The Geopolitics of TikTok: A Nudge Toward Chaos?
By Colin A. Warren
Are you or one of your loved ones one of the 63% of U.S. teens that, according to Pew Research, uses TikTok regularly? Are you, perhaps, one of the 32% of 18-30 year olds that use TikTok to get news?
If so, and even, frankly, if not, I implore you to dive into this article in order to give yourself a better understanding of the app that is most ascendant; it now garners more view-time per user than Facebook and Instagram combined. The average user looks at the app for 1.5 hours a day, which adds up to 22.81 days (!) of the entire year spent looking at it. Cumulatively, Americans looked at TikTok for 22.6 trillion minutes in 2022, and that number will likely go up.
This article is meant to provide what would amount to a nutrient list on a grocery item, or perhaps a bit like a warning label at a movie. Because, unlike food or other media content, which we tightly regulate here in the States, the Internet has, dangerously, not been regulated since its inception in any meaningful way. At least not yet. (It’s coming.)
Users have been left to fend for themselves on TikTok while navigating a sea of disinformation, corporate greed, and an unquenchable desire for viral fame. This warning is full of caught-red-handed deceptions, jaw dropping wealth, government surveillance, an ever blooming cold war with another superpower, and lots of quality synchronized dancing, too. Hopefully, it won’t be as boring as reading the list on the back of your Doritos bag.
After all, TikTok is alluring. You open it up and immediately it takes over your entire screen, edge-to-edge, pushing out all other distractions— it somehow knows it has a captive audience in you the moment you open it up.
Usually, you’re met by a catchy song. And that’s one of the most clever parts of the app, the way they let you use music. Creators— those that post videos —are allowed to select music from vast catalogs to sync with their content because TikTok has licensing agreements with both Sony and Warner Music Group. They were the first to allow you to add your own sound on top of the music. Their competitors have all copied that feature by now. Then you can take your video and slow it down, speed it up, or edit it with an array of fabulous filters. They also invented a “duet” feature in which you can record your own video over or side-by-side another one. It’s easy-peasy to figure out. And that’s why it gained traction so quickly.
One of the most satisfying parts of being a human is the act of creation. And TikTok gave that power to heaps of people worldwide. According to Professor Scott Galloway of New York University’s Stern School of Business, 55% of all TikTok users are creators; that means that there are nearly 700 times as many TikTok creators than there are professionals creating content in film and television around the world. And most of them do it for free!
Many have noted that’s essentially what TikTok is: Gen-Z’s version of television. Cause, like, who the hell gets cable anymore? And, with an average length of around thirty seconds, TikTok is a lot easier to digest. But it’s not just the short time length of the videos that make it so digestible. It’s TikTok’s all-powerful algorithm that feeds its users exactly what they want. Whereas other social media apps build your user preferences off likes, shares, and clicks, TikTok has taken it further. They gauge metrics such as how long you stay on a video, whether or not you go to their profile, how many times you may repeat it— more refined user-interaction data. And it’s rumored that they even use your phone’s camera to gauge the dilation of your pupil to measure excitement, but that has not been proven. Users also make claims that it’s more democratized than other social media apps — because it’s easier for a ‘nobody’ to go viral. The irony, coming from Communist China. (More on that later…)
Saying that it’s the algorithm, though, doesn’t paint the picture clear enough. It’s the fact that their algorithm chooses for you— that’s the true golden ticket for the app’s success. No time wasted trying to figure out what to watch next. It might not seem like a big deal, until you hear that Vox reported that the average American Netflix user spends 45 hours per year just choosing what to watch next. Choice, it seems, is not what we always want.
TikTok was launched in 2017, and it only took until October 2018 to reach the status of most-downloaded app in the world. It originally was known as the app to learn and share infectious, choreographed dances, but it’s grown well beyond that. It is now a popular place for sharing food/cooking, fashion, opinions on everything, and, interestingly, rallying social justice movements. It’s no longer uncommon for music stars to be born there. TikTok also has a multi-year contract with the NFL and Disney, and they’re in negotiations right now with Google.
Yet, in spite of all that meteoric success, the future of TikTok in America is all but certain. That’s because, although TikTok is based in both Singapore and Los Angeles, its parent company, ByteDance, is based in Beijing. And while China is not quite our enemy— our economies are far too intertwined to allow for that word —they’re also not our ally. Love it or hate it, we are living in a world in which capitalism is king, and that means we are all inherently in competition with one another to secure, through open-markets, more money. Despite the fact we are the top dog today, China is a close second, and they would love nothing more than to surpass us. This tentative “healthy” competitiveness between our countries all could change quickly if China’s President, Xi Jinping, decides to invade Taiwan, which he threatens to do with disturbing regularity.
