How Did the TikTok Ban Become a Bipartisan Issue?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: How Did the TikTok Ban Become a Bipartisan Issue?

Podcast: The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Chris Stokel-Walker (Tech journalist, author), Evan Osnos (The New Yorker staff writer)
Date: April 17, 2023

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the surprising bipartisan support for banning TikTok in the United States and explores the app’s cultural and political impact. Host David Remnick interviews British journalist Chris Stokel-Walker and New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos to analyze TikTok’s explosive growth, the national security concerns fueling American politics, and how the issue mirrors broader U.S.-China tensions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. TikTok’s U.S. Popularity and Uniqueness

• User Engagement: TikTok has approximately 150 million users in the U.S., who on average spend 90 minutes per day on the platform—a time commitment comparable to watching a feature film. (03:38)
  • “The average user spends pretty much as much time on TikTok in a given day as they do the average feature film exists.”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (03:38)
• Why It’s Different: TikTok breaks down barriers for online expression. Unlike platforms that require high production value, TikTok enables anyone to create, contributing to its explosive popularity. (05:11)
  • "It has made creators of all of us."
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (05:11)

2. Security & Surveillance Concerns

• U.S. Political Anxiety: Central to bipartisan fears is the risk that user data could be harvested by parent company ByteDance and accessed by the Chinese government, possibly for espionage or propaganda. (06:47, 08:09)
  • “Their fear is that TikTok is sending all of your data to China where it is sucked up and monitored.”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (06:59)
• Difficult to Disprove: Chris Stokel-Walker points out the challenge of disproving these fears, noting the lack of clear evidence (except one documented instance of journalist tracking), and that similar data collection occurs on U.S.-based platforms. (08:50–09:25)
  • “How do you disprove a negative?”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (08:50)

3. Propaganda & Algorithm Manipulation

• Strategic Fears: There’s concern the app’s algorithm could be used for “feeding us pro-China content” or influencing American public opinion, though previous real-world examples (e.g., Russian influence in 2016) happened primarily through U.S. platforms. (10:30)
  • “The Chinese state could be surreptitiously feeding us pro-China content… but they do this already on other platforms.”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (10:44)

4. Double Standards and International Perspective

• China’s Own Bans: China bans Twitter, Facebook, and other Western social media, citing concern for free speech. Ironically, the U.S. push to ban TikTok mirrors some of this state-level censorship. (12:06–13:00)
  • “It seems ironically quite Chinese to kind of crack down on something because we’re worried about it.”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (12:18)
• Geopolitical Posturing: TikTok bans in other countries (e.g., India) often follow broader political disputes, cloaked in national security rhetoric. (12:46)

5. Congressional Hearings: Performance vs. Substance

• Tech Ignorance on Display: U.S. lawmakers often display a lack of technical understanding during hearings. The TikTok session exhibited little substantive inquiry but plenty of antagonism. (13:37–16:04)
  • “It was kind of a total eclipse of knowledge. It was just the darkest thing I’ve ever seen.”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (15:09)

6. Evolving U.S.-China Relations

• Historical Context: Evan Osnos presents a dramatic deterioration in U.S.-China relations since 2015, aligning with TikTok’s rise in the American market. The TikTok dispute is just one manifestation of much wider anxieties. (18:20–20:17)
  • “The US-China relationship is at its most deteriorated condition since 1972.”
    —Evan Osnos (19:44)
• Reciprocity Principle: U.S. officials defend possible bans by citing China’s exclusion of American tech as justification. (20:54)
  • “Why is it that you expect to have full access in the United States when you don't grant that the other way?”
    —Evan Osnos (21:46)

7. Possibility and Impact of a Ban

• Copycat Platforms: In the event of a ban, domestic competitors (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels) would likely absorb U.S. users, though their appeal and adoption remain uncertain. (23:13)
  • “We do have two pretty well-formed, well-funded competitors… but whether those 150 million users move over is yet to be decided.”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (24:21)
• Political Ramifications: Disappointing such a large, engaged user base could have significant political consequences. (24:35-25:00)

