Time for TikTok

partly true. I love tech and I do try to stay up to date with news, but some trends appear and I'm a little slow on the uptake. And I would say that holds true with TikTok, the insanely popular video app and meme generator extraordinaire. And that's kind of funny because I was at least semi aware of it

on some level before it was even TikTok. So in this episode, we're gonna look into the app, the company that owns the app, the people who developed it, and the controversies surrounding it, as well as the culture that has grown up around it. And it's all pretty fascinating stuff. There's actually a couple of origin stories for TikTok because, as it turns out, TikTok is the product of some acquisitions and mergers of other apps. Let's start by taking a look at the company Byte Dance, which as of

this recording still owns TikTok. More about that later in this episode. And that story really begins with its founder, a Chinese entrepreneur named Jeong ye Ming. Now I'd say that Jong has kept a pretty low profile in the West. In fact, to dig up some info on him, I really had to pull up some articles that were written in Chinese, and then I had to rely heavily on Google Translate. So with that in mind, we have to take a lot of what I've got to say with

a few grains of salt for two big reasons. One, journalism in China is not exactly objective. The state, that is, the Chinese Communist Party, often plays a very big role in that, and so the truthiness of a piece can come under question. Second, the translation algorithms that we depend upon today, they sometimes fail to capture more subtle linguistic elements like idiom or you know, metaphor. Similarly, so some stuff does get lost in translation. So with that in mind,

let's see what we can find out now. According to the Chinese website so Who, which is part of a big internet company that I'll have to cover in a future episode. Here's what I was able to discover. Jong initially studied microelectronics, but then switched to software engineering in college at non Kai University, and so he was there from two thousand one to two thousand five. Upon graduate wation, he interviewed with a company called cook Soon, and he

became employee number five over there. Cook Soon got its start as a meta search engine designed to pull up train ticket options for travelers in China. It's kind of like how search services like hotels dot com or booking dot com will aggregate deals for various hotels in a region so that you can find the one that best suits your needs, whether it's for your budget or where

you plan on being or whatever. Over time, the cook Soon site expanded its scope, becoming more of a general search engine for everything from shopping to job positions, and it would change its focus numerous times, sometimes scaling back to focus more on the travel industry and sometimes going more broad. In the meantime, Gen rose rapidly from being a software engineer to leading teams of engineers who are developing the various products that would get rolled out onto

the site. There's Jong would leave cook soon in two thousand and eight, and at that point the site had not yet become profitable, possibly due to this wavering focus on what the site actually was about. But it wouldn't be the end of his involvement with Cookson the company, however,

we'll get back to that. So in the meantime, he joined Microsoft, but he found that working for an established global company that had a fairly rigid corporate structure was a very different experience from working in a startup environment, and he didn't stick around with Microsoft for very long. He would leave that company to join another Chinese company called fan Fou, which was essentially a clone of Twitter.

It was a short messaging service style social platform device that did not necessarily go that smoothly either, though it wasn't through any fault of gens necessarily. In the summer of two thousand nine, a series of riots relating to China's treatment of ethnic mon noorities erupted in northwest China.

In an effort to clamp down on the situation, the Chinese government began to restrict communication channels as much as they possibly could, and that included the effective shutdown of Fanfu and several other Chinese websites, which were to remain dark until the spring of Joan. Ye Ming didn't wait around for the Chinese government to lift restrictions. Instead, he left the company and he pounced on what he saw

as an opportunity to have his own start up. Expedia, the online travel company, was in talks to acquire Cook Soon, Jong's old employer, but as I mentioned earlier, Cook Soon had sort of wandered all over the place when trying to establish what it actually was, and one business it had dipped its corporate toe into was in real estate,

and that's what Jong was interested in. He arranged to acquire that part of Cook Soon's business because it wasn't really a line end with expedia strategy and it wouldn't be needed for Expedia's acquisition. It was a part of the company that wasn't really that interesting to Expedia, so Jeong y Ming was able to swoop in and purchase that part of the company, and he founded his first independent company, which he called nine Fong dot Com. A couple of years later, Jeong saw a new opportunity, this

