TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world, and now has over a billion users worldwide. But its future in the United States remains in limbo. The Biden administration, citing national security concerns, has demanded that the Chinese-owned company be sold, or face a federal ban. Montana lawmakers have already passed legislation banning the platform on personal devices, sending the bill to the governor. A lot of questions remain about the feasibility of statewide and federal bans, and why, exactly, do U.S. policymakers view this platform, that started as a lip syncing app, as such a threat? Jacob Ward is the NBC News technology correspondent and is author of “In The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back.” He joins WITHpod to discuss what’s driven the app’s exponential growth, the company’s lack of transparency in the past, the case for and against it, what could be ahead on the regulatory front and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Jacob Ward: They enjoy the particular protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in which they literally are considered just this neutral platform. They are not legally responsible for the things that we post or do on there. There’s a bunch of legal challenges to that coming up, but they enjoy an open road we have rarely seen. The gun industry is one of the only others I can think of that enjoys anything like the special protections that this industry does.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
I spend too much time on my phone and on social media, as I would hazard many people listening to this podcast do. And I have been using Twitter less, I think, for fairly obvious reasons, because it has become more of a sort of insufferable cesspool. But rather than cutting down my time on social media, I’ve replaced the time that I spend on Twitter often with scrolling through an app called TikTok.
You’ve probably heard of TikTok. I’d actually be curious. You should write in to us at WITHpod@gmail.com or tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod. Curious listeners of this program use TikTok. I sort of was skeptical or felt like, oh, it’s one of those things for young people and I’m not a young person, so it’s not for me.
And I’m writing this book, as I’ve mentioned before, about attention, and so TikTok seems sort of an important thing to kind of learn my way around. It’s for my job, I promise. And so, I downloaded TikTok and there’s a lot to say about it as an app.
The first thing that I think is the most interesting and powerful thing about it and the reason that I think it is the fastest growing social media platform in the country, and possibly the world at this point, is that it takes away the paralysis of choice.
Something that has happened recently with the proliferation particularly of streaming outlets and, you know, different forms of video content you can watch, particularly if you’re just sitting down and you’re like, what should we watch? That conversation, right? Well, I heard this was good, that was good.
There’s a kind of work, there’s a labor, there’s a little bit of anxiety. There’s a threshold to get over when you’re deciding what to watch. In TikTok, you’re just like, don’t worry about it. Don’t make any decisions. Just give me a thumbs up and thumbs down. Just recline back, I’m going to show you stuff. You like it, you watch it. You don’t, you keep going. And we’re just going to do that.
It’s a very, very simple interface. In some ways, in a weird way, what it does is recapture the logic of what TV used to be, which is that you would sit with the clicker and watch what was there. And if you liked it, you stayed. And if you didn’t, you kept clicking, right?
In some ways, it’s a sort of “Back to the Future” aspect. But it also has that kind of slot machine, kind of endorphin, addictive feeling to it. The slot machine metaphor is in the actual scrolling, right? The screen moves the way that the cherry does when it comes down. And I think that’s actually intentional, and I write about this in the book throughout.
But you can really get sucked in. There is something narcotizing, if that’s (ph) right word about it. It is an amazing mix of stuff. It’s a wide variety of stuff.
And I think this is one of the things that’s really cool about it, you’ll discover forms of content that you didn’t think you wanted like, you know, people restoring very old tools from the 19th century lovingly or carpet cleaning videos, which I’m super into, and I’ve mentioned before in the program.
Or (ph) my favorite people just making different kinds of sandwiches, which is just great. And like, it turns out, I am capable of watching people make sandwiches for ungodly amounts of time. That’s not something I knew about myself or even a thing that I would have predicted was a form of content that I wanted to watch.
So, in that way, there is something kind of powerful about it. And there is something, kind of, sort of expansive. And when it’s at its best, I have to say, the best parts of TikTok feel like the best parts of internet culture that I’ve loved from when I was first 12 years old, which is random people doing really funny, smart, interesting, impressive things.
Because the beautiful thing about the internet when it’s sort of operating at its peak, and you see this, you know, this was very true in the early days of Twitter, you see this with Wikipedia, is that, like, it has a way of aggregating human talents and brilliance, such that you encounter different forms of it in different places that you wouldn’t have encountered before, because it’s an alternate system of elevating human talent and brilliance than whatever the other institutions are, whether they’re someone getting an agent and someone, you know, going to Hollywood or someone getting a job like myself as, like, a newscaster or a broadcaster.
What’s beautiful about the internet is this sort of democratizing effect it can have such that you encounter all forms of brilliance and human ingenuity and human talent.
What ends up happening over time, generally, is that as those platforms develop sophistication, they start to adopt hierarchies that ape the other hierarchies such that, you know, you end up with a hierarchy that looks like, well, if you’re a TikTok influencer and you want to get views and you get an agent, then maybe you can get views. So, there’s a sort of, kind of, top-down control or hierarchy that ends up forming often around these platforms over time.
But TikTok to me is new enough that there’s just a lot of funny, cool, random stuff on it, right, you know, to go back to the throwback metaphor of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
There’s two things about it, though, that are really distinct and have made it the target of more political controversy and possible legislation, including the possibility of an outright ban, which is, A, its ownership is Chinese. It’s a Chinese company. And the degree to which that Chinese company is enmeshed with the Communist Party of China, that controls all private enterprise there at some level, is an ongoing question. And the degree to which that presents privacy and national security concerns is also a huge question.
And then there’s also just something, even by the standards of the kind of drugged feeling of a long social media jag, where TikTok feels like, you know, it’s like the fentanyl of this kind of drug, that it’s somehow more potent than what came before it. And maybe because it’s more potent, it’s more dangerous.
So, I’ve been wanting to talk about TikTok for a while. And I’m super psyched to have one of my favorite tech journalists in the world, who also happens to be a colleague of mine, Jacob Ward, who is the NBC News technology correspondent. He’s a former editor-in-chief of “Popular Science” magazine. He’s also (ph) author of a really interesting new book called “The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back.”
And I’ve followed Jacob’s work for a long time, but also was reminded that he’d be a good person to talk about this when he popped up in my TikTok algorithm as I was scrolling through because he’s doing a lot of TikTok. And so, I thought, oh, I should talk to Jacob about this.
So, Jacob, welcome to the program.
Jacob Ward: Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate being here. And, man, that is so flattering. I can’t believe that I popped up in your algorithm. I was going to say that what you were describing in terms of what you dig on TikTok, or at least what TikTok thinks you dig, is so funny because it’s exactly the kind of stuff it serves me.
And I wonder, you know, there’s always the hazard in this business of comparing social media feeds because you can learn so much about somebody based on what gets fed. But, brother, I get those carpet cleaning videos like crazy. I get the sandwiches like crazy. For me, it’s the historical meals. There’s a guy who with like revolutionary garb sleeves, makes the —
Chris Hayes: Oh (ph), I haven’t seen that dude.
Jacob Ward: — horrible lunches of the 17th century. Oh man, it’s so good.
But like you, I also am an addict. My name is Jake and I’m an addict. And I don’t know about you, but I get the videos eventually when I scroll for long enough that tell me to stop scrolling, that come from TikTok. Have you gotten those?
Chris Hayes: That’s a tough moment.
Jacob Ward: Dude (ph).
