Much Ado About TikTok 57:39

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's all about history.

Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. A TikTok ban has been a hot topic for years now. I wrote about the potential dangers of the popular app in July of 2020 in the New York Times and Axel Springer's CEO, Matthias Duffner, made news and made heads nod when we interviewed him at the Code Conference and he called for an all-out ban. Yet recently, the effort seems to have gained momentum.

The House voted to force a divestiture of the company earlier this month, a bill that will have a harder time in the Senate. And already eager investors like Steve Mnuchin are exploring consortiums to buy the company.

Today, we wanted to dig into the drama with two guests who have distinct points of view on the matter. Alex Stamos is the former chief security officer at Facebook who left the company in 2018 after warning the social network's top executives about foreign manipulation on the platform. He went on to run the Stanford Internet Observatory and now is chief trust officer at cybersecurity company Sentinel-1.

Taylor Lorenz is a columnist for The Washington Post covering technology and online culture and was previously a tech reporter for The New York Times. She's the author of the book Extremely Online and the host of a brand new Vox Media podcast called Power User. She also happens to be a power user of TikTok.

Our question this week comes from Ellen Pau, the former CEO of Reddit, which just went public last week, who is now the CEO of diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include, and Anika Collier-Navaroli, a senior fellow at Columbia Journalism School and a former senior policy official at both Twitter and Twitch. We'll be back with their question and with Alex and Taylor after this break. ♪

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Welcome, Taylor and Alex. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you, Cara. Glad to be here. So everyone's been talking about TikTok. It's really gotten so much press recently because of this recent bill in the House. We'll get to that. But I want a quick headline from each of you to start. Should the U.S. ban TikTok? And yes, I'm using the ban word.

but it's sort of not a ban because no one's going to lose TikTok. Let's say that at the beginning. But yes or no, and in one sentence, why? Taylor, let's start with you. I think if lawmakers want to address these concerns around data privacy and protecting Americans, I don't know that this bill is the answer for them. It seems like targeting a specific app and not addressing the problems with...

Alex?

and the national security threat that comes with it. So Alex, first, why don't you briefly talk us through the risks that TikTok poses if it remained owned by a Chinese company and has been, something I've written about years ago, and also something that the senators were just briefed on, the House was briefed on by all kinds of public officials, security officials this week. The Senate was just briefed as the House had been last week. So why don't you go through the risk? Why don't you put it out there from your perspective?

Yeah, so TikTok's a fascinating example because it really is the first example

Chinese consumer internet company that has just one in the marketplace, right? Traditionally, Chinese apps had a huge benefit from the actions of the People's Republic, especially the Great Firewall. So WeChat, for example, is used a lot by folks in the Chinese diaspora all around the world because it's the only way you can talk to family members. But in this case, TikTok just built a product that beat out their competitors.

So I do think, and we can discuss this, I do think there is some just overall concern of finally China has cracked the code of how do you build stuff that people want to use. But I think the legitimate national security risk fall into two categories. One is data access and the other is algorithmic manipulation. So on the data access side, in the course of doing business, these companies gather up a huge amount of data, right? They have apps on people's phones. Those apps do things like contact upload,

They'll have access at least to coarse-grained location data. TikTok has tried to be careful not to use fine-grained location data so they can't get you within a foot, but they can know roughly where you are. But they also know a lot about people's interests and their interactions with one another.

And so that's the kind of data that all these companies have. And one of the concerns is that the People's Republic of China in particular is really good at data mining large data sets. Over the last 15 years or so, what we've seen is attacks by the Ministry of State Security, the People's Liberation Army, where they go and they grab huge data sets without a specific target. And then that's useful for them in the long run. The Anthem data breach, the Office of Management and Budget breach,

The Sabre system, the database for Sarwood Hotels. Like, why would they want that? Well, you put all those things together and you've got the security clearance applications, the SF-86s for everybody who works in the CIA. You have their healthcare information because they're Anthem customers. And so you can tell who's getting healthcare from the CIA. Then you can find out their flight information. You can find out what hotels they stay at.

Right? Yeah, lots of data. Right, and so the trainings are really good. All countries hack, but when you look at other countries, you're often seeing them go for like, I want specific data on this person. And what the PRC has done is like, let's just grab terabytes, petabytes of data, and let's do it. And so that's one of the big concerns is like, we don't have a specific thing other than if they have access to petabytes of TikTok data, they have a long history of...

utilizing that for their national security purposes. So because they can, and they probably will, is your point, which is my point often. Taylor, TikTok CEO, Shou-Chu, told Congress that, quote, ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country. That may not matter, but you've cited that TikTok is also owned, correctly, by international investors, including many in the U.S.,

as well as their employees. Do you think it mitigates the concern over Chinese government's access to data or possible access to data and its influence of the algorithm? Yeah, well, first of all, they don't influence that. There's no evidence that they influence the algorithm in any way or have ever influenced the algorithm in any way. TikTok is not a Chinese, it's not an app that operates in China. It is based in Los Angeles and Singapore. It's incorporated right here in America. It was originally based in America as Musical.ly right here in Los Angeles.

before it was sold to, you know, they sold a steak to ByteDance in 2017. And again, there's no evidence that the U.S. user data for TikTok is stored in Texas on, you know, servers controlled by Oracle, a U.S. company. And there's no evidence that China or any nefarious actor has ever sold

access that data or had access to it. Not to mention, they could just buy, even if you were to sell TikTok, they could just buy a ton of that data on the open market. They could get it elsewhere. They could steal it. Of course. And also, there's no evidence. To ban an app is a pretty extreme, you know, it's a pretty extreme action. And we just have zero evidence that that data has ever been compromised. I'm going to get Alex to make a response, but the fact that they could and they have, I

all over the world seems to me a relatively strong concern here. Of course. I consider it a strong concern, but I think this is, you know, to ban a communications tool that 170 million Americans rely on, I think we need to see evidence of some sort of wrongdoing. So far, we haven't. I'm totally willing to admit that, you know, who knows, right, what they can do. But what

we have seen, this has been an investigation for the past five years, and we still have not seen a smoking gun. If we're going to take such drastic action, shouldn't we see any proof? Yes. Okay. All right, Alex, any response? Because as I know, let me just, before you start, I've covered a lot of Chinese tech companies and they have wielded power over their CEOs every single time. So go ahead.

