat phone between

Xi Jinping and bytans. Did you hear any sense of expertise? I'm afraid this is the world's most leading question but in the past when you've seen congressional panels on social media the level of cluelessness and ignorance was kind of stunning, sometimes endearing in a kind of grandparent-like way, but stunning. And did you see any difference this time around? I wasted five and a half hours of my life. There were lower low lights than we have seen in previous tech hearings,

including... one congressman asking whether TikTok connected to his home Wi-Fi router, which yes, it does because every single digital service that you use utilizes that. There were some interesting small chinks of light to be had in it. There was a line of questioning around the communications tool Lark, which is used on Bightdance's servers. But generally, this was a lot of heat and almost no light. In fact, I'd say it was kind of a total eclipse of knowledge.

It was just the darkest thing I've ever seen. Chris Stoker Walker is the author of TikTok Boom. We'll be back in a moment with Evan Osnows, who's based in Washington and is reported extensively in China. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. David Remnick. We're looking today at the politics of TikTok. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have expressed interest in banning the app or enforcing bite dance to sell TikTok to a U.S.-based

company. Now, the general suspicion about TikTok comes largely from a concern that Beijing could lean on bite dance, which owns TikTok, to direct what videos get seen. Some Pauls worry that through TikTok the Chinese could exert influence on political opinion in America, particularly among young people. Now, before the break, we heard from Chris Stokel Walker, a British tech journalist, and we'll get back to Chris in a moment. But we're joined now by New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos, and he's based in Washington. Evan, you live for years in Beijing as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and then for the New Yorker. Let's step back and look at the broader moment we're in with U.S.-China relations. You wrote a piece not too long ago called Sliding Toward a New Cold War,

a very ominous piece. To what degree do you think the anti-Tick-Tick-Tac sentiment is a symptom of a real hardening of anti-China positions in this country that's not limited to left or right or center? It's quite striking, David, I have to say, as somebody who's kind of been studying and watching and reporting on the U.S.-China relationship for a couple of decades, to see how precipitous the change has been. I mean, in broadstrokes for 30 years from the time that Nixon went to China in 1972 all the way up until this period when there was this time in which American companies and American individuals and students basically believed that the future involved China for them. And there was this assumption that, look, China is in so many ways utterly different than we are. Its political system is authoritarian and it's not going to wake up tomorrow as a democracy.

but that bit by bit it was becoming a little bit more like us, quote unquote. And I think there's been this profound change. It's really only happened since about maybe 2015. That's when you began to see it towards the end of the Obama administration. It became more acute during the Trump administration. In 2018, of course, the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. China responded in kind. And so you had this trade war that signaled this new era.

And the net effect is that, that today, as we're talking in 2023, the U.S.-China relationship is at its most deteriorated condition since 1972. I mean, there's just no other way to put it, David. It is at a really acute and in many ways dangerous moment because of growing tensions over Taiwan, over human rights abuses in China, over the way the United States has responded to these things and its own internal political chemistry. And I would add one other thing, which you, is that in some ways, TikTok arrived in Americans' lives in about 2018. It's just been about five minutes.

And in some ways, it coincided with the same period of collapse in the U.S.-China relationship. And so they became synonymous. So TikTok is a symptom of a larger. Exactly. And in a way, if you're a member of Congress, you look at TikTok and you say, this is the clearest emblem of my. concern about China, and this is something I can talk about and touch. Evan, what does it mean politically that Jamal Bowman, for example, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are among the members of Congress who think that banning TikTok is ridiculous?

Is it because they're younger and use social media so prominently in their own political lives? There's no question that they are in touch with that 150 million Americans who tend to to be, tend to be younger than the average voter, they are listening to their concerns, not only about access to an app, but also about what they would view as a kind of hypocrisy on some level. They'd say, well, why is it that we're going after this company, but not after Google and Facebook? I think that the, in some ways, China's decision to ban, not just Twitter, but also Facebook and the New York Times and a whole host of other foreign information sources, it makes it actually

that's in some ways the most credible piece of evidence to then take action on the U.S. side. If you're looking for an argument for why the U.S. can and should do something, you come down on the argument for reciprocity. You say, look, this is an imperfect solution. But as long as China is banning these kinds of American companies, why is it that we're going to allow them to have free reign here? And whether or not you think the final destination should be that everybody is banned, it forces a conversation on the Chinese side to say, well, why? Why is it that you expect to have full access in the United States when you don't grant that the other way? How do the Chinese rationalize that?