8. The Real Missing Conversation: Data Protection

• Lack of U.S. Regulation: The conversation has focused on foreign threats, while the absence of meaningful American data privacy laws puts users at risk—no matter the platform’s nationality. (25:00–26:15)
  • “We don’t have a meaningful federal protection statute… And in some ways, that's the conversation that is necessary.”
    —Evan Osnos (25:00)

9. Challenges of Regulation

• Generational Politics: Legislative action lags because older, less tech-literate politicians dominate, and “the AOCs of the world are not yet the decision makers.” Real change may require generational turnover. (26:24–27:39)
  • “Truthfully, we need to wait for older people to die and younger people to take their place.”
    —Chris Stokel-Walker (26:50, 33:34)
• Risk of ‘Splintetnets’: Premature or poorly designed action could fracture the internet along political lines, creating parallel, isolated online worlds (as seen in China). (27:17)

10. Bipartisanship—A Source of Relief & Concern

• Rare Unity: The crackdown against TikTok is one of very few bipartisan issues in D.C.—which itself stirs skepticism. (27:39–28:10)
  • “There is a way in which China and TikTok as part of that has become almost a kind of source of relief for politicians.”
    —Evan Osnos (27:50)
  • “Any time we have too much of a consensus in Washington… that means that we're at risk of something.”
    —Evan Osnos (28:16)

11. Global Consequences & Copycat Restrictions

• Worldwide Ripple Effect: Other countries (UK, Canada, EU, New Zealand, Australia) have rolled out partial TikTok restrictions—mainly on government devices—partly to signal alignment with the U.S. without angering their citizen users. (29:36)

12. Recommendations: Navigating Social Media Risks

• Individual Steps: Users should be cautious about data sharing, use pseudonyms, and periodically “reset” their algorithms to protect privacy. (32:25)
• Civic Engagement: Constituents should demand better, tech-literate oversight from lawmakers. (32:25–33:34)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the nature of U.S. concern:
  “We share a lot of information on social media that we shouldn’t, but we’ve kind of misdiagnosed it as China.”
  —Chris Stokel-Walker (13:52)

• On Congressional performance:
  “A lot of heat and almost no light. In fact, I’d say it was kind of a total eclipse of knowledge. It was just the darkest thing I’ve ever seen.”
  —Chris Stokel-Walker (15:09)

• On the difficulties of separating ByteDance from Beijing:
  “There is a point on the horizon…and you don’t really know when it is, when they can come to you and say, now we want access to your data…That’s just the practical reality.”
  —Evan Osnos (22:29)

• On regulatory solutions:
  “If we have bad regulation enacted, this could…lead to…parallel splinternets…the same way China has a splinternet.”
  —Chris Stokel-Walker (27:17)

• On age and policy:
  “Truthfully, we need to wait for older people to die and younger people to take their place.”
  —Chris Stokel-Walker (26:50/33:34)

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Important Timestamps

• Main topic intro / bipartisan alignment: 01:17–02:46
• Stats on TikTok usage / user behavior: 03:10–05:11
• Security & data fears explained: 06:47–09:25
• Propaganda & algorithm anxiety: 10:30–12:06
• Social media bans in China and other countries: 12:06–13:37
• Congressional hearing: performance vs substance: 13:37–16:04
• Evan Osnos on U.S.-China relations: 18:20–20:17
• Reciprocity & policy context: 20:54–22:05
• Corporate competition & impact of a ban: 23:09–24:35
• Lack of U.S. data protection statutes: 25:00–26:15
• Risks of regulation & splinternets: 26:24–27:39
• Rarity—and worry—of bipartisanship on this issue: 27:39–28:10
• International parallels and partial bans: 29:36–30:54
• Chris's skepticism and policy suggestions: 31:10–33:34

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Banning TikTok has achieved rare bipartisan support in the U.S., driven by a mix of national security anxieties, anti-China sentiment, and tech industry competition.
• Many of the articulated fears around TikTok—data security, influence operations—exist equally on American platforms and reflect broader gaps in privacy regulation.
• The drive to ban TikTok is as much about symbolic politics and international rivalry as it is about practical digital safety.
• Regulation must catch up generationally and technologically to avoid fracturing global digital spaces, and users themselves must remain vigilant in protecting their data.