Chris Hayes: I didn’t want to bring it up because that’s a pretty upsetting moment —
Jacob Ward: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — when you’re pretty far in.
Jacob Ward: When the drug dealer says you’ve had enough.
Chris Hayes: When the drug —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — when the drug dealer possibly being puppeted by the Chinese Communist Party —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — says —
Jacob Ward: Says you’re cut off —
Chris Hayes: — you, buddy —
Jacob Ward: — you’re good.
Chris Hayes: — you’re good.
Jacob Ward: You’re good. And that means two things. One, you’re an addict and, two, they know you’ll be back tomorrow. Right?
Chris Hayes: Oh my God.
Jacob Ward: There’s no question about it. And it was so funny, I was talking to a colleague of mine today who said, oh, yeah, when those messages come up, I’m like, leave me alone, TikTok, I’m a grownup —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — and I scroll right past it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Shut up. Get out of here.
Jacob Ward: And I think to myself, which one of us is being dumber? Is it me who’s taking the cues of the corporation that my attention —
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God.
Jacob Ward: — has been hijacked? Or is it the person who’s like, I’m my own person, leave me alone, I’m going stay up all night. You know?
Chris Hayes: You’re cut off. Oh, it’s so true. And I think that speaks to why it, you know, does have a kind of uniquely seductive or addictive —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — sort of feel to it. I will say that I’ve actually gotten, that was happening more when I first started.
Jacob Ward: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I feel less that way now. And it’s also interesting, too, that I will have these conversations with other people where they also find stuff that is being fed to them, that algorithm, and then it turns out like, oh, maybe it’s just feeding a lot of the stuff to the same people. And there’s a certain kind of, like, coterie of kind of dude-bro comedian podcasters.
Jacob Ward: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: They’re fine. I don’t have strong feelings either way, but they’re (ph) showing up in my algorithm always. And I’m never that interested in them.
Jacob Ward: Hmm.
Chris Hayes: So, I partly wonder, like, how smart is this algorithm? How much is it just, like, really just doing raw demographic stuff? Like, well, you’re a white guy in your 40s. You probably like these people. You know, as opposed to —
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: — something more sophisticated and sensitive. But maybe the best place to start is just if you could just explain, like, TikTok really felt like it came out of the ether to me.
Jacob Ward: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Where did it come from? Tell me the origin story of TikTok.
Jacob Ward: Sure. OK. So, let’s see. Eleven years ago, a Chinese entrepreneur named Zhang Yiming, who’s, you know, in the same generation as Zuckerberg and others, created this software firm and it was ByteDance. That’s the Chinese parent company that it’s important to sort of know the name —
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Jacob Ward: — of because that’s what draws so much ire, of course. Right?
And so, that company began kicking out all sorts of different platforms. There was a news aggregator. There was a joke aggregator. And they were very similar to TikTok in that they, very quickly, would figure out, OK, based on, you know, the thousands of other people looking at this same video and behaving the same way you have, we think, you know, you will like this next one.
And then they came up with a similar concept for one that was sort of a lip-sync video performance thing —
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Jacob Ward: — called Douyin. And Douyin is essentially TikTok but in China. And in 2017, they created this twin app to Douyin with an identical interface. And they put it out to the rest of the world. That was the outside of China version of Douyin. and it was named TikTok. And what’s crazy is how fast it took off.
So, it’s interesting, when I think about TikTok, I try very hard to break apart the things that make it successful technologically and the things that make it —
Chris Hayes: Uh-hmm.
Jacob Ward: — controversial geopolitically because they’re very different —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — things, right?
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: And when you talk to people who deal in the raw guts of these systems, they will tell you that there’s really nothing that distinct about TikTok. You know, there’s no insidious conspiratorial geopolitical thing going that makes it so successful. It is the guts of what people have learned about what makes things addictive. And I think your —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — analogy to slot machines is dead-on for the opiate sensation one gets from scrolling it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: But to get back to the history of it, you know, as of last year, it had hit, you know, a billion users, and that was when it was only five years old, right? Which —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jacob Ward: — you know, YouTube, Instagram, those guys, you know, took years and years and years and years to get to that milestone.
Chris Hayes: Do they still run parallel? There’s TikTok and Douyin is (ph) —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — operates inside China. That doesn’t count their Chinese user base?
Jacob Ward: No. Right, that doesn’t count —
Chris Hayes: Oh, OK (ph). I see.
Jacob Ward: — the one operating within —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — the, you know, country of more than a billion people. I mean, that’s what’s so incredible about TikTok —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jacob Ward: — is that this is an exported product that has more than a billion users. Now, it’s 1.5 billion people around the world who (ph) use this thing.
And, you know, it is the most downloaded app in the world, you know. And it’s just crazy. So, we don’t get internal figures from TikTok. It is a private company and does not like to share proprietary information. But the estimate is that in America, users spend an average, in the United States, of anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour a day on the app, which is longer than any other, as far as we know, any other platform, including YouTube.
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Jacob Ward: And so —
Chris Hayes: I believe that.
Jacob Ward: Right? And so, it’s so interesting what you say about the slot machine effect. But I got so into this. And it’s funny, I just happened to have it (ph) sitting at my desk. I’ve been doing this run of books that I was inspired by in writing my book. And this one, “Addiction by Design.”
Chris Hayes: “Addiction by Design.” I knew you were going to —
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: bring it up, yep.
Jacob Ward: Natasha Dow Schull —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: I’m sure you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — her work as well. She is an incredible —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — human being, in that she went and did the saddest, the hardest research project I could imagine, which is going and spending time with people who were deeply, deeply addicted to slot machines. And then she spent a huge amount of time getting inside the companies that make slot machines, and then all of the ways in which the learnings of that industry have been now —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jacob Ward: — exported to social media and tech in general. The big blow-my-mind takeaway that I got from that, and I came to her because I was interested in companies that do the online simulator version of slot machines in which you have to pay money to play, but you can win no real money back, and yet people are losing their life savings in this country. Tens of —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — thousands of people —
Chris Hayes: Jesus Christ.
Jacob Ward: — are blowing their life savings on this, right? What a society we’ve built.
And my question was, why on earth would anyone blow all their money on a game that you can only lose? You literally cannot win that game. Why would that be? And so, I went to her to ask. And she said, well, that’s because your misconception about slot machines is that —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — people get addicted because they want to win.
Chris Hayes: No, she’s got the quote in the open from the woman who says, I’m in the zone. It’s like the eye of the hurricane.
Jacob Ward: That’s right. That’s right.
Chris Hayes: There’s a woman who says, I started playing and I learned pretty quickly that I’m not going to win money. But it’s not about winning and losing. It’s about the feeling I get when I’m in the zone. It’s like I’m in the eye of the hurricane. Everything is calm. I’m locked in and focused.
Jacob Ward: And Natasha Dow Schull then, you know, goes on to describe that machine zone feeling as this opiate feeling.
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Jacob Ward: And what’s crazy is that one of the companies that makes the social casino games, the simulators online that grab people’s life savings, is called Machine Zone. Right? So, none of this is lost on the companies making these systems.
Chris Hayes: No.
Jacob Ward: They know all about the research and they have deployed it. And TikTok is, you know, another example of this. You know, that feeling of, oh, the next one, the endorphin hit —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jacob Ward: — you get from scrolling to the next one goes on and on forever. So that is what makes it so compulsive on the user side.