Right. So first, I mean, we do have evidence here. The actual physical location of the data does not matter. What matters is where physically and over whom do the People's Republic have influence who has access to query that data? So it could be physically sitting anywhere. It's Oracle, right? That controls the data. So let's go back a little bit. So TikTok traditionally was an AWS. Yes.

and claimed that their employees in Beijing could not access Americans' data. This was a claim that they made publicly. That turned out to be false. Beijing-based investigators utilized their access to TikTok's data to investigate Emily Baker White and other journalists who were writing critically of the company. So they've lied. They didn't investigate her, right? Okay. They pulled her data, right? Like they went and we have internal documents that show that...

They looked up her info as other tech companies have done to other journalists, which is totally unacceptable, by the way. Right, but that is utilizing her data, right? And it's the Chinese government. Let's be clear. And it's the Chinese government who's driving that. I don't think it was the Chinese government. It was employees.

So I have had employees of mine who have been threatened by their parents because they're Chinese Americans, but their family's in China for access to data or access to information that would be useful to Chinese government. Like every tech company has been dealing with the fact that the Ministry of State Security

considers anybody of Chinese descent to have a responsibility to the PRC. The employees don't feel that way, but the PRC feels that way. And they will utilize... Well, we have no evidence that the employees have ever even felt that way. So first, Beijing, we know that Beijing has access to the, had access to this data. Now they do have this plan, U.S. Data Services, which is to move the data out of AWS into Oracle-based systems and there to be protections there.

I think this isn't a crazy idea. The problem is, is there's no legal standards for what that looks like. And there's no American agency that is qualified to go audit and to go make sure those things are true. So a model in which TikTok operated as a Cayman Islands company,

that had ByteDance as an economic owner, but the data was being protected in U.S. data centers, it was not accessible to folks who could be influenced by the PRC. I think that's actually a reasonable outcome. The problem is it's just totally voluntary, and they have not released any of the information necessary for external observers to validate that that's an appropriate way forward. Let me just say, Taylor, they can't. That is, I think, what Alex is saying, is they have the ability and they have the history of doing it. But then if they can't...

they can, why do we have zero evidence of it ever happening? I mean, we know exactly that they went after a set of reporters who used to be at BuzzFeed, a U.S.-based reporter who were able to get evidence. That was not the PRC that had those employees look up Emily's info. It was not. But they were not influenced by the PRC. And they were immediately fired, by the way. Again, if we're going to

They were immediately fired because it got caught, not because they had security protections internally that found it. I totally, yeah, I totally agree. Like, I had the team whose job it was to do this at Facebook, and we would constantly fire people who did inappropriate data access, and clearly this was approved by ByteDance corporate. ByteDance in China had the journalist's data in the end, so that was a problem.

It ultimately got to China. Well, it's just the one example that's never been... But that's the problem is we have no ability to see into how this thing works. I totally agree. I'm going to move you both on here. So let's talk about tech storage because the last time there was a frenzy of national security concern and watching around TikTok, we got Project Texas.

initiative to move all American TikTok user data to Oracle, which is a U.S.-based company. In January, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok had already spent over a billion dollars on the effort to convince U.S. lawmakers that this is safe and also report a number of problems, including informal rollbacks of their data sharing rules, which one employee in the report called a wink and a nod. Alex, what's your assessment of Project Texas? And do you think it's been a good faith effort by TikTok? And then Taylor, I'd like you to respond.

So the model here is a model that we're seeing actually around the world for companies to operate and to address the data flow issues. This is effectively how the United States...

how a number of our companies are operating in Europe is by the creation of European subsidiaries where the code that's written comes from the U.S. still, but the data itself is controlled by employees who are covered by GDPR, who are European citizens, and that they put controls in place so that American laws like FAA 702 and FISA warrants can't touch it.

right? So this is not a new idea. It's actually an idea that American companies use to deal with this ECJ ruling, this European Court of Justice ruling that we're not going to go into because we only have one podcast. But it is a model that can work. The challenge here is that

I can't tell you if it's a good faith effort or not. It could theoretically work. One, the choice of Oracle is clearly a political choice. Oracle is the most pro-Trump tech company. And so clearly, like the co-CEOs, you know, give all this money to Trump. Safra Katz is on his committees. Like that was clearly trying to basically— She's one of the top executives there, but go ahead. Yeah.

Clearly trying to pay off, you know, this is basically a way to pay off Trump supporters to try to build support on the Republican side. And maybe it worked. I mean, we can talk about Trump's change in feeling here, but that might be one of the things that was effective was that Oracle is now making a gazillion dollars, you know, doing this work. Two things you're saying. This has happened before and you can't tell it's good faith. Taylor, you respond to this.

Yeah. I mean, I think, as Alex said, we need to have more systems in place to protect data. We need to figure out how to, I think, operate in a global economy with apps from all over where we have data privacy protections. And I would love more oversight. And what do you think? Do you think this is a good faith effort on their part, Taylor? Yeah. I mean, I think that the company wants to continue to operate in America, and they will probably do whatever they can to kind of

operate in good faith. But as Alex said, I don't trust any company. I wouldn't trust Facebook either. I don't trust any of these companies to operate in good faith. And that's why we need extra protections, which I wish, you know, it doesn't seem like this legislation addresses. We'll get to that in a second. So I want to talk about the timing of the revival of this attempt to ban TikTok. It's been debated in Washington for a while now. And as Alex noted, Trump had an executive order around it, a pretty clottish one, but one nonetheless, and it led to

the Committee on Foreign Investment, to be part of figuring out what to do, which they've done before with other companies, other internet companies. But a lot of people have linked these renewed and heightened attempts to ban the platform to the content surrounding the war in Gaza and the fact that sentiment on TikTok skews towards sympathy with Palestinians. Some, like my Pivot co-host Scott Gallery, are concerned that this could be the result of foreign propaganda. There's absolutely none of this, you know...

