--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Obviously, she starts 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 going to, of course, get murdered."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I can't even go onto it on my own phone. Initially, TikTok didn't say why they had removed the video.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And TikTok said that it has a policy against imagery relating to terrorist figures.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They told her that they accidentally removed her post, that they had locked her account.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So after all of the controversy, TikTok reversed the ban and apologized to Aziz.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so she is now free to apparently make critical TikToks again, if she so chooses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Aziz is not accepting the apology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she is absolutely rejecting the logic coming from TikTok.
--:-- Casey Newton: The Verge, this 17-year-old girl, Faroza Aziz, says she was kicked off TikTok for talking about the Uyghurs in China.
--:-- Casey Newton: The video sharing app has apologized. Aziz clearly doesn't think it's a sincere apology.
--:-- Casey Newton: Do you?
--:-- Casey Newton: Well, I think two things are true.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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?
--:-- Casey Newton: So let's remember TikTok is made by a company called ByteDance.
--:-- Casey Newton: ByteDance has many different apps, most of them in China.
--:-- Casey Newton: One of those apps is a clone of TikTok that is also very successful there.
--:-- Casey Newton: And there is stuff on TikTok in America that you just never see on that app, right?
--:-- Casey Newton: Like we have pretty good evidence that TikTok is more permissive than the Chinese version.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: That they think that TikTok will say whatever it has to say to stay alive.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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, right?
--:-- Casey Newton: Like this is a trust-based exercise.
--:-- Casey Newton: And, you know, I think in the moment, TikTok has a lot of good reasons not to tell the truth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, several senators are raising questions about that business deal and how the company is using American users' data.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Earlier this year, Senator Marco Rubio asked for an investigation into TikTok.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then, as I remember, even more senators came down on the app.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, I'm going to give you the two political figures involved here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The first one is Chuck Schumer and the second one is Senator Tom Cotton.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say they are concerned about the way that TikTok is collecting user data and about whether American citizens could be censored by China.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're responding by saying, "No, it's not true that we've removed any content."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'll give you a look at one of the statements that was issued.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: "We've never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content, and we would not do so if asked, period."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did anything happen in response to these senators?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the government opened an investigation into TikTok, and it has not been underway for very long now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the expectation is that there will someday be a report that attempts to make sense of these issues and maybe come up with something more definitive than journalists have been able to so far.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which part of the government is investigating TikTok?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's this body in the government called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is abbreviated and pronounced CFIUS.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: CFIUS.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm told it actually came up recently as a plot point in a recent episode of Silicon Valley.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because ByteDance didn't seek clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musically, CFIUS now is planning to investigate the acquisition.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one potential outcome of that could be they could say, "Nope, we are going to retroactively say that this acquisition cannot go forward."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And sorry, ByteDance, but you're going to have to spin off TikTok into its own American company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why didn't CFIUS weigh in on that initial acquisition?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Basically, when a foreign acquisition takes place, you can do it two ways.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it's that latter process that's happening now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Has CFIUS ever done something like this before?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, they did it with an app near and dear to my heart, Grindr.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Grindr? Yeah, the famous gay hookup app was sold to a Chinese company called Kunlun Group.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the time, no one really raised any national security concerns over it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then CFIUS suddenly had something to say about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sources who worked at Grindr told Reuters engineers in Beijing got access to users' personal information, such as private messages and HIV status.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's what set off alarms at a U.S. government office overseeing foreign buyers of American business.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The U.S. government recently ordered a Chinese company to sell the dating app Grindr.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I had no idea that the U.S. government could order China to sell a company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the truth is that it is a very popular app among queer folks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of those folks are in the military.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think CFIUS was concerned that that data could be used to understand troop movements.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It could be used to blackmail individual users who might have security clearances, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Keep in mind that on a hookup app, people are often exchanging nudes and other sort of very explicit information.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so CFIUS decided it was not comfortable with the acquisition.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it is forcing Kunlun Group to put Grindr up for sale and become an American company again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK. 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then on top of that, we got this news last night that...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A California college student has accused video sharing app TikTok of transferring private user data to servers in China despite the company assurances that it does not store personal data there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: TikTok is owned by Beijing ByteDance Technology, but says that it operates entirely outside of China.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The company is already facing a U.S. government probe about data storage and possible censorship of politically sensitive content.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we've got censorship and a credible fear that China might have access to the sensitive data of tons of American citizens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But a large majority of those TikTok users don't even care, do they?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I'm sure for the majority of TikTok users, that's true.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm sure the majority of TikTok users are not like doing a careful read on the community standards to figure out what they can post.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, you know, 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For mainland Chinese companies, it is impossible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last year, the government came down on ByteDance and said, "You've allowed this certain banned content to proliferate on your networks."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they had to shut down some of their apps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The government shut down at least two of ByteDance's apps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this question of will the Chinese government intervene in a social app is not theoretical.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We saw it happen to ByteDance.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think the question everyone is asking is, well, why wouldn't they do the same thing in TikTok?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: ByteDance can say whatever it wants to about how it wants to, you know, honor local laws and customs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But at the end of the day, what leverage does it have over the Chinese government?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't seem to have any.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All TikTok's other problems are coming up after the break.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And because they've been married for so long, they're starting a new podcast to keep things interesting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's called In Bed with Nick and Megan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And on the show, they invite their favorite friends and celebrity guests into their bedroom to make a podcast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm not joking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I haven't heard it yet, so I can't tell you if things get even more risque than that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that's certainly the concept of the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They cozy up with their famous friends and take a very candid look into their own relationship and life at large.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In some episodes, they even kick their friends out of the bed and then just get cozy with each other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like a whole thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bill Hader, Lisa Kudrow, Nick Kroll, and so many more get into their bed with them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Bed with Nick and Megan is out now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's playing wherever you play your podcasts.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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?