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Transcript

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[David Remnick]

This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnant. Given the level of partisan rancor between the two major parties, and honestly, rancor feels like a huge understatement at this point. You would think that the parties share absolutely nothing in common. But that isn't exactly the case. Here are two points of agreement between many Democrats and an increasingly hard line toward China, and a general suspicion or hostility toward tech companies. So the idea of banning TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, is getting real traction in Washington. A ban had been floated during the Trump administration, but at the recent congressional hearing with TikTok's CEO, members of both parties were in full display of performative outrage. Even members who wouldn't know TikTok if they saw it on their screens.

[Evan Osnos]

So if I have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home WI Fi network, does TikTok access that network? It will have to access the network to get connections to the Internet. That's not enough for me.

[David Remnick]

That's not enough for the parents of America. Can you say with 100% certainty that TikTok does not use the phone's camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the algorithm. Can you tell me that the Chinese government has that data?

[Evan Osnos]

Congresswoman, I have seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data. Have never asked us. We have not provided.

[David Remnick]

Well, you know what? I find that actually preposterous. We're going to talk today about the U.S. china and TikTok. Joining me a little later is our Washington correspondent, Evan Osnos, but I'll start with the journalist Chris Stoeckle Walker. Chris, where are you? You're in the.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I'm based in Newcastle, England, so I'm 300 miles north of Stoeckle.

[David Remnick]

Walker writes frequently for Wired, and he's the author of two books, YouTubers and TikTok. Boom. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, which, of course is Chinese, says it has 150 million users in the United States. Can give us some context around that number. How much of a hold does that app have on its. Its users?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Yeah, the average user spends pretty much as much time on TikTok in a given day as they do. The average feature film exists. So this is kind of like a. You spend 90 minutes or so on TikTok every day. If you are the average TikTok user, obviously.

[David Remnick]

Okay, timeout. 150 million people are spending an hour and a half, two hours a day on TikTok.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Yeah, because you just. You get sucked in. Basically. The way that the app is designed is. Is engineered to try and keep you going. So you open the app, and it is a significantly different experience to lots of other social media platforms. It is full screen. It is immersive. It is vertical video. You are thr headlong into an endless torrent of videos that scrolls past you without stopping.

[David Remnick]

Core. Core.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

What is it and why is it suddenly taking over TikTok? It's kind of, you know, the world's cinema, playing all of the different genres possible.

[Evan Osnos]

Guys, I figured out the reason why I'm single.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

There's 10 movies on Netflix that you've.

[Evan Osnos]

Never heard of but should totally watch.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

This one is an absolute banger. Woodchuck by Huddie.

[Evan Osnos]

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

If a wood chuck was a. This is what you need to be.

[David Remnick]

Doing in 2023 to go viral on Tik Tok.

[Evan Osnos]

A lot from 2022 has changed, so make sure you lock into this right now. Ro v Wade.

[David Remnick]

And what happens next in under 60 seconds.

[Evan Osnos]

The Supreme Court just overturned federal second.

[Katie Drummond]

Earth has just been discovered by NASA.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Here's what you need to know.