Sympathy with Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with TikTok or the algorithm. This is a longstanding belief among young people that goes back far before TikTok, as my colleague Drew Harwell has reported. There's zero evidence of algorithmic manipulation. And I think that a lot of people in power in Washington don't like the fact that TikTok has become a really active hub for progressive activism. And so you see them sort of trying to claim, oh, these kids are just being brainwashed. In fact,

these kids are expressing the same exact sentiments across the internet and have been even prior to when TikTok launched in the U.S. All right, Alex? Yeah, no, I think Taylor's right here. I think there's no evidence of algorithm manipulation. The concern comes out of the fact that more than pretty much any other social network, TikTok is driven by the algorithm, right? Like the number one determinant of what you see on Twitter or Facebook or threads is who your friends are, who you follow. Right?

the number one determinant on TikTok is they decide, which is what's made them incredibly effective is the power of this algorithm. But it also means that their ability to twist things is pretty unique, even compared to other large social media companies. But that being said, we don't have any evidence. It does seem like, as somebody who teaches 18 to 22-year-olds all the time, this does seem to be the kind of sentiment that they're reflecting everywhere, including on campus, including possibly in a protest in my class. We'll see in the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, and also it's the biggest. It's the biggest. It's where everybody is and where these particular demographics are. Yeah, I mean, the worst interpretation you can have is like TikTok is really good at pushing engagement. So like all the stuff people used to say about, you know, the big American social media companies, TikTok's actually refined that.

in that it's really, if it's hot, it goes hot, very hot, right? And so the fact that like, it is a place where you can definitely enter into an echo chamber. People want to be in echo chambers. TikTok algorithm know that. And so, but I've seen no evidence that they're actually turning that knob specifically on Gaza. It's just that the way they do optimization means that if you watch a little bit of this content and react positively, you get a lot of it.

Which is the same on Instagram now, too, especially with their recommendations. Like, all these platforms are moving to more algorithmic recommendations. TikTok's won this battle, right? Like, TikTok, basically, everybody has to follow TikTok in their model if they want to chase the people, chase the eyeballs. It's a better mode of content delivery. Yes, it is. Okay, so we have regulations, Taylor, around foreign ownership broadcast media not to exceed 20%. We can thank such laws for Rupert Murdoch's citizenship. Yay. Isn't...

That just the government recognizing that social media is media. This is something Ed Lee brought up. I've always said it. I think TikTok's entertainment. I think it's a broadcast network. Talk a little bit about this because we do have these regulations for a particular reason. And tech seems to always get to push its chair out and say, we're not. We're a platform. I think they're media.

Well, I think that ignores, I mean, look, there is a media component to TikTok, but I think it really is so much, it's so radically different than a media company in a lot of other ways. Explain why.

Well, first of all, it's highly interactive, right? Media is a one-way distribution system, and it's sort of editorial choices made by a small group of people that are publishing out to a wide group of people that don't really have much back and forth. TikTok is a social network. It is a platform. It's a communication tool, fundamentally. And it's not just content delivery through an algorithmic feed. Yes, that is a core platform.

Part of it, it's also direct messages. It's live streams. It's a million other different ways you can interact. And so I think it's much more... It's just as much a messaging app, for instance. I mean, many of these...

companies have even said people use these apps primarily as messaging apps as it is, I would say, a media, you know, a media platform. And TikTok especially, because TikTok is far more highly interactive than a lot of other apps, I would say, because of the duet feature and all of these other ways that people really build off of each other. It's not just a single... So it's not... What about, Alex, redefining what a broadcast network is? Because it is something else. It's another...

It's like a turducken of media. Yeah, we're watching the Supreme Court wrestle with this in the last several months through the Netchoice cases and now Murphy v. Missouri, which is that you hear the nine justices always trying to look like, is it like a newspaper? Is it like a TV station? Is it like a bulletin board? And these companies, it's very hard to go back and like, what would Thomas Jefferson think about? If we reanimated Thomas Jefferson, the first thing would be like,

oh, please God, let me die again. Why'd you bring me back? And then the second would be complete shock on everything about our world. Like trying to apply these media ideas and especially in the United States, First Amendment ideas to social media is incredibly hard. And it's all about metaphors. And I don't think it's any of those things. I think-

It is both a situation in which companies have editorial judgment because they are judging both what can be on and what can't, right? So they have baselines of certain hate speech, child exploitation, terrorism. These are things that we don't want. Some of which is illegal. Most of that stuff is not illegal in the United States.

So they are making editorial decisions above and beyond what the law requires them to do. And then above that, they decide what trends and what doesn't. And like Taylor pointed out, that because of the success of TikTok, now lots of platforms are going towards that direction of the algorithmic feed. And that is an editorial decision, just like a newspaper. But they're also speech platforms because these platforms generally –

Most of the content is coming from non-employees and it's coming from people around the world. Unlike an American TV station, one of the differences is if you're on Facebook, for example, 95% of Facebook's users are outside of the United States. And so you're seeing a ton of content that is not created by Americans.

even though the platform that is carrying them is American. And so I think like a lot of this stuff is just very hard to apply. We need to come up with our own rules that like going back and trying to fit it into television regulations from the 1950s doesn't make sense to me. Right. So propaganda misadventures are problems that plague all social media platforms, as you noted, Taylor.

Is there something different about TikTok? Or is it just the size of it? Because everyone is copying it, as you noted. Yeah. I mean, I think what TikTok did is it gave, you know, Meta and Google a run for their money. And...

