The Big Tech Stories of 2022: Tech and Politics

drama that's still playing out right now. That included some of the fallout of how that has affected Tesla that's also continuing. I think the last time I covered it, the stock price for Tesla was somewhere around maybe one fifty, maybe one thirty. Now it's like one twelve, So yeah, Tesla's stock is still kind of well, seriously struggling. We also talked about Meta's very bad twenty two. We also talked about how regulators and governments around the world are

starting to push back against big tech. But believe it or not, we still have some more important stories from last year to look back on, including some that include the most dreadful of all words politics. Now, for those of y'all who listened to Tech Stuff regularly, you know I don't exactly shy away from expressing my own opinion in these episodes. But in this case, I'm really just playing on reporting how politics and tech intersected or at

times came into conflict over the last year. So this isn't so much about Jonathan showing his left leaning perspective. It's really about talking about how politics and tech had a big year in two. Before I really get into it, I do want to say that I occasionally get messages asking that I just focus on tech and leave all the politics stuff out. And y'all, I understand we hear a lot about politics in our daily lives. It can get overwhelming and exhausting or at times infuriating or depressing,

or a mixture of all of these things. But the problem is is that tech is shaping politics, and politics in turn shapes technology. And if you ignore contextual factors while you talk about technology, stuff quickly stops making any sort of sense because you end up saying something like, well, then company X stopped doing it that way, and you can't really explain the reasons for any sort of changes.

That were made because those changes came from political pressures or what have you, and you're leaving politics out of it. If tech existed in a perfect vacuum, then we could just talk about the tech itself. We could be objective, just look at the tech, how it works, whether it works well, all that kind of stuff. But that's not the way the world works. If you have a space that has two or more people in it, congratulations, you

got yourself some politics and going on. Now, I think it would be crass of me to label any story as being the biggest story in this category in two because if you do that, then you're immediately suggesting that people who were involved in other massive political text stories in the year weren't as important, and that that just

seems wrong to me. But one story that has had and continues to have a massive impact on the technology sector as well as lots of other areas is the War in Ukraine when Russia invaded Ukraine in late February

of this year. Now, to dive into what prompted this invasion would require a thorough series of episodes from a history podcast, not a tech show, and you know that's not what you tune into tech stuff war, So I'm not going to dive into the full backstory of how we got into this, and to be clear, if I did, I would need to do some very substantial research on the matter myself, because I really only have a kind of surface level understanding of it, and I would do

a terrible job at setting that story. So I can talk about the war's effect on technology and text effect on the war, there's a lot of ground to cover there. So first off, Ukraine has a hefty software development industry inside of it, and much of that work was able to continue through at least the early months of the

war without too much interruption. In fact, in July of this year, in Cube reported that only two percent of I T companies in Ukraine had to discontinue operations and around eight of I T companies were still closing new deals while the war was going on. So that's pretty impressive that the whole industry could continue largely uninterrupted, at

least in the early stages of the war. As for where they are right now, that's a great question, and I could not find reliable data while I was researching this episode to see where things stand now, because clearly you know that that conflict has continued over the following months, but yeah, it was impressive to see that the software industry managed to continue on in the face of Russia's invasion.

That work was made possible partly by Starlink. So this is the division of SpaceX that's known for providing satellite based Internet service. So you have ground stations or terminals that have an antenna, and this antenna can track satellites

that are moving overhead and establish Internet communications. There's a little bit of latency because the signals have to try hold back and forth between the satellites and various ground stations, but having this meant that many areas of Ukraine have been able to maintain Internet connectivity and thus a communications network in a time when Russian forces are consistently targeting

Ukrainian infrastructure. So it made a huge difference. And this wasn't some spontaneous act of charity that Starlink had on behalf of Ukraine. SpaceX had been in negotiations for almost two months with Ukraine before the Russian invasion even happened. Those negotiations were still unfolding when on February two, Russia did in fact invade Ukraine. Two days later, Mikhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation, tweeted to Elon Musk, who

at that point was not yet publicly pursuing Twitter. He had been buying up Twitter stock, but no one really knew about it yet, and Federov asked Elon Musk if Starlink could provide assistance and serve as sort of a communication lifeline for Ukraine, And immediately Elon Musk said absolutely, and the satellite network above Ukraine went into active service, and SpaceX shipped thousands of terminals to Ukraine just a couple of days later, so by the end of February

