Today, Explained - Don't curl your lashes and talk about Uighurs on TikTok

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

TikTok, the video sharing app that has taken the tweens and 2019 by storm, is now facing stiff competition, concerns over censorship, and a federal investigation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

so last week the 17 year old girl named faroza aziz who lives in new jersey posted on tiktok a tutorial on how to get longer eyelashes hi guys i'm going to teach you guys how to get long lashes so the first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously. She starts, you know, by grabbing her eyelash curler and curling her lashes. And then she says, then you're going to put them down and use your phone that you're using right now to search up what's happening in China, how they're getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there, separating their families from each other, kidnapping them, murdering them, raping them, forcing them to eat pork, forcing them to drink, forcing them to convert different religions, if not, or else they're kidnapping them, murdering them, raping them, forcing them to eat pork, forcing them to drink,

forcing them to convert different religions if not or else they're going to, of course, get murdered. Then she tweeted that she had been suspended from TikTok for a month. It's just a black screen and it won't let me go into the app. It says due to multiple violations, your account is suspended. So I can't even go onto it on my own phone. Initially, TikTok didn't say why they had removed the video, and that led to a lot of speculation that she must have offended the Chinese government, and that she was essentially being censored by them, even though she's an American citizen. It was right after I posted about the Uyghurs, so I thought it was very suspicious that right when I speak about it on a Chinese app that it's taken down. The company responded a little while later, saying that she had used another one of her accounts to post a

comedic video that happened to include a picture of Osama bin Laden. And TikTok said that it has a policy against imagery relating to terrorist figures. They told her that they accidentally removed her post, that they had locked her account. And they say the reason why they banned her and locked her out of the account initially is because she was using a cell phone that was connected to other banned accounts, including one of her own previous TikTok accounts that posted material that they did not deem appropriate. So after all of the controversy, TikTok reversed the ban and apologized to Aziz. And so she is now free to apparently make critical TikToks again, if she so chooses.

But Aziz is not accepting the apology. Let's bring up a tweet that she posted a short while ago saying, do I believe they took it away because of an unrelated satirical video that was deleted on a previous deleted account of mine right after I finished posting a three-part video about the Uyghurs? No. So she is absolutely rejecting the logic coming from TikTok. Casey Newton, The Verge. This 17-year-old girl, Feroza Aziz, says she was kicked off TikTok for talking about the Uyghurs in China. The video sharing app has apologized. Aziz clearly doesn't think it's a sincere apology. Do you? Well, I think two things are true. One is we definitely know that there is content posted on TikTok that we would not expect to see ever posted on the Chinese equivalent of TikTok,

right? So let's remember TikTok is made by a company called ByteDance. ByteDance has many different apps, most of them in China. One of those apps is a clone of TikTok that is also very successful there. And there is stuff on TikTok in America that you would just never see on that app, right? Like we have pretty good evidence that TikTok is more permissive than the Chinese version. But there's this flip side of it, which is when I talk to people who are really smart about China and security and policy, they will say that they do not believe TikTok on any of this stuff, that they think that TikTok will say whatever it has to say to stay alive. And, you know, I think you and I are never going to be able to open up the servers and see what is happening in real time,

like this is a trust-based exercise. And, you know, I think in the moment, TikTok has a lot of good reasons not to tell the truth. In 2017, the Beijing-based company ByteDance purchased the U.S. social media app Musical.ly, merged it into their TikTok app, and opened TikTok's headquarters in California. Now, several senators are raising questions about that business deal and how the company is using American users' data. Earlier this year, Senator Marco Rubio asked for an investigation into TikTok. Then, as I remember, even more senators came down on the app. Now I'm going to give you the two political figures involved here. The first one is Chuck Schumer

and the second one is Senator Tom Cotton. In October, the Senate minority is Chuck Schumer. And the second one is Senator Tom Cotton. In October, the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Tom Cotton, so that's a bipartisan group, they write a letter to the acting director of national intelligence. They say they are concerned about the way that TikTok is collecting user data and about whether American citizens could be censored by China. They're responding by saying, no, it's not true that we've removed any content. I'll give you a look at one of the statements that was issued. We've never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content, and we would not do so if asked, period.

