The Vergecast - How a TikTok ban would affect the influencer economy

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz about what actually happens to TikTok users, creators, and the influencer economy if a ban on the app was implemented in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's Nealai from the Vergecast on this week's interview episode. Taylor Lawrence, the excellent reporter from the New York Times, joins me to talk about TikTok. Just before we recorded this episode, Trump had issued his executive orders banning TikTok and we chat in 45 days, September 20th. We talked about that a bunch, as you would expect. But I really wanted to talk to Taylor about the entire influencer economy. That's what she covers.

That's what our creators' desk covers. I think of our creator's desk as our secret business section. But there is an entire ecosystem of companies, of law firms, of agencies, of huge talent agencies that have built up around influencers and creators on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. I wanted to unpack that with Taylor so people could have a sense of just how big that ecosystem is, how big that economy is, how intertwined it is into our entertainment and advertising industries. I think people think of TikTok as just teenagers dancing, but it is an absolute force. in the entertainment and media ecosystem.

Taylor has heard from a lot of this book. So I wanted to, you'll hear us. We talked about how big that ecosystem is and how it works. Before we got into the TikTok ban, it's undercovered. It's not something people are talking about as much as the mechanics of the national security debate

or how Trump might ban an app. But I think it's really important to understand the scale and the impact that a band might have on that economy, on the influencer ecosystem. And there's honestly no one better to talk about it than Taylor. So check it out. Taylor Lorenz for the New York Times.

Taylor Lawrence, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having me. You are a reporter at the New York Times, so you cover influencers in the influencer economy, which is what I want to talk to you about. But I asked you on the show to talk about TikTok a while ago, like several days ago, and I said, we should do this as late as possible before we publish because something else will happen with TikTok. And lo and behold, last night, we're recording us on Friday, last night, Thursday night,

very late, the Trump administration issued two executive orders. one banning all transactions with TikTok in 45 days, which is September 20th, and the other with WeChat banning all transactions with WeChat. And WeChat's parent company Tencent, which owns like stakes and everything from Spotify. They own all of League of Legends. They own 40% of Fortnite and Unreal Engine Epic games. I want to talk to you about TikTok, but that all happened. What has been the response from sort of the influencer community to that?

I feel like I should just ask you that off from the jump. Yeah, well, it's been a roller coaster for them. I reached out to a bunch of people last night because, you know, earlier this week, it seemed like everything was going to be fine. Like a lot of them were told, I think Trump said even last week that the ban could come as soon as last Saturday. And when that didn't happen, they kind of thought they were all good again. And now they're scrambling. It's literally thrown huge swathes of the entertainment industry into arrears. I mean, we saw Forbes release their, list of top-winning TikTokers yesterday, and including people like Charlie DeMilleo, Addison Ray, all of these kind of young internet stars. And they're making millions. And so, you know, all of that money that they're making is in jeopardy. You know, all of these big brand campaigns that American Eagle, Chipotle, other brands are doing is in jeopardy. The music industry is obviously scrambling. So it's a mess. Yeah. I want to come back to that. The thing in the moment. But I wanted to, the reason I wanted to have you on is I think the influencer economy,

those millions of dollars that you just talked about, is kind of not well understood. And you do a great job of covering it. I think I've told you, like, your coverage has definitely been an influence on our coverage. I think of our creator's desk is a secret business section on the verge. Like, that's fundamentally what it is. It's our teenage millionaire section. Like, it's a business desk, not really like a memes desk. But just, to give even that even some more context. Your personal reporting history has twists and turns that kind of led you here. Can you give people just a sense of that? Because you started as like a strategist, like a digital strategist, and you've ended up covering platforms and the money that gets made on them.

I see a pretty clear through line there. Yeah. I mean, I've always been really obsessed with these platforms. I mean, I graduated over a decade ago now into the recession and got on Tumblr, which I very quickly kind of built some popular on Tumblr and that was my entry into social media world. And yeah, I worked as a strategist basically helping social brands like household names like Bud Light kind of navigate the social media world. This was before brand Twitter was even a thing. Facebook had just rolled out brand pages in like 2009. So I was sort of helping brands build audiences online and I got really fascinated by how these deals were being done on the internet, how people were leveraging audience for themselves. And yeah, I sort of did that and then ended up doing the same thing for media

companies, be I was a social media director for a while. And then I was always sort of writing on the side. And then finally about almost three years ago, I switched over and started writing about it full time. I think also the creator economy, I don't think it was truly a beat until that time the way that it is now. I think the real money started pouring in, maybe post-2016. Yeah. And I think it started pouring in first to YouTube and then to Instagram. in a really serious way in the now to TikTok. And that's, let's start at the basics. So you mentioned Charlie DeMilleo making millions of dollars.

TikTok doesn't pay her, right? I mean, we know that like Instagram and Facebook will just pay people to be on Instagram and Facebook. YouTube and in various ways will pay YouTubers to be on YouTube. TikTok doesn't have that yet, right? How do you make money as a TikToker? Well, TikTok did just launch a creator fund. So they are going to be giving grants to certain popular creators in terms of, you know, direct they're going to be paying them directly. But no, the popular creators all make money through

basically ad deals and selling merch and, you know, sometimes different app download things where they, you know, have a link in bio and they get a certain amount of money. They also can make money through live streams. So you can give kind of like digital gifts that people can then, you know, convert to money. So all of those ways are sort of the main ways that they monetize. I would say brand deals and direct monetization through things like March are kind of the main ways that they're making these millions. And then there's got to be like a secondary economy of law firms and agencies. Oh, yeah. How are they affected by something like Trump saying?