It also pioneered this mode of algorithmic discovery. It broke that model of friends, this burden on the user where you have to log onto the app, you have to find people to follow, you have to subscribe to them, and then you get all their content. So Musical.ly was taking off in the U.S. when ByteDance bought it, and I think it also allows a lot more in-app video editing. It really carries on Vine's legacy in that it's a really mobile-first platform.

communications. Alex, how do you think it's different? It just is pioneering this area, correct? Or has it perfected it? They had the best algorithm for folks. They figured out the creator relationship. Like Taylor said, they allowed you to do all your editing in your phone, right? So the

quality of what you can do in your phone versus, you know, YouTube, that's all people taking offline into Final Cut Pro into, you know, big Mac workstations, right? Mr. Beast does not edit his videos on a phone, but I expect 98% of the interesting TikToks are being edited on the phone. They're not being edited professionally and avid or whatever.

And I think that's a huge deal, like Taylor said. That also being said, it's also probably going to be a flash in the pan, right? Like you drive up and down 101 and you see the bleached skulls of the tech companies that came before. You know, things get big, things get small. As you know, Kara, this is like Mark Zuckerberg's big driving fear is becoming mice-based. And there's no evidence that TikTok will be as dominant as it is right now. It's quite possible, you know, kids will move on to something else at some point because that's what young people do. That's one thing I absolutely know that will happen.

We'll be back in a minute. Let's talk about the current bill in Congress for both of you and what it does, because it is here. Whether we like it or not, it's here, depending on what side of the equation you're on here. So let's start. Actually, I'm going to start with you, Alex. What does the bill in its current iteration get right and wrong? And let me say what you wrote on threads.

That's why it's incredibly important to get this TikTok bill right. The focus on speech instead of privacy, the specific naming of ByteDance when neutral criteria would clearly suffice, and the pulling in of American tech companies via the App Store provisions are all serious weak points. A federal privacy bill that protects users' data and also controls data flows to our adversaries would be more defensible and more comprehensive. So why don't you talk about this and then Taylor? Yeah, so what the bill does is it gives 180 days

for any company that has over a million monthly users that carries speech. And they define this as pretty broadly from chat all the way up to video, up to audio and such, that is beneficially owned by a Chinese corporation to disgorge that ownership within 180 days. Otherwise, the enforcement is against the app stores. App stores are not allowed to carry their apps.

Okay, so like you said, I'm not a law professor, even though I play one on podcasts sometimes, but my colleague Evelyn Dueck and I did a long podcast on this. And the details that we talked about that a number of law professors are worried about. One, it's a bill of attainder. So it has fair criteria, but it also then says that

on top of the fair criteria, this should be by dance, which is just stupid, right? Like it's just not necessary. The bill of attainder thing is in the constitution that you're not allowed to pass laws saying Taylor ends as a bad person, put her in jail, right? Like that would clearly be unconstitutional. That's just Mark Andreessen, but go ahead. Right, if Mark Andreessen could rewrite article one, that's what he would do, right?

Sorry, Taylor. Sorry. Me too, Taylor. And I used to work for the guy. Oh, yeah. He doesn't like any of us. We all joined. We're all going to jail in Mark. Hey, Mark, I do appreciate as one of your LPs that you continue to do well. But anyway, so the bill of attainder issue is an interesting issue. Huawei and Kaspersky have actually lost on this because there's been bills about them. But that was about government contracts. And so this hasn't really been tested.

The second is about platforms that carry speech. So it explicitly talks about platforms that carry speech, not platforms that collect data. That creates at least three different classes of people who can sue under their First Amendment rights. ByteDance themselves, the users of TikTok, as well as the tech companies, other tech companies. And that's the third problem here is that by saying –

This is effectively a bill that says we don't like this company, so Apple and Google have to exclude them. Apple and Google are fighting very hard right now in NetChoice and other cases for them to maintain the ability for Texas and Utah and other states to say, you have to remove all porn, or you have to remove this, you have to remove that, right? Like, whatever they actually believe about TikTok, it doesn't matter because they want there to be a First Amendment right incorporated that binds the states. And

And so they have to appeal this, right? Like in the end, Apple and Google have to take this fight because they can't let this stand. Yeah, they can't because it's already in the Supreme Court right now. Yeah. Okay, Taylor? Yeah, no, I mean, I actually agree with Alex and I agree that, I mean, I think the only thing I would add, and I think Alex said at the end of that Threads post is like,

there are real problems. We have real problems with data privacy here in the U.S. And this bill is very specifically targeted at TikTok. And we need to do, we need, you know, in my opinion, I think it would be a lot of these issues that the Congress people say that they care about so much would be better addressed, you know, potentially, I would imagine, through bills that target all sorts of tech companies, right? Because this doesn't seem to... Which have not passed ever. Exactly. Which doesn't seem to solve this problem that these Congress people keep saying that they...

have, right? And so... There are hundreds of Chinese companies we have to be concerned about, right? Yeah. By the way, CapCut as well, like, ban TikTok. I'm getting ads for Lemonade, ByteDance's Pinterest competitor, all over my Twitter timeline. You know, CapCut is an enormously popular video editing app and tool also that you can publish to now, which is similar to TikTok, also owned by ByteDance. Like,

This problem doesn't go away. It's like whack-a-mole, right? You just get rid of target TikTok. It doesn't fix the broader problem at play. Got it. Every week we get a question from an outside expert. And this week our expert is a two-parter from co-authors Ellen Pau and Anika Kalyar-Navaroli, who collaborate on our recent book, After the Whistle Blows. We're going to have a listen. Ellen was also the former CEO of Reddit, which has gone public. So let's listen to their questions. And I'd love you each to answer them. Each of you can take on one of them. Let's go.

I'm Ellen Pau, former CEO of Reddit and now CEO of Diversity and Inclusion nonprofit Project Include. We all know about the harm and harassment that happens on social media around the world. Why do you think Congress has failed to regulate U.S. social media companies but has been so aggressive in its plans to regulate TikTok? Hi, this is Zanika Collier-Navaroli. I am a journalist and a lawyer and a senior fellow at Columbia Journalism School, and I was a senior policy official at Twitter and Twitch.

And our other question is, do you predict that these regulations will open the door to Congress finally regulating U.S. social media companies? All right, Taylor, you take on the first one, Ellen's. Oh, sure. You do Anika's, Alex. Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that they are regulating TikTok right now is, I believe her question was, TikTok.