time revolving around how people access news. China was lagging a little bit behind the rest of the world in this endeavor, but even in China, it was clear that mobile devices were completely upending the way people get access to information. So with that in mind, Jong resigned as the CEO of Fong dot com and he founded a new company, one that would be known in the West

as byte Dance b y t e Dance. The original product from byte Dance wasn't a short videos service, nor did it have anything to do with lip syncing to songs or generating me eames or anything like that. It was a news aggregator service, one that would pull headlines from various Chinese news organizations. The app was called Chao Chow and it was a big hit in China, despite the fact that Jong initially encountered very little enthusiasm from

investors for his idea. Bye Dance would launch a video sharing app for mobile devices called dough yin in China, but it would be known elsewhere as TikTok and the app allowed users to create short, like really short video clips fifteen seconds long and then share them online. Users would create lip sync videos. They had access to a large database of sound bites they could use, or they might create short comedy videos, or they might show off

odd or impressive talents. The service launched in China in twenty sixteen. It received a warm reception in China, but when they tried to exp and the app outside of China in Seen, it did not immediately catch on. That would change a bit later in seventeen when byte Dance would merge its TikTok app with another app called Musical dot Lee or Musically if you prefer, and that's when things would really take off. But that means we need to chat about musically for a second. And where that

came from. That started as a different Chinese startup, this time co founded by friends Alex Shu and Louis Young. The two originally intended to create a short form video service meant for educational videos. So these were supposed to be things like how to videos or explainer videos, you know, like how this thing works, videos I can identify with that.

They called their app Cicada, and they pitched it to venture capitalists back in and investors like the idea, and they poured about a quarter of a million dollars worth of cash into the There was only one tiny little problem, nobody was using it. They were able to develop the tool, they launched the tool, they saw very little adoption, and as it turned out, they they realized the reason was it's actually really difficult to communicate complicated ideas effectively in

just a few minutes. I mean, I've done that. That's been my gig for a while with making short videos. I used to do that back with how Stuff works all the time. So it's hard to do and that's why you noticed that the average running time for a tech Stuff episode is closer to like forty five minutes. It's just it's not easy to boil all that down in just a few minutes and make it accurate and interesting.

So the co founders discovered that people didn't want to use the app because it took so long to write, produce, and edit videos that the return on investment in terms of time and effort just weren't there. It wasn't fun to use. Creation really needed to be more effortless and have a better payoff, and young folks who were leading the way when it came to mobile phone adoption just weren't into Cicada, so it was not really succeeding. So

the co founders were faced with the problem. They had built tools that worked, but they weren't really suitable for the purposes that they had in mind. People just weren't using it. So they were running out of cash, and they had a couple of different choices that they could really follow. They could go back to their investors and return what little money was left with an apology saying we built this thing, it works, but nobody's using it.

Or they could attempt a pivot and see if they could leverage the tools they had already built for some other purpose. And that's when they decided to give entertainment a shot. Now. According to you, he made this decision after visiting the United States. He was in Mountain View, California, according to his story, and saw a group of teenagers

on a train that were listening to music. They were taking self fees and videos with the music in the background, and they were using social media apps to add filters and virtual stickers on top of the images in the video. And he thought, hey, you know, these kids are sharing stuff in a really creative way, and they're cluging it together, right there. They're doing this by using different things to

try and make something new. If I made a tool, if I used the stuff we developed for Cicada, and I adapted it so that it was all all of those elements were together in one app, people would use it because they're doing it already, but they're doing it by, you know, kind of piecing it together piecemeal. If I put it all together, it's gonna be a big hit. Now. I find it interesting that, at least according to the sources I looked at, SHO wasn't inspired by previous short

form video services like Vine now. Vine was a short form video sharing service that Twitter had acquired shortly after Vine had been founded. Users could create six second long looping videos. Those videos lived on vines servers, but they could easily be shared the platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Inteen.