there were already these these SpaceX designed terminals heading to Ukraine to establish communications. Now this also wasn't strictly a show of solidarity and charity. According to reports, SpaceX has been receiving money from the governments of Poland, the UK, and the United States to provide these kinds of pieces of equipment. The US government has said it has paid to send terminals to Ukraine, but that SpaceX itself was

handling the service. In October, service for around thirteen hundred terminals in Ukraine opt and the problem was not a technical one. Apparently, instead it was a lack of funding. Now, SpaceX had previously sent a message to the Pentagon here in the United States asking the Department of Defense to foot the internet bill for Ukraine. But you know, it's a pretty bad pr move for a company to stop providing service to people who are actively under siege from

an oppressive military force. And I suppose even Elon Musk recognized that. So he refers to his company's position and said SpaceX would provide the service while withdrawing its requests for funding, though reportedly the company is still you know, negotiating with the US government for funding. The Starlink story

illustrates the analogy of the double edged sword. So on one side, you've got a vital communications service that has allowed the people of Ukraine and the Ukrainian military to maintain a communications network while finning off attacks from Russia. That is clearly a vital service for the people of Ukraine. On the other side, the other edge, we see a shift of countries depending not upon allies as much as

they are on large businesses. In fact, Starlink's involvement has been one part of a larger picture in which we've seen for profit companies playing a vital part in how a conflict unfolds. These companies are effectively taking sides, where in the past companies at least attempted to maintain a kind of neutral stance because they figured that that was probably the best thing for business. Now we're starting to

see that shift where companies will take a side. That's making some folks a little nervous because these companies might not answer to anyone while making these decisions. Now, obviously there are notable exceptions, like if a country or group of kind trees level sanctions against another nation, then even large companies aren't likely to violate that, at least not yet.

So it's not in every case where these companies are just acting totally on their own, lone wolf style, but they are able to make these kind of decisions, you know, on their own without the direction of governments. And that's made a few people nervous because we've had plenty of, say, science fiction stories that suggests that in the future of the world is going to be run not by governments, whether those are authoritarian or democratically elected or whatever, but

rather by corporations. In fact, it is a trope in certain types of science fiction. At this point, you can see stuff like Blade Runner, Snow Crash, Jennifer Government, Broken Angels, the Space Merchants. There's a huge list of science fiction movies and novels and stories that follow this kind of storytelling. Generally speaking, businesses first and sometimes only concern is delivering value to stakeholders, whether that's a private business or a

publicly traded one. And yeah, delivering value might mean putting out a really good service or product, but that's almost secondary, right, Like, that's the way you get value for your stakeholders. It's not that you're really really dedicated to making the world's best thing of a jig. It's that by making the world's best thing of a jig, you end up providing an incredible value to your stakeholders. That's sort of the fear here, and and to be fair, that is like

oversimplifying matters dramatically. And there are plenty of companies out there that really do take serious pride in providing the best of the best that they can, right, and not just a cynical approach of here's how we make our stakeholders richer. Anyway, corporate value you it's not necessarily equate

to societal value, and that's where there's some unease around this. Also, the fact that Starlink shut off service even temporarily for those terminals in Ukraine painted a pretty scary picture for a company just to decide to stop service for whatever reason that could lead to life or death situations in certain parts of the world. Now, we've seen this sort of thing happen due to government's cracking down on services in an effort to stop citizens from being able to organize. Like,

that's something we've seen for a while. Right If government says, oh, we see a danger here because people are starting to use Twitter to organize resistance, then they'll crack down on Twitter. That's something we've seen in the past. But to see it from the corporate end, where a company could just say, you know what, we're just gonna turn off service here, uh,

that is a little different. Anyway, Starlink continues to provide EID services in Ukraine, and numerous Ukrainian officials have praised Starlink and the service, pointing out that the country would have significantly more struggles without that lifeline, and that connectivity has contributed to important Ukrainian military operations, including drone missions.

