Pattern Matching

TikTok Can’t Stay Out of Trouble

There’s no such thing as an apolitical social platform

Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.

When the Chinese tech startup ByteDance bought the lip-syncing app Musical.ly for about $1 billion in 2017, the move registered little more than a blip on the U.S. tech news scene. The app was wildly popular, but almost exclusively with teens, and the acquisition didn’t seem particularly noteworthy in a geopolitical sense.

By 2019, the app — having rebranded in fall 2018 as TikTok — was starting to gain mainstream attention as a refreshingly fun and seemingly apolitical counterpoint to scandal-plagued Facebook and taunt-ridden, bot-infested Twitter, whose executives were by then making regular trips to Washington, D.C., to testify on their role in undermining democracy. It was still mostly kids doing funny dance videos, but now the New York Times and New Yorker were paying attention. (Both of those links lead to fascinating profiles of the platform and its viral dynamics, if you’re interested.)

There is an intuitive appeal in the idea of a “neutral” social media platform — one that applies a coherent set of rules to all of its users without embodying or discriminating against any given ideology or value set. It’s what Facebook often seems to have in mind when it defends itself against, for instance, charges of anti-conservative bias — and it’s what Facebook’s critics on the right often appeal to (whether in good faith or not) when they lodge said charges.

No social media platform of sufficient scale, however, can avoid becoming an instrument of power, whether by political actors seeking influence, governments seeking to exert control, or users seeking to subvert that control. This week, TikTok found itself at the center of two major political stories, which are noteworthy case studies in the impossibility of separating technology from politics.

The Pattern

TikTok is in trouble

• On Monday, TikTok became the first major tech platform to pull out of Hong Kong in response to an invasive new national security law intended to suppress the territory’s pro-democracy movement. That might seem at first glance like a bold move measured against U.S. tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, which have continued operating there. But as Quartz’s Jane Li points out, ByteDance’s pullout is less about taking a stand against the law on behalf of users and more about running away from an untenable situation. By simply shutting down TikTok in Hong Kong, it avoids any chance of offending Beijing by hosting pro-democracy content. (ByteDance runs a separate app, Douyin, for the mainland Chinese market.)
• The same day, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that the Trump administration is “certainly looking at” banning TikTok in the United States, on the grounds that it threatens national security. He cited fears that the app shares data on U.S. users with the Chinese government, a charge that has so far not been substantiated and that TikTok has long denied. The threat echoes the U.S. crackdown on the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, at a time when the Trump administration is finalizing a set of sanctions against it. This comes after India, previously Tiktok’s largest market by far, banned TikTok last month alongside other Chinese apps amid tensions between the two countries. That the U.S. would take such a drastic step seems unlikely at the moment. The Verge’s Adi Robertson has a clear-eyed analysis of what Pompeo’s threat might mean, and what actions the government might realistically take.
• Much of what’s troubling TikTok today has to do with its roots in China, a country whose government aggressively censors online speech. Whereas Google, Facebook, and Twitter are free to stand up to Beijing by suspending their compliance with government requests for user data, ByteDance operates at the Chinese government’s mercy. Notably, Apple — the U.S. tech giant that depends most heavily on the Chinese market — has yet to follow its Silicon Valley rivals in responding to Hong Kong’s draconian new law and is operating as normal there.
• But as this illuminating Wall Street Journal story makes clear, TikTok would be facing politically charged content moderation decisions no matter where it was based. As TikTok entered the U.S. spotlight in recent years, it became clear that the restrictive content policies that had fostered its seemingly apolitical atmosphere were themselves political. As the Journal put it, the app’s aggressive moderation amounted to “avoiding any video that might make someone uncomfortable:”

That included blocking or flagging snippets featuring disabled people, too much cleavage and, in one case, “Make America Great Again” caps. When protests over the killing of George Floyd first rocked the U.S. in late May, some TikTok users said the hashtag “Black Lives Matter” was being censored on the app.

• In addition, reports last fall suggested TikTok was censoring videos of the Hong Kong protests, even though the app doesn’t operate within mainland China. TikTok pushed back on those charges, but that didn’t stop the U.S. government from launching a national security investigation. (The Trump administration’s most recent lash out at the app may also have something to do with its role in a prank by activists and K-Pop fans that may have suppressed attendance at his Tulsa campaign rally.) With Silicon Valley platforms constantly facing charges that it doesn’t care enough to enforce its rules on problematic content, The Verge’s Casey Newton holds up TikTok’s heavy-handed moderation as a cautionary example of “what caring looks like.”
• That might be a bit of a false dichotomy, as Newton acknowledges: Surely it’s possible for a platform to take content moderation seriously while also taking seriously the importance of allowing political speech. (Whether it’s possible to consistently enforce those policies at scale is less clear.) But TikTok’s predicament should at least explode one myth that has been pervasive in Silicon Valley — the notion that it’s possible for a social media platform to be apolitical, or even politically neutral. The very choice to build an app that gives any user the opportunity to directly reach a wide audience without editorial intervention is political in itself, whether the people who build those apps realize it or not. (If they lived in China, they would have no choice but to realize it.) The subsequent decisions around which types of content to amplify, which to prohibit, and whether to grant or deny governments’ requests for user data are all political, too.
• In short, there is no such thing as a politically neutral social media platform. The sooner everyone acknowledges that — including Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, and congressional Republicans — the more clearly we’ll be able to talk about what platforms’ political values are, what they should be, and what that means for the governments and leaders that oversee them.

Undercurrents

Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time

• People are using voice assistants more during the pandemic, Protocol’s Janko Roettgers reported, citing data from industry analysts and surveys. Not only has media consumption on smart speakers become more common, but people are buying speakers for more rooms in their house (in some cases, to entertain kids), setting up household accounts that differentiate between family members, and generally experimenting with more use cases. Voice has long been hailed as the platform of the future, and as with many other long-anticipated futures, it’s one that Covid-19 seems to be hastening.
• Black YouTubers are being shut out of YouTube Kids, Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen and Lucas Shaw explained, as the platform’s “family-friendly” policies seem to be racially biased.
• Twitter is building a subscription platform, according to a job ad for engineers on a new team, code-named Gryphon. The company declined to comment on the nature of the platform, but its shares jumped on the news. Adam Singer, a software executive, tweeted one ambitious vision for how Twitter could become a one-stop hub for paywalled news sites.
• “Coordinated inauthentic behavior” is an increasingly popular concept that merits closer scrutiny, online speech expert Evelyn Douek argued in Slate. An arbitrary coinage by Facebook — after it ruled out “coordinated inauthentic activity” due to its unfortunate acronym — it has gained currency as a framework for identifying platform manipulation, but its meaning is slippery. Case in point: Was the K-Pop prank on the Tulsa Trump rally an example of coordinated inauthentic behavior? And if not, “What if QAnon conspiracy theorists or 4chan users targeted a Biden rally?”

Threads of the Week

• Writer Lili Loofbourow on the lost dream of social media as a forum for good-faith debate. (This thread also taught me the term “sea-lioning.”)
• Product manager and writer Devon Zuegel on the need for “an equivalent of a disapproving glare on the internet.” (See also Nick Punt in OneZero on how social media platforms could be designed to de-escalate rather than inflame conflicts.)
• Writer Jaya Sundaresh hurling insults at the signatories to an open letter on free speech, one by one — until she reached a name that surprised her.

Thanks for reading Pattern Matching. Reach me with tips and feedback by responding to this post on the web, via Twitter direct message at @WillOremus, or by email at [email protected].