When You and Young were working on their tweaked service, Vine was still a thing, though Twitter would shut that service down in After about a month of making changes to their original platform, the Cicada team created a new service that they called Musically or musical dot l y. Users could create fifteen second long videos with this app.

They saw some early adoption and user retention, but growth was a little slow in the beginning they were running low on cash when they made some more adjustments, a big one being that they repositioned the logo so that it wouldn't get cropped out when the videos would get shared on services like Instagram. So that meant that once people saw these videos, they could actually see the logo for music Lee, and they knew where to go in order so that they could get the happen and make

their own videos. And adoption really took off at that point, particularly in the United States. It did not receive widespread adoption back in China, but the musically app would hit number one on the iTunes app Store, which guaranteed that the app would have a prominent position that helped drive adoption, particularly in the United States. The music Lee team created

some features that really helped it get attention. One was creating a type of tier called Best Fans Forever or b f F. So if you followed a music Lee creator, you could become a BFF of that creator who would follow you back. Essentially your BFFs with each other. So

let's say two users become BFFs. They could then record videos of themselves lip sticking to the same song, for example, and music Lee would take these two videos and edit them together, creating what was called a duet, so it would switch back and forth between the two little videos to create a single experience as long as the two

users were BFFs of each other. A related feature allowed music Lee users to create a video response to another video, building a chain of videos together, so you could do a Q and a style format that musically would stitch together so then users could see the full thing later. They could see the questions and the answers, or they could see a video and a response. And these features, along with the ability to post videos to other popular platforms like Instagram, meant music Lee had an appeal that

tapped right into the zeitgeist. Before long, it became a launching pad for Internet celebrities as well as musicians who otherwise we're finding discovery to be an insurmountable challenge. So you had music Lee, which was doing well in the United States and in Europe as well as several other markets. And you had du Yen or to Talk, which was doing well in China but hadn't gained much traction anywhere else.

Jong saw the chance to bring together two similar but unrelated services under one company, and so byte Dance would make its move. When we come back, I'll talk about that acquisition and what came next, but first let's take a quick break. Musically started back in TikTok Or or du Yan had launched in two thousand sixteen. Byte Dance was doing incredibly well, largely driven by the enormous success of the news aggregator service it had built years before.

Based on funding rounds in China, byte Dance had a valuation of nearly twenty billion dollars around this time, which is in fact and extremely princely some In November, news broke that byte Dance was making a move to acquire the music Lee service, which itself had been valued at nearly one billion dollars. So while I was watching friends do silly lips sinking videos to songs from the musical Hamilton's, these companies were skyrocketing in value. In December seen the

deal was finalized for an undisclosed amount. Analysts estimate it was somewhere between eight hundred million dollars and one billion dollars. Not a bad take for the developers of music Lee, who had started out with a failed effort to create an educational video tool. I really wish my failure is paid off like that. Now I'm being a bit snarky, but I have to point out that the services were both doing really, really well both before and after Byte

Dance acquired musical Lee. By mid teen, musical Lee had one hundred million active monthly users. TikTok or du Yan had five hundred million users in China, and those users were generating tons of data, and they were watching lots of ads, and as we all know, this is really valuable stuff, particularly when you're looking at it in bulk.

So Byte Dance was sitting on a treasure trove of information as well as getting lots of money through ad deals, and it really gave the company an enormous boost in value. In August, byte Dance announced it was shuttering musical Lee as a brand. It was going to go away as its own thing, and it revamped the service into TikTok, so it unified the name across its two services. However, the company would still continue to operate the du Yan version of TikTok separately on Chinese servers. This was so

the company could adhere to Chinese government requirements. I'll talk more about that a little later in this episode. So even though there was a unified Dame, there are still two distinct, separate incarnations of TikTok to this day. One month after byte Dance consolidated TikTok, the service reached a new milestone. In September, it became the top app in monthly installs in Apple's App Store. It surpassed Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. It was a social media app on the rise.

