It is my considered opinion that TikTok, a fast-growing Chinese social-media app, is evil. And not just because it seems uniquely manipulative of user attention at the algorithm level, tracking user keystrokes and even the amount of time a user lingers on a certain video. Or because, as a result of a soulless algorithmic manipulation excessive even by modern standards, users can be led down dark rabbit holes of drug- and sex-related content very quickly.
All of this is suspect, but questions about the app’s possible connections to the Chinese government should remain paramount. We have asked such questions here before. The stock response is that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, maintains separation between TikTok, the American app, and Douyin, the Chinese version; and that the data of U.S. users stay in this country. But a recent BuzzFeed report by Emily Baker-White raises questions about this arrangement.
According to BuzzFeed, though TikTok does not currently store user data in China and is making efforts to store all of it in the U.S. (with backups in Singapore), they can still be accessed by ByteDance employees in China. From the report:
For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States is stored in the United States, rather than China, where ByteDance, the video platform’s parent company, is located. But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users — exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States.
The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.
“Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)
There are all sorts of reasons to find this unnerving. The more worrisome but perhaps less plausible concern is that the data could be accessed directly by the Chinese Communist Party, to which Chinese tech companies are legally subordinate. A more plausible concern is that the CCP could exert a more indirect influence over the platform. “The soft power of the Chinese government could impact how ByteDance executives direct their American counterparts to adjust the levers of TikTok’s powerful “For You” algorithm, which recommends videos to its more than 1 billion users,” as Baker-White puts it. This is unsettling for all sorts of reasons, chief among them that, apparently, “Zoomers” (the generation after my own, for whom I am thus obligated to have some contempt) get a lot of their opinions, information, and general awareness from TikTok. Writing on his Substack earlier this year, Matt Yglesias said that this level of cultural power was equivalent to “if the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union had decided to plow some of its oil export profits into buying up broadcast television stations across the U.S.”
Yglesias notes that the FCC would not have permitted this. And yet, here we are with TikTok. Late in former president Donald Trump’s term, he attempted to force a sale of TikTok to a U.S. company; early in his term, President Joe Biden abandoned this effort. And so TikTok faces no competition even from a government-revived (for national-security reasons) Vine. Until government action is taken against this app, the best we can do is be wary of it.