[David Remnick]

You're a user of Tik Tok. What are you particularly enthusiastic about watching, looking at?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I like the fact that you can express yourself much more on TikTok than you can on any other social media platform. I, I wrote a book on Tick Tock but before that, two years before that I wrote a book on YouTube and I, I kind of have made it my job to study digital creation. The idea of how you express yourself on the Internet in this world, which is increasingly now how you express yourself in life, full stop. Online and off worlds have blended together for all intents and purposes in the kind of, you know, 20 plus year history of online creation and online expression. There have been huge barriers to entry. You know, you needed good equipment, you needed good Internet connections, you needed good cameras, good microphones, you needed time to edit videos, you needed photogenic looks, you needed to be having a winning personality to sustain an audience over a 10, 15, 20 minute video. TikTok breaks down those barriers and that is in large reason why it's so successful. Why 1.5 billion people worldwide use it is because the app allows you to just pick up and create. It doesn't require a lot of thinking, it doesn't require a lot of effort, it doesn't require a lot of equipment. It has made creators of all of us, which is good in one way but bad in another way. But I think more than any other platform that has gone in the past, it allows us to dip in and out.

[David Remnick]

Let's get to the politics of this. The main concern that we're hearing from the Biden administration and many members of Congress is security. What is their fear exactly?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Their fear is that TikTok is sending all of your data to China where it is sucked up and monitored and wiretapped by some Beijing based spy for the central Communist Party of China. That essentially they are learning all about you through your habits, through your interests. I, I personally don't buy it. I think that actually, you know, there are, there are several different angles to this. Number one is if the Chinese Communist Party was actually interested in your preference for baseball versus football or your choice of different types of music, or whether you like knock knock jokes or whether you like carefully constructed satires on society, it could get that information from any number of other western social media platforms where you provide exactly the same data. I think that the difference here is one of perception, which is that the app has that inexorable link to China, so much so that the parent company ByteDance prefers to say they're based in a known tax haven.

[David Remnick]

Before we're too dismissive, before we're too dismissive of this, it's been shown in previous years that, in fact, American owned social media has not been such an innocent player at all. So why shouldn't we be suspicious of TikTok and with the added dimension that it's owned by the Chinese, which, you know, we'll get to in a second with Evan Osnos, who spent a hell of a long time in, in China. Go ahead, Chris.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I think we should be suspicious of all social media, but I don't think that TikTok is the attack vector that we think it is. I think it's.

[David Remnick]

How do we know?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Well, we don't. And this is, but this is the challenge. How do you disprove a negative? You know, I, it's, it's, it's that classic journalistic question of when did you last beat your wife? David Remnick, when did you last beat your wife? By asking that question in that way, I am supposing and presenting a kind of negative viewpoint of you by having.

[David Remnick]

But there is one instance that's been documented of TikTok employees tracking a journalist's data. It stands out, at least to my innocent years, as an example of what's possible. If the company is tracking other journalists or politicians, would we ever know for sure what's going on?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

No, I don't. And I come to this in a sort of relatively unique position in that I am not based in the U.S. i am not born in the U.S. i'm 33 years old. I've spent my entire online life living by the rules designed by a small cadre of people in Silicon Valley who think that this is the way that the world should work. And so to me, as an outsider from outside the US I'd love to say to you all, this is what it's like for the rest of us. You are encountering for the first time what it is like to be the taker of the social norms on these platforms from an entirely different country. And, you know, there are these concerns. You're right. We can't overlook the fact that, you know, this company spied on journalists, which is absolutely abhorrent. We can't also overlook the fact that it is a Chinese company, it has origins in China.

[David Remnick]

But you're asking us to overlook that fact, aren't you?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

No, I'm saying that this is exactly the Same as any other platform.