--:-- Casey Newton: It's very unclear whether TikTok can survive independently.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: Is there a chance TikTok could survive if this happens?
--:-- Casey Newton: I mean, it seems like it's doing pretty well right now.
--:-- Casey Newton: Well, I mean, in a lot of ways, it's never been bigger.
--:-- Casey Newton: Like 2019 was huge for TikTok.
--:-- Casey Newton: I think it is undeniably the social network of the year.
--:-- Casey Newton: It has been an engine of culture.
--:-- Casey Newton: We seen so many memes proliferating there.
--:-- Casey Newton: Old Town Road, which might be the biggest song of the year, became popular as a TikTok.
--:-- Casey Newton: There are many ways in which TikTok is kind of at the peak of its powers.
--:-- Casey Newton: And I think the question is just kind of how long can it hang on to that?
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: More people abandon the app than come back to it.
--:-- Casey Newton: And while that is true of most apps, it is more true for TikTok than it is, for example, of Instagram.
--:-- Casey Newton: And in order to attract its first big bunch of users, ByteDance spent a billion dollars on advertising.
--:-- Casey Newton: It's not spending that much money anymore.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: But also maybe some of that initial novelty about the app is starting to fade.
--:-- Casey Newton: And now it's got rivals.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: Yeah, so Facebook created a clone of it, which is what Facebook does whenever any other social app becomes popular anywhere in the world.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: 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?
--:-- Casey Newton: 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.
--:-- Casey Newton: And then you just start showing them to people as soon as they open the app.
--:-- Casey Newton: Like that's what TikTok is, right?
--:-- Casey Newton: And the more you watch, the more TikTok understands what you're likely to like.
--:-- Casey Newton: And so it just kind of keeps doing that until you get tired and shut the app off.
--:-- Casey Newton: So there are a lot of investors out there who think that they can build a better mousetrap, right?
--:-- Casey Newton: A lot of that video is either public domain or they can go out and license some variety of it.
--:-- Casey Newton: And then they just have to work on their own machine learning algorithms and their own user interface.
--:-- Casey Newton: And they think they can maybe win there.
--:-- Casey Newton: There's an app called Triller, which just raised, I think, $28 million to do the same thing in America.
--:-- Casey Newton: So I suspect we're about to see a lot of these kind of AI entertainment apps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I want to be careful about the way that I talk about this because obviously in America, we have a long history of racism and xenophobia against China, and I want to acknowledge that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the same time, the country's political systems have very different values, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We live in a democracy and China lives in an authoritarian dictatorship.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What you are seeing in this big public discussion about TikTok is essentially a clash of those values.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You look at the incredibly brave protesters in Hong Kong and the way that the Chinese government has cracked down on them, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's cracking down on people who just want the freedoms that you and I take for granted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think increasingly it may be hard for TikTok to escape that shadow, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If more people think, you know, TikTok is just an instrument ultimately of the Chinese government, then I do think people might abandon it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Casey Newton writes about social networks and democracy at The Verge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I'm just a dreamer and explorer of this life, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And each day I just sort of become alive to the tapestry of human experience.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's also got a very good newsletter called The Interface.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find it at theverge.com slash interface.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramasviram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