Did anything happen in response to these senators? So the government opened an investigation into TikTok, and it has not been underway for very long now. But the expectation is that there will, you know, someday be a report that attempts to make sense of these issues and, you know, maybe come up with something more definitive than journalists have been able to so far. Which part of the government is investigating TikTok? So there's this body in the government called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is abbreviated and pronounced CFIUS. CFIUS. And I'm told it actually came up recently as a plot point in a recent episode of Silicon Valley. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, is a federal agency that has

wide latitude to prevent American companies from doing business with foreigners if there's a national security threat. Because ByteDance didn't seek clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musical.ly, CFIUS now is planning to investigate the acquisition. And one potential outcome of that could be they could say, nope, we are going to retroactively say that this acquisition cannot go forward. And sorry, ByteDance, but you're going to have to spin off TikTok into its own American company. Okay. So for the people who aren't following along at home, ByteDance, which is TikTok's parent company, bought into America when it acquired Musical.ly, which was essentially the predecessor to the TikTok we know now. Yes. Why didn't CFIUS weigh in on that initial acquisition? Basically, when

a foreign acquisition takes place, you can do it two ways. One is you can go to CFIUS and say, hey, we want to sell our American company to this foreign company. Is that okay with you? And then they review it then and either sign off on it or don't. But if they do not seek that clearance, CFIUS can kind of come in after the fact, after maybe some concerns are raised, and then kind of go through the investigation at that point. And so it's that latter process that's happening now. Has CFIUS ever done something like this before? Yes, they did it with an app near and dear to my heart, Grindr. Grindr? Yeah, the famous gay hookup app was sold to a Chinese company called Kunlun Group.

At the time, no one really raised any national security concerns over it. But then CFIUS suddenly had something to say about it. Sources who worked at Grindr told Reuters, engineers in Beijing got access to users' personal information, such as private messages and HIV status. That's what set off alarms at a U.S. government office overseeing foreign buyers of American business. The U.S. government recently ordered a Chinese company to sell the dating app Grindr. I had no idea that the U.S. government recently ordered a Chinese company to sell the dating app Grindr. I had no idea that the U.S. government could order China to sell a company. You don't have to be too creative to think of all of the fascinating and disturbing things that a

potentially threatening foreign security service could do with all of those photos, all of that messages and all that information. And the truth is that it's a very popular app among queer folks. Some of those folks are in the military. And I think CFIUS was concerned that that data could be used to understand troop movements. It could be used to blackmail individual users who might have security clearances. Right. Keep in mind that on a hookup app, people are often exchanging nudes and other sort of very explicit information. And so CFIUS decided it was not comfortable with the acquisition. And so it is forcing Conlon Group to put Grindr up for sale and become an American company again. Okay. If we're using Grindr as our precedent here,

we have reports that after it was bought by a Chinese company, Grindr allowed its Beijing-based staff access to sensitive information, sensitive data. And then on top of that, we got this news last night that... A California college student has accused video sharing app TikTok of transferring private user data to servers in China, despite the company's assurances that it does not store personal data there. TikTok is owned by Beijing ByteDance Technology, but says that it operates entirely outside of China. The company is already facing a U.S. government probe about data storage and possible censorship of politically sensitive content. And that's in addition to what we talked about at the top of the show, what happened last week to Feroza Aziz, which looks a lot like straight up censorship of political speech. So we've got censorship and a credible

fear that China might have access to the sensitive data of tons of American citizens. But a large majority of those TikTok users don't even care, do they? I mean, I'm sure for the majority of TikTok users, that's true. I'm sure the majority of TikTok users are not doing a careful read on the community standards to figure out what they can post. But at the same time, I think people want to understand whether ByteDance and TikTok can really build a firewall between the company and the Chinese government. For mainland Chinese companies, it is impossible. Last year, the government came down on ByteDance and said, you've allowed this certain banned content

to proliferate on your networks. And they had to shut down some of their apps. The government shut down at least two of ByteDance's apps. So this question of, will the Chinese government intervene in a social app is not theoretical. We saw it happen to ByteDance. And so I think the question everyone is asking is, well, why wouldn't they do the same thing in TikTok? ByteDance can say whatever it wants to about how it wants to, you know, honor local laws and customs. But at the end of the day, what leverage does it have over the Chinese government? It doesn't seem to have any. All TikTok's other problems are coming up after the break. If you're a fan of Nick Offerman, which I am, or his wife, Megan Mullally, who seems great, you probably know they've been a couple for 20 years, which they say is about 138

years in Hollywood time. And because they've been married for so long, they're starting a new podcast to keep things interesting. It's called In Bed with Nick and Megan. And on the show, they invite their favorite friends and celebrity guests into their bedroom to make a podcast. I'm not joking. I haven't heard it yet, so I can't tell you if things get even more risque than that, but that's certainly the concept of the show. They cozy up with their famous friends and take a very candid look into their own relationship and life at large.