Like they're just middlemen, right? They're just taking a cut. Like they've got to be freaking out. I mean, I think that's what people forget. You know, people are like, oh, ha ha, you know, L.O, all these TikTok stars are screwed. okay, well, there has been this entire sort of industry built around them now. So managers, agents, like you mentioned, there are specific lawyers. There are also just video editors, graphic designers, audience development people that work with all of these influencers,

stylists. I mean, they're entertainers. And to kind of wipe out this big platform where a lot of entertaining happens is going to be a hit to that economy. Right next to that, right before we started recording. We were joking about Reels. Facebook by Instagram launched Reels, which is tucked into Instagram in a very confusing way. There is an element of all this, which is like, well, it's fine. They'll just all go to Reels, which is a clone of TikTok. I mean, it looks exactly like TikTok. Is that, are you seeing that happen? It looks exactly like TikTok was literally none of the features. I mean, it's the most delusional product I've ever seen. It doesn't have anything that makes TikTok compelling If you think about what people love on TikTok, it's number one, the really creative video tools, which Facebook is not offering.

A lot of the remixes, the sound, you know, TikTok sort of pioneered this idea of like a sound meme and by sort of allowing people to chop things up and have all these remixes. Facebook has none of them. They just have the default kind of songs that no one really uses. And then the most important thing it doesn't have is the discovery mechanism. So the For You page is this incredibly addicting page that, you know, sort of sort of. sources content from all over the app and shares just the most engaging content with you. And Instagram is horrible at Discovery. I mean, the Explorer page now, too, is impossible to navigate.

And they've jammed shopping in there, too. So it's really hard to get visibility. Ultimately, Instagram is still built on a follow graph, which is just a horrible way to deliver content to users. You know, users shouldn't have to seek out people and follow them. And I think that's what TikTok proved. Actually, I wonder about that because Instagram was obviously very successful. The notion that you have one app for a follow graph and one app for an interest graph, the idea that they necessarily have to be separate apps, I think is what we're learning.

Yeah, I think that Instagram is a place where you can go to follow things. I think also, though, Instagram is this personal place where you also follow friends and family and you're using it to communicate, whereas I think of Instagram or I think of TikTok a little bit more similarly to YouTube, where it's a place for entertainment, like you're going there to just consume content and just. discover engaging things, kind of watch shows almost sometimes. So I just think to kind of jam that into Instagram is is going to be hard. Doesn't YouTube have a forthcoming competitor to TikTok? What's going on there? They do. And I forgot the name of it. YouTube has been experimenting with more short form video content for a while. They launched sort of a Stories, Snapchat Stories clone when everyone was doing that. And obviously you can post these kind of status updates on YouTube. So I do think that they're, they were going to roll out some feature that is more kind of,

it's called shorts. That's it. Right. Yeah. Tremendous. I mean, all of these, I just think, won't be successful unless they can really, really clone all of the incredible editing features and the sound library that TikTok offers and then deliver it in the compelling way, you know, as compelling of a way as the for you page.

So as you've seen kind of the creator economy grow up, I just think like the first set of creators that made it big on YouTube. They made all their own deals. as we have seen, some of them didn't have any lawyers. Like, they were pretty upside down. Now it's a pretty professionalized space. One thing that we haven't seen, except for Vine, which literally shut down and they all moved to YouTube, but it seems really hard to go from one platform to another. I think we just watched Ninja not go from Twitch to Mixer, and then he's back.

And like that was such a disaster that Mixer shut down. Like, it's like at the far end of disasters is like it went so badly that the whole platform disappeared. Why is it so hard for influencers and creators to jump from one platform to another? Well, one is just what the audience expects from every platform. So, you know, the audience goes on TikTok for a very specific purpose and they're not going on Instagram for that same purpose necessarily. So I think that that sort of hard is what audiences kind of like expectations. But it's very hard to, you know, if you are an expert at creating content for one platform

and you really understand the culture and the algorithm and the tools to create successful content on there, that doesn't mean that, you know, you can suddenly just hop to another completely different platform. There's a really steep learning curve. I compared it to sports in a tweet last week and other people have compared it. It made the same comparison. But it's like, you know, if you think of the top NBA players, you can't just suddenly expect them all to succeed in golf, for instance, or something like that. Yeah, maybe a few of them well, you know, we saw that with Vine, right? Like the top players, the Jake Pauls of the world, you know, they had enough of an audience and they were, they could sort of adapt to this new format. The top TikTokers are already top YouTubers, you know, Bryce Hall, Josh Richards, the Dimmilios, they're going to be fine.

They are going to become, you know, potentially the next generation of YouTubers. But it's this large swaths of mid-level creators that I think will have a really hard time. Do you think that that YouTube is just like the final resting place of all? Like, right? Everything happens and we end up watching 15 minute blogs with like multiple, like, mineral ad breaks and many brand integrations. And it's just because it's longer and it's a 16 by nine rectangle, all the traditional advertising money can flow into it. Is that just the path? Yeah, I think TikTok disrupted that path. But if TikTok goes away, it will still be there. I think that YouTube is still the gold standard. You know, YouTube still.

pace people directly because you can just put ads on your video. And you just don't have that option on these other platforms. And YouTube is just viewed as very safe. Like you said, they, not only has the platform been around forever, the YouTube sort of creator partner program has been around for a really long time. And yes, creators constantly have issues with YouTube, but they're not going out of business tomorrow. You know, Trump isn't going to ban YouTube, hopefully. I mean, that's, it seems like a, it's a confident statement on this day of 2020. Like, I have no idea what he's going to ban tomorrow. You mentioned the, we talked about Charlie DeMilleo twice now.

