The NPR Politics Podcast - TikTok CEO Heads To The Hill As Congress Mulls A Total Ban

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew is set to address the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday and is expected to tout the company's billion-dollar restructuring effort to build a firewall between its Chinese owner and the data of the app's 150 million U.S. users. Lawmakers of both parties — having previously shied away from regulating U.S. tech giants — are laser-focused on the app as part of a broader effort to curb a perceived threat from China.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, tech reporter Bobby Allyn, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It is edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Giveaway: npr.org/politicsplusgiveaway Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Devin and Esme. We are awake in the middle of the night because Esme is nine months old and teething. This podcast was recorded at 11.32 a.m. on Wednesday, March 22nd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully we will have gotten some sleep. Okay, here's the show. As someone who is living that regularly myself, the best tip I can give you is Motrin, Motrin, Motrin. Takes me too far back. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And Bobby Allen is here with us today. He covers tech for NPR. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And Bobby Allen is here with us today. He covers tech for NPR. Hey, Bobby. Hey, guys. So TikTok's chief executive is preparing to testify this week before a House committee. It comes as Congress is considering tougher regulations and maybe even an outright ban against the popular social media company. We're obviously going to talk about the issues here, but Bobby, can you explain first how big of a reach TikTok has in the U.S.? It's really hard to overstate. I mean, TikTok was the most downloaded app

in the world last year. In America, the CEO just gave a new stat. His name is Shouzi Chu, and he said there are 150 million monthly users of TikTok just in the U.S. So that's like half the country. It's pretty incredible. So during the pandemic, they were really supercharged and they just became this global sensation. So obviously, as you mentioned, TikTok exploded during the pandemic when people were sort of stuck at TikToks for really years.

And the concerns are twofold. One, with their data practices, right? Because they're owned by ByteDance, which is based in Beijing and subject to Chinese intelligence laws, which require companies to hand over information about their customers to the government when they request it. The concern is that the information of Americans, very personal information, could be handed over to the Chinese government and that they could, who knows, do whatever they want with that. They could use that information to potentially figure out what Americans' preferences are and then sort of mount information campaigns to try to influence their opinions or maybe even try to meddle in a U.S. election. And also a big concern is that, you know, maybe that the Chinese Communist

Party can request data vis-a-vis TikTok and potentially surveil and track, say, federal government employees and try to blackmail them. That's in the bucket of sort of data usage, data practice concerns, right? The second bucket has to do with young people. Because this app is so immensely popular with teenagers, with Gen Z, there's a real concern among lawmakers and among experts who study social media that this app is just too addicting. And TikTok has responded to this by imposing 60-minute screen limits. So if you're, you know, a teenager using TikTok now after an hour, it will say, hey, you've been on here an hour. Do you really want to be on here much longer? And a number of other sort of policy changes TikTok has made as a way

of sending a signal that, yeah, we know this thing is incredibly addicting. Yes, we're trying to mitigate that. But those are really the two areas that people are most concerned when it comes to TikTok. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of apps that are addicting, but this politically really China to influence Americans, soften them up, push propaganda, and when there are others on Capitol Hill, some other Democrats like Jamal Bowman of New York, who's saying that he thinks that this is just fear mongering. And he hasn't seen any evidence to this point that any of this is taking place or will take place. Well, the government, both on a state and federal level, has started to take some attempts to limit TikTok's reach. I know governors in several states have issued bans on the devices they can control, right? Like job-issued devices, both in many states and now on the federal level, they're not allowed to have it on anything that is a federal device. Because of the tensions between the U.S. and China, TikTok has really sort of,

I think, caught in some of that pressure. And the grandstanding is just really grandiose, right? I mean, Representative Michael McCaul has called TikTok a spy balloon in your phone. Mike Gallagher, another congressman called TikTok digital fentanyl. I mean, these politicians know what they're doing, right? They're targeting TikTok and they're saying, you know, this is an example of, you know, China potentially surveilling us, potentially spreading disinformation, and we need to crack down and we need to get this out of our country. But they really, you know, they are sort of a window into just US Chinese relations right now. And if you ask TikTok, they say it's really unfair. They don't even consider themselves a Chinese company, right? They say we're a global

company, our investors are around the world. We have a headquarters outside of Los Angeles. So all of this focusing on Beijing and our corporate parent company is a big distraction and it's political grandstanding. And it's really missing the point. And they think the point is, look, we already have cordoned off Americans' data from both Chinese employees and the Chinese government. So why is everybody so angry? But guess what? Everyone is still so angry. But Bobby, wasn't there fairly credible reporting that TikTok did attempt to access at least one journalist's information on their phone and potentially others? I mean, are they guilty of what they're being accused of in some level? Yeah, that's a good point. And to sort of back up on that for a moment,

there's really good reporting that relied on some leaked documents at TikTok. And a reporter from the Financial Times, another reporter from Forbes, and it was discovered that TikTok employees, including two who are based in Beijing, improperly access the accounts of these journalists to try to figure out how exactly that these leaks happened to try to figure out who the person at TikTok was who gave this information about the company that wasn't supposed to be provided. And they fired four employees and admitted that, hey, this shouldn't have happened.