[David Remnick]

Now as I understand it though, the concern is not just the tracking of user data, but the algorithm itself. The idea that TikTok could be used as a sort of propaganda machine favoring opinions sympathetic to China or critical of.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

The U.S. yeah, this is one of the interesting pillars of the argument against TikTok and for banning it, which is that the Chinese state could be surreptitiously feeding us pro China content that could essentially program us to rise up when they choose against our governments and overthrow capitalism in favor of Chinese communism. It is an interesting idea and we certainly know that state sponsored propaganda and prompting of users through social media happens. We have lived through the 2016 US presidential election where Russia was shown to have interfered in our democracy and to have seeded ideas about the way that the US worked through social media media platforms like Twitter. And it's that precedent, I think, that nullifies the concerns around TikTok and the idea that this is being seeded with propaganda because ultimately, even if we were to ban TikTok and say the Chinese state cannot use those platforms, they do this already on other platforms. We know of state sponsored interference through Twitter, through Facebook, through Instagram. All of those platforms are used and would be used even if we decided that TikTok couldn't be.

[David Remnick]

We should, we should also add just, just to, to round out the, the picture where social media is concerned. Twitter is already banned in China, as are other apps. How come the Chinese ban Twitter and those other apps?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I mean, they, they, they banned it because they dislike the idea of free speech, which is what's so curious about the, the push to ban TikTok now is, it seems ironically quite Chinese to kind of crack down on something because we're worried about it and we're worried about the kind of content that is shared on it.

[David Remnick]

So on one hand, the Chinese are worried about social media from abroad for free speech reasons. We're worried about it for surveillance state reasons.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Yeah, and I think, I think it's, it is interesting to, to see that we're going down that line because Tik Tok has been banned in other countries before. In India, they banned it in June 2020 over a border dispute with China where the government at the time in India said, you know, we are banning this because of a geopolitical problem. And what this is essentially to me it seems is a sort of long standing, very angry geopolitical disputes that is being trussed up in sort of national security clothing because we feel more comfortable saying that rather than just coming out and saying this is actually, we dislike China. China flew a spy balloon over North America two months ago, and we think that that is a problem.

[David Remnick]

We just had a congressional hearing at which the CEO of TikTok sat in front of a congressional panel and took pretty much of a beating, it seemed to me. What did you think of that spectacle, Chris?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I thought it was reflective of a lot of the big tech hearings that we've seen in the past. But there was this added venom, I suppose, which I do think comes from that China connection. You know, we have diagnosed here the, the problem, which is that we, we share a lot of information on social media that we shouldn't, but we've kind of misdiagnosed it as China. And, and it was, I think it was disappointing as someone who has been, you know, kind of scrutinizing this company and this app for many, many years to try and find that smoking gun. And I'm not the world's best journalist, but I'm also far from the world's worst. And I was hoping to hear in this hearing some sort of evidence of that bat phone between Xi Jinping and bytedance.

[David Remnick]

Did you hear any sense of expertise? I'm afraid this is the world's best, most leading question, but in the past, when you've seen congressional panels on social media, the level of cluelessness and ignorance was kind of stunning, sometimes endearing in a kind of grandparent like way, but stunning. And did you see any difference this time around?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I wasted five and a half hours of my life. There were lower low lights than we have seen in previous tech hearings. For example, one Congressman asking whether TikTok connected to his home WI fi router, which, yes, it does, because every single digital service that you use utilizes that. There were some interesting small chinks of light to be had in it. There was a line of questioning around the communications tool Lark, which is used on ByteDance's servers. But generally this was a lot of heat and almost no light. In fact, I'd say it was kind of a total eclipse of knowledge. It was just the darkest thing I've ever seen.

[David Remnick]

Chris Stoeckle Walker is the author of TikTok Boom. We'll be back in a moment with Evan Osnos, who's based in Washington and has reported extensively in China. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'LL try to make sense of what's happening, happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown, Jackson Nuke Ingrid, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts, we're looking today at the politics of TikTok. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have expressed interest in banning the app or enforcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US based company. Now, the general suspicion about TikTok comes largely from a concern that Beijing could lean on ByteDance, which owns TikTok, to direct what videos get seen. Some polls worry that through TikTok the Chinese could exert influence on political opinion in America, particularly among young people. Now, before the break, we heard from Chris Stoeckle Walker, a British tech journalist. And we'll get back to Chris in a moment, but we're joined now by New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos, and he's based in Washington. Evan, you lived for years in Beijing as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and then for the New Yorker. Let's step back and look at the broader moment we're in with U.S. china relations. You wrote a piece not too long ago called Sliding Toward a New Cold War, a very ominous piece. To what degree do you think the anti TikTok sentiment is a symptom of a real hardening of anti China positions in this country that's not limited to left or right or center?

