Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are You. So today we're going to look back at TikTok. Over the course of twenty twenty three. This year, the video sharing network found itself in the crosshairs of politicians from all sorts of backgrounds and across the world, but primarily I'll be talking about here in the United States. Now,
this in itself is not a new thing. It's not like this all just started in twenty twenty three. In fact, back in twenty twenty, then President Donald Trump wanted to ban TikTok in the United States, citing it as a threat to national security. This may well have initially spouted from Trump's ongoing trade war with China, but it's a narrative that has held first years later. But it's not the only reason that politicians and regulators and various other
groups are concerned about TikTok. So let's break down some of the things that unfolded over the past twelve months. First of all, TikTok maintains it is an American company, but the truth remains that its parent company, Byte Dance,
is in fact in China. And it's also true that China has laws that require companies and citizens to share information with the ruling party, the Chinese Communist Party, to be precise, and that brings up the question does that mean Bite Dance has been using TikTok to gather information
about other nations? And that is a matter of dispute. Still, what's not in dispute is that China's government can get awful hands on with companies in China, often requiring that larger companies reserve a seat on the board for a report presentative from the Chinese Communist Party itself. So the thinking goes that even if TikTok is not actively working as some sort of agent for the Chinese government, it potentially could in the future, and no one at TikTok
would have any say in the matter. Now. Back in March, the US Department of Justice and the FBI began an investigation into TikTok, and on March twenty third, TikTok CEO Shall Chew submitted testimony to the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce in an attempt to smooth things over. Now, Chew is from Singapore. He actually served in Singapore's armed forces.
He stated that TikTok would keep US citizen data stored on secure servers located within the United States, so their information would not be stored on servers in China, and that they would protect that information quote from unauthorized foreign access end quote. The testimony pointed out that TikTok was partnering with Oracle for this purpose, and Oracle has a
pretty darn good reputation for that kind of thing. Chu also categorically denied that China has any influence over the company, pointing out that byte Dance is actually a global company and saying that Citizen Lab investigated the possibility of data transferring from TikTok to China and came back with no
evidence that any such transfer has actually happened. Essentially, Chu was saying that the perception that China's government could put the screws to Bite Dance and then by extension to TikTok was just a good old case of thud, that is, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But then we get to July of this year and we get another story that raises the scary question of espionage once again, but in this case it
wasn't about targeting US citizens. Rather, a former Byte Dance employee alleged that representatives of the Chinese Communist Party were able to access TikTok's data in an effort to track the activities of protesters in Hong Kong. This information came out as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit brought against By Dance by Jintao Yu, who was a former engineer
with TikTok. By Dance officials denied the charges, and they also pointed out that you had made no such claims in the immediate wake of his termination, because this was
happening five years after you had been fired. That he was bringing forth these allegations that Chinese Communist Party was able to use TikTok to track protesters in Hong Kong, and presumably by extension, you could say, well, if they can do that with protesters in Hong Kong, why couldn't they do that to say, citizens in other countries as well. So there's a lot of questionable activity going on here. There is the question of if it did happened, why
did you wait five years to bring this up. Is it just in an effort for you to get a positive outcome in your wrongful termination lawsuit? Or is it that you're telling the truth and that TikTok and Byte Dance have been not telling the truth and have tried to put a veil up over the fact that the Communist Party can access TikTok. These are questions we don't have answers to yet. So does that mean TikTok serves as an information gathering service for the Chinese Communist Party?
It beats me, But in some ways it doesn't matter, because the belief that this could happen appears to be more than enough to raise concern in political circles within the US and beyond. So whether it can or does do this is almost immaterial. It's the perception that matters, because that's what's driving a lot of political action against TikTok. Various government agencies and organizations have been banning TikTok off of work smartphones for a few years at this point.