This was a huge deal, and driving this adoption were young users who otherwise weren't quite as keen to join some of the more established networks out there. Now that being said, the user base still wasn't as big as something like Facebook, which is a true monolith of a social platform. When it comes to total users, Facebook remains king, but TikTok was seeing much faster adoption than other platforms

at this time. While all this was going on from an adoption perspective, there's another aspect we need to address, and that's the cultural impact of TikTok. The short form video restrictions meant people had to come up with creative ways to make use of that time and of the platform, and they had to do it in order to stand out among all the other stuff being uploaded every day. TikTok culture began to evolve, and soon there was a

TikTok optimized form of storytelling and of humor. TikTok emerged at the same time as a generation of kids who had grown up in the smartphone age, and they were all becoming teenagers around this time. So smartphones have immersed

us in media like nothing before. Now, my generation would spend hours in front of a television every week, and there were often times that we could easily escape from mass media if we wanted to just go outside or whatever, because cell phones were barely a thing when I was a kid. There was no YouTube or Facebook, there were no smartphones. Even digital cameras were in credibly rare and expensive, and so my generation developed a very different sensibility and

relationship with communication and humor. Now, I don't say that superior sensibility. I don't think my generation had a better version of that than any other generation. I'm just pointing out that it's different. So you contrast my generation with the teens of the twenty one century. The Internet and mobile devices have changed how we experience, consume, and interact with media. Everything seems pulled into the media realm. People who would otherwise have led fairly average lives were able

to leverage online tools to become celebrities. They they've been able to amass fortunes by vlogging or live streaming games or developing themselves into a brand. It's a totally different landscape, and as such, it provides a much different launch point for humor and communication, and that's what we're seeing on TikTok. TikTok Let's users share short videos that often end up being a reflection, commentary, or criticism of some form of media or cultural idea, and it's easily shared and it's

easily digested. So in many ways, it reminds me of how people tend to encounter the news. The twenty four hour news cycle created a demand for news. You had to fill up all that time with something if you're going to be broadcasting twenty four hours a day. And then the Internet comes along and took that news cycle

and made it a bazillion times worse. One consequence of this is that we don't tend to have very long memories when it comes to big events because we're flooded with notifications whenever the next big event happens, and because the Internet is global, there's always a big event happening somewhere, so it just becomes this sequence of big events. Well, TikTok videos kind of taps into that in a little way.

Video creators can become famous. Some may only achieve temporary notoriety, but other people have launched entire careers from TikTok and they can make ironic observations about the world and media and memes that are going on at that time. Most videos use a soundtrack taken from established media, such as a musical artist or a film soundtrack or audio from a television show, and so to someone like me, the videos might appear silly or unimportant because I'm a grumpy

old man. But to a different generation, it's an actual response, whether conscious or otherwise, to the environment that they're growing up in. Also, because these TikTok videos rely so heavily on identifiable pop culture media, they tend to transcend barriers like language, so they become really accessible. Oh the the tone is really interesting too. There's a sort of self deprecating humor that runs through a lot of TikTok videos, which is a stark contrast to how people try to

present themselves on other platforms like Instagram. On Instagram, it's far more common to see someone present themselves in full blown self promotion mode, so kind of like, look how awesome I am, Look how awesome my life is. Look how awesome these products I enjoy are. Don't you want these products too? Like? That's kind of the perception of your typical Instagram personality, right, they are a person who are They're presenting themselves as a brand that interacts with

other established brands. Well, a lot of TikTok users seem

to use TikTok in a totally different way. They're using TikTok in a way to kind of voice their own insecurities and to deal with that and to to sort of poke fun at themselves in a self aware way, as opposed to trying to present this kind of idealistic vision of themselves and on the app that frequently goes fairly well if you're viewing TikTok through the app, that's kind of the vibe you get with a lot of TikTok videos, not all of them, by the means but

it's a pretty common thread. But TikTok also has created a strange duality. So on the one hand, you had the TikTok culture of the app itself, and then on the other you have the culture around TikTok that has grown out from the way TikTok is presented on other platforms platforms like YouTube and Facebook, where people will upload collections of TikTok videos, they'll aggregate them much in the same way as Byte Dances news aggregator would gather headlines.

