The NPR Politics Podcast - Is Time Ticking For TikTok?

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Congress is giving the popular Chinese social media app TikTok an ultimatum—find an American buyer or face a nationwide ban in the United States. Will the Senate pass the bill to ban the social media app and what does a sale of TikTok actually look like? This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and technology correspondent Bobby Allyn.Our producers are Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey there, this is Dr. Maddie Butterfield. I'm a veterinarian in Auburn, Alabama, and today is match day. I am minutes away from opening a website that will tell me where an algorithm has determined I will go for residency training to become board certified in veterinary anesthesiology. This podcast was recorded at 1.15 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, March 14th of 2024.

I realize it's Pi Day. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully at that time, I will know where I'm going in my final step of specialty training to being able to anesthetize all creatures, great and small. Okay, here's the show. Such suspense. Now I feel like we need a follow-up email to know where you actually matched, but such suspense. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And Congress is giving the popular Chinese social media app TikTok an ultimatum. Either find an American buyer or face a nationwide ban in the United States.

Today on the show, why lawmakers want to do this and what it could mean politically. And to help us make sense of this story, we are joined now by NPR's tech correspondent, Bobby Allen. Hey there, Bobby. Hey, everyone. Deirdre, I actually want to start the conversation with you because when I saw the news yesterday that the House passed this bill and that it had bipartisan approval, I admit I was a little surprised because Congress doesn't do much, especially this House doesn't do a whole lot on a bipartisan level. So why TikTok? There have been various efforts over years to ban TikTok. There have been proposals on the Hill.

But the speed and the coalition behind this bill in terms of lawmakers was really remarkable and very unusual. As we know, and we've talked about on this podcast a lot, there is a razor thin margin in the House of Representatives. Not a lot gets done. It is very heavy lifting to do basic things. But on TikTok, they voted 352 to 65 to force the sale of TikTok or face a ban. That's a pretty sizable margin. I think it's worth noting just how unusual it is to pass a bill that's supported by both Speaker Mike Johnson, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and opposed by sort of a bipartisan coalition of the far right and the far left.

You had people like Marjorie Taylor Greene opposing it from the far right and the far left. You had people like Marjorie Taylor Greene opposing it from the far right, and then you had folks in the so-called squad like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voting no together. There are not a lot of things that those people vote together on, either for or against, right? And I think that it was very strategic by the bill's sponsors to introduce the bill, move it forward in committee. Once it was passed unanimously by a House panel, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed it 50 to nothing. It went to the floor right away, right? So that sort of gave it this momentum. And I think TikTok had a challenge to mobilize the opponents of the bill. And there are a lot of people who have major concerns with this bill.

They think it's being rushed through the House. They think a lot of members of Congress aren't the most tech-savvy people in the world. They may not understand the implications of what a ban would mean. But I do think that the fact that they scheduled the vote around intelligence briefings by the top intelligence officials in the United States came and briefed all House members. About TikTok? About, yes, there was a TikTok specific briefing the day of the vote. And then this week was also the week that the intelligence community annually comes up and talks about worldwide threats in both the House and the vote. And then this week was also the week that the intelligence community annually comes up and talks about worldwide threats in both the House and the Senate. And this issue came up at those hearings as well. So I think that those factors were a confluence of things that sort

of added to the political environment that gave this issue some momentum. So on that note, actually, Bobbi, I want to ask you about people who use the app. TikTok estimates that about 170 million Americans use their app. I had heard reports about just the sheer number of people calling lawmakers, telling them to please oppose this bill. Ultimately, that was not successful. But how are people who use TikTok responding to Congress's ultimatum? I mean, TikTok users are a pretty cynical and jaded lot. They've seen time and time again, whether it's the Trump administration trying to ban TikTok through executive action or state lawmakers in Montana trying to ban TikTok. And now this move out of the House of Representatives, it kind of feels like Groundhog Day to them.

So none of them are crying, no, I'm going to lose my livelihood. I'm really going to not be able to reach my audience. Many of the TikTokers that I'm seeing are just kind of rolling their eyes and saying, oh, this again? Really? We'll believe it when we see it. And it's hard to blame them. I mean, if you're a diehard TikTok user or someone who, you know, turns to it for your primary way of surviving, and you know, some do, you just see all the headlines, you see all the political theater, you see all the legal maneuvering about TikTok, and every day you wake up and open the app and nothing has changed. So many of them are sort of alarmed, but the bigger feeling is just, okay, what's really

going to happen here? Because I think I've seen this movie before. There were some content creators that TikTok flew to Washington who were very vocal about the economic impacts that they were concerned about having. Business owners who said this really helped boost my business interests. And if it goes away, I will lose this much money. So I think that TikTok really worked hard to make those influencers and creators the face of the opposition, as opposed to the corporate executives of the company, which the company's ownership is obviously the core of this issue. I would expect to see a lot more of those types of people as this fight goes to the Senate.

And you know what, Deirdre, that's a really good point. Because from the company perspective, I noticed a really interesting shift this time around. Previously, TikTok would rebut the claims that Beijing has any influence over the algorithm, you know, try to push back vociferously against the argument that Chinese propaganda is flying around TikTok. They actually didn't address any of that publicly. All of TikTok's statements since the House passed this bill has been about, as you mentioned, the economic impact, right? They're really underlying what they, you know, according to TikTok, there's, you know, 7 million small businesses in the U.S. who rely on TikTok, right? So they're really trying to make the economic case, and they're not really dealing with the merits of the national security concerns I think are animating so many lawmakers in Washington.