On the creator side, one of the things that makes it such a successful business is that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the social media platforms that we are used to in the United States, are built on the idea of the social graph. Your social network —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — is how —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — they figure out what you like. It’s, you know, how they draw you in to spend time with other people.
Chris Hayes: And how you get big, if you have a lot of followers, for instance —
Jacob Ward: That’s right. That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — then you can —
Jacob Ward: You have huge amounts of followers —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — and you connect, you know, which is why celebrities automatically do well on those platforms. Well, what’s interesting —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — about TikTok is TikTok does not play by those rules. Instead, anyone can hit it big.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Jacob Ward: Which is, you know, to get back to our jackpot, you know, ideas here and the casino and addiction ideas, is one of the reasons that I keep coming back as a creator on TikTok to somebody who posts work, right, and I’m trying to promote a book on there and all that stuff, is that you never know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — when you’re going to hit it big.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Jacob Ward: I’ll (ph) have these random, you know, I’ll spout off about my book for a second and it’ll randomly do really, really well. And so that also, you know, keeps people coming back. You know, and all of that, right, it’s important to note, is not a product at all of it being a Chinese built system.
Chris Hayes: No.
Jacob Ward: It is simply the cutting edge of what all social media in —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — our country and beyond does. They’ve just nailed it in this particular way.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So, they have this very sophisticated, well, we can talk about how sophisticated it is, but a very effective recommendation algorithm. That’s the core of the engine, right?
Like, in the same way that, you know, going back 15 years when the nerds and the grad student nerds came up with Pandora, which was, oh, you like this kind of music, you might like this kind of music, right?
That idea, like you like this video, you probably like this video, but with the thumbs up, thumbs down. Right? So, you’re constantly giving it feedback. And then it’s also reading how long you’re watching stuff.
Jacob Ward: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: So yes, you have this, there’s massive virality. Unlike Facebook, unlike Twitter, where you need to build a following, or even YouTube where you want subscribers, you got to build a following over time, some person could do a funny dance on their couch and get 5 million views.
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: And they have basically no followers. It just blows up. Now, we should say, one of the things I find funny about this is occasionally I’ll be served a video of like a basically (ph) conventionally attractive young woman wearing very little clothes.
Jacob Ward: Hmm.
Chris Hayes: And I’m like, why are you sending me this? Like, this is not what I watch on TikTok. And I’ll scroll past it. And if you ever, like, go back and be like, what what’s the deal with that? It’s like, well, that has 6 million views because, like, a lot of it also isn’t rocket science. It’s like, oh, right, there’s a whole universe of things that are, like, what would you think would blow up on the internet? Like, you know, a lot of (ph) —
Jacob Ward: Hmm. That’s right. That’s right.
Chris Hayes: So, there’s a sort of weird disjunction between, there’ll be these really specific, very funny things where, like, a very funny young person is making a very particular joke about going to Eid feast at the end of Ramadan with your uncle and the things he says. And it’s very funny and it blows up. And then there’s stuff that’s just like, yeah, it’s, like, conventionally attractive people dancing, or something like that.
Jacob Ward: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And the nature of it is that it sorts of encourages what you and I in the old days would have considered a kind of plagiarism in its user interface in that it began as a lip-syncing algorithm —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — you know, sort of a —
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s such a good point.
Jacob Ward: — lip-syncing platform, right? And the process by which you often can find related content is you find the same underlying sound. You literally —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — have a button you can click in the interface that will show you all —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — the other videos that have used that same sound.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Those trends will blow up, right?
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: And that’ll blow up. And what’s crazy is that I can’t tell you how many times I have bumped into a thing, like you say, like, you know, a charming kid going to Eid, right, or the Jamaican truck driver showing you how he makes dinner in his cab.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: And I’ll think, God, what a human, beautiful, original moment I have just witnessed through this platform. It really is, you know, the most fantastic —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — experience. And then I’ll discover that that was actually a lip-sync of somebody else’s Eid video or somebody else’s —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — Jamaican truck driver preparation video. And you go, oh, this is all the —
Chris Hayes: Mimesis.
Jacob Ward: Yeah, that’s right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: And as a result, I have bookmarks like crazy in that thing. I bookmark everything. And I have a whole section that’s for, like, you know, the thesis of my book is basically we are losing human choice and human agency because we are ceding it to technology. The book is called “The Loop,” and I literally have a bookmark called “The Loop Examples.” And it is thousands —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — and thousands of different, like, here’s people giving over their dating life to an algorithm, here’s people deciding to just plagiarize the opening lines of their dating app approaches. You know, just like the culture of plagiarism that is somehow —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — sort of encouraged by this is really, really interesting, I think.
Chris Hayes: Well, and a (ph) plagiarism is one way of saying it. The other way of saying it is, you know, sort of mimesis or imitation or sampling, right, or borrowing.
Jacob Ward: Hmm.
Chris Hayes: So, there’s something like, you know, there’ll be a little bit of sound and then a whole bunch of people will use that bit of sound and lip sync to it.
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: And it’ll be some witty little bit of dialogue, but then in different scenarios, right? So, you’re sort of appropriating this funny little bit of dialogue, but you’re putting it in different scenarios. You know, in some ways, it’s like it’s a very optimized culture machine in that way.
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: In the sort of —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — Richard Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” when he coined the term meme, which he says is basically the cultural version of a gene, right, which is a little bit of, sort of, reproducible code that kind of replicates itself. I mean, it’s optimized for that.
Jacob Ward: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I am so often trying to trick it into thinking I am not a white dude in my 40s. I’m always trying to trick it into thinking, you know, that I’m constantly trying to convince it that I am somebody else. Because you get the vibe, once you click —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — into it, just how quickly things move through all these different subcultures. You’ll find these —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: And, you know, I’ll think, oh, this is unique. And then I’ll realize, no, there’s a ton of incredible videos about this thing that I would have thought of as a really, you know, that for me is tremendously novel.
But it turns out there’s a whole culture around the world of whatever it is, like cooking while on slack lines or here’s how your immigrant parents treat you once you reach a point of success or, you know, these things —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — that I don’t know, that I just don’t have any lived experience of. And so, you just learn like, oh, they really have clicked into this kind of one-size-fits-all user interface that somehow manages to grab —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — the vastness of human decision-making and cognition.
By the way, I have to just confess to you that I didn’t know you were writing this book about attention. I am really, really excited about that. I think you’re going to do a tremendous job of it. And I just think there is no more important job in the world than articulating how codified human attention —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — is. That’s what the science has shown us and how —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — you know, capitalized or whatever we want to call it.
Chris Hayes: Monetized, yeah.
Jacob Ward: Yeah, monetized it has become in this era of technology. I just think that is holy work you’re doing. So, keep going.
Chris Hayes: That’s my obsession. You know, for me, it’s also particularly because I’m a practitioner, which means that I have to keep people’s attention, you know, every night from 8:00 to 9:00 —
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: — and while (ph) you’re listening to the podcast. I think a lot about it. So there’s both, sort of, theory and praxis here, which is that I do it, I have to do it. That’s like, this is my carpentry. This is the cabinetry that I build every day. This is —
Jacob Ward: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: — when I go to work and I have my hammer and my nails, like, this is what I do. So, yeah, that part of it. You just said another thing that, to me, what I really like about it is I am pretty digital native. I was a kind of early computer geek. I subscribed to “Wired,” the magazine, the first month that it came out.