[Evan Osnos]

It's quite striking, David, I have to say, as somebody who's kind of been studying and watching and reporting on the US China relationship for a couple of decades, to see how precipitous the change has been, I mean, in broad strokes, for 30 years, from the time that Nixon went to China in 1972, all the way up until this period when there was this time in which American companies and American individuals and students basically believed that the future involved China for them. And there was this assumption that, look, China is in so many ways utterly different than we are. Its political system is authoritarian and it's not going to wake up tomorrow as a democracy. But that bit by bit, it was becoming a little bit more like, like us, quote, unquote. And I think there's been this profound change and it's really only happened since about maybe 2015. That's when you began to see it towards the end of the Obama administration. It became more acute during the Trump administration. In 2018, of course, the US imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. China responded in kind. And so you had this trade war that signaled this new era. And the net effect is that today, as we're talking in 2023, the US China relationship is at its most deteriorated condition since 1972. I mean, there's just no other way to put it, David. It is at a really acute and in many ways dangerous moment because of growing tensions over Taiwan, over human rights abuses in China, over the way the United States has responded to these things and its own internal political chemistry. And I would add one other thing, which is that in some ways, TikTok arrived in Americans lives in about 2018. It's just been about five minutes. And in some ways it coincided with the same period of collapse in the US China relationship. And so they became synonymous.

[David Remnick]

So TikTok is a symptom of a larger.

[Evan Osnos]

Exactly. And in a way, if you're a member of Congress, you look at TikTok and you say, this is the clearest emblem of my concern about China, and this is something I can talk about and touch.

[David Remnick]

Evan, what does it mean politically that Jamaal Bowman, for example, or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are among the members of Congress who think that banning TikTok is ridiculous? Is it because they're younger and use social media so prominently in their own political lives?

[Evan Osnos]

There's no question that they are in touch with that 150 million Americans who tend to be younger than the average voter. They are listening to their concerns not only about access to an app, but also about what they would view as a kind of hypocrisy. On some level. They'd say, well, why is it that we're going after this company but not after Google and Facebook? I think that in some ways China's decision to ban not just Twitter, but also Facebook and the New York Times and a whole host of other other foreign information sources. That's in some ways the most credible piece of evidence to then take action. On the US Side, if you're looking for an argument for why the US can and should do something, you come down on the argument for reciprocity. You say, look, this is an imperfect solution, but as long as China is banning these kinds of American companies, why is it that we're going to allow them to have free reign here? And whether or not you think the final destination should be that everybody is banned, forces a conversation on the Chinese side to say, well, why is it that you expect to have full access in the United States when you don't grant that the other way, how do.

[David Remnick]

The Chinese rationalize that they don't have to.

[Evan Osnos]

In a sense, what they say is your system is yours and ours is ours.

[David Remnick]

We saw a real campaign by Chinese officials to defend TikTok, even as the company itself tries to distance itself from the, the Communist Party and the Chinese government. Is it possible to untangle that relationship?

[Evan Osnos]

I think the honest answer, David, is that it's impossible to untangle it. In the end, if you are a company in China, there is a point on the horizon and you don't really know when it is, when they can come to you and say, now we want access to your data or we want access to your executives, or we're going to put pressure on your leadership to do things that they might have committed publicly to not do. That's just the practical reality. And I think TikTok finds itself trying to come up with ways of segregating its relationship in the United States from its broader relationship in China. And that's just very difficult to do.