So, there was a natural suspicion of the app as it gained popularity, due to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, being based in our advesary’s country, and especially because of its wild popularity with our youth. We have seen for many years now our own tech companies abuse our personal data in almost every way imaginable, but, so the thinking goes, at least they were American companies; they don’t want to see our economy diminished and our culture torn apart. But what could our number one competitor do with that information? Particularly since China does not have a very good human rights record (see: Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, and Uyghurs, among others).
The simplest fear is that our kids are addicted to it. The bigger fear is that China could control the narrative of our nation and use it for espionage. We knew that it was true that they didn’t label content made by Chinese State Media (as all American tech companies do) because the same content is released on multiple platforms making it easy to catch. But, back when they were starting up, the possibility of more nefarious action (espionage, in other words) was just conjecture— and TikTok haters were left trying to prove a negative.
How do experts worry that they might shape our narrative? The insider term is “heating,” or turning up the dial on certain content so specific videos more easily go viral. Fill up young people’s feeds with content that addles their belief that capitalism actually functions for everyone. Fill up middle-aged Trumpists feeds with more and more conspiracy theories. Find middle-of-road voters and give them extremist content to push them this way or that way. The goal isn’t to fool anyone entirely, supposedly, but rather just keep nudging everyone toward chaos.
Trump first made calls to ban the app back in 2020, but didn’t take any serious action. Fears among our elected officials grew, though, and, back in 2021, a TikTok executive swore under oath to the U.S. Congress that they had “no affiliation” with ByteDance, and went further to say that “a world-renown U.S.-based security team” decides who gets access to data. The hearing was met with skepticism. That skepticism was validated when in June 2022, eighty hours of audio recordings of internal ByteDance meetings were leaked to the American media outlet, BuzzFeed.
“Everything is seen in China,” quoted one member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in one of the meetings. The recordings were full of embarrassments for the company. TikTok responded by moving all U.S. data to servers controlled by Oracle, a U.S. company. This did not fully allay our national security concerns. Things got worse for the company that summer when Forbes reported that several U.S. executives, who were U.S. citizens, were hired by TikTok only to quit when they learned that they were expected to not lead teams by their own experienced discretion, but rather follow orders issued directly from Beijing.
By December 2022, Congress passed a ban on TikTok barring them from all devices issued by the Federal government. Many states, ours included, followed suit over the next few months in banning the app from state-issued devices. And, it came out later, that during the second half of 2022, after the BuzzFeed leaks, ByteDance actually furthered the abuse of data: they started tracking journalists. They wanted to find their internal leaks; they hoped that they’d see one of their employees' devices near one of the journalists. When their tracking of journalists was also eventually leaked, too, they fessed up. What else could they do? There was hard evidence. They fired some ByteDance employees and blamed a rogue group of them for taking inappropriate action. Few Westerners believed the group was actually rogue. The head of the Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.) wrote to Apple and Google asking them to remove TikTok from the app stores, but since he has no regulatory power over the Internet, they ignored his pleas.
It should be noted that both Facebook and Uber have been busted for using their technology to track journalists in the past, also while trying to find internal leaks to the media. But it’s just that extra bit of fear that this can be done by our main economic competitor that really drives the concern up the wall. Yet this beckons another question: how much does tracking really bother average people? How much does your U.S. citizen, especially Gen-Z, really care about being tracked? Many keep apps showing their location to all their friends at all times. Professor Galloway of NYU likes to joke that the only people that care about online privacy are over-forty and live in D.C. or Brussels. (Brussels is the capital of the European Union, and they are several steps ahead of us in regulating Big Tech.)
ByteDance and TikTok offered a solution to this problem: Project Texas. By spending $1.5 billion, they would move all servers for their data to the Lone Star State, claiming that once set up this special site “no data goes in or out of the U.S. TikTok platform without going through gateways that will be controlled by an American based trusted provider.” But trust had been broken. And even at Project Texas, they would be writing the code. The possibility for a backdoor exists.
Everything came to a crescendo last March when the CEO of TikTok, Singaporean Shou Zi Chew, testified in front of the the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The night before the trial he made a post on the platform, looking like a cool creator himself in fancy sweats as he stood in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking D.C., he called on his fellow content creators to support him the next day. The memes and video content of support followed in spades. The company also flew in a cadre of their top influencers to support him on the ground.
Democrat from Maryland, John Sarbanes, cried that teenagers were “drowning” in their algorithms. Another congressperson, who is grossly out of touch with technology, asked if “their company used peoples’ home Wi-Fi.” Chew dubiously dodged questions that directly asked about how much TikTok answered to ByteDance. He made a lot of big promises about Project Texas. Many TikTokers saw him as a savior, protecting their right in the First Amendment. Chew pointed out that TikTok employs over 7,000 Americans. He remained much, much cooler than the people questioning him, and it was one of the only bi-partisan moments in recent years for a divided Congress.
Ironically, the same month as the congressional hearing, Biden flew in a large group of TikTok influencers to the White House to brief them on the war in Ukraine in hopes they’d get the messaging right. There’s no arguing the clout of the platform.