You mentioned Addison Ray. Who are sort of the top TikTok stars? And how did they get there? Yeah, there are, there are these people that succeed in what is called sort of straight TikTok, which is basically just mainstream TikTok. It's just kind of like the teeny bopper, you know, young. handsome or beautiful people. So there's Addison Ray who is part of the hype house, Charlie DeMilleo. And then you have a lot of people like Josh Richards, Noah Beck is now kind of a new popular one,

Alex Warren, Daisy Keach, who's part of Clubhouse. All of these kids are part of these massive collaborative groups in Los Angeles. So they live in these mansions and they kind of collaborate with each other and they've created this little kind of like a mini reality show where they all date each other, hang out with each other. And it's incredibly compelling for, you know, their very, very young audience. So our hype house, clubhouse, are those businesses? Yeah. Are they just loose affiliations?

Like, there was, the one I remember that from the YouTube days is Team 10. Yes. Right? Which, like, also exploded into disaster. They all devolve into disaster. Let's be clear. None of these houses will survive 2021. That's my prediction.

But, yeah, I mean, these are, this is the generation of kids that grew up watching Team 10. So they, I mean, Thomas Petru, who's the manager of the High Pass kind of sort of default manager, he's 21, but, you know, he actually worked for Team 10 prior to this. And then the kids in the Hype House are younger than that. So they kind of, these are the ones that grew up watching Jake Paul videos and wanted to live that lifestyle. So when they got to L.A., it was like, hey, where, you know, how can I live this vlog life that I've watched, not just Jake, but David Dolbrick and all of these people kind of be living for years. You know, whether their businesses is debatable, it depends how well they're run.

Some of these houses, like the Sway houses, are run by management companies that take a significant cut. And these kids basically go out there and live, you know, they pay a highly reduced rent or no rent because they're basically just doing TikTok videos for brands or creating collective IP that the management company can monetize. Hype house is more a loose affiliation, you know, and then we've seen a bunch of other kind of different types of ones. I mean, the Faze clan has is also a good example of this. So the Fais Clain, we had, is he the Faye CEO, the Faiscline CEO? Lee Trink, who's in charge of Fais Clan theoretically, although how anyone can be in charge of that eludes me, which is mostly what we talked about. So we had the CEO Face Clan on and we

actually talked about the contracts for a while. And that first scenario you discussed is like how they work. You show up, you don't pay rent, you make a bunch of ads effectively or you stream all day for them and they take a cot and pay you back, right? And you don't end up owning anything, which has led them into all kinds of legal hot water. Yeah. Like they've been sued by the other face land members. This to me is like when you say they're all going to devolve into chaos by 2021, that seems like the underlying issue here, right? Like they're not good at telling people how they make money or what they own or who gets to walk away with the audience. And I think in a moment where TikTok might go away that's going to accelerate is the businesses have to pivot?

I think it's going to be a mess. I think it's, you know, I don't know, we're seeing all of these companies scramble. Talent X is a good example where they've signed basically 100 TikTokers at this point. The entire management company is built around TikTok. And if it goes away, they're in trouble. So what they've been doing is doing these exclusive deals with like other apps, like Triller. So now pretty much all the top talent is on Triller. They said they're moving. there exclusively if TikTok shuts down. And so I think you're seeing these management companies try to do deals, preemptive deals with other apps.

There's just not a lot of options out there, aside from Triller, which is sort of, I think, raising money so excited to get the hype of some of these TikTokers. But there's going to be a lot of disputes, I think, soon because, you know, everyone's about to get screwed. I mean, again, it's 20-year-old millionaires. Like, historically 20-year-old millionaires send up in disputes. Yeah. I think that part is pretty normal.

I think that the part that isn't normal is the reason we're seeing the Trump administration, or at least the claimed reason the Trump administration is going after TikTok. There's two parts to it. You actually wrote, I think, the story at the Times that accelerated all this, which was about the Tulsa rally. I think Trump saw that headline and the rhetoric. You can just track the rhetoric heating up after that day. It's funny. Some wacko website yesterday was saying, like, Taylor has been arguing that this is the response.

the Tulsa Rally. I have not made that argument in any pieces, though I did write the coverage of it. The thing with Trump is, is like, yeah, like, we just have no idea. He doesn't, he doesn't articulate the reasoning. I think definitely, like, that probably got it on his radar in a new way. But it's, I think it's also like the China stuff plays into it so much as posturing, you know, against China. That's the other part. You have this built-in reason, which is national security concerns, and nationalism concerns with China to do something. Like, if this organization around the Tulsa Raleh happened in, on Instagram or YouTube, you wouldn't have this card to play.

Yeah, exactly. Is the TikTok community aware of the national security concerns and the sort of, well, Facebook is banned in China, so we should ban TikTok in the United States argument? I mean, I think that they are aware that people say there's national security concerns. I mean, a big joke on TikTok is that no one can. or they're already like pledging allegiance to the Chinese government. That's kind of like a meme. I mean, there's just so much activism on TikTok and there's so much anti-Trump sentiment on TikTok. You know, it's not a platform like Facebook that he can just dominate and sort of

promote himself with impunity. So I do think that it's a platform that he, you know, he's frustrated that he can't probably, he might be frustrated that he can't dominate it in that way. But yeah, I don't think any of the TikTok stars really think the national security stuff. is an issue. I mean, some of them were saying stuff like that, or basically Triller was saying stuff like that. You know, Triller has been trying to capitalize on this moment, left and right, sending all these press releases about how, oh, yeah, the TikTok stars are nervous. And so they're coming to us. And I interview a bunch of them and they're like, no, we don't, we just want to make money. Yeah. So there's Triller and there's Bight. Dub smash, clash, likey. Like,

I feel like the only one that has a name that seems like it'll do well is Dub Smash. All the other ones are like the names are insane. Although Bite and Bite Dance, that's pretty good. Pretty lucky for them. Which one of them is, are any of them getting any uptake besides Triller, which appears be signing deals? Yeah. Dub smash is getting a huge uptick too.