[David Remnick]

Chris, what would a TikTok ban actually look like?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I think it would be pretty significant. I think again, we can look to prior precedent in India for kind of an example of how it would go, which is you would see homegrown alternatives trying to step up in its place. And that didn't really work in India because frankly those, those homegrown versions were developed so quickly in the aftermath of the ban that they just were imperfect copies handily. We do have two pretty well formed, well funded competitors, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. Two massive tech companies who are developing essentially TikTok alikes, things that look pretty similar to TikTok and have been for several years as they've seen the rise of TikTok eat into their market share. It's also notable actually that, you know, a lot of this political maneuvering and wrangling comes off the back of lots of lobbying on behalf of meta. To say TikTok is a little bit of a risk here. So I think we can't overlook out.

[David Remnick]

Of pure economic self interest, you're suggesting.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Precisely. Yeah. And I think that is interesting to think about whether or not those users of TikTok, those 150 million Americans would port over their accounts to Instagram or to YouTube, I think is yet to be decided.

[David Remnick]

This is exactly the point. It's my experience, and maybe everybody's that, but when people have something and they enjoy it and seem to use it two hours a day, as you're suggesting, which is an incredible number, 150 million people getting disappointed all at once is going to have political ramifications, isn't it? Evan?

[Evan Osnos]

I think there is a real political element here. Chris touched on something very important, which is the fact that the Facebooks and the Googles of the world have a really strong interest in actually seeing TikTok disappear. I think actually that in a way, the larger political question that isn't being talked about because people are focusing on China, is the fact that we don't have a meaningful federal protection statute of any real kind that prevents ordinary people, whether they're kids or adults, from having their data collected and misused, whether it's by an American company or a Chinese company. And in some ways, that's the conversation that is. That is necessary. I look at it partly through the lens of my own kids who are too small right now to be using it, but it's just a matter of time before I'm going to be sort of transposing my own neurosis about it onto them. And I do want to see us do something that would make the world a little safer for them. And some of that is our own behavior. And then some of that is also ultimately, I think, asking regulators to do what we've done. Whenever there's a new technology that comes into our lives, whether it was automobiles and saying, look, it's not that we're going to ban the automobile, but let's put seatbelts in them and let's figure out a way to make ourselves.

[David Remnick]

Chris, what would seat belts be for TikTok? What do you recoil from that sense of restriction?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I don't. I think that we need better regulation. I think the problem is that at the minute, with the sort of politicians that we have, the seat belts would be made of silly string and kind of tied together with loose knots. And this is kind of the challenge. We do need regulation, but we're in this awkward flux period at the minute where, truthfully, we need to wait for older people to die and younger people to take their place. The AOCs of the world are not yet the decision makers that they need to be. And so if we have bad regulation enacted, this could set off a kind of series of chain reactions that could lead to the thing that we've kind of been avoiding for the entire history of the Internet, which is we essentially run parallel splinternets in the same way that China has a splinternet where you can access some services that are similar, but not all of them. We could run that same risk in the United States, which would be really catastrophic for not just users in the United States, but also for outreach to those in different parts of the world that we want to educate about our norms, our societies, our democracies.

[David Remnick]

Evan, why do you think this is such a bipartisan issue when bipartisanship is a vanishing phenomenon in American political life?

[Evan Osnos]

I think there is a way in which China and TikTok as a part of that has become almost a kind of source of relief for politicians because they're divided on absolutely everything. And yet here is this one topic.

[David Remnick]

We can all agree on, TikTok in China.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, in a sense, that's how it seems, that's how it feels in the room. If you watch, there's a set of hearings that have been going on with a select committee on China, and there is a certain degree of glee that you detect among the participants that they finally found something that pulls them together. And I think that as a citizen, makes me a little bit uncomfortable because anytime we have too much of a consensus in Washington, an unexamined set of beliefs, that means that we're at risk of something. I think, you know, we're now talking about 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, and it's not too grand an analogy to make to say we need to be really vigilant as citizens, as journalists, to question what it is that the government is, is basing its assumptions off of. And one of the questions that's been asked is to say, I know that TikTok is vulnerable to the Chinese government's requests. We know that that is a fair reading of the facts. But we also don't know exactly what it is that our government believes is possible and what is the risk. And oftentimes when you raise that question, the answer that comes back from people in the US government is, well, if you had access to the information, I have access to the intelligence, then you would agree with my level of concern. But I think all of us have learned that that's not really a satisfying answer to any question.