I want to go a little deeper into what the substantive arguments are against TikTok. I mean, what is the essential national security concern? Because it seems like we have been hearing for years that there is some sort of national security concern. We know this came up under the former President Donald Trump. We know that the U.S. military has banned the app for its personnel. So there does seem to be a fairly widespread concern amongst, I think, both politicians on the right and the left that there is some sort of national security threat to having TikTok on your phone. But I do think a lot of users

and listeners don't really know what that is and feel like nobody's told them what it is. Yeah, I think the concerns can be broken down into two buckets. I think there's, in one bucket, the privacy concerns. There's this fear that because TikTok's parent company is based in Beijing, ByteDance, that the Chinese Communist Party there can potentially use TikTok as some form of espionage, that the Chinese government officials could use TikTok to spy on U.S. citizens. That's sort of the privacy worry. And there even has come up in previous debates about TikTok that maybe the Chinese government,

and again, this is a hypothetical, but maybe the Chinese government could sort of get personal information about government employees and try to blackmail them in some capacity. This is like a fear that we haven't seen, but it's a fear nonetheless. pro-China propaganda on the app or TikTok sort of fine tuning the algorithm so that what you see is slanted in one way or another. And because there's so much distrust of China's authoritarian regime, there's just a lot of discomfort in Washington and beyond Washington with ByteDance being based in China and with them potentially having the power to influence TikTok. Now, TikTok says, look, we're incorporated in the United States. We're based in L.A. We segregate all of our U.S. data here. Beijing cannot get their hands on it.

But it's just not enough. I mean, critics of TikTok say it's either divestiture or nothing. And TikTok has been refusing to find a buyer. I mean, I will say I talked to Mike Gallagher, who's the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on China. He's the co-author of the bill that passed. And he touched on a lot of these same security issues

that Bobby outlined in terms of information. For him, the core issue is who controls the algorithm that serves up the content to tens of millions of US users. He says, as long as that's China, he has a concern with it. He talked about classified and unclassified assessments that have been provided to lawmakers. Obviously, we do not have access to classified briefings, but as I mentioned, there were classified briefings around this vote, both in committee and then before it went to the House floor. And in my experience, it's very unusual for this many members of Congress from both parties,

352, to vote for something. I don't know how much the intelligence briefings had a factor, but I sort of think you can draw that they were a factor, right? We don't know the details. Bobby talked about the information that served up. I think that that's part of what we heard from some of these intelligence officials on the Hill this week, including the FBI director, who talked about the fact that he's already concerned about election interference in the election in Taiwan, in the election in the United States in 2024. But to Bobby's point, there wasn't like, here's this story, this specific piece of intelligence that we can make public. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. And Deirdre, the politics of this bill have been very fascinating, but I still wonder what are the odds of the bill making it through the Senate and getting to Biden's desk? I mean, I am not going to predict the future because I think on this podcast that's a risky thing to do. I do think it's safe to say Congress doesn't have much of a track record, as Bobby can attest to, on passing much tech legislation. But I do think that this is maybe

could be an exception. I think that there are a lot of hurdles ahead for supporters of this effort. One thing that I think helps give the momentum to the effort potentially to move this through the Senate is the overwhelming number in the House vote. You don't normally pass things by 352 votes with a bipartisan coalition. And the fact that right after the House vote. You don't normally pass things by 352 votes with a bipartisan coalition. And the fact that right after the House voted to approve the bill, the top leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had been sort of noncommittal about what specific proposal they were willing to back, this is the Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, the top Republican on the committee, Marco Rubio, endorsed the House bill. And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer put out sort of a non-committal statement in terms of like, we'll look at it. It's unclear whether it's something that would

move to the floor relatively quickly. Congress has to fund the government next week to avoid another possible shutdown, harsh little shutdown. So there are a lot of other things in the queue. Are there any reservations in particular that some senators have expressed? I think the same reservations that you saw from the 65 who voted against it in the House, right? Those who are concerned about the impact on free speech rights, those who are concerned about the economic impact. And there's a political concern, right? Do they want to be on the side of banning this app that is super popular with so many Americans in an election year? I mean, because if they sign it, then it will go to Biden's desk and the president has already said

he will sign it. Right. And that's something I want to ask you about, Asma. I am really curious as to why you think the president decided to come out in support of this bill. It sort of seemed unusual for me for him to weigh in at this point because sometimes presidents sort of— He's often said, let the policy, their national security policy. And this is part of this, right? And as you have said, there are a number of members of the House, it seems, who potentially were influenced by these national security briefings that they were given. So there may be things that we all don't know. Right. But I also will say from a political perspective, Biden has a severe weakness when you look at polls amongst young voters. They are very frustrated by a whole host of policy issues. And this is just another issue that I think could potentially alienate young voters. It is also, I will say, further confusing because he is going to be accused of hypocrisy because just last month his campaign decided to venture onto TikTok and they have a TikTok account. And so the question I'd be asking if I was Donald Trump in this moment would be, well, if it's so dangerous, why is your own campaign on this platform? In terms of young people, I did talk to Maxwell Frost.

He's the youngest House lawmaker. He's 27. He's a Democrat. He voted no. And he said he does think that this could hurt the president with young people in the election. Before I let you go, Bobby, I've got one final question for you. What would TikTok's algorithm was built by and is maintained by engineers at ByteDance in Beijing. It seems to be the view of most tech observers that the sale of TikTok to an American company or group of investors in the US would maybe get the platform, maybe get the user base, but the algorithm would require a real fight. And without the algorithm, TikTok just isn't TikTok. But that is the thing that has become the envy of Silicon Valley. The sort of, you know, the secret sauce of TikTok is this incredibly powerful algorithm that everyone

talks about and is interested in. And would that be part of the sale? That is a big question. And, you know, without the algorithm, TikTok just isn't TikTok. All right. Well, Bobby, thank you very much for joining us. And thanks for your reporting, as always. Thank you. That's Bobby Allen. He's NPR's tech correspondent. And I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.