All the cosplayers went over to Dub smash. Dub smash, a lot of stuff on TikTok originates on Dub smash, actually. A lot of dances and sounds or on Dubstack. smash first. And so I think there's already kind of a synergy there. A lot of black creators are also really big on dub smash. So I think dub smash is in a relatively good position. Byte, I'm not so sure, because it's such a different app and it's really a newer app. And it's, you know, I don't know, a lot of people on quote unquote alt TikTok, which is more like the Vine-E-esque side of TikTok, kind of the lo-fi side, you know, not just the dancing. They're all on bite.

where they've kind of moved to bite. But Clash is another app that is trying to get traction that is actually made by a former Viner who created the app kind of in the wake of Vine and has given a bunch of creators' equity and is also trying to make it be the best place where creators can monetize. What is the best place for creators? YouTube. Well, not like that. But like that to me seems like a kind of competition that doesn't exist, right?

Like everyone hates YouTube for its monetization rules, but there isn't another platform that's just like YouTube that you can make 10% more money on. Exactly. It's weird that that doesn't exist to me. I find that very strange. There isn't a version of Instagram that is more lucrative for creators. Why does that competition sort of not appear? I mean, I think these platforms have always had a very fraught relationship with creators.

You know, a lot of them have kind of like Snapchat, for instance, like shunned them actively. I've been like, this is not the platform for you and then turned around a couple years later. and have a whole creator partnerships team and are actively trying to recruit these people. Especially, I mean, Snapchat's been taking meetings with a bunch of TikTokers, trying to convince them to all launch Discover shows. So I think only now are they really realizing

the potential of these creators almost. I do think that this whole industry was written off by platforms, aside from YouTube and to a lesser extent, Instagram. But, you know, it's just hard. You have to have a certain amount of traction to attract big brands. That's the other issue.

A lot of these platforms are small. So when, you know, for instance, American Eagle looks to do a new campaign, some $10 million campaign, they need a certain level of scale. And these platforms just don't have that scale. So it's hard to offer them, you know, hard to offer the creators the same opportunities. What do those deals look like? A lot of it is kind of a promotional, just straight up promotion promotional deal. So, you know, we're paying, you know, Addison Ray, for instance, $2 million to create X amount of TikToks. You're also going to create video. and photo content for our campaigns that we can run on our own channels.

And then you're obligated to post a certain amount of time and maybe where American Eagle at certain events or things like that can kind of depends on the deal exactly what, you know, what the creator needs to do. But it's pretty much sponsored content. And then do the creators just like have teams that do that stuff? Big time agents at UTA and WME and CIA. But like the actual posting, right? Like is there like an army of Addison?

Ray social media managers that are like running her campaign for her? I don't know if Addison Ray has a videographer, but a lot of them have videographers, which the videographer is basically a content manager that will film and edit and make sure that the content is delivered on time. And then they presumably the advertisers and the agencies get approval over the content. Yeah. So it's like a very class. What I'm building up to is these are media companies.

Full on media companies. Like as individuals, they're media companies and they're. going to scale to become media companies, whether that looks like hype house or one person supporting an ecosystem, like Oprah. I mean, if you look at NELC, which also has gotten a lot of backlash, they're really YouTubers, but they've been hanging out with all these TikTokers. Somebody was asking me, well, what are they going to be? Are they YouTubers?

Are they just trying to get like a jackass style show? I was like, I highly doubt it. I think they're trying to like build the next bar stool, which is like they basically want to build this massive audience online, monetize it through brand deals initially. And then eventually they all move into launching their own products, you know, having events, merch, sometimes direct monetization through things like Patreon, podcasting. But yeah, they're all their own, their own, complete own media companies. Media companies are like the ones we work for are not experiencing the best time in the American economy. Yeah.

Are they buffeted by the same pressures and concerns that, you know, your average sort of American media companies? I think it's a little bit different. I think a lot of digital media companies monetize. They have a web-based presence that they then monetize with ads. These influencers don't have a web-based present that they're monetizing with ads. So they're doing different. The deals are structured differently and they're very dependent on these platforms. They're probably more dependent on the platforms than some media companies. And that can be good and bad. One is that they have incredibly compelling content that, you know, they delivered to people where they are. But they are, a lot of them are suffered to the same whims of the advertising industry. So, you know, if ad spending is down across the board, that is going to hit a lot of creators pretty hard. But creators also have more diverse monetization strategies, I think, or monetization models. Like a lot of media companies have like events or certain things that they're selling or maybe a subscription plan. We have T-shirts, our T-shirt, or email T-shirts is very popular. Just a little plug there.

That's awesome. I mean, that's very like creator, creator style. You got to get on like fan joy. We're doing what we can, man. But, you know, like these creators, they ultimately end up doing as launching products. If you look at someone like Emma Chamberlain, for instance, like she did a bunch of ad deals until she could kind of launch her own stuff. Now she has her own coffee line.