So I don't want to dismiss Starlink's important role in this ongoing conflict, but rather, you know, taking the big picture, look, other stuff that happened created a sort of secondary struggle. I almost said a war, but I don't want in any way to diminish the horrors of the actual war going on in Eastern Europe. But for example, social networks began to shift a bit in favor of Ukraine. So Facebook, TikTok,

and YouTube began blocking Russia's government connected communication accounts. This followed a move in the EU to ban those Russian media and news organizations in an effort to shut down propaganda and misinformation efforts. Meta also began to take down networks of accounts that the company said we're part of such misinformation campaigns. In addition, Meta allowed posts that were calling for violence against Russia itself on Facebook. That was

quite unusual, right. That was one of those things where this was a controversial call because normally the policy is you can't call for violence, that is just that's against the rules. But in this case where people were saying, no, we're trying to organize resistance to an invasion, that's threatening people's lives. Meta made the call of allowing those posts to stay up on Facebook. Russia's response was to start

to ban various services within the country. They labeled Facebook and then later Instagram as extremist corporations, and so this was a back and forth issue. Okay, we've got some more to talk about with the Ukraine War and then some other issues around the world where tech politics came into conflict with one another. But first let's take a

quick break. Okay, we're back. So we were talking about Starlink and a little bit about social networks like Meta and their role within the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. There were other parts of tech that were active in an effort to help Ukrainians. So, for example, Google shut down live services and Google Maps in parts of Ukraine. Now, at first that might sound like Google was acting against Ukraine,

but that wasn't the case. Instead, they were removing real time traffic information so that Russian forces wouldn't be able to use services to identify where Ukrainian resistance happened to be at any given time. So really this was Google's a chance to help provide a little smoke cover for

Ukrainian forces essentially in a digital way. Companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, uh and Nvidia, Samsung and lots of others in the tech space effectively pulled out of Russia, shutting down their offices, some of which Russian authorities ended up seizing and then handing over to people to to create, you know, a

Russian company using whatever assets were left behind. The departure of so many tech companies dealt a major blow to Russia's efforts to continue to develop AI solutions their speculation that that is going to have a lasting impact on the country for the mid to long term. On top of that, many countries, including the United States, have placed tons of sanctions on Russia that really limit the types of technologies that companies are allowed to export to Russia.

So now Russia's getting a real shortage of some of these high tech components. Russi also experienced an outflow of skill and expertise and knowledge. Reportedly, thousands of tech professionals left Russia to go work in other parts of the world. Russia has since attempted to create incentives to inspire tech professionals to stay in the country. Also, reportedly, a few of them have returned to Russia, possibly because they were failing to find gainful employment elsewhere, so they really had

no other options. But yeah, that's another part of this story where Russia is potentially doing long term damage to its technological innovation and evolution through these actions in Ukraine. It has become clear that the future of conflict, the future of war will likely involve tech companies making decisions that impact outcomes. As we continue to see with the Ukraine war, tech companies can have and a real influence

on how day to day operations progress. Now we're not at the point where some company somewhere, like some boardroom executive decides who wins or who loses an a war. It's not like that. But we're certainly seeing how companies can provide or deny aid in meaningful ways and make decisions to side with one side over another. And again it shows how tech companies are playing a role that traditionally we would just think of as kind of the

the purview of governments. Right that we would think of governments either leveling sanctions or having some other form of um punishment for a country that appears to have violated international law. That kind of stuff. Now we're seeing tech companies take it upon themselves to make some of these moves without necessarily being directed by any kind of government authority, and that I think is the overall theme that we

saw in two. That's starting to make some people nervous because while that is good, while we can see or it potentially is good. It's potentially good that a company can step in and perhaps provide help when a government either is too slow or unable to do so. That could be inspiring. But then you flip that situation and you could quickly get to a scenario where a company is effectively holding a country hostage, right kind of like with the starlink example when those uh, those terminals went

dead for a little while. That is another possibility, and it's made some people really start to question things again, mostly questioning how big is big text grasp and should it be restricted. We've seen some governments respond to this. I mentioned in an earlier episode that Russia has really cracked down on VPN services for its citizens in a way to kind of strike back or at least to

keep a lid on things. So a VPN, in case you're not familiar, is a virtual private network and for those of you all who haven't really used one or no much about them, I'll give you a very simple explanation of what they are. So when you use your computer and you log into a VPN, the VPN essentially becomes a data channel for you. Anything that you access online.

