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What should America do about TikTok? Force a sale or ban the app. The risk of foreign influence operations impacting an election are just too great.
A thread: 1/ https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/what-to-do-about-tiktok
A thread: 1/ https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/what-to-do-about-tiktok
ByteDance has already been repeatedly forced to bend the knee to party authority at home. Most punishingly, in April 2018 the government compelled ByteDance to shut down its popular 内涵段子 (“inside jokes”) app for good due to its “vulgar” content. 2/
In response, Zhang issued a letter of self-criticism where he said, “Our product took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values.” 3/ https://chinamediaproject.org/2018/04/11/tech-shame-in-the-new-era/
He also promised that the firm would in the future “Further deepen cooperation with authoritative [official party] media, elevating distribution of authoritative media content, ensuring that authoritative [official party] media voices are broadcast to strength.” 4/
I heard rumors that in the leadup to this self-criticism letter, the government, without prior warning, forced senior Bytedance managers to spend days away from their families getting read the riot act about the importance of controlling content on their platform.
5/
5/
It has openly given party member job applicants preference, and I noticed that after the government crackdown on 内涵段子, videos about the Chinese police and army started to appear more frequently—driven, presumably, by internal tweaks to the recommendation algorithm. 6/
The Chinese government is no stranger to using orchestrated networks on western platforms to influence foreign opinion and interfere in elections. The Chinese government has run massive twitter operations and surreptitiously bankrolls pro-CCP youtube channels platforms. 7/
I just don’t see how some enterprising young bureaucrat doesn’t recognize the potential power of juking TikTok’s algorithm and once that idea gets seeded, how TikTok can resist. 8/
For the first few years of TikTok’s existence, Bytedance thought they could sidestep these political issues abroad by making a ‘fun-only’ app completely divorced from politics. 9/
However, the Black Lives Matter movement made that stance untenable. But once George Floyd was killed, it would have been impossible to suppress related content (not that they didn’t try). https://www.insider.com/tiktok-apologizes-for-blm-hashtag-glitch-after-censorship-allegations-2020-6
Honestly, I feel bad for Zhang Yiming and the rest of the new generation of Chinese tech founders. They were promised a China opening to the west, were all active online back when the Chinese internet was much more open than it is today, and many spent years in Silicon Valley 7/
The proper mental model of a Chinese tech CEO under 40 is not that of a faithful party member toiling ceaselessly to spread Xi Jinping Thought rather a nerdy engineer who worked in the Valley and daydreamed of building something as big as Sergey and Mark. 8/
Like tech titans in SF, most would much rather have nothing to do with politics, and on the whole, are much more liberal than your average Politburo member. 9/
But until ‘TikTok USA’ has enough independence to expose subversive PRC activity with the same verve that American-owned firms do, I’m not buying the separation.
10/
10/
I think the data privacy side of this is a red herring. Thanks to the OPM hack, Chinese intelligence services have more interesting personal data than they know what to do with. 11/ https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-opm-hack-far-worse-you-imagine
I think there’s no choice but to ban TikTok or force a sale. The irony of a Trump administration that has done nothing to punish Russia for its election interference efforts banning TikTok on the same grounds does not escape me, but a broken clock is right twice a day. /12
thanks to @kevinsxu for his edits. Of interest to @benthompson @SammSacks @lorandlaskai @Scholars_Stage @ElliottZaagman @LichtSpektrum @niubi @ByrneHobart @BeijingPalmer @gwbstr @EBKania @pstAsiatech @ChinaLawTransl8 @jamesallworth @karaswisher
congrats to @iandenisjohnson @thocpodcast @niubi @JulianGewirtz @rzhongnotes @danwwang and @yuenyuenang for making tweets of the week