I managed to convince my parents when I was 12 or 13 that, like, dial-up services were garbage and we needed to get a direct ISP. And, you know, I had a Lynx browser, which is the text browser before, you know, Andreessen comes up with the (ph) —
Jacob Ward: My man.
Chris Hayes: — graphical user interface. You know, I was on Usenet newsgroups and, you know, I was transferring files in (ph) FTP protocols. Like, I was, really. So, I have always felt pretty connected to digital culture and to the internet. And I reached a certain age where I started to be like, I am not anymore.
Jacob Ward: Hmm. Yep.
Chris Hayes: I am distant from and alienated from youth culture. I’m an old man on the net. And what has been cool about TikTok is I find youth culture great. You know what I mean?
Jacob Ward: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: It’s interesting, and it’s fascinating, and particularly when it’s globalized or it’s different —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — particular places and identity perspectives people are coming from. And it is just like one step away to just get sort of immersed in one aspect of. Obviously, it’s a very, you know, constrained and performed version of youth culture. But to me, it’s been great. Like, just even just dumb stuff with, like, lingo and what —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — slang words people use.
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: And what music people are listening to, what they’re wearing. I’m, like, how do you decorate your room as a college freshman in the year 2023?
Jacob Ward: Totally.
Chris Hayes: I have no idea. But now —
Jacob Ward: Totally.
Chris Hayes: — I sort of know because I’ve seen a bunch of videos about how people decorate their dorm room in 2023.
So, you and I, we’re both journalists. So, to me, there’s always this journalistic curiosity. You know, when I meet someone at a party or I meet someone in any sense, it’s like, what’s your deal? Hey (ph), what do you do?
Jacob Ward: Yeah, right.
Chris Hayes: Where are you from?
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: What do you care about? So that, to me, is always just satisfying. So, there’s that aspect of it, to me, that is amazing. Like —
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: — that part of it I truly love.
Jacob Ward: Well, and I think for me, you mentioned that you don’t like Twitter anymore, I feel the same way. Right? For me, the experience of putting my work on Twitter or trying to engage in conversation on Twitter is like, you know, getting into a shouting match with the drunkest guy at the bar, always. Always, you know, the craziest exchanges always wind up happening on Twitter.
On TikTok, I’ve had the most thoughtful, delightful —
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Jacob Ward: — open-minded exchanges with people about my book, about my work for NBC, about all kinds of stuff.
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Jacob Ward: Something about that format. And whenever anybody jumps out of line and tries to be abusive, other people jump in to say, hey, hey, hey, you know.
But what I think is —
Chris Hayes: Huh.
Jacob Ward: — so interesting, and I want to use this to maybe bridge this now to the geopolitical aspect of —
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes.
Jacob Ward: — this one, the weird part about this is, how weird is it that all of what we are describing is the product of a company, a Chinese company, right? From a country where none of what we’re talking about, I mean, civility, I guess, is a priority in China, but the diversity of experience that one can experience on TikTok.
And for me, there’s a huge amount of political speech and people saying, you know, really interesting and provocative things about how the future should work and critiquing capitalism in certain ways. I will say, they critique capitalism in my feed. There is not a lot of critique of communism in my feed.
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Jacob Ward: So that’s interesting.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: Right? But the fact is that all of that is inside a wrapper owned by a Chinese company. And we know, right? So, remember, we talked about ByteDance, the parent company. ByteDance, actually back in 2018, remember, I was saying it launched a bunch of different platforms. So, its joke sharing app was this one called Neihan Duanzi. They shut that thing down in 2018. It had more than 200 million users.
Chris Hayes: The government did or ByteDance?
Jacob Ward: ByteDance shut it down because the Chinese media regulators said that it was full of off-color content that had, quote —
Chris Hayes: Aah.
Jacob Ward: — “triggered intense resentment among internet users.” And the founder of ByteDance, Zhang, had to say, quote, “The product has gone astray, posting content that goes against socialist core values. It’s all on me. I accept all the punishments since it failed to direct public opinion in the right way.” So —
Chris Hayes: Wow! Wow! Wow!
Jacob Ward: — how weird, right, that we love the openness and fun of this thing as we experience it in the United States. That’s not how people experience it inside China.
Chris Hayes: So, this segues us to some of the controversy around TikTok. And there’s a bunch of different reasons for it. Let’s tease through some of it. Some of it strikes me as, like, grossly jingoistic.
Jacob Ward: Yes, I agree with you there.
Chris Hayes: It’s just like, we don’t like the fact there’s a non-American company —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — that has figured out how to do this and we’re pissed off about it.
Jacob Ward: When, in history, have we ever had a foreign product —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — media product, you know, exported to the United States that took our media landscape by storm the way TikTok has? We have —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — never experienced in this country anything except the outbound Disneyfication and Coca-Colafication of —
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Jacob Ward: — the world.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Jacob Ward: Now, we are getting an inbound one —
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Jacob Ward: — that we don’t know how to deal with. I agree with you, there’s a lot of weird sentiment around that.
Chris Hayes: Or sometimes we have inbound, you know, cultural, you know, the Beatles show up, right?
Jacob Ward: Sure, the Royals.
Chris Hayes: Right, the Royals. But those are from countries we’re allied with.
Jacob Ward: Hmm.
Chris Hayes: If you recognize, we as a (ph) democracy, we’ve not had cultural penetration from countries that we essentially view as competitors or —
Jacob Ward: Right. Right, there’s been no —
Chris Hayes: So, that’s a big difference.
Jacob Ward: No Russian game shows have —
Chris Hayes: No.
Jacob Ward: — hit it big here.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And in fact —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — our cultural hegemony is, you know, the number one thing about American, quote/unquote, soft power, and I would even say more than that. So, there’s that aspect of it.
To go back to Douyin, right, so when you’re talking about ByteDance, the important context here is ByteDance is existing in the universe of a Chinese internet, which is hermetically sealed from —
Jacob Ward: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the outside world.
Jacob Ward: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They’re never competing against Facebook, they’re not competing against YouTube, they’re not competing against Twitter, they’re not competing against Snapchat. They have a hermetically sealed internet which, by law and through technology, cannot be penetrated by outside forces.
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: They, then, create this successful app and export it. And so, when you strip away to me the jingoism, there is, and I don’t think it’s the argument I would make, but there is a defensible sort of mercantilist asymmetry argument here, which basically goes the (ph) following. We can’t sell Chinese customers —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube. Why on earth should we let the Chinese sell us their TikTok?
Jacob Ward: That’s right. I was talking to an expert about it the other day. And he said, imagine this was steel. Right? If we —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — are not allowed to sell steel to China, but China is allowed to sell steel to us, that would be unacceptable in any kind of trade —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: negotiation. That’s (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: The essence of the trade agreements we have with China is —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — that it’s supposed to go both ways. And the fact that they have cut off their market to our companies, in theory, like you say, creates a politically defensible argument for shutting it down.
That, I would argue, however, is not the argument we have heard from lawmakers, from the Biden administration, right? That’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about national security —
Chris Hayes: No. And —
Jacob Ward: — and other things.
Chris Hayes: — I wanted to highlight that argument because I think it’s actually the more honest, and —
Jacob Ward: I agree with you.
Chris Hayes: — in some ways, more defensible —
Jacob Ward: Yeah, I agree with you.
Chris Hayes: — one. Right?