She does much of other stuff. These influencers, a lot of them, you know, gal meets glam or whatever, they end up launching their own clothing lines. So that kind of, it's the Kylie Jenner model where it kind of carries them past, you know, just doing SponCon. Support for the.

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your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork.com. Let's come all the way back to TikTok. What is the company doing? Have you heard from anybody who works? They have 1,500 people in the United States. They just hired Kevin Meyer from Disney. Like, I wanted to make sure we laid the foundation of just how big and diverse and quite frankly important to like the United States advertising industry, the creator economy has been. But now we're at this moment where a huge part of it might get pulled away. What's TikTok up to? I mean, employees at TikTok are freaking out. A lot of them don't know what's going on. I talked to one who just joined in sort of the advertising role recently who's also freaking out, wondering if she

should call up her old employer and try to go back because it's just, it's, it's very unstable. You know, there's not a lot of faith in Microsoft from a lot of young people that are working there. And, you know, TikTok has committed to, or they previously committed to hiring 10,000 people in the U.S. So I think those 10,000 job opportunities are definitely in jeopardy at this point. Why is there not a lot of, I mean, I feel like I know the answer, but why is there not a lot of faith in Microsoft? I think it's not seen as a very great company. People are familiar with Skype, which is sort of awful and other things linked in. When you think of Microsoft, you don't necessarily think of cool and young.

Even though they do have some... They have Xbox. They have, right, exactly. And I think they would probably integrate TikTok with that stuff potentially. But I think just the perception with young people is like, oh my gosh. The big thing that people are worried about is that is a potential... So so much of TikTok is this like global community. And a huge part of the culture is riffing off trends, which are really like spread throughout the world.

And so I think if Microsoft only buys the U.S. or Australia part of the business, that would, that would create this huge rift. And I think the way that a lot of TikTokers feel is like, okay, great, so we're getting cut off from the rest of the world that is going to continue to create amazing content, have the best product. And now we're going to be over here siloed where our stuff can. only reach a certain threshold. Yeah, and this is Trump saying he wants them to buy all of it, not just a chunk of it. Actually, that's what I interpreted Trump is saying. I don't really know what he was saying. I don't know either.

I think that, like, neither do the TikTokers. And so that's, I think that's what they're freaking out, especially around audience numbers and, like, are their follower accounts going to drop if only a portion of it is bought? What do people at TikTok think of Kevin Meyer at the new CEO? Has he, like, made an impact? I mean, that story, I think Virtchast listeners know Julia. You are friends of Julia. Julia Alexander, our streaming reporter, is like all over Disney all the time.

And she is obsessed with Kevin Meyer, who ran Disney Plus. And then Bob Chapec became the new CEO, which is supposed to be Kevin's gig. And he, like, took off and became the CEO of TikTok, which seemed like a great job. And now it's chaos. And he's the new guy. Like, are people bought into him? Do they think that he can lead to this moment? People love Vanessa Pappas, who is the general manager.

And I haven't heard that much about Kevin just because I think he is new. Most of the TikTok employees that I talk to, though, are like the more low-level people who are doing the brand deals and working with creators. I think when it comes to high-level strategy, I don't know how he's doing, but it must be an insane thing to walk into. Like he definitely took this job not realizing, you know, the chaos that would ensue, I feel. I don't know. Though I just want to say one other thing, Casey Newton has been like calling, like saying TikTok is going to get in trouble. TikTok's going to get regulated. And I was like, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.

And then finally he like wrote this piece like kind of being like, I guess TikTok is doing great. And then it all hell broke loose. That's the way it goes. I mean, particularly with this administration, it is impossible that they're going to predict. Yeah. It is impossible to predict what they're going to do minute to minute. A lot of people are saying, though, I mean, oh, Joe Biden, he'll save TikTok or whatever. Joe Biden doesn't seem to understand TikTok at all.

And there's no evidence that he would even be less harsh on it. I mean, I think he probably wouldn't do something like this. But, you know, he's already banned all of his campaign staff from using TikTok. So, you know, it doesn't seem like he's necessarily willing to go to bat for the app either. So there is this previous U.S. governmental response. Right. Beyond what happened literally last night with banning it and forcing a sale of Microsoft and all that, the Pentagon was not allowing TikTok on phones. Other government agencies were not allowing TikTok. There was this weird moment where Amazon said Amazon employees couldn't have TikTok and then they rescinded it for some reason. Yeah. Those concerns have been there. Do they, I mean, just from your perspective, do they seem well founded beyond what the TikTokers are saying? I mean, I'll kind of let the national security folks, like, speak on that. But, you know, there is, there is absolutely no proof of a lot of the things that people are alleging. And I think that's the hard thing is that, you know, TikTok, like any Chinese company has a very, that the Chinese government can sort of traditionally go in and take data or take things that they need. And there is this porous relationship there. But TikTok has been super, super adamant that that doesn't happen. Data has stored domestically. They would never, you. you know, work with the Chinese government. There is some indication that, you know, they've made

good faith efforts around that. For instance, they pulled out of Hong Kong when China took over Hong Kong. So I think, you know, I think that a lot of this is just a politically expedient talking point. My colleague Kevin Ruse wrote about this, but, you know, these people that suddenly seem to care so much about data privacy, you know, where were they when Mark Zuckerberg was harvesting all of our data for years and is still using it for very nefarious purposes? You know, it seems like a very convenient way to express concern about data privacy. It's like, hey, look, China's the bad guy, not these horrible practices that, by the way, all of the American tech companies pioneered. Well, it's because they get the data. I mean, it's fairly self-serving, right? If you're