What the company says, and I was at the TikTok headquarters a couple of weeks ago, and I literally spoke one-on-one with company executives about this very incident. They told me this happened before their company restructuring, that Beijing employees were able to get access in a way that is no longer possible. And they have mounted this $1.5 billion restructuring plan. They brought in this software giant out of Austin, Texas called Oracle that is now the custodian of all of

America's data. And there's this big firewall now between the US and China. If TikTok is to be believed, they say that kind of thing can't happen anymore. That happened under our old regime. We made a mistake. We're sorry. Won't happen again. But ByteDance, which owns TikTok, also owns Douyin, right, which is sort of a sister company of TikToks or similar to TikTok in China. And haven't they been accused of pushing the very kind of propaganda that American intelligence officials are concerned about?

They have. So TikTok is owned, as you mentioned, by ByteDance, which has a suite of social media apps. TikTok actually doesn't exist in China itself, but there is a copycat app, as you mentioned, called Joyin, and they have been accused of pushing misinformation about the South China Sea, about Taiwan, about the war in Ukraine. And so skeptics look at TikTok and say, well, if they're doing it with one of their other social media apps, what is preventing them from doing it with their global sensation that is TikTok? Let's take a quick break, and we'll talk more about this when we get back. And we're back.

And Bobby, do you have any sense of what TikTok's executive's message is going to be to Congress tomorrow or sort of what are your questions that you would like him to answer? This is going to be a pretty high profile hearing. Yeah, this has been super anticipated. Lots of people who are both tech watchers and interested in the future of TikTok, which apparently now is 150 million people, are really curious to see exactly what Shouzei Chu is going to say. And his testimony, at least his prepared remarks, has been released by the House committee. And his main point is

really that TikTok's corporate owner, ByteDance, is not an agent of China, never was, never will be an agent of China. And if they're ever asked for data on any users, they're going to say no. That's the big point, number one. His big point, number two, is I don't think divestiture is going to solve the issues, right? The Biden administration recently has told TikTok executives that if you want to stay in operation in the US, you're going to have to find an American buyer, you got to spin off completely, be acquired by someone else, because we just feel a little

uncomfortable with the Beijing corporate ownership. He says, look, that is not going to solve some of the data issues that folks have, we already have are in the process of spending $1.5 billion. Just please let us do the plan that we have already started. So those are his two big points. I mean, the one question that I have goes back to the spying on journalists who got the information from TikTok, right? I really want a little bit more detail about how exactly it is that Beijing-based employees are not able to access the app. I mean, when you get a paycheck from TikTok, it says ByteDance, there's lots of reporting. You know, look into TikTok, you'll find that there's engineering staff and other

technical support staff in Beijing that helps with TikTok. It just, it does not seem plausible from the years of reporting that I've done on TikTok that this notion that somebody in Beijing who works for ByteDance is not able to get information on an individual user. So I would like to hear a little bit more color on that, a little bit more detail, because it really, I think, gets to the crux of some of the concerns. Domenico, you made the point that politically right now, skepticism towards China, tougher stances towards China. It's more easy to find bipartisanship there between Democrats and Republicans. But I do wonder, separately politically, if the U.S. government were to do something like try to enact a ban on TikTok in the United States, do you see a political risk there in that it is a hugely popular social media platform? I mean, we're talking about one out of every three Americans

uses this, and I'm not sure that those users are as convinced of the national security concerns that the federal government might be. Well, sure. What's one of the big pillars of the Democratic Party? You know, younger voters, for sure. I mean, voters 18 to 29 who are much more likely to be using this app than are older voters, and they skew heavily Democratic. You know, they voted overwhelmingly for Biden in the 2020 presidential election. And if they suddenly wake up and they can't get updates on their phone anymore to TikTok and their app is glitchy, and they wake up and realize this is Biden's fault? What happened here? You know, that's not great politically going

into a presidential election and making the sale to Americans who, if you asked 100 of them what their feelings were about the South China Sea or Taiwan geopolitics, probably don't have an opinion or a thought on that. It's pretty difficult to see how that is helpful or to make the case to them that this is really a national security problem that you don't see now, but you might. Bobby, the question that I keep swirling around in my head is, I get and I think our listeners get and people get that social media could be used to distort for misinformation and why that could be a risk. But isn't that also a problem with all social media platforms? I mean, I'm

thinking about Facebook and how that was a platform that was used for misinformation and how I don't think we haven't resolved that debate yet. I mean, aren't social media platforms in general inherently risky when it comes to sensitivity towards how your data is used, how the platform could be used to misinform potentially or accidentally the people that are using it? Yes, there are definitely greater concerns about the use of social media and how platforms can amplify dangerous misinformation about public health, about elections, about geopolitical conflicts. Those concerns, like you said, spread across all platforms, but none of the major platforms that people are using every day in the US are owned by a Chinese based company. So the data practices of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok are pretty similar, you can really get into the nitty gritty and find

some differences. But the elephant in the room is China and always has been China. Remember, this started under the Trump administration. It seemed like it was a new day for TikTok when Biden came into office and everyone thought, oh, is he going to have a softer stance? It was quiet for a period. And then we thought, oh, you know what? He actually is bringing the hammer down just as hard or maybe harder than Trump did. And Trump tried to put TikTok out of business. Federal courts halted it. And now Biden's kind of trying to do the same thing. But it all comes back to China. Yes, there are greater social media concerns about this information. But the China thing is something that no national security expert can avoid. All right, Bobby Allen, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.