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Hello, and welcome to Infamous. I'm Natalie Robimett.

And I'm Vanessa Gregoriades.

So TikTok. If you're like me, you're obsessed with it.

And if you're like me, you're freaking out about what your kids are doing on it. Now, TikTok is a company owned by ByteDance, which is an Asian tech conglomerate. The main concern among US politicians is that TikTok is stealing our data for nefarious reasons. Now, President Biden has signed a law that's going to force the sale or the ban of this hugely powerful video app.

Which is good news for parents who want their kids off the app, but bad news for 170 million Americans who make a living off of it or just enjoy watching it.

So we figured we'd call the ultimate expert in all things TikTok ban. It's Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online, the untold story of Fame, influence, and power on the internet. She's one of the foremost social critics about life on the Internet, and she's a writer for The Washington Post.

We both talk to Taylor, so let's listen in.

Taylor, welcome to Infamous. Can you tell us how you became so famous, how you became the number one social critic on the Internet?

I don't know. I post a lot. I'm a poster at heart. I can't shut up.

That's useful, though, for this day and age.

I was born in the right time. I came of age just when we got enough freedom to post that I'm a millennial, so I didn't have social media too early.

Tiktok is obviously, as my 12-year-old daughter has said, how can something so fun be so bad for you? What's What's your relationship to TikTok and where are we at with it as a country right now?

I've been covering TikTok since it was Musically. So back in 2014, it launched in the US as Musically, was forced to essentially sell because it was being driven out of business by competition from Metta in 2017, so they sold to ByteDance.

And Musically was the same thing as TikTok, but it was supposed to be little bits of music that were set to people's lip syncing?

They rebranded Musically as TikTok when they relaunched in the US in 2018, but it functionally It definitely looked the same. It was short form videos set to music, and lip syncing was really popular. That was the original format of Musically. And then, of course, it evolved into everything that TikTok is now today. But yeah, so I had been writing about users who were the big content creators. And then obviously it relaunched and is now the subject of all of this political scandal.

And do you watch a lot of it? Are you into it? I have.

That's where my biggest following is. I have my biggest following on TikTok.

As of when?

As of for a while now. I have over half a million there, and that's where I get hundreds of thousands of views on stuff. I used to go on Twitter more, and now that Twitter is a mess, I spend more time on Instagram. It's a lot of younger people, but it's gotten a lot older.

So my personal TikTok algorithm is like, videos of Pitbulls, girls show jumping, and edgy girls doing alt makeup. What's your- Wow.

That sounds like an eclectic mix. I'm just constantly fucking over my algorithm because I go down a weird rabbit hole for work. I have a couple of accounts, and I have an Android phone also as well that I used to basically see a logged out experience or that phone is not tied to any of my other data on the other phone. So sometimes I go on there to check out basically what they're serving to new users. But it's like going on YouTube, too, or any of these platforms where there's just so much content in such a variety. The content that I personally I personally like is funny content and then home decor, just boring shit that other people in their 30s, I guess, get into how to rehabilitate your plant.

But yeah, I mean, basically going off what Vanessa's daughter said, looking at my FYP I don't understand how my girls show jumping videos could be dangerous or why anyone could potentially want to. So let's talk about this ban and this bill that got signed into law. What is going on with it and when did this happen?

As I was explaining earlier, Musically, which became TikTok, was sold to ByteDance in 2017. It was really slept on by, I would say, tech journalists in the tech industry because it had an audience primarily of teenage girls. And so it just wasn't taken seriously, whereas Twitter had a fraction of the users, but it was considered relevant. And so when it sold, nobody cared that it was selling to this big Chinese tech conglomerate. So it becomes more and more popular. And in 2020, Trump starts this narrative that after a bunch of TikTok creators, there's a lot of Gen Z activism on that app. They started to mess with things like that rally in Tulsa. Tiktok users are taking partial credit for this, a less than full arena at President Donald Trump's first political rally in months. That's when he decided he wants to ban it, basically because it was this hub for progressive activism. And he couches claims that he wants to ban it through this fear mongering about China.

And it's media that probably isn't pro-Trump.

A hundred %, because it's all progressive.

It's not a MAGA safe.

Yeah. And also that's when TikTok for Biden was being formed, which was this group of hundreds of the biggest creators on the app, aligning to advocate for Biden being elected. So he's like, Let's ban this app. It's bad. Obviously, that fell away, and also was the way that he wanted to do it was debatably unconstitutional. What brought it back was, as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post we've all reported, is these conversations around Israel, Gaza. So the conflict breaks out in October, immediately, young people are expressing a lot of affinity for the Palestinian cause, following Palestinian journalists on TikTok. This becomes this way for them to get news that's countering a lot of mainstream news. And also, as my colleague and I, Drew Harwell wrote a great story debunking, actually, young people have been increasingly sympathetic to Palestinians for decades. It has nothing to do with TikTok. And when you actually look at the hashtags for pro or zero content versus pro-Palestinian content, as of all of 2023, they were actually completely equal in the US. So this narrative that it was a completely baseless narrative, but that reinvigorated all these people in Congress to try to ban it, again, under the guise of national security, but when you actually listen to what their problems are.