In some episodes, they even kick their friends out of the bed and then just get cozy with each other. It sounds like a whole thing. Bill Hader, Lisa Kudrow, Nick Kroll, and so many more get into their bed with them. In Bed with Nick and Megan is out now. It's playing wherever you play your podcasts. Casey, Casey, if this breakup were orchestrated by CFIUS and TikTok became a somewhat more independent American entity, do we have any idea what that would mean for the app? No. It's very unclear whether TikTok can survive independently. Something that we know is that over

the past 18 months or so, ByteDance spent about a billion dollars on advertising TikTok in the United States. And many people, myself included, believe that TikTok would not be as prominent or successful right now had this other wealthy company not spent a billion dollars to get it in front of people. So while TikTok does show ads and is rolling out some new ways for itself to make money, I think you do have to ask yourself whether the company would be able to thrive over the long term as an independent company. Is there a chance TikTok could survive if this happens? I mean, it seems like it's doing pretty well right now. Well, I mean, in a lot of ways, it's never been

bigger. Like 2019 was huge for TikTok. I think it is undeniably the social network of the year. It has been an engine of culture. We've seen so many memes proliferating there. Old Town Road, which might be the biggest song of the year, became popular as a TikTok. There are many ways in which TikTok is kind of at the peak of its powers. And I think the question is just kind of how long can it hang on to that? Because at the same time, even though it's like very culturally prominent, I also know from talking to people who study these things closely that TikTok's user retention isn't that great. More people abandon the app than come back to it. And while that is true of most apps, it is more true for TikTok than it is, for example, of Instagram. And in order to attract

its first big bunch of users, ByteDance spent a billion dollars on advertising. It's not spending that much money anymore. And so I think the question is, how does TikTok continue to grow when one, frankly, like they're sort of hitting a saturation point in America, where I think, you know, if not the majority of people have heard of it yet, then I think we're getting close to that.

But also maybe some of that initial novelty about the app is starting to fade. And now it's got rivals. I feel like the last time we talked about TikTok on the show was with you. And we were talking about how Facebook was developing its own version of TikTok. Yeah. So Facebook created a clone of it, which is what Facebook does whenever any other social app becomes popular anywhere in the world. So Facebook's version is called Lasso, and it is now in Mexico and a few other countries where TikTok had yet to make inroads. And then there are a number of

other apps now that are raising money to create what you might call a kind of AI-powered entertainment app, right? Like the basic idea of TikTok is you have some like library of video, and then you use machine learning to figure out which videos are most popular. And then you just start showing them to people as soon as they open the app. Like that's what TikTok is, right? And the more you watch, the more TikTok understands what you're likely to like. And so it just kind of keeps doing that until you get tired and shut the app off. So there are a lot of investors out there who think that they can build a better mousetrap, right? Like a lot of that video is like either public domain or they can go out and license like some variety of it. And then they just have to work

on their own machine learning algorithms and their own like, you know, user interface. And they think they can maybe win there. There's an app called Triller, which just raised, I think, $28 million to do the same thing in America. So I suspect we're about to see a lot of these kind of AI entertainment apps.

So while it looks like TikTok has been having this amazing year behind the scenes, the brass might be pretty nervous about the CFIUS investigation, the looming competition, anything else? So I wrote about what I call narrative risk, which is just basically the idea that TikTok isn't going to be able to overcome shifting public opinion about Chinese-owned apps in America. And I want to be careful about the way that I talk about this,

because obviously, you know, in America, we have a long history of like racism and xenophobia against China. And I want to acknowledge that. At the same time, the country's political systems have very different values, right? Like we live in a democracy and China lives in an authoritarian dictatorship. What you were seeing in this big public discussion about TikTok is essentially a clash of those values. And there's a lot of anxiety in America about an internet that is ruled by Chinese values, where censorship is a given, where discussing politics is a no-no. You look at the incredibly brave protesters in Hong Kong and the way that the Chinese government has cracked down on them, right? It's cracking down on people who just want the freedoms that you and I take for granted. And I think increasingly, it may be hard for TikTok to escape that shadow,

right? If more people think, you know, TikTok is just an instrument, ultimately, of the Chinese government, then I do think people might abandon it. Casey Newton writes about social networks and democracy at The Verge. You know, I'm just a dreamer and explorer of this life, Sean. And each day I just sort of become alive to the tapestry of human experience. He's also got a very good newsletter called The Interface. You can find it at theverge.com slash interface. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.