[David Remnick]

In fact, it's often a disastrous answer to a question. Chris, in the UK, are there similar concerns about TikTok or is this a particularly American phenomenon?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

No, this is, this is a global issue now, and actually it is multiple countries around the world, multiple jurisdictions, following in the US's lead. So Canada has banned TikTok on government devices. The European Union has done a similar thing. The UK banned it on government devices, and then eight minutes into the congressional hearing announced that they were banning the use of tick tock on the UK parliamentary estate. So that would be essentially the equivalent of banning it from any use on the hill in the US and what's interesting is each of these countries, and there are more, New Zealand, Australia, others have kind of taking this approach of banning TikTok partially. They're not banning it countrywide, which is what the US Seems to be trying to do, which will be interesting to see whether it holds. They've been choosing a sort of half measure. They're saying we're going to focus this specifically on a very, very small proportion of users, government users. I mean, it seems almost like this is a way of signaling to the US that we are behind you while also not really poking the bear in a way of angering everyday users.

[David Remnick]

Chris, you're obviously very skeptical of a ban of TikTok. And it does seem that in trying to regulate social media, the government so often gets it wrong. What is the smart way to think about or deal with this problem?

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

I think we have to recognize that, you know, we, we have uniquely failed over the last 15, 20 years to get a grip on social media and tech more generally. And we're so beyond being able to get a grip on them through any sort of regulation, whether it's in the US whether it's in Europe or anywhere else, that they have to essentially self police and that doesn't always work. And we kind of see the excesses of that, particularly in how Twitter is spooling into a kind of odd death spiral right now, where the sort of conceit that, you know, the tech executives will be the grown ups in the room and we've kind of thought that they haven't been previously, has been shown that actually they're trying pretty well to do so with Elon Musk in comparison. So I think if we can't get that kind of federal data regulation, as Evan says, or any kind of antitrust level sort of crackdown on these big tech platforms, I think we need to kind of take ownership ourselves. We need to be much more cautious about what we share with these platforms. We need to, you know, monitor where our data is going.

[David Remnick]

So in practical terms, what would we.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Have to change so you don't use your real name on social media? If you are really worried about these national security risks, which, you know, we have had previous concerns around TikTok being banned on army bases several years ago and that is kind of a valid concern. But then also, if you're on an army base, don't record video on any social media platform because people can glean information from that from what they see in the background, clean out your data regularly. For instance, you can, you can reset your Tick Tock algorithm if you worry that it knows too much about you. Those are sorts of the things that we should be doing. But we should also, you know, not necessarily give up on the idea of regulating this officially. We should be asking our politicians to do better. We should be, you know, getting aoc. Like tech literate politician Dilhan Omar is a twitch streamer, which is, you know, means that she has much more lived experience of this stuff and knows it innately more than anybody else who is kind of blustering from behind a pulpit in Congress.

[David Remnick]

I think the line of the day is we have to wait for the old people to die. Thank you both. It was a terrific discussion.

[Evan Osnos]

My pleasure.

[Chris Stokel-Walker]

Thank you.

[David Remnick]

Chris Stokel Walker writes for Wired and other publications, and he's the author of Tick Tock Boom. Evan Osnos, of course, is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Foreign I'm Katie Drummond.

[Evan Osnos]

I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Kalore, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. And I'm Lauren Good.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.

[David Remnick]

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[Evan Osnos]

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[David Remnick]

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[Chris Stokel-Walker]

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[Evan Osnos]

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[Katie Drummond]

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[Chris Stokel-Walker]

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