Let's say you're on a browser and you want to go to a website, Well ends up being masked because it's actually the VPN that does all the visiting of the site and then funnels the information to you. So let's say you're logged into vpn X and vpn X is based in some other country, it's not where you are, and you choose to visit a news website. Well, the news website will see that the request is coming from vpn X. They won't see that ultimately that request comes

from you. They just see that, oh, vpn X is asking for this web page, let's send it to them. So it sends the data to vpn X, and vpn X then sends that data to you. So VPNs can have a lot of valuable benefits. At one is that they can help you maintain privacy. So if someone snooping on your connection, they would see that you were communicating with a VPN, but they wouldn't see where you were going.

Beyond that, assuming that everything is encrypted, they would not see that you were trying to use VPN to visit that news site, for example. They would just see that you were connected to the VPN. Conversely, if they were looking at the VPN and the traffic that the VPN or the sites of the VPN was visiting, they would see that all the different sites of VPN was visiting, but they wouldn't be able to say who went to what site. So it helps mask your pri or it

helps keep things private for you. That's one of the big benefits right now. Using a VPN can slow stuff down a little bit, but that's a trade off if you want to have your communications better protected. By the way, if you ever do use any kind of public WiFi, I highly recommend that you subscribe to a vp in and you use a vp N. It's not a perfect, bulletproof type of protection for you, but it goes a

long way to helping keep your data safe. Um again, not a perfect solution, but every little layer of protection is is a good one. So another benefit for the VPNs is that if you log into a VPN that's in another country, you can sometimes access stuff that otherwise would be off limits to you. So, for example, let's say that you were a UK citizen and you moved to the United States, but you would still like to be able to watch some UK programming that's just not

available here in the States. Uh, maybe the platform carrying that programming has region locks on it. So let's say that you know, you go to a website, let's say it's one of the BBC websites. You go to a BBC website, and you want to watch this one program that runs on BBC. But when you try and play it here in the States, you get a message that says something along the lines of we're sorry, but the programming you're trying to access isn't available in your area

or your region. Well, logging into a VPN that is located within the UK can potentially help you sidestep this region lock. Now, generally speaking, I'm against doing this personally here in the United States. I am not in favor of doing it for myself. For one thing, we have access to so much stuff that it starts to feel a bit selfish to ask for even more. But there are parts of the world where governments restrict a lot of what citizens can see, and there I think VPNs

provide a critical service. It gives people a chance to get past those government restrictions and see what's going on in the world. Well, that's exactly why the Russian government really started to crack down on VPNs and has been for a couple of years now. So Russian citizens could subscribe to VPN services for a while and they could get access to information that the Russian government objected to. It did not go in line with the official Russian communications.

So over the last couple of years, many VPN services have been banned within Russia. Even Russia's own Kaspersky Labs has announced that it is no longer going to offer VPN services within Russia, presumably because government pressure is so great that it just doesn't make sense to try and operate VPN as a business there. Russia is not the

only country to have cracked down on VPNs. In two Iran, India, and Myanmar similarly have tried to restrict access to these kinds of services in an effort to control the information that citizens can access. In some of these countries, it is illegal to post or share any messaging that criticizes the government or contradicts the government's official stance on any given top. So again we see this ongoing battle between governments,

particularly more authoritarian governments, and tech companies. Now, often these crackdowns on tech coincide with authoritarian governments doing authoritarian things go figure, you know, like ignoring or manipulating elections, or

removing or restricting citizen rights, that kind of thing. One of the truly powerful things tech has ever done over the years is given people more accessibility to information and for the chance to communicate, and thus potentially leading to things like organization, like citizens banding together to oppose an

oppressive government. That's the kind of thing that is very dangerous for authoritarian regimes, which depend heavily on controlling people, and that comes hand in hand with controlling information and access to various services. Now, sometimes tech companies will still

try to operate in these regions. They might say that they do so in an effort to provide resources to people who desperately need them, And I'm sure that's at least part of the reason, and it's a valuable one Like that is a valuable goal is to to let people have access to these tools that could potentially help

them have a better existence. It also could be true that these companies depend upon expanding to more customers every year, so you know, expanding into countries where things are dicey can still align with company goals from a business standpoint, and I guess there's an argument for that as well, Like we don't live in a world where we can

all just be altruistic. But one thing we have seen over the year the past year is that more and more companies are are either reluctant to do business in or they're actively pulling out of one of the largest markets in the world, and that being China. As for why, well, there are a lot of potential reasons. One might be a fundamental disagreement with the Chinese Communist Party the c c P, that's the ruling party in China. In fact, a lot of people just equated with Chinese government. Then

you could understand why. And the CCP has a very long history of human rights violations, um terrible ones. You can read all about it if you like to, but trust me, there's an incredibly long history of truly dreadful things going on on an official basis, but not a public one official, but denied is the way it works.

