Last week, the US House of Representatives, a dysfunctional body that hitherto could not agree on anything, suddenly converged on a common project: a bipartisan bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in the US, TikTok’s largest market.
American legislators’ concerns about the social media app have been simmering for years, mostly focused on worries that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance (and therefore TikTok) to hand over data on TikTok users or manipulate content on the platform. A year ago, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, told Congress that TikTok “is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government – and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns”.
These fears were amplified by the raging popularity of TikTok among US users. It has upwards of 170 million of them and their addiction to it has bothered Mark Zuckerberg and his empire for the very good reason that TikTok is the only other social media game in town. Six of the world’s 10 most downloaded apps last year were owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent. But TikTok, beat all of them except Instagram to the top spot.
TikTok is ferociously addictive, at least for people under 30. What bothers Meta most is that TikTok extracts far more granular data from its users than any other platform. “The average session lasts 11 minutes,” writes blogger Scott Galloway, “and the video length is around 25 seconds. That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session, with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.”
To date, public discourse about the platform has been pretty incoherent – as one critic pointed out: “From policymakers completely talking past each other to the media falling into false binaries when discussing TikTok and a possible ban, too many narratives on the issue have been contradictory, full of logical leaps, or incredibly reductive.” But two main themes stand out from the hubbub. One is that TikTok gathers incredibly detailed personal data on its users (data that may find its way to the platform’s Chinese parent); the other is that it may be a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist party (CCP).
The first is plausible but overegged. As the Economist puts it: “If Chinese spies want to find out about Americans, the country’s lax data protection laws allow them to buy such information from third parties.” The second proposition – that TikTok may be an efficient conduit for propaganda and misinformation – looks spot-on, though. After all, about a third of under-30s in the US regularly get news on TikTok and a recent study has found grounds for thinking that the platform already systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is respectively aligned with or opposed to the interests of the CCP.
And here’s where the question of what happens to TikTok takes on geopolitical and domestic political dimensions. On the former, it’s highly likely that the prospect of TikTok separating from ByteDance and thereby slipping out of the control of the CCP does not appeal to Beijing. So this congressional bill (which passed overwhelmingly in a floor vote on Wednesday) looks like bad news.
On the other hand, there was some good news last week for Beijing. First, Donald Trump became the Republican party’s nominee for the presidency. And second, he announced that he was against the bill. “If you get rid of TikTok,” he posted on his Truth Social platform, “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
For those who appreciate hypocrisy, this was a collector’s item. Is this not the same Trump who in 2020 tried (but failed) to get rid of TikTok? What lies behind this change of heart? Who can say: trying to read what is loosely called Trump’s mind is a fool’s errand. Still, it was interesting to learn that recently Trump reportedly had a “cordial” meeting in his Mar-a-Lago lair with a guy called Jeff Yass. Who’s he? Oh, just someone whose business happens to have a $30bn-plus stake in ByteDance. Sometimes you couldn’t make this stuff up.
What I’ve been reading
Matter of Interest
Viewing the Ob-scene is David Hering’s terrific review of Jonathan Glazer’s great movie The Zone of Interest.
Machine learning
Read Of Top-Notch Algorithms and Zoned-Out Humans, a sobering essay by Tim Harford about the downsides of becoming dependent on smart machines.
Science fiction
Superconductivity Scandal: The Inside Story of a Scientific Deception in a Rising Star’s Physics Lab recounts a gripping investigation by Nature magazine’s news team.