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: So if you say, look —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — this is just a mercantilist dispute. This is a trade dispute. We’ve got a bunch of companies that are looking for new customers. There’s 1.3 billion people in China. We’d like to get them on Facebook. You won’t let us. We’ll let your TikTok in if you let our Facebook in. Like —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — fair is fair. Like —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — and that, to me, again, I don’t think I go along with it. I think there’s actually speech implications, and we can get into those. But that’s a more honest argument. But that’s, to your point, not the argument that’s being made by policymakers.
Jacob Ward: That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Walk me through the argument policymakers are making.
Jacob Ward: Oh, Chris, why would you put that on me? My God. You know, because it’s so —
Chris Hayes: Well, they’re making a lot, I mean, yeah.
Jacob Ward: I mean, it’s interesting because, I will say, so on the one hand, it’s funny. So, we watched, there were these hearings recently in which the CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, actually spoke out for the first time —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — in the United States. And we here at NBC, you know, watched with great anticipation his arrival in the United States. Every media outlet wanted to try and get him on air. You know, like, it was at this moment where this behemoth —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jacob Ward: — that has been pretty opaque with certainly the media, you know, was going to speak out. Right?
And so, those hearings take place. And I have to say, I was impressed about the lines of questioning that came from the members of that committee. But it’s so interesting because then when you speak to people who don’t remember the last time those people tried to interview the CEO of a social media company, they were tremendously disappointed.
So, I’ve got all kinds of people on TikTok and elsewhere yelling at me saying, are you kidding? Did you watch the same committee meeting that I did? This was the dumbest line —
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Jacob Ward: These were the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard.
And I had to go say to them, but do you remember how they talked to Mark Zuckerberg?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: You know, like, back then it was so distinct. I mean, you know, so you had, back then, people literally asking Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Zuckerberg, how do you make money?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: And Zuckerberg sort of giving this little, kind of, embarrassed grin and saying, well, Senator, we sell ads.
You know, just this fundamental, like, explaining the internet to your grandfather —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — you know (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — kind of misunderstanding. And these questions that went in front of Mr. Chew were very different and much more sophisticated. How do your —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — algorithms target people? What happens here? What happens there?
So, there was a lot of different lines of questioning, a lot of it was performative. It was not an honest exchange of information in the way that one would hope a subcommittee hearing —
Chris Hayes: But they never are.
Jacob Ward: — could have been.
Chris Hayes: I mean —
Jacob Ward: They never are —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Jacob Ward: I know, but —
Chris Hayes: I mean (ph), yeah.
Jacob Ward: — I’m so naive about this stuff, because I also —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — in my business, there is no more closed entity than a tech company. You will never get them —
Chris Hayes: Right, right, right
Jacob Ward: — to sit down and talk to you unless you have subpoena power, for the most part.
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jacob Ward: And so —
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jacob Ward: — for me, it’s this vicarious opportunity to listen to what they —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Jacob Ward: — have to say and so forth. And so when the senators cut him off and don’t let him answer, it drives me bananas because I —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — so want him to answer some questions.
But anyway, the argument broadly is a national security argument. And that argument seems to go along the lines of we do not trust that your company won’t simply hand American data to the Chinese Communist Party, to the ministry of intelligence or whoever else asks for it, because under Chinese law, in theory, any Chinese company, including ByteDance, has to cooperate with the authorities in China and hand over data, even if that data is not held in China.
That’s the base level, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — 101 argument. The 201 argument is even a little more sophisticated, and I heard it from a couple of people, and it’s an interesting one. And that is not only are we worried that you’ll be hoovering up Americans’ data and perhaps putting it to nefarious purposes, you know, there may be leakage within the behavior of anybody on a phone to your app when they go to other apps.
And if you look inside the terms of service of TikTok, it, you know, has tremendously sophisticated language in the terms of service that talk about, you know, I’ll quote a little bit of it here. Like, we collect certain information about the device you use to access the platform, your IP address, user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising, model of your device —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — the device system. You know, they get your screen resolution. They get, you know —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — your app and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms. Right?
And so if you go off to do something else on your phone, while you’ve got TikTok open, in theory, they can look at all kinds of things. So, that’s 201. 301 objection, and I heard this only from a couple of people, is that there would also be the ability to understand, it is more sort of psychographic, understand the habits and desires of the American people in this sort of broad way that social media companies are so good at doing, and perhaps seed the audience with propaganda.
And that, you know, very well may be true. And as in that quote that we were talking about earlier from the head of ByteDance when he had to shut down his joke site because he was not correctly directing public opinion, you know, that’s interesting. These are interesting arguments.
But I think, you know, the thing that I think is really interesting is here in the United States we have set ourselves up to not have the tools we need to get the answers to these questions, to the 101, 201 or 301 argument, because we have just given the road to social media companies and given ourselves no tools to investigate.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, the next place I’m going to go is like, OK, right, all of those seem absolutely plausible concerns, but a lot of those concerns apply to American social media.
Jacob Ward: That’s exactly right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the data they’re collecting and, like, OK, well, it’s not in the hand of the CCP. But also, who knows where it ends up? I don’t know. You know? Like, are they selling it on the backend to other nefarious actors?
And the 301, you know, the sort of psychographic maps and the ability of propaganda, I mean, you know, I used to run this thought experiment in my head back, you know, I think it was probably, like, eight years ago when Zuckerberg was doing his weird thing where he was, like, touring around the country and, I think —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — probably thinking about running for president?
Jacob Ward: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: Or he just like really wanted to go to a bunch of county fairs and, like, hear from the American people. I think —
Jacob Ward: Hmm.
Chris Hayes: — probably it was to get the former.
Jacob Ward: I don’t get the vibe he’s a county fair guy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So, I was like, here’s a guy who’s like clearly, to me, laying the groundwork for running for president. It didn’t happen.
But then I also thought, like, what if Facebook just tweaked the algorithm, so all you did was you saw good stuff about Mark Zuckerberg and bad stuff about the people he’s running against? And like —
Jacob Ward: Dude.
Chris Hayes: — it would be wholly within —
Jacob Ward: I mean —
Chris Hayes: — that’d be (ph) fully legally protected. Like, that’s First Amendment speech. It’s their —
Jacob Ward: Totally.
Chris Hayes: They can do whatever they want.
Jacob Ward: Not only is it —
Chris Hayes: You know —
Jacob Ward: — First Amendment speech, but they enjoy —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — the particular protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in which —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — they literally are considered just this neutral platform. They are not legally —
Chris Hayes: Platform, right.
Jacob Ward: — responsible for the things that we post or do on there. There’s a bunch of legal challenges to that coming up. But they enjoy an open road we have rarely seen. The gun industry is one of the only others I can think of that enjoys anything like the special protections that this industry does. And the ability of lawmakers to even see inside, like, so it’s not just that there isn’t any data —
Chris Hayes: That’s the other thing.
Jacob Ward: — privacy in this country, right, there’s no regulations on what you want (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Zero —
Jacob Ward: — shared (ph).
Chris Hayes: — basically.
Jacob Ward: Zero. The fact that they can say, we’re going to look at the keystrokes that you use as you’re on our platform, or other platforms or whatever, like, that’s crazy.
We also have no data transparency laws. So, nobody, except the people who work for that company, whatever company, American or Chinese, only employees or authorized agents of those companies can actually see what they know.