Another reason that companies might be reluctant to work in China is how the Chinese government has taken a more active and restrictive role in how companies, particularly tech companies, are allowed to do business within the country. This past year, we saw the Chinese government past restrictive laws that affected the video games industry. For example, this has actually been

an ongoing story for more than a year. It began before two but this year we saw the Chinese government take a more firm stance on certain types of video game businesses. For example, China's government issued a ban on licensing games for the first several months of two so in China, video game companies have to apply for a license before they are allowed to sell a specific game to Chinese citizens. Even Chinese companies video game companies have

to do this. It's not just foreign companies that are wanting to sell their titles within China, and in fact, back in two thousand eighteen, ten Cent famously had to pull Monster Hunter World from Chinese markets after failing to secure a license first. Intencent is a huge Chinese company, so the government has been issuing fewer licenses in recent years, and by the summer of one they essentially just stopped issuing game licenses. That pretty much was the case until

the spring of this year. Somewhere around April of two, we started to finally see the government licensed new titles for sale in China. As for a while that was going on. It was part of a larger effort to combat what the government was referring to as video game addiction, particularly for younger citizens, as well as just the standard They don't want any content in any video games that could potentially contradict the official Chinese government line on any

given topic. The restrictions this year also included a ban on live streaming certain games, so China warned platforms against the live streaming of titles that are unapproved and unlicensed. Further, if you wanted to live stream overseas games within China, you first had to secure approval in order to do so, and live streamers were also told to avoid quote unquote

abnormal esthetics. Now you might wonder what was an abnormal I think mostly they were trying to tell streamers that they need to dress modestly and not play up their sex appeal the way you see a lot of Western streamers do so kind of a crackdown on people being able to express themselves in a way that they wanted and that would be popular. So yeah, the Chinese government says,

don't do that. They also said, don't foster the kind of para social relationships you see in other parts of the world with online gaming culture, to avoid you know, so called harmful celebrity uh interactions, that kind of thing, which, honestly, I mean, if we can do stuff to help discourage the development of para social relationships, that might be a really good thing, because I've seen a lot of heartache pop up because of people developing these sorts of relationships,

and that's that's unfortunate. Sometimes doing business in China maybe more work than what it's worth, or the revenue will be reduced due to government interference, and that's one of the reasons why some companies have been dialing back or even pulling out of China. So when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about that. We'll also talk about a company that has Chinese heritage and how that has run into some issues with the US government.

And I'm sure most of you have already guessed what it is. If you haven't, Hey, that clock it's ticking and also talking, We'll be back. Okay. We were talking about reasons why companies were looking to potentially pull out

of China. There's another big one, and that is there are a lot of state run or state owned Chinese firms, more than a hundred fifty companies in China ultimately owned by the state by the Chinese government, and as you might imagine, these companies typically enjoy competitive advantages over outsiders that are providing goods and services within the same space.

So while China does have a huge population and theoretically represents a healthy source of revenue for a company, the reality is that some tech companies from other parts of the world might find themselves at a disadvantage rail the gate because they're jumping into uh an industry where state run companies already have an existing presence, and so they're just going to run into more and more adversity as they try to establish their own base of operations within China.

So that's another reason why some companies have decided to pull out. They just can't compete in a country where state owned businesses get the edge over everybody else. Then, of course there are sanctions. There are various sanctions within say the semiconductor industry in particular, So the US government essentially has put a strict limit on the types of semiconductor chips that are allowed to be exported to China. Essentially,

only the older, less powerful chips are fair game. Anything else that's more modern, more powerful, those are not allowed to be exported to China. Then there was China's former

policy with regard to COVID nineteen. Until recently, it was the official policy that if health officials detected a COVID nineteen case within a given region, that whole region would go on lockdown and a lot of businesses, particularly in the manufacturing field, would either have to shut down or they would have to arrange to have employees essentially live at the manufacturing facility in order to stay in operation. Tesla did that and got a lot of pushback on it.