Because it is a threat to American social media companies' business models. You know, it is giving competition to Facebook and Google. I think, look, harassment is a problem, as she mentioned, across social media. I don't know that the government needs to be the one to solve that problem. I think that these tech companies could easily solve the problem. And harassment's not going to get better because we ban TikTok. Online harassment is not going to be solved by banning TikTok. Mm-hmm.

And you think they're doing it at the behest of, this is something Trump has said, right? And Elon Musk and others, that they want to help Facebook. Oh, no, not just Trump. And others. This is something that Drew and I have reported on as well. I mean, Facebook's done aggressive lobbying against TikTok. I mean, all of these tech companies lobby against each other. No one is a bigger beneficiary from this TikTok ban than Google and Meta. And there's a lot of interested parties that don't want to be regulated, right? Meta spends an enormous amount of lobbying. I think

I think we just need to take a look at American tech companies as we look at Chinese tech companies as well. All right, Alex, her set next question, do you predict these regulations will open the door to that? And since you were a Facebook executive, not in charge of the policy, but in charge of a lot of important things,

What is your answer to Anika? So, I mean, first, the reason Congress doesn't regulate the speech of Americans on social media companies is the First Amendment. This is what's being argued about in the Nestchoic cases. People who are really excited about the idea of Congress mandating content moderation choices need to go look at the laws in Florida and Texas and tell me that they think that that's a great idea, right? If Congress can do it, the states can do it. And that's like a, that's a

big barrier. And again, that's a weakness of this law. I think if you wanted to regulate social media companies, you do so from a privacy perspective that would be speech neutral, that would, that would, you know, succeed the first amendment test. Um, I don't think this is being driven by Facebook. I'm sure that there are people there who are supportive of it. Look, I just going to reset this. The people's Republic of China is absolutely the most dangerous authoritarian state in the world. It is the longest, the longterm risk for the United States.

In my day job, I do cyber investigations. And what are we uncovering right now? We're uncovering that the PRC has been planting back doors in the power companies, the water companies, the railroad companies that would possibly be supporting an American war in the Pacific.

in places like San Diego and Guam and Pearl Harbor. This is what's going on right now. These are the briefings that members of Congress are going. They're going into the skiff in the basement of the Congressional Visitor Center, and they're going and getting briefings, and they're being told that China is waging a massive campaign against American infrastructure, that every single day,

hundreds of different Chinese groups are breaking into American companies and that they have changed their tactics to prepare for war. So that is why Congress is interested in this. Now, do I think just focusing on TikTok by itself is a bad idea? Yes, I've said that. I think they need a broad thing, but it is not unreasonable to say that the People's Republic of China should not have companies

that have access to petabytes of Americans' data. Okay, very briefly, this is more than Russia. They're more technically competent than Russia, correct? They're more technically competent than Russia, and they also have, like, realistically, we're almost certainly not going to get in a shooting war with Russia. I think the odds of us being in a shooting war with China in the next 10 years is extremely high. It's something I'm very concerned about with my three kids.

is that that is what they'll be doing. And that'll be like the biggest moment of their young adulthood. They are planning for that, right? That is what the Chinese are preparing for, both from a cyber perspective and a military perspective. And if you think this bill's bad, wait until American troops are dying in Guam. The bill about speech on Chinese platforms is not going to be great on that day.

I guarantee it. Yeah, I just want to say, I think a lot, you know, it's very scary to me as a millennial that came up in sort of the era of the war on terror and the ways that that was used to restrict speech and surveil people online. It's very concerning to me when people want to restrict rights under the guise of

national security protection, you know. And so I, you know, again, I totally agree with Alex. I think we need to address these problems across the board, not just target one company, because that's just not going to fix the problem. And I want to see some evidence. I want to see the receipts. You know, we had Sarah Jacobs and Jim Himes and other people in these national security intelligence briefings saying, you know, I heard the evidence against TikTok and I haven't

I don't find it compelling. So I just think we need more evidence. Very quickly, Alex, answer, will it lead to more regulation of U.S. companies, yes or no? Absolutely.

I am hoping it leads to a privacy bill that regulates American companies that then also deals with the China problem. I don't think if this passes by itself, it'll lead to more regulation because it's so specific. And I think you'll get five years of litigation here. So I need you to address the censorship bill. Sarah had talked about that and others are saying it violates First Amendment rights, including Elon Musk. Do you do the censorship First Amendment?

claims hold water for you. And again, Alex, as you said, this could tie up the enforcer of the bill in court, but first, Taylor. Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with what Alex said earlier. I mean, I think that the way that the bill is currently written, it will be tied up. And, you know, you had a lot of lawmakers on the floor making it clear that the reason that they want to ban TikTok is not because of data privacy issues, but because they have issues with the content on the app. And

Alex?

I would not call this specific bill censorship. I do believe that, as I said before, the way it's written means that it's going to be litigated for years and that most of the litigation costs will be borne by American companies, not by ByteDance. And then they'll just keep working away just like they do. And so that doesn't fix anything. The reason I don't like this bill is I think this is a huge issue. It needs to be fixed. And so Congress should do it correctly the first time because this is probably our only bite at the apple, right? Like if Congress passes a bill and then it ends up being stayed by a federal court and then we end up in four or five years of litigation –

then the odds of Congress going back and passing some kind of comprehensive privacy bill that deals with the hundreds of Chinese companies that are entering the U.S. market is very unlikely. The other company that will probably actually fight this one that has a lot of money is Epic because they carry speech. Yeah, they have way more than a million users. They carry speech because people can chat on Fortnite and all their games. And they're 40% owned by Tencent. There's no access to Tencent. I mean, that's one of the problems with this bill is it has –

No difference between here are Chinese companies who are investing in American tech, which you could pass bills about, but there's...

that should be about like the investment and the money. That's a very good point. But there's no access to data on the Epic side. And it doesn't make any sense to have a bill that catches just every Chinese investor and doesn't only look at the organization, which again, where I disagree with Taylor is I think there's good, strong evidence that ByteDance has had access to TikTok's data. And anything that is built to prevent that needs to be strongly regulated and needs to be inspected. And there needs to be criminal penalties, which aren't right now, about lying about that.