Many of those compilations popping up on other platforms aren't like a best of you know, it's not the best of TikTok featuring clever users of the app or particularly funny jokes. Instead, there are a lot of cringe compilations. These are videos where something isn't necessarily going well, or maybe they're meant to service material for mockery and derision, so you're making someone's making fun of another creator. So

these are two very different experiences. Right on the one hand, you have the app experience, which tends to be a bit more lighthearted, and then you have the wider experience of videos appearing on other platforms where people are being you know, jerks on the internet. As per usual, the duet feature on TikTok can be used for mockery in this way. So with a duet, a user can respond to a previously posted TikTok video, creating a split screen in which the original video plays on one side and

on the other side you have the response video. Now, ideally you would use this to add something of value to the original video, to create a duet. Maybe someone's singing in one video and you harmonize with them in the duet video, and then it's presented that way together.

That's the intent of this feature. However, a lot of people use it in order to make fun of the original video in some way, either to react to something that happens in the video in an over the top way, or to just out and out burn the person who

created the first video. So you might post an earnest attempt to sing a song, and then you might see that your video shows up on a YouTube list that's being held up for mockery by some TikTok troll who gets most of their views by tearing down other people. In TikTok culture, it's called ironic TikTok. I think it's playing pretty fast and loose with the definition of irony, because often the word ironic is being used in a place for something like means spirited. That being mean is

not necessarily being ironic. The two are not synonymous. However, this isn't exactly new. I'm not pointing out something that has just popped up. This is not to say that this generation is particularly awful. I don't think that's true at all. The Internet has had plenty of forums and platforms where this stuff has happened well in the past. It's pretty widespread on TikTok, or at least on the

plot secondary platforms like YouTube and Instagram. But it's not like this is a huge surprise, right that the target demographic for TikTok tends to be young people, and young people throughout most of history have often sought approval by making fun of vulnerable targets. I mean that was true when I was a kid and the Internet didn't even really exist, at least not in the minds of kids my age. The Internet was a thing, but none of

us access to it. The Worldwide Web didn't exist yet when I was a kid, but kids were still you know, mean and picked on people. So this is definitely something that has been a thing for ages and ages and ages. It's just that TikTok enables it on a scale that's much larger than what you could do back when I was a kid, Like I might get fun of in front of the whole school, but that was a school people, it wasn't the whole Internet. So this creates a pretty

unusual landscape. Right. The app itself isn't really plagued with trolling. Meanwhile, the secondary platforms like Instagram and YouTube are much more likely to feature trollish videos and making it worse, a large percentage of TikTok's audience are not watching the videos on TikTok. A lot of them have never downloaded TikTok. They're watching the videos on these other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, so they're seeing more of the cringe compilations

and things of that nature. So your experiences with TikTok really depend heavily on how you actually access the content. Now, not all of the ironic TikTok videos are means spirited. A lot of them are, but not all of them. Some are more absurdist humor that doesn't really seem to have any kind of malicious intent. It's more like a very goofy reaction to a similarly goofy video and not meant to be like it wasn't that first video terrible

or whatever. But there are a lot of users who really do set out to make stuff that was either intended to belittle or insult the original creator. Some are just making stuff that is an overt attempt to be offensive, probably for no other reason than they find it amusing to get an emotional reaction out of people. It's a