a United States government, you can squeeze Mark Zuckerberg. Right. But you think the Chinese government can't squeeze Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, even though Mark Zuckerberg was literally like offered, you know, Xi Jinping the opportunity to name his child and just running on the great wall. Yeah, I mean, had a friendlier relationship with China. I think now it's, now it's in his best interest to kind of make them the boogeyman. I mean, we saw this at the antitrust hearing, right? His argument was, if not us, then a Chinese company will do it. Tick-Tock. And it kind of just feels like the United States government is taking that argument away from him, which I'm sure he's, you know, he's happy that Instagram Reels doesn't, might not have a competitor. I'm sure he's

pleased his punch about that. But then his best argument against having Instagram broken up from Facebook might be going away. I've just been waiting to see sort of the Facebook policy response to all of this, which has largely, until now, has largely been a very nationalistic. We are the exporters of the First Amendment around the world. We have to operate at our scale to keep users safe. And if we don't do it, China will do it. And if suddenly China isn't operating social networks in the United States or chat apps like we chat in United States, such a big chunk of that argument falls out. And so, we don't know. I have no idea how that's going to break, but it just feels like Facebook is at a real crossroads.

Yeah. I mean, I just think that cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world like this is not a good precedent to set. So much of the community on these apps is a global community. We're all so interconnected. And I think, you know, just slicing us off is it's not going to stop progress. I think TikTok will still continue to, say we just ban it, right? And it flourishes around the rest of the world. That's just going to make us seem less relevant, especially with the creator industry, that's going to make our creator economies seem less relevant. You know, for so long, our American creators have been sort of the A-listers, right? Like we almost like the same movie stars, right? Like America makes the stars and then imports them all over the world. I think if a TikTok ban would totally disrupt that. And I think we would see more talent. emerging from other companies, brands willing to work with those types of talent. I don't think that I think we would lose a lot of cultural relevancy, basically. Definitely what I was taught in college in the early 2000s, which is a very different time. But my sort of college economics professor would always say America's most important export is its culture. It's Hollywood. It's

the American ideal. It's all that. And if you lose the distribution channels for that, then like something is going to go very sideways. But that doesn't seem to be the interest of the administration. They don't care about that for sure. But it is all of those things that you should be thinking about. I mean, these are the ripple of facts that something like this has. And I mean, we didn't even get into WeChat and it's a totally different thing. But, you know, it's just heartbreaking to see all of these stories, too, of just people not being able to potentially communicate with relatives anymore in China. It's very scary to think of kind of like the U.S. closing its borders in that way. Do you think that like Facebook doesn't

operate in China. Google doesn't operate in China except for a very limited sort of AI research presence. That hasn't stopped those companies from being global forces. Do you think that because it's TikTok as a Chinese company that we blocked from operating here, that that will have a different kind of effect? Yeah, it hasn't stopped those companies from being global forces, but they haven't faced a lot of competition. Now they are facing competition. I think look at these Chinese companies that are becoming global forces. I mean, if you think about VidCon last year, there was literally 20, you know, big Chinese execs there to sort of like learn about American, you know, American creator culture and figure out how to essentially spread Chinese creator culture out more

towards, you know, other countries. So I think that you're right. It, you know, it hasn't prevented anything. Well, yeah, I just think these companies are all losing relevance. I think Facebook is, is facing steep competition for more Chinese companies. Chinese companies are getting a bigger stake in sort of all of these other tech companies around the world. Like, look at what Tencent has a stake in, you know? They're just getting more and more power in Silicon Valley. And I think the power that these platforms have in other countries shouldn't be underestimated. You know, like, yeah, if you're not in America, but you're in literally the rest of the world, that's powerful. TikTok was already banned in India. Yeah, recently, which has been crazy, too.

What has happened in the Indian creator, do you know? Like, has that shifted in some way? Have they all gone to a different app. Like, it feels like the amount of nationalistic app banning is, like, going up. And the sort of global creator, and maybe that's what you want, right? There's, like, an element of every country should have its own sort of localized economy. Yeah. I mean, Facebook has not been good to other countries around the world, right? Like, they have a certain amount of cultural ignorance that just makes them blunder into enormous problems.

you could make an argument that it's better for this to be a little bit more local, a little more tightly constrained. That's interesting. And I mean, potentially, I think that Facebook is horrible at creating things like TikTok or YouTube or Vine. Like, they just can't. They have a really hard time with the creator economy. Like they did allow a lot of Instagram influencers to get, you know, sort of taken a hold.

But that was before the platform shifted to video. So it's very hard. Instagram's a very saturated platform. And it's, I don't, I don't know if, you know, if you were going to build that type of world where everyone has their own localized, you know, creator economy, I think you'd need to build a new suite of apps. I don't think that that creator economy could live on Facebook apps, basically. I don't think the main Facebook app, I never open up.

That one. Yeah, that's a lot. I don't think of it as like a cool place to go. I think with Reels, my opinion of Instagram has just changed. like now just feels like a messy chaos overstuffed. It's totally overstuffed. It kind of reminds me of what happened to Facebook where they're like, let's put marketplace.