Biden pressed and might still be pressing ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company. China said they will block any sale. Besides, American supporters of TikTok cried how twisted is it for us, the protectors of the free-market, to force the sale of a private company. And with projected revenues of $18.5 billion for 2024, why would they want to sell?
While Biden stalled, legislators in Montana moved ahead. In May, 2023, they outright banned the app from the entire state. They didn’t seem to care that both Apple and Google said it would be impossible to do so. A Montana lawyer representing the state claimed some “geo-fencing” technology could work; most experts remain skeptical. Creators in the state were angered, and they sued, citing a violation of the First Amendment and that states couldn’t regulate interstate commerce. TikTok sued separately. It came out later that TikTok was not only funding the citizen’s suit, but that they actually brought the diverse group of creators that filed the suit together, coordinating a certain well-rounded American image, including a cattle rancher, a mother of several children, and a liberal college kid. Then, in late 2023, a judge issued a preliminary injunction to stop the TikTok ban. The trial is set to happen later this year, and the entire globe is watching. This could set market trends for trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, Biden is still reportedly mulling over an executive order dictating how much and what kind of data can be collected by foreign countries.
India is the only other major country that has blocked TikTok, and they did it back in 2020. This gave way for copycats like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts to take the lead. Several homespun Indian versions popped up, and they’re doing okay, but they’re still a good distance behind Insta and YouTube in total users there. Terrifyingly, Forbes reported that even though the app is banned and off people’s phones, TikTok still has the ability to see the former user’s current location, contacts, and search histories.
Gen-Z misinformation researcher, Abbie Richards, who has made a career of trying to make apps more accountable, advocates strongly that we should not ban TikTok. She argues that “influencers are no longer merely hawkers of products— they’re now trusted messengers to their communities.” We can see this is true by the fact that Biden brought them to the White House regarding the war in Ukraine. She also notes that it’s invaluable for social justice movements such as the BLM protests, the women’s movement in Iran, and, more recently, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex agrees. TikTok caught a lot of flak from Americans for supposedly “heating” the Palestinian-side for young people in our country. TikTok pointed out that Palestinian liberation has long been a cause for youth around the world, and, moreover, Kara Swisher reported on her New York Magazine podcast that there were twice as many pro-Palestine posts on Instagram, and three times as many on Facebook.
It should be noted that it was also discovered by The Washington Post that Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) actually paid a lot of money to a Republican consulting firm to run a smear campaign to turn the country against TikTok during the congressional hearing last March. The consulting firm, Targeted Victory, was proud of their work when confronted about it.
If it seems that this case is the center of a social and geopolitical maelstrom, it’s because it definitely is. There were a lot of articles coming out from political pundits late last year musing whether or not we have entered a cold war with China. (Essentially, most say, “not yet.”) But when we’re all playing an economic game in which competition is at the center of it, what else are we to expect? To be sure, China plays a bit of a different type of capitalistic game than we do. It has been reported by The Economist that the Chinese Communist Party is sold “golden shares” of important companies, which is expensive stock at cheap rates that also come with a prized board seat (one of three at ByteDance) that definitely hold a huge sway over the direction of the company. Professor Galloway of NYU also reported that there are laws on the books in China that require companies to hand over requests for information to the government. That unsettles diplomats and investors alike. There’s no doubt that our tech companies sometimes hand over data to our government, but when they do not want to, they have to go to court. That judicial intermediary is missing in China.
TikTok is not allowed in China. They have their own version, Doyin, which supposedly doesn’t contain any of the feather-ruffling content that is so often shown on TikTok. But also many tech companies and their apps are not allowed in China— Facebook was kicked out of the country, as was X (formerly known as Twitter), and Google. People calling for TikTok to be banned often point to this and ask— why should we let them in our country, when they don’t let us in theirs?
TikTok is an emblem for a new type of battle between the U.S. and China. When we shared the superpower seat with the U.S.S.R. (Russia pre-1991), we didn’t have to worry about our economies overlapping. The world is different now. We are more interwoven and reliant on one another than ever before. And in many ways that’s a good thing— it likely keeps us out of real war. Yet we are experiencing geopolitical growing pains, and TikTok represents that.
Since Nixon went to China back in 1972, we thought for decades afterward that, as the country became more affluent, they would mirror our values, but over the last decade, that has turned out to simply not be true. That’s partly why so much of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act contained a lot of made-in-America clauses; we’re going through a period of “selective decoupling” from the Chinese economy.
It’s happening with TikTok, same as it’s happening with Apple, who have moved a lot of their production to India and Vietnam, as it’s happening also with batteries, a big component to the green revolution, and really a lot of other products too.
TikTok is just the golden child that we all watch— having crested one billion users worldwide last fall —and so we will all be staring at our phones to see what happens next.
You won’t be able to look away, or so they hope.
Dear Reader: do you think TikTok should be banned from the U.S.? Why or why not? Why is it important to you? Write to us at editor@uafsunstar.com.