classic troll behavior. Others might be using TikTok to express some truly terrible beliefs that they hold, like racist beliefs or misogynistic beliefs, because they see it as a way where they can exp us these things without there being any kind of consequence to that. But why are these secondary platforms presenting a more toxic version of TikTok in the first place? Why is it so popular there? What mostly has to do with how algorithms suss out which

videos they should suggest to users. Videos that get a lot of engagement tend to rise to the top because engagement translates to spending more time on that platform, and spending more time on the platform means spending more time around ads. Spending more time around ads means that the platform makes more money. So you see how this drives decision making From a platform perspective, the platforms like YouTube and Instagram our businesses, and a driving motivator for business

owners is to maximize profits. So to do that, if your YouTube or Instagram, you have to find ways to keep people on your platform, to keep them engaged, and that often means serving up some stuff that's pretty nasty. DN means spirited, not because the content is better, but because it keeps people glued to the platform, which is pretty gross. But we see this all the time, and not just with TikTok. I'm not trying to call them

out here, It's on all these platforms. It's also one of the underlying principles that fuels the discussion around fake news and the promotion of extremist ideologies on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Over at the TikTok app, meanwhile, it's largely using a different type of curating. A common feature on social platforms is the ability to indicate you like

a post or video or whatever. So you click on the little like button or the thumbs up icon or a little hard icon or whatever it is, and you express your admiration for the content. On the back end, the service logs this response then begins to develop a profile for you. Are you liking a lot of pictures of dogs on Instagram? Well, what do you know when you start doing a search on Instagram. A lot of the images that are just gonna populate before you even type in a search term are going to be dogs

on TikTok. If you indicate that the lip syncing videos that have really clever edits, maybe they have really interesting makeup effects or something you're clicking like on a lot of those, you're gonna see more of those pop up in your feed. If you don't like videos that are more mean spirited, like you never hit like on a mean spirited video, then over time they're going to show

up less frequently. Your actions guide TikTok to curating a feed that's most likely to keep your attention, because again, keeping your attention, keeping you on the platform for as long as possible is the goal, because that's what generates

revenue for TikTok. There's a feedback loop going on here in which TikTok gathers information about its users, then it makes use of that information to tweak the presentation of the platform to those users in an effort to improve the experience, and and by improve the experience, I mean encourage more engagement, then monitor the results. The cycle repeats endlessly with the goal of constantly morphing to suit the preferences of the individual user, while also promoting content that

has near universal acceptance. There's another aspect of TikTok that we're going to explore when we come back, and that's how it has come under scrutiny from the standpoint of national security. I'll explain more in a minute, but first let's take another quick break. Before I get to the national security stuff with TikTok, It's important to mention that the app has been at the object of scrutiny for

lots of different reasons, not just national security. One of those reasons is that the app hasn't been terribly good at enforcing any sort of age restrictions, and so there have been some awful, high profile cases in which the app has played a part in putting kids in danger. For example, according to the South China Morning Post. Kids in Hong Kong potentially put themselves in danger on TikTok by sharing personal information like their full names or their

phone numbers. So that's not great, and it's not that TikTok should prevent them from doing that, but TikTok allowing such young people access to the app in the first place, and I'm talking like nine or ten year olds, that's a problem. TikTok, like pretty much any online space, has its share of predators who might try and exploit that kind of information, and that alone is truly disturbing and

needs to be addressed. And because TikTok doesn't have good age restrictions in place, it has run a foul of the law in some countries. So in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission find TikTok in February nineteen for collecting data on children under the age of thirteen. That's a violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in

the United States, also own as Kappa. Now, incidentally, I'll have to do a full episode on Kappa because it's a law that's affecting lots of people, including creators on YouTube, and it's actually a pretty complicated issue. Anyway, the FTC found TikTok guilty of violating Kappa and tracking this data of underage users, and so byte Dance was hit with a fine of um five point seven million dollars. And sure, to folks like me, five point seven million bucks is