You can’t get the world experts, right, people like, you know, Natasha Dow Schull, who we were talking about. Like, I would like nothing more in this world than to get an academic who really understands addiction and give them a good solid tour of the inside of one of those companies. But you cannot —
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jacob Ward: — do that. There are no regulations —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — around that whatsoever. And so, the idea that we are as outraged as we are, when —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — this highly successful Chinese company comes along and, somehow, we’re not as outraged when it was American companies, is so strange. The cognitive dissonance of that is so strong.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: And I understand, you know, again, I understand, you know, for instance, it seems to make sense to me to, like, not have TikTok on government computer (ph), like, government phones —
Jacob Ward: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — which is (ph), you know, yeah —
Jacob Ward: Right, I mean —
Chris Hayes: Sure, that makes sense.
Jacob Ward: — you think back to —
Chris Hayes: I mean —
Jacob Ward: Right. So, you know, there was (ph) an app called Strava that you use to —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — track your runs —
Chris Hayes: Runs.
Jacob Ward: — or your bike path.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jacob Ward: And it turned out that military personnel, because what else are you going to do when you’re on the Bagram Air Base but go for a run, would run the perimeter —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jacob Ward: — which is what one does. And so Strava suddenly discovered, oh my gosh, we have been publicly displaying maps of hidden, unmapped American military installations all over the world.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: Right? So there are some basic cyber hygiene and security ideas that we —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — can feel good about. Like, yeah, sure, don’t —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — put it on your government device. Don’t be TikToking from the classified room, you know.
Chris Hayes: So, here’s a factual question that I don’t think there’s an answer to, but I’m curious what the status of the knowledge we have of the answer. I can’t quite tell. The objections seem to come in two flavors. One is, under Chinese law, all this data can be seized by the CCP —
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: — and the Chinese state, can be used for nefarious purposes. You’d have to hand it over. All you have to do is like look at ByteDance’s CEO’s, like, you know, struggle session, sort of (ph), apology for his joke sharing app to be like, yeah, what will they do, you know, if they come knocking?
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: So, that’s one objection. The other is, it’s actively happening and, you know, you’re a fool if you don’t think that the Chinese surveillance state doesn’t have a back door and their intelligence agencies are collecting this info already.
I don’t know. Again, I don’t know the answer to that.
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: But does anyone know the answer?
Jacob Ward: Well, this is the thing, nobody knows the answer to this.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: Right?
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Jacob Ward: And this is a function of so many things. It’s a function of the lack of data transparency and data privacy laws in this country. We have no ability, there’s no modus operandi for looking inside the operations of these companies. So we don’t really even have any idea, you know, we have no method of going about doing that.
There have been independent investigations of the degree to which data could leak off the app, or the degree to which what it collects is, you know, particularly sensitive or that the data is particularly porous. And there has not been any clear indication that it, as a matter of routine, kicks off data to some, you know, surveillance system in China. There’s —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — no sense of that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: Now, there have been, however, a couple of instances in which specific —
Chris Hayes: Journalists, right?
Jacob Ward: — things have happened. So a couple of journalists, you were just going to say, right? A couple of journalists —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — inside the United States had their information accessed by ByteDance employees in China in spite of the assurances of the company that it would never do that thing. That’s bad.
Chris Hayes: I mean —
Jacob Ward: That’s bad.
Chris Hayes: — that’s a big deal. That’s —
Jacob Ward: Yeah, that’s bad. That call —
Chris Hayes: That’s a really big deal.
Jacob Ward: — whatever that (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — when that (ph) went on out on Slack —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — I bet that went bad. Like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — that’s a bad day. So, that’s right.
Now, one thing I will say, however, is that to me, I feel like there has not been evidence of a grand conspiracy to do this as much as there —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — has been evidence of dumbness, which is so often —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — the source of —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — trouble.
Chris Hayes: Sure.
Jacob Ward: I have heard that, you know, and this is just sort of the rumor, but the people that I have talked to in and around TikTok basically described it an organization in which nobody really wants to go to anybody above them for fear of being sort of shut down for bureaucratic reasons. The bureaucracy is only very, very strong at the top, such that it’s more of a beg forgiveness than ask permission culture —
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Jacob Ward: — which is true —
Chris Hayes: Yep, yep.
Jacob Ward: — in a lot of tech —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — places, but it supposedly is particularly true at TikTok.
And the fact that when this joke sharing app got into trouble, the reaction of the Chinese Communist Party was not to, you know, surveil. I mean —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — they may very well have gone on to surveil individual —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — citizens and launch all sorts of investigations and use it for nefarious reasons. But the screenwriter in me says, oh, well, when they just shut it down —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — and this guy got to issue this blanket apology, that strikes me as —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — just, like, one big boss pulls a lever.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Jacob Ward: Not —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Jacob Ward: — a vast surveillance apparatus —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — goes to work.
Chris Hayes: I think all that is pretty persuasive to me. I mean the answer is we don’t know, right?
Jacob Ward: Yeah (ph), but this is the thing.
Chris Hayes: But there’s —
Jacob Ward: We do not know. And let’s be clear —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — we do not know. And the fact that we do not know, in the case of even this, is crazy.
Chris Hayes: Right. And we should also say, what’s happening now isn’t necessarily what happens in (ph) six months or, you know, if, you know, they get really good AI to sift through all this data and all of a sudden it becomes super. And, you know, the FBI just announced these arrests of essentially agents of the Chinese government in the U.S., essentially there —
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: — to target speech and dissonance of Chinese folks who are in the country studying at schools and stuff like that.
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: And to basically act as kind of, you know, crushing dissent here on —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — American soil. Like, I don’t want to undersell how nefarious the Chinese —
Jacob Ward: Well, this is true.
Chris Hayes: — government can be.
Jacob Ward: This is actually an excellent point you’re raising. And I think that the thing that we should remember about all social media is that, you know, the way it was articulated to me recently by somebody was, you know, the last 20 years have been an unregulated data festival —
Chris Hayes: Yeah
Jacob Ward: — for —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — big tech companies. They had, and with no oversight whatsoever, been collecting everything about what we do in our online lives, which increasingly are our whole lives. Right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: And now that unregulated data collection over those two decades is the fuel with which AI —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — is being built. So, everything, all these miraculous things —
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jacob Ward: — you are seeing AI do is because we fed —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — it ourselves —
Chris Hayes: Yep, yep.
Jacob Ward: — for 20 years.
Now, we don’t know yet what TikTok plans to do with how much it is collecting so quickly about subcultures and desires and behavior all over the world. We don’t know, right, but we do know that you can do a lot. And so, you’re absolutely right. And it doesn’t take a genius to use AI to get patterns out of big, unstructured data. And so —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — you know, you don’t have to be a really sophisticated company to do some creepy stuff with it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: That’s absolutely right.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So, now Montana’s got a bill, which I think they’re going to vote on soon, which would be the first state to actually ban TikTok, right?
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Their state legislature, I think, is moving towards that. There’s proposals for federal bans, and I think there’s legislation that’s been introduced that would do that. I mean, this is serious and gone further than anything I’ve ever seen.
Jacob Ward: Right.
Chris Hayes: On the other side, you’ve got now, I love it, there’s TikTok propaganda ads, which are just the funniest things in the world. It’s like a young woman farmer from the South with, like, a deep drawl about how TikTok has allowed her to live her dream of, like, turn (ph) her barn raising business into a little enterprise. You know?