Several companies have been exploring the option of migrating at least some of their manufacturing to India instead of China. This is also in response two issues we had with supply chain problems, where you know, we started to see a real shortage and semiconductors due to lots of different reasons.

It's actually very complicated, but one of the fears was that will if it's in China and China shuts down operations, then that stops everything for like two weeks, and that can really start to put massive bottlenecks in the supply chain. So companies have actively been looking at migrating some of those operations to other countries to relieve that dependence upon China. Companies that had already left China before two even got started would include Yahoo and LinkedIn. Both of them pulled

out of China. They had encountered challenges relating to operating within a country that has such a hands on government. Amazon stopped selling Kindle devices in China this year. They closed there did all Kindle bookstore in China. This year. Airbnb started to shut down operations in China, sighting challenges associated with the pandemic as well as the presence of heavily established Chinese competitors within that space and um and yeah.

So that's why we're starting to see the tech sector reconsider China as a market, at least the Western tech sector, I should say. Now, speaking of China and tech it is time for us to tackle another big story from this past year, and that would be TikTok. So for those who don't know, TikTok got its start as an app called Musical dot Lee so Musically and it let folks record short videos, typically of them lips sinking to popular songs, and it got its start in China, but

it didn't really get much traction there. However, US users were responding well to it, so Musically then established a headquarters in California and really just focused almost exclusively on developing its business in the United States. Then you had this big company in China called Byte Dance, and it had a different short form video app that it owned, and it wanted to get access to the American market.

But just as it can be difficult for an American company to gain traction in China, it can be really hard for a Chinese company to gain traction in America. So Byte Dance saw that Musically was already doing pretty well and decided to essentially by their way in. They bought Musically and then rebranded that into TikTok, and that became a subsidiary company underneath Byte Dance, the Chinese company. So TikTok is headquartered in America, but their parent company

is byte Dance, and that's in China. During the Trump administration here in the United States, concerns were first brought up about TikTok and it's really reationship with its parent company. There were worries about where TikTok was storing user information, like we're users data being stored on servers in China.

This concern led TikTok to make some changes. They migrated their services and data onto US based servers that were administered by the company Oracle, so essentially saying, look, see are our data is not on Chinese servers, It's on American servers. This is not totally satisfied at least some folks in the US government. There continued to be those concerned that TikTok could be serving as a way to collect US citizen information as well as just accessing other

kinds of info. I mean, if you've got someone who's shooting a funny TikTok they happened to be and say, you know, a fairly secretive company or government agency, then that video might end up giving people some really valuable information, even if it's not exclusively about that subject. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has a history of establishing a presence

in private companies in China. Last year, China's government acquired a one percent stake in part of byte Dance, specifically in the part of the company that holds licenses that are crucial to their video sharing platforms. So along with that steak, the CCP also secured a seat on byte dances board for this part of byte Dance. That's a board that only has three seats on it, so one third of the board of directors for this part of byte Dance is occupied by a representative from the Chinese

Communist Party. Then you have to consider that China has the National Intelligence Law of the People's Republic of China. This is a law that China actually passed back in two thousand seventeen. That law states it is the responsibility of all Chinese companies and citizens to work to maintain national security of China, and that as part of that, all businesses as registered in China are required to hand

over information to Chinese intelligence agencies. That includes Chinese companies that are operating in other countries like the United States. So there's literally a law in China, that assuming TikTok is obeying this law, means that TikTok is obligated to share data back to the Chinese government because TikTok itself is a subsidiary of byte Dance, a Chinese company. By the way, the same policy as part of the reason why the United States banned Huawei components in telecommunications networks

here in the States. Now. Back in former President Trump issued an executive order aiming to ban TikTok, but this band never actually went into effect, partly because there were real questions over whether the US government actually had the authority to ban TikTok just based on an executive order in the first place. Then there were other factors at well, but I'm not gonna get into it because that was twenty two now, you don't need to rehash all that.