They don't have to. In a sense, what they say is your system is yours and ours is ours. We saw a real campaign by Chinese officials to defend TikTok, even as the company itself tries to distance itself from the Communist Party and the Chinese government. Is it possible to untangle that relationship? I think the honest answer, David, is that it's impossible to untangle it. In the end, if you are a company in China, there is a point on the horizon and you don't really know when it is when they can come to you and say, now we want access to your data or we want access to your executives or we're going to put pressure on your leadership to do things that they might have committed publicly to not do. That's just the practical reality. And I think TikTok finds it trying to come up with ways of segregating its relationship in the United States from its broader relationship in China. And that's just very difficult to do. Chris, what would a TikTok ban actually look like? I think it would be pretty significant. I think, again, we can look to prior

present in India for kind of an example of how it would go, which is you would see homegrown alternatives trying to step up in its place. And that didn't really work in India because, frankly, those homegrown versions were developed so quickly in the aftermath of the band that they just were imperfect copies. Handily, we do have two pretty well-formed, well-funded competitors, YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels, two massive tech companies who are developing essentially TikTok-alikes, things that look pretty similar to TikTok and have been for several years as they've seen the rise of TikTok eat into their market share. It's also notable, actually, that a lot of this political maneuvering and wrangling comes off the back of lots of lobbying

on behalf of meta to say TikTok is a little bit of a risk here. So I think we can't overlook that. Out of pure economic self-interest you're suggesting. Precisely, yeah. And I think that is interesting to think about. Whether or not those users of TikTok, those 150 million Americans would port over their accounts to Instagram or to YouTube, I think is yet to be decided. This is exactly the point. It's my experience and maybe everybody's that when people have

something and they enjoy it and seem to use it two hours a day, as you're suggesting, which is an incredible number, 150 million people getting disappointed all at once is going to have political ramifications, isn't it, Evan? I think there is a real political element here. Chris touched on something very important, which is the fact that the Facebooks and the Googles of the world have a really strong interest in actually seeing TikTok disappear. I think actually that in a way the larger political question that isn't being talked about because people are focused. focusing on China is the fact that we don't have a meaningful federal protection statute of any real kind that prevents ordinary people, whether they're kids or adults, from having their data collected and misused, whether it's by an American company or a Chinese company. And in some ways, that's the conversation that is necessary. I look at it partly through the lens of my own kids who are too small right now to be using it. But it's just a matter of time before I'm going to be transposing my own neurone.

about it on to them. And I do want to see us do something that would make that would make the world a little safer for them. And some of that is our own behavior. And then some of that is also ultimately, I think, asking regulators to do what we've done whenever there's a new technology that comes into our lives, whether it was automobiles and saying, look, it's not that we're going to ban the automobile, but let's put seatbelts in them and let's figure out a way to make ourselves safer. And Chris, what would seatbelts be for TikTok? What do you recoil from that? sense of restriction? I don't. I don't. I think that we need better regulation. I think the problem is that at the minute with the sort of politicians that we have, the seatbelts would be made of

silly string and kind of tied together with loose knots. And this is kind of the challenge. We do need regulation, but we're in this awkward flux period at the minute where truthfully, We need to wait for older people to die and younger people to take their place. The AOCs of the world are not yet the decision makers that they need to be. And so if we have bad regulation enacted, this could set off a kind of series of chain reactions that could lead to the thing that we've kind of been avoiding for the entire history of the internet, which is we essentially run parallel splinternet. In the same way that China has a splinternet where you can access some sort. services that are similar, but not all of them, we could run that same risk in the United States, which would be really catastrophic for not just users in the United States, but also for

outreach to those in different parts of the world that we want to educate about our norms, our societies, our democracies. Evan, why do you think this is such a bipartisan issue when bipartisanship is a vanishing phenomenon in an American political life? I think there is a way in which China and TikTok as a part of that has become almost a kind of source of relief for politicians because they're divided on absolutely everything. And yet here is this one topic. We can all agree on TikTok in China. Well, in a sense, that's how it seems.