Dozens of TikTokers went to Washington to protest the ban. A lot of people are against banning the app for reasons beyond they like scrolling through it. Taylor, talk about this response and the Gen Z millennial sentiment around the effort, because it's not going to go away. They seem to think it's going to go away. And, of course, TikTok put the thing in the app that pissed off someone like Scott Galloway, pushing people to call their representatives, whatever.

which some have called a form of foreign interference. So what is the reaction? How do you look at the reaction and the efforts by TikTok? Yeah, I mean, look, the content creator industry is massive, and TikTok plays a massive role in it, not just for content creators, but for small businesses, et cetera. I think that this is enormously unpopular. I mean, I know it is enormously unpopular with Gen Z and millennials. You know, not only do they rely on this app as sort of like a social tool for people

to connect with other people, but a lot of them rely on it economically. And to sort of rip that out from underneath them, I think, makes them mad and scary, especially when so many young people feel like the government is not addressing the issues that they actually care about. They just feel like the government is increasingly out of step with what

All right. What about their response? Alex, why don't you answer that, actually, the response from TikTok? Does it help or hurt them? TikTok pushing this push notification, which then you put your zip code in, and then it gave you the ability right from the app to call your representative's office, is absolutely the stupidest government affairs decision I've ever seen in the history of the tech industry. Wow. There's been some stupid ones, Alex. There's been some real stupid ones.

No, there's some stupid ones. And I was there for Facebook not giving Russia's data to Congress until being forced, right? Like until this moment, that was the dumbest government affairs decision ever. For the record, I was on the other side of that decision and thought that like transparency was the only way out, which eventually the company figured out. But this has now lapsed it, which is a joke I always make is like,

between Elon and TikTok, Mark Zuckerberg's the luckiest man in the world that whatever he does, he looks better than these companies. But like, it was incredibly stupid. You have, you know, these teenagers calling up totally overwrought. And one saying they're going to commit suicide. Yeah, which is like... Shooting, shooting. They were going to shoot. But I think it's...

But look, shouldn't those lawmakers hear the effects that this... Like, shouldn't they hear from their constituents about these effects? They should hear if it's real. But the problem is, is now, members of Congress are not going to think that any of these calls are real, that they're being driven by TikTok. That's the incredibly stupid thing. But how are they not...

not real just because somebody is alerted to this through TikTok. Yeah, I think you both have a point. They're a little much. It's a little much. And I think in terms, it feels like... It's a little much when the specific concern is they can manipulate kids. If they're talking about being manipulated by China, it feels like that. It went to users over 18. But I just don't understand why these Congress people...

They made it easier to contact your congressperson. Isn't that a good thing? Well, that's the argument from TikTok. First, on the 18-year-old, there are plenty of 117-year-olds who look fantastic on TikTok. Oh, I know. That's true. So we could have an age verification debate at some point. I totally agree. But there are plenty of teenagers who got that notification. And word spread, by the way. Like, word spread. I mean, in tons of groups, there was content creator groups where they were all posting, spamming, you know, the numbers, and then content creators telling their followers to call. So...

But again, I would imagine that a lot of these lawmakers, they need to hear from people and they should stop getting all pissed about it. I talked to a member of Congress who was on the fence here and this pushed them the other way. That's correct. I think it really did. That's crazy. I know, but it looked like China was manipulating them. You don't want to hear from people. I mean, it's...

It's not manipulation to say. We get it. But I think it backfired. I think it really did make me feel like— Oh, I agree that it backfired. I agree that it backfired. Right. It was a little too much, a little too much. So what happens—and by the way, they just keep publishing all these crazy calls, and then the kids look crazy, right? Those crazy kids. What happens now if the—I'd like to get predictions from both of you—if the bill passes through the Senate, how likely do you think it is that TikTok will be sold? Because Biden has said he will sign it if it passes through.

I think it's in the Senate. There's a number of senators who have expressed the same kind of reservations that I have and whose staffers I know who are looking into fixing it. I think it's highly unlikely we get a comprehensive privacy bill like I'd like, but I do think it's likely the bill will get marked up in ways to make it more legally defensible and to raise the bar so you don't catch...

American video game companies and stuff like that. If it passes, I think it'll still be litigated. It just really matters on the fine details here of if they have people who are concerned about this who have studied the case law go through the bill and get rid of all the possible exceptions. If it does pass, then I think there will be a pressure. If it looks like it's not going to be fought over for years, there'll be significant pressure on a sale to happen. There's a number of American groups that are putting together the money to do it.

I find it highly unlikely that President Xi will allow it to be sold. This has become a big issue, which is also a demonstration of the fact that TikTok is a subsidiary of the People's Republic of China, is that President Xi has the control over this. And he will not allow the Beijing-based executives of ByteDance to make a deal that would make them $100 billion, $150 billion, would be probably okay for ByteDance shareholders. He will not let them do that because he cannot allow it to become a standard that you force Chinese companies to disgorge

Because that's something that Europe will do, Australia will do. So what then? What then? Then it becomes a real problem because now we face for the first time Congress basically saying this app can't exist in American app stores. And so you will have litigation over that depending on what the exact enforcement mechanisms are. You'll see if they want to continue to operate, what they'll have to do is shut down all their American offices, move everybody offshore, and then provide it as a web app.

which we don't have a great firewall of America, so you might still have TikTok exist. And also, Apple and China have a close relationship, so it puts Apple in a really bad situation. It puts Apple in a real... Okay, so Apple's in a real difficult position. No company has done more for the Chinese Communist Party, including TikTok. No company has done more than Apple, right? Frankly.