Biden revoked Trump's executive order. Instead, Biden proposed a process by which the US government will evaluate apps and social networks that are owned and operated by foreign companies, particularly foreign uh foreign companies that are in countries that are antagonistic toward the United States or that we are antagonistic toward if you prefer. The process is meant to determine if these apps or platforms represent a security risk to

the US or just two American citizens. So TikTok has kind of been going through this process, but that's not where this story ends, because various people in Congress have brought up concerns about TikTok, ranging from fears that the company is actively spying on behalf of China to other worries that TikTok is promoting and perpetuating harmful material to impressionable people, particularly to young people, because TikTok has a strong appeal for younger users, so there are some pretty

well founded worries that messages that relate to say self harm get amplified on TikTok. So there have been renewed calls to ban the service outright, not necessarily because it might be a spy, but because it could be doing some serious harm to younger users. And ultimately, TikTok's recommendation algorithm responds to whatever it is you're watching, So if you watch a video in full and that video happens to have harmful material in it, TikTok is more likely

to recommend similar videos, which does amplify that message. If you happen to watch videos in full that are about puppies playing, then you're probably going to see more videos about puppies playing. So the platform, you could argue, is agnostic. It doesn't care what the content is. It just wants to serve more content that's going to keep you on TikTok.

The problem is if that content is negative, stuff that is impacting your mental health, that's going to get amplified and replicated and reiterated, and eventually that could have a really negative impact on at least some people. So that's one of the reasons why certain politicians want to ban TikTok. So there are multiple points of view that have a

similar goal, but for different reasons. We have seen the federal government here in the US proposed policies that make it against the rules for federal employees to install TikTok on their work devices. Uh, they even work that language into spending bills, And to me, that just kind of makes sense, the banning them on work devices, not the

burying something in a larger spending bill. I hate that kind of stuff, like the idea that politicians sneak their pet projects in on really necessary pieces of legislation has always bothered me. I hate that, like, oh, well, no one's going to vote against this because everyone needs to get paid. So I'm gonna put my pet project that gets my buddy back home in Mississippi a huge amount of business, and no one's gonna object because we need to get paid. I'm just gonna put that in here.

I hate that stuff anyway. I think banning TikTok from federal devices makes total sense if I were issued a phone by my office, which is not a government office, but if if my bosses gave me a work phone to use with work, they would be fully justified in my opinion, of pulling me aside. If I've had installed TikTok on my work phone, you know, they could say, hey, Jonathan, you know this is for work, right, that kind of thing.

I think that would be totally justifiable. I personally don't have any real issue with a ban on TikTok for government owned property. We've seen similar bands and several states here in the United States for state owned property as well, so both on the federal level and in some state

government levels. And again I don't think there's anything really scandalous about that, and I think it's totally you know, fair for a government or even a company to say, don't put this stuff on the devices we assigned to you, because ultimately those devices don't belong to the employee. They belong to, you know, either the government or a company. Now, when you start moving toward a more general ban that would affect private citizens, then things get way more complicated.

And honestly, most of the analysts I've followed feel that a nationwide ban for personal devices seems unlikely, but we might see more state governments and perhaps even companies issue bans on work devices out of concern that TikTok could

actually be sharing info back to China. Like, if you have a work device and you do critical work on that device, Like if there's like stuff that is proprietary in nature that you access on that device, or anything else that is kind of a secret stuff of your company, it makes sense that you don't want someone putting TikTok on that machine. Really don't want any kind of social network based app on that device if that is not necessary for your work. If you're a social influencer, then yeah,

that's one thing. But if you're doing you know, important work for say the CIA. You don't want to have all these different apps that are basically designed to gather as much information about the user as possible in order to exploit it. I mean, I know we've all seen the James Bond movies and that idiot goes around introducing himself by name all the time, proving that he is the worst spy in the world. But don't be like James Bond. Okay, be like, I don't know Jason Bourne.

He he he knows how to keep a low profile. It's just that people are really looking for him. Okay, that's it for this goofy episode. As I look back on the tech News of two, I've got at least one more of these, but it should be really focused on things like cool scientific discoveries and developments and that kind of stuff. That's my plan for that, and that will probably be the last one of these, unless who knows,

something major happens between now and Wednesday. We'll see um or now on Thursday, I should say, we'll see I forgot Today's not Monday, is it. So? I hope you've enjoyed this look back on two. We're gonna do at least one more of them, and already starting to look ahead at three. If you've got suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know. You can do that either by downloading the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download,

free to use. You can put tech Stuff in the little search field that'll take you to the tech Stuff podcast page on the I Heart Radio app. You'll see a little microphone icon there. If you click on that, you can leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and uh, I would love to hear from you, or if you would prefer, you can send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart

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