Jacob Ward: Hmm, yep.
Chris Hayes: And then, there’s a TikTok creator who focuses on, like, veterans and, like, veteran health and —
Jacob Ward: Yeah, wow.
Chris Hayes: — shows about how, like, I connect. It’s just, like, the most unsubtle —
Jacob Ward: You can imagine the marketing meeting in which they were like —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Jacob Ward: — let’s see, should it be a cake baker? No, let’s go with the veterans guy. Yeah, good —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Jacob Ward: Good.
Chris Hayes: Veterans guy, the southern woman who’s building a barn. So, you know, they’re going to try to fight back. What happens now? Like —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — tell me about the Montana bill and tell me about what the, sort of, balance of forces is.
Jacob Ward: Well, it is so interesting, right? So when these hearings were happening, TikTok flew a bunch of creators to Washington to basically pose them on the steps and make them available —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — to folks like us. And we did interview them. We made sure to point out every time that they were flown there. One of them told us, you know, just how lovely it was to fly first class for the first time in her life, you know.
So, there has been a huge effort on the part of TikTok to try to just, like, get out to the world, you know, like, a huge number. You know, they talk about censorship. I mean, it’s so interesting, right, that, again, this is a Chinese-owned company, you know, talking about censorship and the crushing of American voices. And it’s a weird moment we’re living in.
So, the Montana bill is a side effect of, again, this lack of national political consensus on what we should be doing about social media broadly. Right? It is a side effect of the fact that we just —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — have not been able —
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — to get out of our —
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jacob Ward: — own way on this stuff —
Chris Hayes: Right, right, right.
Jacob Ward: There should be by now, all experts say to me, some federal regulation around data privacy, data transparency, and we don’t have any of that.
And what’s so interesting is that for the big American social media companies, they in fact argue all the time that they want a federal standard. And they are —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — only too happy to offer you some white papers and some experts to talk about what that —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jacob Ward: — national standard should look like. And it just so happens —
Chris Hayes: We have opinions.
Jacob Ward: — that that national standard is one that only the very largest and most entrenched players could actually meet.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. Yeah, that’s right, yeah.
Jacob Ward: Because, if I’ve learned anything in this job, it is that no tech CEO gets to where she does, or he does, without being able to do a thing for multiple reasons and have it benefit them in multiple ways. So, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — I’ve learned never to take at face value like, well, we just care about people so much. Oh, do you? OK, well, what else —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — is this doing for you? So in this case, the weird thing is the nightmare has always been, for the big American social media companies, that we would have this Balkanized policy landscape in which all 50 states implement different laws and you got to deal —
Chris Hayes: Right. Right, right, right.
Jacob Ward: — with different laws among every state. And that is a problem. They don’t want that. Their —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — whole business is scale and a standardized —
Chris Hayes: Yep, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — delivery of product. They do not want to customize it.
It’s the same dynamic, right, in the auto industry that has basically made California emission standards, the de facto national standard, because no car maker wants to make a different car for each state. They want to just make one —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — that you can sell anywhere. Well, this is the same kind of thing here with social media.
The weird thing is that nightmare Balkanized scenario is now happening to the one Chinese company, and that is this first legislation in Montana that’s basically going to ban it inside the state. How is that going to work? You know, it’s not entirely clear.
Now, I do not buy for a second the argument on the part of TikTok and others that they somehow can’t do that. They talk about —
Chris Hayes: That’s nonsense.
Jacob Ward: It’s nonsense.
Chris Hayes: It’s obviously technically feasible. I mean —
Jacob Ward: Come on.
Chris Hayes: — first of all, it already exists with sportsbooks. You can’t use —
Jacob Ward: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: — DraftKings or FanDuel or whatever to make sports bets in California because it’s not legal in California. Like —
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — but it works in New York. And I have friends who live in California and then when they come to New York, they use it to bet. And —
Jacob Ward: I mean, this is —
Chris Hayes: Absolutely.
Jacob Ward: — whenever —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: When a tech company that employs some of the most entrepreneurial —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — best-trained technical people in the world tells you over technical reasons that’s not feasible, you just have to, I mean, don’t even —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — just hush your mouth. So for me, it is ridiculous, that idea. What is, however, confusing to me is what happens for people using or creating, right? Are you —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: Can you literally drive across the border? You know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — could you drive into Wyoming, you know, to —
Chris Hayes: Wow (ph).
Jacob Ward: — post? I don’t know. Do you go into one of the seven, you know, autonomous tribal territories?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: Right? And do they become havens of TikTok, you know, of entrepreneurs (ph)? You know, is that a new business model?
Chris Hayes: That’s fascinating.
Jacob Ward: Like, I don’t know what the heck we’re going to do out of that. All I know is this is not a model that American social media companies want.
Chris Hayes: So, the rivals of TikTok don’t like the idea of the Montana law because of this kind of localism precedent that is terrifying to them.
Jacob Ward: That’s right. They wouldn’t want that for themselves, certainly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Jacob Ward: You know, I had a friend text me sort of in a crasser way that I’m going to put it to you, but he texted me when the TikTok CEO was testifying in Washington. He said, Zuckerberg must be really excited right now.
You know? And that is right. I mean, you know, these guys —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — we know Mark Zuckerberg back in the day when Trump was in office, went to Trump with his head of policy, Nick Clegg, and they made the argument to Trump, TikTok is a national security, you know, threat —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — and you got to be careful with this thing.
And maybe they believed that honestly, but it also happened to serve the purposes of the —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — company in getting Trump to talk about, you know, banning that app entirely.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: Right? That was the first time that happened.
So, there’s a complicated relationship, I think, between these localized moves vis-a-vis TikTok, vis-a-vis other, you know, social media platforms. But we do know that, broadly speaking, what all of this just points to is the lack of federal regulation and how ridiculous —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — it is that you’ve got Montana beating federal regulators to the punch on something that I think most people agree should be changed, at least to some extent. We should have some kind of regulation around this stuff.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And, I mean, the last sort of question I have about it, you know, to go back to this, sort of mercantilist argument, this sort of trade war argument, right. You know, an app is a market good, right?
Jacob Ward: Sure.
Chris Hayes: People purchase it, and it monetizes through advertising, whatever it does. And then (ph) there’s speech. And, you know, I’m just not sure. Like, banning TikTok, are there speech implications for that? That seems —
Jacob Ward: I mean, totally.
Chris Hayes: My initial reaction is, like, there’s kind of a First Amendment problem with banning an app that —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — is all speech. That seems like it’s going to be a tough one.
Jacob Ward: So, yeah, and this brings us to, right, like, what’s coming up next for TikTok. So, what’s happening right now is there is a federal path to banning, if that’s the word, which is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is part of Treasury, and it vets deals and companies as national security risks.
And what President Biden has basically been authorized to do is, in theory, expand that kind of ability, executive branch ability, to being able to just sort of designate a company a national security threat.
And it’s funny, in preparation for talking to you, Chris, I was thinking to myself, like, what are instances in which we have done this kind of thing in the past? You know?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: And I can only come up with two. And one of them is a First Amendment versus safety issue. And the other is this weird national security threat issue.
So, the First Amendment one was Backpage, which you’ll remember, right.
Chris Hayes: Right, yep.