Late in twenty twenty two, President Biden signed a bill into law that would ban TikTok off merely all smartphones owned by US federal government employees. That is actual federal owned smartphones, right, So if you're issued a phone as a federal employee, you're not supposed to put TikTok on that phone. Your own personal phone, that's a different matter. The state of Montana was the first state in the US to pass a law that would actually ban TikTok
on all personal devices in the state. There are questions as to how that would be enforced, how that would actually work. The law was not meant to go into effect until January of twenty twenty four, so it's not
in effect right now. And in November, a federal judge threw up a ten temporary block on the law out of concern that it violates the First Amendment and says until that matter is decided, this law cannot go into effect, so essentially saying we need to have discussions about whether or not a ban on TikTok is a First Amendment violation, but not all judges see it as being that, you know,
whibly wobbly or shade of gray. The state of Texas issued a ban on state employee devices, so again not a ban across all devices in the state, but if you're a state employee and you have a smartphone that was issued to you by the state, you're not supposed to put TikTok on it. However, Texas's ban goes beyond just the state issued smartphones. They say that if you use your personal device to conduct state business, well that
applies too. So if you have your own personal device and you do, I don't know you access your email, your work email on your personal device, I guess you could argue, well, you're using this for state business, so you cannot put TikTok on your own personal phone. In that case, this led to the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Night in that case is spelled Knight. This organization filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Texas in an effort to strike down the ban on
the grounds of the First Amendment. So this group was arguing that the band was having a negative effect on state school faculty who needed to be able to access TikTok, either to research the app because they're actually doing active research on it, or to teach about TikTok in their classrooms. But a federal judge disagreed with the argument and allowed the band to stay in place. They essentially said that the lawsuit lacked the proper grounds to have it struck down.
Beyond the concern around surveillance and espionage, there are worries that TikTok is warping young minds. There's been a growing movement that has argued that TikTok's algorithm is pushing specific points of view onto the young people who are using it. So the most recent example of this, it's not the only one, but it is very recent, has grown out
of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Some politicians have been arguing that TikTok has its algorithm biased against Israel and is pushing pro Palestinian propaganda, as it were, to young people, but some independent research suggests that that's just not the case. TikTok's algorithm doesn't appear to favor any particular political perspective. Rather, TikTok's algorithm serves content up to
users that is most likely to keep those users on TikTok. So, in other words, TikTok really to doesn't care what you believe. It just wants you to stay on TikTok. It almost comes across sinister when you put it that way, that they don't really care what your world view is. They care that you stay on the app for as long as possible, which kind of falls in line with all
the other social media platforms there. Right, It's all about engagement and keeping you there for as long as possible, because every moment you're somewhere else, you're not making money for TikTok. Okay, I've got more to say about TikTok's year in twenty twenty three, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, all right. We're now brought up to the matter of
the state of Indiana versus tech Talk. Now, technically, Indiana actually brought a pair of lawsuits against TikTok in twenty twenty two, but then those two cases sort of consolidated into a single lawsuit and played out over the course of this year and only recently kind of came to a head. Much of the lawsuits were focused on the alleged harm TikTok can cause, and that the app had somehow violated child safety laws. TikTok tried to get the case moved to a federal court, but it was ultimately
remanded to state court. However, that didn't matter because a state judge actually just dismissed the case, and in doing so, gave a lengthy explanation as to why the matter had no place in a state court in Indiana. So the dismissal it's quite long. You can read it online and it is very informative. But among the issues the judge cited was that there was no evidence TikTok had targeted Indiana or anyone in it, and so Indiana didn't really
have jurisdiction over this case. They also said that, well, the it's in the lawsuit that bring up the matter of TikTok's relationship to Bite Dance doesn't really constitute a legal issue. That the state failed to present any evidence that this relationship was in some way breaking the law. Just because there is a relationship doesn't mean that it's
a matter for the courts. The judge also said that the state failed to bring forth any credible evidence that TikTok had committed any kind of fraud, among other things. So in this battle, victory goes to TikTok. Now, I do understand the concern about TikTok and its capacity to amplify messages though again, that amplification comes from an algorithm that doesn't really care what the message is. You could argue that that's a problem because it also doesn't care
if the message is true or not right. TikTok doesn't care if what you're posting is fake news other than the fact that it looked bad on TikTok, and so they do have an incentive to try and weed that stuff out, but the algorithm doesn't care well. Pew Research Center conducted a survey this year and found that nearly a third of all Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty nine are relying on TikTok in part for their news, and more than forty percent of TikTok users
in general said that they consume news on the platform. Obviously, that makes TikTok a powerful communications tool, and if you're clever enough to craft videos that really resonate, you could leverage this to spread all sorts of information or misinformation for that matter. So I do understand the concern around the platform. It has the capacity to do great harm if misused and if no one steps in to intervene.