Let's put this. It's like it's such a mess. And, you know, Reels duplicates so much functionality of stories already that it just seems totally unnecessary. And it doesn't capture anything that, you know, is actually what's appealing about TikTok. So I just, I think Instagram is already slipping in terms of. cultural relevance and this is this is sort of another step towards its grave really is that happening as fast as as you would indicate like i think it's not i think it's like not immediate but it is

it is showing the same signs of what facebook made less cultural development which is like it's completely saturated the adults are all on it you know it is very tied to offline identity still it is not good at sourcing new people and sourcing new content like the explore page is not the primary feed that you go to. So you're not, you're not really seeing fresh stuff. And it's just, it's so confusing. It's like, what is it? What is it for messaging? Video chat is trying to be everything in one, but not really succeeding really well in any of it. And it's just kind of cloning all of these features. I saw this guy post his thing last night saying that he, you know, Facebook had cloned threads, which was this messaging system that he came up with, I guess, and how frustrating it was as a

developer to just see Facebook continue to just glom on, or, you know, or Instagram continue to just go on and glum on everyone else's creativity. I mean, this is what Facebook is going to get in trouble for the government. I mean, that's like the, this is what I mean, like, it's obvious to their copying apps. Like, more than ever it is obvious to Facebook copies and its competitors. And if their best argument was, well, if we don't do it, China, we'll do it. And that goes away. Like, yeah, yeah.

I just, you got to be wondering, like, Mark Zuckerberg calling up Joel Kaplan and being like, hey, we need a plan. Like, you have to wonder how he sees this actually playing out when the Trump administration is removing his best competitor, but the House antitrust subcommittee is like, you copy your competitors too much. Yeah. And like you're saying, like, if the kids don't think it's cool anymore, like the bottom falls out very quickly.

Yeah. I mean, kids are still on Instagram, but I think I just, I wonder how long that will be. I think every social platform has, it's kind of peaked just the way that these creators, like a lot of them don't last forever. It's like, yeah, Facebook is still around, but its relevance is waning. And I just, I feel like Instagram is kind of on the precipice of some of that. Just given the fact that it's so saturated and confusing. But yeah, do you think that like, I mean, my impression and I am not a policy reporter,

but is that like Trump is not going to punish Facebook for anything. Like it doesn't seem like, I mean, yeah, I know they drag him out to these hearings. But I just, it seems, I don't know. I'm like, will Facebook get broken up? I mean, do you think that's a real possibility? Um, there's 90-ish days to the election. You know, coming out of the hearing, what we heard from the committee was the next step is this report. So the committee is going to issue a report. I think they had already written that report before the hearing. I'd be honestly, it really felt like that they already knew what they thought. They just wanted to see, they wanted, you know, like, as journalists, you have to, you write the story about somebody, you have to call the person and get comment before you publish it. Like, I think they, this hearing was like, they, they, this hearing was like, they, they, just got comment from the CEO of this or these company. Like, did you do it? Are these your emails? And they're like, yes, those are my emails. And now they're going to issue this report. And they've,

they've sort of dotted the eyes and crossed the T's. The report feels like it's going to say, here's some proposed changes to antitrust law. Here's, we have to review these kinds of mergers. Oh, and BTW, we need to break up Facebook. Right. And oh, here's some rules for Amazon and Apple with their stores. I think that's what that looks like. I think it's always what it has looked like. I think the hearing was like an exclamation point at the end of their sort of investigation process. Well, they can do that. And then they've got to turn over. Like, Congress can't break up the company. And they can't, they're never going to pass a law in the 60 days before an election. There's just zero percent likely that's going to happen. So if Trump wins again,

who, like, is Bill Barr going to take it up? Like, I don't know. Because the DOJ would do it. If Biden wins, it's unclear that Biden has a coherent tech policy. Yeah. It's a thing that we always talk about. Like the other big thing, I actually wanted to ask you about how TikTok moderates, but like the other thing we always talk about is Section 230 and how the platforms moderate and should they moderate more or moderate less. And Biden's policy position on 230 is we should repeal it, which is not a very nuanced position

on Twitter. Right. Especially when there's like 45 bills in Congress to modify it. We actually just had, by the time people are listening to this, last week on Tuesday, we had Senator Ron Wyden, who wrote 2,000. 30 on the show. And he has a million ideas about what to do about it. Yeah. And Biden's position is we should repeal it. And so, like, I don't know that these companies are going to get broken up or there's going to be a rational or coherent policy from the top of the government, even after the

election. But I do think the Congress of the United States is going to issue a report that says Facebook should be broken up. And then we're all just going to have to stare at that for a while and, like, figure out what happens next. That step to me seems very likely to happen. Yeah. Do you like like Instagrammers worry about antitrust hearings in Facebook and Instagram breaking up? Do they think about how it might affect their businesses? I don't think that they do. I honestly don't think that they do. I think that their awareness of all of this policy stuff is basically is really minimal. I think the TikTok van stuff was was an eye-opener because it was like, wait, the government can affect this type of stuff. But, you know, I have not heard them, you know, I don't think any of them know

what Section 230 is. I don't think any of them know about the antitrust Facebook hearings or anything like that. A lot of these people, especially the ones that are making the most money, are young teenagers or people in their early 20s in L.A. And it's just not a community that's super plugged into the government stuff. I think it seems very far away and not relevant. I think that's appropriate. I got to be honest. That seems that's the big benefit, right? like a bunch of 20-year-olds reached an audience and built a business and made a bunch of money

without interference or help or like gatekeepers. That's the victory of the internet. Yeah. That's what it was the removal of gatekeepers and the creation of large businesses. It just doesn't look like traditional businesses. It looks like individual teenagers.