an enormous amount of money. It's truly enough to merit the designation of a princely sum. But around that same time, byte Dance had a valuation of nearly eighty billion dollars. Do you know how many times five point seven million goes into eighty billion? I do. I did the math. It's more than fourteen thousand times. It is point zero zero seven vent of the company's value. So the fine wasn't even a drop in the bucket for byite Dance. The app has also been in the spotlight for how

it monetizes itself. So there's the advertising that I mentioned. Of course, you know you see ads and that generates revenue, but that's everywhere. TikTok also allows for sponsored videos, So you could have a brand sponsor a content creator, and that creator then goes and makes videos featuring that brand's products, and then you would have a tab in the app that would make it easy for users to purchase those

products featured in the videos. They click on the little tab they can order the stuff and it really facilitates that transaction. Then there are the virtual items, which are coins and then virtual gifts. This gets a little wishy washy complicated, timey whimy wibbly wobbly. So TikTok allows quote select users aged sixteen or above end quote too participate in the program. In this case, the program is live streaming. Quote.

Such users shall be selected exclusively at the discretion of the platform on the basis of various criteria, including their track record and creating quality content, their number of followers, etcetera. End quote. So live streaming is now a thing on TikTok, and you have to be at least sixteen years old in order to be able to do it. Beyond that, for those users who are eighteen years or older, there's

an additional benefit. These users can purchase virtual coins, or if they are people in this live stream program, they can accept virtual items. So to purchase a virtual item, users have to be at least eighteen years or uh. They have to be the age of majority for their respective country. And they can purchase virtual gifts with virtual coins.

The gifts are meant to show a pre ciation toward content creators, and the creators received the gifts in the form of another virtual currency called diamonds, which is getting a bit confusing right. Virtual coins are used to purchase virtual gifts, which convert into another virtual item called a diamond. Gift. Giving is public, by the way, so anyone on TikTok will be able to see when one user sends a

gift to another, including what that gift was diamonds. Meanwhile, are as TikTok puts it quote a measurement of the popularity of the relevant user content end quote, so it's essentially saying how good or how popular is this video. TikTok reserves the right to determine the rate of conversion of diamonds too, you know, actual real world money that

can be spent on real world stuff. So creators who earn diamonds can withdraw diamonds from their account, whereupon TikTok will convert the virtual diamonds into real money based in US currency using an arbitrary conversion rule that the company dictates. So you can make money as a creator on TikTok. But the amount you make is purely at the whim

of Bite Dance. They might say like, oh, a hundred diamonds equals one dollar one day, and then the next day they might say a thousand diamonds equals one dollar. It's completely up to the company and there's no solid conversion there. All right, But now about national security, what's going on there? Well, part of the issue doesn't necessarily point back to Bite Dance the company itself, but rather how extremists can make use of social media to spread

their message or to spread misinformation or disinformation. The concern is that extremist groups can spread messages promoting their philosophies in short, bite sized packages to a wide audience of mostly young and by extension, impressionable viewers. Whether it's an organization like ISIS or a looser groups such as white supremacists, there's a real concern that platforms like TikTok will serve as an entry point for more young people to join

dangerous groups. Then there are fears that the app could be used to interfere with major events, such as a country's elections. Here in the United States, there's a real concern that social media services are being leveraged by all sorts of parties, both domestic and foreign, in an effort to spread misinformation, to undermine faith in the democratic process, or otherwise affect the outcome of the elections process in

some way. While you could argue convincingly, I might add that the way these social media platforms curate information can contribute to their misuse. You could also argue that the services themselves aren't necessarily engaged in these activities. They're enablers,

but they're not necessarily instigators. So while there are real criticisms about platforms like Facebook promoting harmful misinformation or extremist views due to the way the Facebook algorithm works, most people would not go so far as to accuse Facebook itself of creating that content. But there's a big difference between TikTok and Facebook besides the way the two platforms present content, and that's the fact that TikTok is owned