That's how it feels in the room. You know, if you watch, there's a set of hearings that have been going on with a select committee on China. and there is a certain degree of glee that you detect among the participants that they finally found something that pulls them together. And I think that as a citizen makes me a little bit uncomfortable because anytime we have too much of a consensus in Washington, an unexamined set of beliefs, that means that we're at risk of something. I think, you know, we're now talking about 20 years after the invasion of Iraq. And it's not too grand an analogy to make, to say, we need to be really vigilant as citizens, as journalists, to question what it is that the government is basing its assumptions off of. And one of the questions that's been asked is to say, I know that TikTok is vulnerable to the Chinese government's requests. We know that. That is a fair reading of the facts.

but we also don't know exactly what it is that our government believes is possible and what is the risk. And oftentimes when you raise that question, the answer that comes back from people in the U.S. government is, well, if you had access to the information I have access to the intelligence, then you would agree with my level of concern. But I think all of us have learned that that's not really a satisfying answer to any question. In fact, it's often a disastrous answer to a question. Chris, in the U.K., are there similar concerns about TikTok or is this a particular? American phenomenon? No, this is a global issue now. And actually it is multiple countries around the world, multiple jurisdictions following in the US's lead. So Canada has banned TikTok on government devices. The European Union has done a similar thing. The UK banned it on government devices and then eight minutes into the congressional hearing announced that they were banning

the use of TikTok on the UK parliamentary estate. So that would be essentially the equivalent of banning it from any use on the hill in the US. And what's interesting is each of these countries, and there are more, New Zealand, Australia, others, have kind of taken this approach of banning TikTok partially. They're not banning it countrywide, which is what the US seems to be trying to do, which will be interesting to see whether it holds.

They've been choosing a sort of half measure. They're saying, we're going to focus this specifically on a very, very small proportion of users, government users. I mean, it seems almost like this is a way of signaling to the U.S. that we are behind you while also not really poking the bear in a way of angering everyday uses. Chris, you're obviously very skeptical of a ban of TikTok. And it does seem that in trying to regulate social media, the government so often gets it wrong. What is the smart way to think about or deal with this problem?

I think we have to recognise that, you know, we have uniquely failed over the last 15, 20 years to get a grip on social media and tech more generally. And we're so beyond being able to get a grip on them through any sort of regulation, whether it's in the US, whether it's in Europe or anywhere else, that they have to essentially self-police. And that doesn't always work. And we kind of see the excesses of that, particularly in how Twitter is, spooling into a kind of odd death spiral right now, where the sort of conceit that the tech executives will be the grown-ups in the room. And we've kind of thought that they haven't been previously has been shown. Actually, they're trying pretty well to do so with Elon Musk in comparison. So I think if we can't get that kind of federal data regulation, as Evan says, or any kind of antitrust level sort of crack down. on these big tech platforms.

I think we need to kind of take ownership ourselves. We need to be much more cautious about what we share with these platforms. We need to monitor where our data is going. So in practical terms, what will we have to change? So you don't use your real name on social media. If you are really worried about these national security risks, which we have had previous concerns around TikTok being banned on army bases,

several years ago, and that is kind of a valid concern, but then also, if you're on an army base, don't record video on any social media platform, because people can glean information from that, from what they see in the background. Clean out your data regularly, for instance. You can reset your TikTok algorithm if you worry that it knows too much about you. Those are sorts of the things that we should be doing, but we should also not necessarily give up on the idea of regulating this officially. We should be asking our politicians to do better. We should be getting AOC like tech literate politician,

Dilhan Omar, is a Twitch streamer, which means that she has much more lived experience of this stuff and knows it innately more than anybody else who is kind of blustering from behind a pulpit in Congress. I think the line of the day is we have to wait for the old people to die. Thank you both. It was a terrific discussion. My pleasure. Thank you.

Chris Stokel Walker writes for Wired in other publications, and he's the author of Tick-Tock Boom. Evan Osnows, of course, is a staff writer for The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks so much and 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 Garbes of Tune Yards with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Halliola, Avery Keatley, Avery Keatley, Avery Keele, David Krasnow, Jeffrey, Louis Mitchell, and Gophéle, and Gawain, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keith Vine, Michael May, David Gable, Meherbatia, and Alejandra Deschet. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment.

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