And so, like, they are in a very difficult situation that they have kind of gone along with the authoritarian growth in China. China's changed a lot since that first iPhone shipped in China. It's actually gone much worse, and that has salami sliced them. It's been the boiling, you know, the different metaphors. It's been a very difficult thing for Apple to keep up with. Yes, and Taylor, what do you think is going to happen if it goes through?

People will still have their TikTok. Say this to the kids so they calm down. No, I mean, I think it'll be a disaster. I mean, of course people will have it while it's caught up in legislation. I think politically, I think that a lot of these lawmakers are completely out of touch with the culture on the internet and completely out of touch with the youth. And I think that it's quite disastrous politically for a lot of these lawmakers probably to participate in this ban. I don't think it's going to—I mean, you saw the one representative on TikTok trying to apologize already. Yeah.

I think it's going to be held up for so long. And as Alex mentioned, it could be a web app. Certainly, they're not going to sell it because that would set a terrible standard. By the way, Facebook, no American company would do that either. I think the bill is going to have to go through a ton of market. But there's so many issues with the current iteration of it that it's not like it's going to fly through. All right. Let's pretend it gets through and it gets sold. And China lets it get sold, right? Because this has happened before. Grindr, I'm trying to think. There's a couple of different examples. Smaller, but not as... Grindr was...

Yeah, U.S. Yeah, but there was China. Remember, they pushed him out. So there's precedent is all I'm saying. So Steve Mnuchin's among the list of investors. Obviously, Microsoft comes to mind, Oracle and Walmart. Remember, that was the old group coming together. So I'd love each of your predictions. If it somehow gets through, it gets changed properly, who would be the buyer from your perspective, Taylor, that would be a good one? And then Alex, and then I have an opinion.

I mean, there's no good one. Whoever gets it is just going to get a stripped-down version of the app that probably doesn't have the algorithm in it. It's just going to be Musical.ly. Why was Musical.ly forced to sell back in 2016? Because it was struggling to compete with American tech behemoths like Meta and Google. And so I think they're just going to be back where it's like, okay, it's their sort of janky app that no one uses and people, you know, I think it's going to be

be a disaster, honestly. Mark and Cuban told me the platform isn't worth much as long as the algorithm is not part of the deal. Exactly, because that's the whole competitive advantage. So then you just have a crappy video editing app. I think people will move to apps like CapCut. I actually think CapCut is integrating more and more publishing features. I think that people will just

start using CapCut as TikTok, honestly. CapCut doesn't have the algorithm. Alex, who do you think? Yeah, so the numbers are so big here. I think the only way you could do it is you get a bunch of investors to do the initial $5-10 billion, and then you do a SPAC. You go public with a SPAC that has a contract to buy it from ByteDance. And so effectively, you IPO it early, and then you raise $100-150 billion. And the quality of the product is...

So that is actually solvable, right? Like I said, this is what's happening right now with like Microsoft's, part of Microsoft's Azure in Europe. This is what happens with AWS. What you do is you create a company in which you have a contractual relationship where certain economic benefits flow through and in return you license the software. Now, the interesting question is exactly how does the algorithm get tuned and what data does it get trained on? But

I have seen this happen. When I was at Yahoo, we had Yahoo Japan, which we licensed them all the Yahoo software, but they operated totally independently and had their own systems and their own data. So you could create... If she allows them to, which I think is impossible. Yeah, that's not going to happen. But if she says to ByteDance, go ahead...

then it's in ByteDance's best interest to economically benefit as much as possible. And so that would include licensing all the software that's necessary. But again, this comes back to the problem, which is the software is being written in Beijing, right? Like I have friends who work at TikTok. I actually have some ex-students who work at TikTok who are doing the best they can. They're in the trust and safety team. And when you talk to them, when they have to get something fixed, they have to talk to Beijing. That's the problem.

That's the problem. And that is the issue that everybody is dealing with right now. And so you would have to have a licensing agreement to, you know, the new SPAC, the new TikTok Inc. in the U.S. The other big question is whether we would be right now TikTok services the entire world while except China. Right. And so would it be the entire world or would you have an America separate TikTok that then does not have any links to the rest of the world, including Europe and such?

I think they would do the whole world because if the U.S. does this, Europe will follow pretty quickly. I think there's no way that TikTok is the powerhouse app that's giving Meta and Google a run for its money that it is now. It is a severely diminished app in every outcome of this, you know, unless it's allowed to stay. Yeah. Unless Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway buy it in our consortium. No, I'm kidding. Let's calculate how many books you'd have to sell, Kara, to buy TikTok. A lot of books.

But one of the things is, another thing that I will point out, just I am going to weigh in here, the cost of doing this is enormous. This is not a slam dunk of everyone's going to make billions. It's a very costly compute, and they're against Facebook, and that is a big competitor. This is a gift to Mark Zuckerberg, no question.

You could imagine Elon Musk trying to weigh in because he likes to weigh in on everything and some others. You know what I mean? There'll be – obviously Google cannot, I suspect. Apple cannot. I mean, DOJ would never let the big – I don't think they'd even let Microsoft do it. Microsoft. They might let Microsoft. I think like under Alina Khan, like this would be a big problem for her if any big –

That's why I'm saying like a SPAC or something, because then you could have a Microsoft or Facebook participate as a 1%, 2% beneficial owner without any control, which also you could structure that, that ByteDance owns 20% of the stock from a financial but has non-voting shares, for example. Yeah, but at the very end, she can't do this because of strength and other things. She won't do it. Which again, is for me, a strike against TikTok, right? Like it is a national champion for them. And that is why people are taking it seriously, is that the PRC wants to dominate the 21st century. This is one of 20 ways they're doing it. Okay, but-

But they would never let this happen with Facebook or Google either. Let's not act like, oh, she is like doing this thing, but if it was an American company, it would be different. Of course, it would— Taylor, we're not allowed to be there, right? Talk about that. We are not allowed to be in their country because we would spy and surveil and use propaganda, presumably. I don't think just because an authoritarian country censors—

speech and controls an app store means that we should censor speech or control the app store. That'll allow the government to control the app store. Yeah, but there is a historical echo here, which is TikTok only exists because the PRC blocked the sale of Musical.ly to Facebook.

So Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy musically and the Chinese vetoed it. So to a certain extent, it turned about as fair play. I mean, from a WTO perspective, from like a trade, all this stuff about it's unfair to the Chinese, this is nothing compared to the rules American companies have to follow under China. And like you said, Kara, not a single large American company is allowed to operate there except a couple of

of enterprise companies that have to run joint ventures where, which actually, I think, again, going back to the data issue is exactly what Congress needs to look next, is you have a bunch of enterprises that are running stuff there in joint ventures that I find very, very scary. Yeah, I'm actually going to win because I actually covered all this with Yahoo and the rest of them. eBay was there, Google was there, I covered all of this. It was super problematic. And it does give more heft to the anti-tick,

owned by China people, for sure. And they were always meddling. I mean, where is Jack Ma? I know it's where is Kate Middleton right now, but where was Jack Ma was another...

one of the greatest entrepreneurs coming out of China. It's certainly in the minds of people. But I'm going to push you along. The last question, Alex, you said TikTok is the only one chess piece in the global struggle to gather and control information and an important one to be sure. But Washington's laser focus on capturing this one piece has blinded it to the bigger game. But so, Alex, talk about that bigger game. Yeah, so the PRC had...

has this plan that is pretty obvious, actually. So, you know, people act as if the Chinese government is this secretive thing. But the truth is, it's a massive bureaucracy and massive bureaucracies create lots of paper and lots of people trying to vie for each other's favor. Yes, they say it out loud. Right. And so if you have an intelligence team that can read Chinese, and we do at Sentinel-1, then you could just read these things of what they're talking about.

And the truth is, is they pretty much document, like, these are the industries we want that they're in the middle of a planning cycle now. But so the old one was called the China 2025 plan, which is these are the areas in which we want to be either independent or dominant. And, you know, now that has shifted to be social media, AI, and semiconductors are absolutely the top. And so there's...

direct infiltration via cyber means there's direct infiltration via human intelligence, which includes a number of investigations I've been part of is people who did not want to spy for China, but who get a call from their apparent or another family member saying the police visited and they want access to something that happens all the time in Silicon Valley, unfortunately. Um,

And that includes running offices here and MSS operatives working here, joint ventures. So if an American company wants to work there, they have to go into a joint venture in which they bring their intellectual property and they bring their source code. They've passed a bunch of laws. They have a law that Chinese PII can't come to America. So not only have they banned American companies outright, they have passed the privacy law that I would like to see the parallel of.

They also have all these laws around the intellectual property flowing there into the joint ventures where they get access to it. They get access to data. Got it. China bad. I agree. Well, no, I'm just, it's not just China bad. It is, they have a full spectrum. This is planned and they work together on it, right? Now the benefit of democracy and, you know, is that we all work in an open fashion, but as a result, we don't really have a plan to counter all this, right? You've got all these different aspects of the government and of private industry trying to do their best.

That is starting to change, like the CHIPS Act. I think the Biden administration, for all of Trump's anti-China speech, he wasn't very effective. Yes. And Biden has picked up the direction Trump went and has passed laws that actually work. And so like the CHIPS Act, the actions against Huawei and other companies, like the work to sanction high-end semiconductor equipment going to China, that has had a huge impact. And I think that also leads into what the Chinese are thinking here is from their perspective, we're...

we have declared war on them from a tech perspective because we are trying to isolate them from the best GPUs, the best chips, knowledge of AI systems, all that kind of stuff. And so from their perspective, like giving up TikTok, I think, would be a huge deal. All right, so the bigger game, we're missing the bigger game of the entire privacy thing is what you're saying. The bigger game is...

of these big things. Again, we have the AI visibility. We have semiconductor visibility. On the social media side, it's data. We should have a federal privacy law that affects American companies that say, this is the data that Facebook has to protect. But also, part of Facebook protecting that data is they can't store it in China. They could right now. I mean, that's the crazy thing that we have this TikTok discussion. But it is completely legal for Mark Zuckerberg to open up a Chinese data center and move a bunch of data there. I mean, he'll be sued and stuff, but there's not kind of an explicit law covering what he can and can't.

And I think we need that privacy law and it should affect American companies. It should improve Americans' privacy. The business community should want this too because what we're ending up with is we're ending up with 50 different content moderation and privacy laws in 50 different states and it's making the U.S. a much more difficult place to build tech companies.

Okay. Taylor, you get the last word. What's the bigger game from your perspective? I mean, I completely agree with Alex in the sense that we have no federal, you know, comprehensive data privacy. I think that's the elephant in the room here. I think that's actually quite a broadly popular issue.

sentiment among Americans, including young people, actually, who are keenly aware of the data that they're giving up all day, right? And I think you have to ask why Congress is focusing so much on TikTok and not passing something like that, that has so much broad public support and is instead pursuing these policies that I think are going to come back to really bite them, because you're targeting this app that is enormously popular with young people in an election year,

Based off hypothetical threats, it just, it seems like a landmine. And I think Alex is 100% correct that, you know, you don't get a lot of shots at this. We might blow it. If we want data privacy in this country, you know, don't blow it on, you know,

This one app. Okay. Essentially what you're saying is our democracy makes it so we can't plan and it'll be a disaster and therefore Kara's going to continue to use TikTok on her burner phone until we figure the whole thing out. Or Queen Kara is the only way out of this. That's correct. That is correct. Queen for life. Yes, that's correct. Okay. Thank you so much. This is really helpful. I think it's going to be helpful for our listeners too because I think it's gotten so caught up in TikTok

Just a lot of yelling, as is typical. And it's much more complex and nuanced. And I appreciate your insights here.

On with Kara Swisher is produced by Naeem Araza, Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Megan Burney, and Sheena Ozaki. Special thanks to Mary Mathis, Kate Gallagher, and Andrea Lopez-Cruzado. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get to buy TikTok in a consortium with me and Scott.

If not, you're banned. Go wherever you listen to podcasts. Search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back on Thursday with more.