Much Ado About Whacking
“Here’s what TikTok knows about my friends… that 18-year-old boys like watching videos of 18-year-old girls.” I learned that from my 18-year-old nephew. Two days before the big TikTok ban.
About six seasons into a hit TV show’s ten-year run, the writers and producers give fans a chef’s kiss glimpse into what might have been with a what-if episode. Friends asked: What if Phoebe was a stockbroker? Big Bang let us see: What if Sheldon wasn’t part of the group? Dallas dreamt an entire season.
This weekend, before the ban started, TikTok turned off their service in the US. And, in Canada. Who knows, maybe TikTok asked ChatGPT if Canada was a US state and got a false positive.
More than 170 million people got a glimpse of what social life would be like if TikTok didn’t exist. And it was… glorious.
You had TikTok Policy’s take.
In two posts.
“The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok's availability to over 170 million Americans.”
“In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”
TikTok seemed happy. Worriers, not so much.
Here’s the worrier take.
Jeremiah Johnson, the founder of the Center for New Liberalism, worried TikTok must be bad because… after viewing classified material about the CCP's influence on TikTok, the congressional committee passed the bill to ban TikTok… unanimously.
Yikes. Unanimous. That sounds ominous. Let’s see if I get this right. TikTok is surreptitiously surveilling us. Our intelligence is surreptitiously surveilling them. Our intel folks share our insider stuff surreptitiously with people in congress. Our elected officials, of course, can’t tell us why they voted to unanimously ban TikTok beyond, “bad stuff.” And, we should worry about… TikTok? I was beginning to worry about all of it. Until remembered by nephew’s comment about eighteen-year-old boys and girls. What do they really know? Whew.
You had the techy takes.
Not knowing what the bannable bad stuff actually was, lay people started to circulate a story from a couple of years ago. When you open a link on TikTok, TikTok opens its own browser and injects tracking code. TikTok’s tracking code can monitor all your keystrokes. Which means it can get your password or credit card information.
A TikTok spokesperson “strongly denied” they use their all-knowing keystroke collecting code that they didn’t tell us about to track us. But, then, that’s exactly what someone covertly putting tracking code on your phone would say. So, hmmmmm. My concerns were allayed — if only a little — by learning that Meta and Google do this too. And, Felix Krause, the person who sleuthed this hot code injection said he had no way to know if TikTok uses this covert code maliciously. I don’t feel good about this. In the same way I don’t feel good about most media most days.
People were taking off.
In the days leading up to TikTok’s potential ban, people started fleeing TikTok’s Titanic for the Xiaohongshu lifeboat. Or, as it’s known Stateside, RedNote. RedNote is another made-in-China social app. It looks, feels, and acts pretty much exactly like TikTok.
Last week, three million people in the US joined RedNote. Because, as one new user put it, “Everyone is being so nice, so kind… Chinese people are not so different from us.” Maybe we should worry less about the CCP and worry more about people who use social apps. By Saturday, RedNote was the #1 trending social app in the App Store. At least on my phone.
This influx of new users from outside China to RedNote had the CCP doing exactly what you’d expect. Creating a demilitarposting zone. RedNote updated their code to segregate foreign IPs. They’re talking about moving all foreign IPs to a separate server. Because — get this — the CCP doesn’t want American influence to spread to their citizens. Pot. Kettle. Black.
There’s the business take.
OK, so maybe TikTok isn’t taking things. Like our precious like data. Maybe TikTok is pushing CCP propaganda on the tens of millions of Americans who use the app.
My savvy nephew’s take influenced my thinking when he added, “Who cares if TikTok goes away? People post on TikTok and then post their tiktok (kid-speak for video) to Instagram or YouTube. I know because the TikTok logo is still there. All platforms get the same content.” If the same content — at least anecdotally — shows up on multiple platforms, are we really more influenced by TikTok than by Instagram or YouTube?
Oh, it’s not the content, it’s the algorithm. TikTok’s magic curation system must be better than Meta’s or YouTube’s. Let’s explore. The average cost to run a video ad on TikTok is about 1¢. On YouTube Shorts, it’s about 2¢. On Instagram Reels, it’s about 3¢. If TikTok were better than Meta or Google at getting us to do things, they’d charge more than other platforms for their ads. They don’t. If it’s not unique content or better pushing systems it’s highly unlikely that TikTok spreads propaganda better than other major platforms.
There’s the political take.
Law makers are the kind of people who bring the nub of Andy Dufresne’s rock hammer to a croquet tournament. Small, pointlessly slow solutions to big, fast problems. In twenty years, we might find a person-sized solution hiding behind a poster of Raquel Welch.
They banned TikTok. But they didn’t think, “Gee, I wonder if Americans who use TikTok may go to another CCP social platform. Maybe we should ban all CCP social platforms. Actually, it’s a bigger deal. Maybe we should ban CCP e-commerce apps. Because is there really a big difference between media and e-commerce these days?”
Senator Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota) is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He imagined the law to force the sale of TikTok was a special case for any app where the CCP has an ownership interest or controls. Sigh. “It’s like a whack-a-mole game,” deadpanned Senator Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota), “Just keep knocking them down.” Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) echoed the plan, “Right now, we’re taking it one at a time.” Oh, good, they have a comprehensive plan to ban whacking one mole at a time.
This may be my favorite take.
Gus Hurwitz is a Senior Fellow and Academic Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition at University of Pennsylvania. His bio says he’s a Trailblazer in Cyber Security & Data Privacy. He’s on the record with this, “With the slim chance that TikTok gets an eleventh-hour reprieve, app stores would be wary of Chinese alternatives becoming liabilities under the TikTok law. They [app stores] are going to be vigilant looking for these non-TikTok apps that also need to be removed.” Um, yah. For reference, my bio says, “My mom puts my LinkedIn posts on her fridge.”
So, here’s my take.
If – and it’s an all-caps IF – IF there were a BIG problem with TikTok, what is it? Is that TikTok knows boys like girls? Nah, that can’t be it. Is it that TikTok is stealing our passwords, hacking into our bank accounts, and stealing our money? Nah. We’d have heard lots of things about that. That can’t be it. Is that they’re cutting into Facebook’s and Google’s ad business? Nah, Facebook and Google are still posting revenue gains. Plus, Meta should buy TikTok. Did TikTok influence this U.S. Presidential Election? You know how many stories I could find about TikTok’s influence on the US presidential election? None. Nah. It’s not influence peddling.
The TikTok ban isn’t just much ado about nothing.
It may be the stupidest game of whack-a-mole ever.