Which is terrifying in a way. Which is terrifying. But I think, right, that's, I mean, and that's what I sort of have built a lot of my coverage on is kind of explaining the other side. of it, that people don't see, that these are huge businesses, that they're completely intertwined with a lot of traditional, you know, entertainment stuff. And, you know, I do think that, like,

the big time agents and managers and stuff are paying attention to antitrust things do think very critically about platforms. You know, a lot of big agencies actually waited, like, a year, a year and a half to even sign any TikTokers because they just wanted to see if the app would, how the app, if the app was stable in the U.S. So I think that they think about technology, you a little bit more. Whereas the creators are more focused on what they do, which is content and programming and performing well and sort of audience growth and stuff like that. So we only have a few minutes left, but I did want to ask you about moderation. I see this on TikTok all the time. It's like somebody posts a video and then the caption is, my last one got

taken down. TikTok, don't take it down. They also post that just because they want to re-upload their viral videos. Yeah. There's obviously some gainsmanship going on there. But it seems like TikTok is a much more heavily moderated platform, which when you tie it into Chinese state censorship seems dangerous, how does that actually work on TikTok? I don't know that TikTok is necessarily more heavily moderated than Facebook and Instagram because there's pizza gate stuff all over TikTok and there's a huge amount of disinformation and mean comments that go unmoderated. But I do think that people are much more aware of the moderation.

You know, when a sound gets taken down, a lot of people are like, they're censoring me or it's this thing. And, you know, I don't know. I think TikTok needs to do that. I think if they overmoderate, that sets a good precedent. That's what a lot of these tech companies should be doing. None of them err on the side of safety, of user safety. So I think that TikTok is doing a slightly better job than they are. And I think that culture of everything gets taken down actually it sets a user expectation.

Yeah. You want to be careful. which is good, whether or not they're actually doing it. But the place you get in trouble, and PizzaGate point well taken, is we don't really know how the for you page algorithm works, and we don't really know what their moderation guidelines are. And so if you do make the claim that the Chinese government is running this thing, regardless of whether you think they're collecting more or less data than Facebook, we have no idea how they're programming what millions of teenagers see. And that seems troublesome. Yeah. I think that's another concern that people

raise. It's funny because people say that type of stuff and then it's like there's a meme on TikTok about this where it's like people freaking out being like and then you go on the for you page and it's like beep boop pop pop like stupid video. It's like is this what China wants to see?

Last question. I will admit what my for you page. I don't even have a TikTok account. The genius of TikTok is that you don't even have an account. Yeah. Right? You just like start using it and it figures you out and I've always never wanted a account because I've always been attracted the notion that I can just delete it and start over, right? And like, maybe it will

learn something else about me. But right now, my TikTok for you page firmly believes that I want to see videos about dad stuff. So, like, I get a lot of videos about grilling. I get a lot of videos about car repair. I get the, I think Charlie DiMilio just, like, transcends all TikTok algorithms. So I see the occasional dance video. And then just an absolute flood of videos. You have probably never seen this. It's the most dad thing in the world. There's a guy singing. I live in a world of OSHA violations, and it's people doing workplace accidents or like dangerous dangerous jobs on oil rigs. It's very funny and like the algorithm knows that I want to see that. So now I will ask you, what does your algorithm show you? You've got to have like the craziest one.

It's so, it's so dependent on the week too because I like over like and engage in certain things just to see what the algorithm will give me. I'm definitely in like frog talk or whatever, which is frog TikTok. And there's just all these jokes about frogs and It's just so much cooler than mine. Like already. It's so crazy. Yeah. But, you know, I don't know. I'm still in the basic TikTok to the mainstream one because I keep track of a lot of these like influencers.

But it definitely shows me a lot of like millennial stuff to kind of like crafting and homemaking and kind of quarantine lifestyle. Here's my daily quarantine routine. Yeah. Stuff like that. Mine is like very much like here's how to make the best cheese burger I've ever eaten. I'm like, this is the content I came here. for. I didn't realize there was such a competition, but it's there. We're doing this kind of

like celebrity package. We're like re-looking at sort of like the different types of celebrities. And I wrote a little thing on For You Page Famous, which is basically like when you're just famous because you're repeated like, you know, those people that you see on your For You page, the For You page will not stop showing you specifically because they're like, no, this person is someone that you need to follow. And it won't stop unless you follow them. And then you follow them. and it picks a new person. I don't have an account, so I can't follow anyone. Oh, yeah.

This is the genius of not having an actual account. Yeah. It's like at any moment I could delete this app and like the local data cache of who I am goes away. And you can be a new person. I feel like the day I'm going to have like a ceremony the day I delete TikTok and start over. Like I graduated to being in like I left high school. I'm like, I'm a new person now. Like I've always wanted a button like that on Instagram.

I always, because I wish that you could just hit a refresh all button on Instagram and just start over. Because, like, I get so much residual junk. Yeah. I mean, this is a, I don't know, I've never proven out my theory that not having an account means you can start over. I think you're right, because you, because it learns. But I still know my IP address. That's true. That's true, actually.

Like, I mean, tech companies are good at figuring out who you are, whether or not you locked in. There's no escape. But it's like a tiny kernel of hope that I can be, at some point, I can be a new person to this one app, provided it stays the United States. Yeah. All right, Taylor, I've kept you for way too long. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. People can obviously find you at the Times.

Where else can they find you? Instagram, TikTok, for now, Twitter. I'm at Taylor Lorenz on everything. Excellent. Well, it was great to talk to you. Yeah, thank you for having me. All right, my thanks to Taylor. She is amazing.

You can follow her work at the Times. Almost everything she publishes is a must read, in my opinion. We'll be back on Friday with the chat show. It doesn't seem like this new cycle is stopping anytime soon, so I'm sure we have lots to talk about. I love hearing from all of you, what you want us to cover, how you want us to help explain these complicated issues, who you want us to talk to. So hit me up. I'm on Twitter at Reckless. We'll talk to you soon.