But I'm not sure if any of that stuff actually borders on the illegal or that it makes it that much different from other existing social network sites. So if you're really concerned about TikTok's impact, you need to look beyond TikTok. Outside of TikTok's constant battle to not get banned out of existence, there have been a few other
stories about the platform this year. One is that back in November, TikTok released an announcement revealing that it was bringing the two billion dollar Creator Fund to an end. So the company had launched the Creator Fund in twenty twenty, and the whole purpose was to serve as a source of money for folks who are making content on the platform, because monetizing your work on TikTok was tricky. You could maybe land a sponsorship, but that's sort of being paid
outside the platform itself. Right, how do you make money through TikTok? Like in other platforms such as YouTube, they run ads against your content and you get a share of the ad revenue. That isn't how tikto works. So TikTok needs content to serve to users. Otherwise there's nothing there and there's no reason to use the app, and the creators would probably like some sort of compensation for it. You can't just depend upon brilliant people making amazing videos
for free forever. That's not going to work. But critics said the fund wasn't actually solving any of TikTok's challenges, that it was an outdated approach even when it launched, you know, back in twenty twenty, and many claimed that despite having videos with millions of views, they were actually making very very little money at all from them. I think Hank Green said that for every one thousand views of a video he got, he would receive two point
five cents, which is not a great return. TikTok's replacement for the Creator Fund is the Creativity Program, which the company said would offer more substantial revenue opportunities for users, but they do have to meet certain criteria. The videos they produce need to be more than a minute long, so they can't be these super short videos that just go viral, and they have to rack up at least a thousand views before they can be considered viable for
part of the Creativity Program. Of course, beyond all these stories, we get to TikTok's impact on culture, everything from the return of the Roman Empire to girl Dinner owes its virality to TikTok, and since I don't use TikTok, and because I'm old and I'm out of touch, I'm not entirely sure what those things have to do with anything anyway, Like the whole thing about guys think about the Roman
Empire more than girls do. Maybe, I mean, I haven't thought about the Roman Empire in a long time, except when I was reading a history about English monarchs, because of course that starts with the fall of the Roman Empire. But whatever. Anyway, by the time I'm aware of a trend, it's ancient history. So there's no point of me even diving into this any further. It'll just be cringey. Anyway, as we in the United States head into an election year, I'm sure we're going to see a lot more rhetoric
around TikTok. Honestly, it's a very easy target, with a Chinese parent company and an incredible adoption rate among younger users, as well as the fact that people are depending upon it to get news content. It's just the sort of thing that politicians like to lean on when they try to position themselves as being concerned for our well being. TikTok is the boogeyman that politicians can point to. It's a lot easier to target TikTok and call it scary and say that it's a threat to our personal and
national security. It's a lot easier to do that than it is to do something about the serious underlying issues that span well beyond a single platform. So I'm talking about stuff like a comprehensive data privacy and security policy that would put control of personal information back in the hands of the people that the information is actually about, as opposed to a sort of wild West anything goes
market that exists today in the United States. Right now, we have very little control over our personal information, which in my mind is a huge, huge, huge problem because
even if you don't have TikTok. Right let's say that we did ban TikTok entirely and got rid of this supposed asset for the Chinese Communist Party, nothing is stopping the Chinese Communist Party from going to data brokers and just buying information wholesale about citizens, the places they work, maybe even information about the places they work conducting espionage that way, Like, that's entirely possible with no TikTok in
the world. Whatsoever. So really, I argue we need to focus on that more than this one instance of social networking that I think scares old people because young people like it so much. And I am an old person, and yeah, TikTok freaks me out, but it doesn't freak me out more than say Facebook or x slash Twitter. I think TikTok's going to have another tough year in twenty twenty four, but it's held on so far, so maybe it'll weather the storm's just fine and just keep
ticking along and talking along. I guess. Meanwhile, I'm sure the next big platform is just around the corner, and when it comes out, it will scare the pants off old folks even more than TikTok does. And so it is. So that's sort of a look back on how TikTok's twenty twenty three played out. That's an ongoing story, clearly. I'm sure we'll keep an eye on it next year. In the meantime, I hope that all of you are well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
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