by a Chinese company. Now, I talked a lot about tech politics and China in my episodes about Huawei and also another one called why is Everything Made in China? But here's a quick overview. The government in China is ultimately under the governance of the Communist Party of China. In China, the government has tight controls on what the

media is allowed to present to the Chinese public. The Chinese government can sense or information, restrict access to information from outside China, and even dictate what can actually be communicated to citizens. In addition, in twenty seventeen, the government passed a law that says, quote any organization and citizen uh in China that is should support and cooperate the

in the national intelligence work end quote. So that is, if the company or person originates in China, then that person or a company has a duty to support China's national intelligence efforts, which includes spying. So you've got this incredibly popular app used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, and you have a country with a government that demands companies and citizens within that country amplify

the country's own intelligence efforts. It is understandable why leaders and other countries would become concerned about the rise of popularity of a Chinese based app. If the company we're gathering all that data, it might be used in harmful ways. If people in the US were to use the app in sensitive locations such as on government property or on military sites. It could give away information to a not

quite friendly country. In fact, in the United States, the Army and the Navy have banned the use of TikTok. You you cannot install it on any government issued phone. A country that has been known to employ hackers in cyber warfare projects in the past. China is already pretty high on that suspect list, so for some the app is akin to handing over ammunition to an enemy during wartime.

In September twenty nineteen, the newspaper The Guardian published an article that included excerpts from leaked documents from inside TikTok. Those documents showed that the company had been sending directives to moderators, whose job it is to look for content

that violates TikTok's terms of serve. This the directives expanded that definition beyond the stuff you would expect, you know, stuff that depicts violence or sexual content, and the directives included other stuff like if a video were to include material that criticized the Chinese government, or one that addressed the political situation in Tibet, or one that talked about other topics that the Chinese government wanted to restrict those were to be removed or shifted over so that nobody

would ever see them. So technically the videos would be on the platform, but they would be in a bucket

that no one would ever access. When citizens in Hong Kong began organizing protests in twenty nineteen against China, their stories were shared on numerous social platforms mysteriously, though it was really hard to find any examples on TikTok since those protests were directed at mainland China, the implication was that TikTok might be purpose fully suppressing any videos that were coming out of Hong Kong on TikTok that were related to the protests. Now in the United States, lawmakers

called for investigations into TikTok. Bye Dance responded by saying that all US user data exists on servers that are actually in the United States, with some backups that are also in Singapore, but that no US data, no US user information lives on any servers in China itself, nor are the data on those servers subject to Chinese law, so the Chinese government cannot do anything about that, according to byte Dance, nor has it asked for any stuff

to be taken down, according to Byte Dance. Towards the end of twenty nineteen, rumors were popping up that Byte Dance was actually considering selling off some or all of TikTok. Byte Dance executives have denied these rumors. They say that the company has no plans to sell any of the service off, despite the pressure on the company that it

is facing on the international stage. At the same time, the US Committee on Foreign Investment launched an inquiry into whether or not Byte Dance should be forced to spin off music Lee. That's the basis of TikTok's presence outside of China itself. As of this recording, Byte Dance still has control of TikTok, and according to the company, the Chinese government has no say in how data outside of

China can be stored or displayed. There have been a few cases in which investigators pointed out examples of apparent censorship, where people's videos appeared to have been taken down on purpose, but so far the TikTok representatives have explained those away as just being examples of human error. You know, they're not examples of a conscious effort to suppress information. By the time you hear this, things may have changed. We'll

have to see. There's also an ongoing concern that TikTok is going to be the home of deep fakes in the near future. There's talk that byte Dance is investing heavily in technology that could lead to deep fake videos. So that's another thing that people are worried about. I'm sure I'll have to do an update on this topic in the future, but in the meantime, I'm gonna sign off and go be old and grouchy for a while. If you guys want to reach out to me, please do.

You can find me on those other old social media platforms, you know, the ones where an old guy like me can still feel comfortable. I'm talking about Twitter and Facebook. The handle for both of those is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ye