Jacob Ward: A few years ago, it was this landmark case in which a online classifieds platform, that’s what it was, was basically sued out of existence for, it turned out, being a hub of trafficking, sexual trafficking and predation. And the reason that they lost such that they basically that they had to go to business is that, you know, there was all kinds of internal communications that showed intent, knowledge.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: Right? There was just sort of a callousness going on there that got them into a huge amount of trouble.
And then just a couple of years ago, in 2020, that Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States ordered the reversal of a Chinese acquisition of Grindr. So the —
Chris Hayes: Oh, right.
Jacob Ward: — LGBTQ dating app —
Chris Hayes: I forgot about that.
Jacob Ward: Yeah, I had forgotten about this too, and I just was trying to figure it out.
And they did it on the grounds that it collects all sorts of sensitive information about people and could be used in some sort of national security context for, I don’t know, blackmailing somebody or something. That was part of the argument there.
And so, I think that the First Amendment argument would be, I’m not a lawyer obviously, but it would be very difficult —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — because, I think, you know, if you’re TikTok’s legal team, you would very quickly go into court and say, what is different about us? You know, there’s nothing different about us in what we do, how we operate, the kind of market we have. Here’s the crossover —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — in our users and that (ph) also go to Instagram. We cross post with all these. We collaborate in a sense. They don’t really collaborate, but they allow you to post directly from TikTok to other platforms. Like, what is the difference here? And I think that that would be a really hard case for a justice department lawyer to make against that company.
But this new authority that Biden has been given under this Foreign Investment Committee —
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting.
Jacob Ward: — that’s broader, you know. And —
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Jacob Ward: — you could conceivably make this argument about national security. But I also think, and this is I think a place, you know, I really think you think about so well is when you look at progressive politics and where it’s happening online, it’s happening on TikTok. You know, you —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — want to talk about a place in which, if you’re a progressive senator in this country right now and you somehow get on board with or are saying publicly that you are on board with banning TikTok for national security reasons or for really almost any reason, you’re going to risk enraging a huge swath —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — of very active, very vocal, and increasingly very famous political activists —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — who make their name on this platform.
Chris Hayes: The only question after that, you know, is it’s a little bit like, wouldn’t just something else rise up? I mean, there’s huge network effects and first-mover advantage with this stuff, which we’ve seen over and over again —
Jacob Ward: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — and that’s why you get these incumbency effects. But I just don’t know. Right? I mean, there’s —
Jacob Ward: I don’t know either —
Chris Hayes: — a universe in which —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — someone can make a competitor. And, you know, the real —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — gangster move would be, like, force them to sell.
Jacob Ward: Well, and this is the other thing —
Chris Hayes: Right? Like, that’s —
Jacob Ward: Right, this is the other thing. They have talked about that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: And it is also, if we’re keeping score on talking points that look bad from a PR perspective for TikTok, one of them is when the Biden administration has in fact suggested to the company that they should sell and that would be a solution to their problems, a Chinese government agency comes out and says, we would not be in favor of that.
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Jacob Ward: And so, undercutting the CEO’s argument time and again, we’re not a Chinese —
Chris Hayes: We’re totally independent.
Jacob Ward: — company. We’re totally independent —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right, exactly (ph).
Jacob Ward: — blah, blah, blah. And then here comes this guy. You know, this flunky —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — comes out of the back and says, we wouldn’t want that —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — to happen.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: Right? So that is tough. I think that you are absolutely right though, that we just don’t know, you know, what the future holds there, except that I do think that there is this sort of illusion. And again, this is me just getting to the politics of it or thinking about, sort of, what would the political fallout be, especially for progressives in this country. There’s this naive assumption that they will somehow just slide back to Instagram or something.
And that might be true. But, I mean, I think it is one of the things that makes this such a compelling thing to be thinking about and talking about, that this foreign-owned company has truly grabbed onto the hearts and minds of this vast swath —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: — of the American population. And the most intellectually and coveted demographic, the young demographic —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jacob Ward: — they’re there. And the fact that you’re going to take that away from them, we’ve never seen that before.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: And I think the fallout there could be enormous.
Chris Hayes: And I think that’s also the source of the power and the panic is precisely that.
Jacob Ward: Yeah (ph). That’s right.
Chris Hayes: And, you know, you’re saying, sort of, we’re used to a world of American cultural hegemony in which we export out. Sometimes, you know, there’s some foreign cultural products we get. We had, you know, an American version of “The Office” and the Beatles and things like that. They tend to be relatively, sort of, culturally adjacent or linguistically adjacent in those two cases.
I mean you go anywhere in the world, it’s like people can quote you “Friends.”
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, all over the world, they can quote “Friends.” Like, people all over the world are just used to being embedded in, enmeshed in, consuming American culture. All over the world, like —
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — people know who Tom Cruise is. I said this to someone today, I said, I can’t name a single Chinese singer.
Jacob Ward: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: Not one.
Jacob Ward: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s 1.3 billion people.
Jacob Ward: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: There are singers in China that sell millions. Like, I mean, I cannot name you one. Right?
Jacob Ward: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: That asymmetry, like, TikTok at some level feels like, even though it’s not at the content level because it’s just, you know, a lot of Americans I see on the actual app, but at a bigger level feels like some kind of end to that complete dominance.
Jacob Ward: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I think that is the sort of source of a lot of the panic and the anxiety, you know, adjacent to the national security concerns. Like, those are intertwined with each other inextricably, but that to me is the deeper pathos there.
Jacob Ward: I think that’s right. You know, we are used to the idea that you win the cultural hegemony game if you export your product —
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Jacob Ward: — your, you know, whatever it is. So, like, South Korea has this vast effort to export its cultural products. And it’s been tremendously successful by that standard, you know, its singers.
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Jacob Ward: Because you do know BTS, right? You have heard of Korean —
Chris Hayes: Right, yep.
Jacob Ward: — pop stars —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Ward: — right? They’ve been very successful in that. But here’s the thing —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jacob Ward: — to remember about TikTok and to remember about all social media is that they don’t have to make you consciously aware of anything to have done their job, which is to gather up your behavior —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — and your attention —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jacob Ward: — into a wrapper that they can pour through, increasingly, AI. That’s where they win the game.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jacob Ward: And so you may —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — emerge from this whole TikTok phase never having understood anything new about China.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: I know nothing new about China, for the most part, on TikTok.
Chris Hayes: No, there’s nothing about in China in TikTok —
Jacob Ward: But that doesn’t mean that country —
Chris Hayes: — more or less.
Jacob Ward: — that’s right. But that doesn’t mean that —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — that company still doesn’t have me —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jacob Ward: — by the throat.
Chris Hayes: That’s exactly right. Jacob Ward is the NBC News technology correspondent, former editor-in-chief of “Popular Science” magazine. He’s got a book out, sort of about this stuff, about the sort of themes we’re talking about today, particularly about the kind of algorithmic dystopia we’ve created for ourselves. It’s called “The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back.”
Jacob, that was great. Thank you so much.
Jacob Ward: Chris, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to my colleague, Jacob Ward at NBC News, a technology correspondent, also author of the book “The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back.”
We would really love to hear your feedback on this one if you’re using TikTok and what you think about it, hashtag #WITHpod on Twitter or e-mail us at WITHpod@gmail.com. And maybe you want to still follow us on actual TikTok, even after hearing this entire episode, and you could do that by searching for us on TikTok.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and Cedric Wilson, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.