Their problems are with the content on the app.

It's like TV that you can't control. And it's like the old people are watching the TV you can control, the young people are on this app that you can't control, and you don't want them being influenced by it. And by the way, it's also in the hands of China. Natalie and I have talked about this. I don't understand. She seems to think it's fine. It can stay there. I think it's a given that they're scraping our data. But here's the thing. And why would we want that?

Well, first of all, you could ban TikTok tomorrow, and they get way more data from a third-party Facebook vendor. We have absolutely no data privacy in this country. Zero, less than zero, less than zero. And so that is It's a joke of all of this. It's like, you guys, you don't care at all about our data. And in fact, simultaneously, while they're pushing this TikTok ban, they're also pushing things like the Kids Online Safety Act and these other pieces of tech legislation that would require these companies to collect even more data on us.

Why? Just to see that you're not 11?

Age verification type stuff. It's just completely a joke. It's like, you don't actually... If you really cared about the data, you would be addressing that a comprehensive data privacy form. And fundamentally, they won't do that, by the way, because that threatens Metta's business model. And Metta, of course, has played a huge role in all of this, too.

I mean, is there any evidence that the Chinese government is using data from TikTok? No.

No, there's no evidence of anything. And they've been, I mean, every national security expert, CIA, FBI, all these people. This has been, for lack of a better word, like witch hunt against. I mean, that's how people at the company describe it, desperately hunting for any evidence of these claims, and they haven't found any. And again, that's not to say that it's probably a concern, right? We should be concerned about our data, but we should be concerned about our data across the board. Right now, we have no data protections.

When you say third party, you mean the farm vills of the world? Basically, the third party apps developers on Facebook who are building on top.

There's massive ways for these data brokers to get our data. We have no data privacy. So you can get it from social platform, from these plugins, things that basically... This is what the Cambridge Analytics scandal was over, and Facebook It did crack down somewhat on some of it, but of course, not on other parts. And just, again, you could delete Facebook tomorrow, and we'd still be in the same problem, too. This is not only a Facebook problem. It's a problem with our entire system. Europe has at least some basic data privacy. We have nothing.

Right. I guess it's just that as the the older party on this call, I will tell you that it makes so much logical sense to me that China would be targeting my house and send a laser beam to like, explode it one day, and they would know where I lived because they have all that information from TikTok. There's just this fundamental Cold War dystopian fantasy about this, which the soccer moms like me of the world are a little bit like, Wow, that is going to happen. And it feels real in this moment of conspiracy theories abounding.

That on top of all of this narrative that they're pushing of, And your children are being brainwashed. You wonder why your child is so progressive and has a gender ideology? That is because of what they are seeing on these apps. And of course, it's just it feeds into these parents fear. And TikTok is an app that truly came after millennial and Gen Z, really came of age, you know? Most millennial and Gen Z people, although TikTok is queuing older and older, TikTok is not a native platform to them. So they believe a lot of nefarious things about it.

Right. It's like the alphas with your skincare regimen where you're like, what? You're like seven and a half.

We'll be back with Taylor Lawrence to talk more about what's going to happen now that Congress has said that the Chinese owner of TikTok needs to sell the company, or it'll be banned from the United States. Stay tuned.

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This is Infamous from Campside Media.

So a third of everyone in the US has used TikTok, according to estimates. But the infamous part of this story is that TikTok is about to be banned in the US. Taylor says that even though Congress claims they're banning TikTok because they don't want the Chinese to scrape our data, that is basically BS because our data is already being scraped all over the place. When she says we don't have data security, she means that when an app says, Hey, can you share with me? What you're actually sharing are your emails, your text messages, your call logs, photos, videos, documents, contact lists, calendars. Basically, you're just spreading your life all over the internet, and you don't even know it. So maybe Taylor's right that our data has already escaped the barn, and everybody in the US doesn't need to worry about the Chinese stealing all our data. But there's also part of TikTok that doesn't sit that well with me. And that's how addictive it is. You can just sit stuck still for hours watching teeny tiny videos on TikTok. It's very entertaining, that's for sure, but it starts feeling like you've wasted your life.

The addiction is real. I find it to be one of the most addicting apps outside of those supercut retention, editing craziness of the Mr. Beast of the world, where you're like, Oh, my God, this is a YouTube video that is giving me epilepsy if I watch it. But do you not feel that TikTok is incredibly addictive?

It's addictive in the sense that it's a good app, and all of these social media contents are addictive in different ways. I think the solution to teaching young people healthy boundaries when it comes to technology, as we know from people that study it, is not to federally ban the app or restrict people everyone's ability to have speech online. It is to limit screen time. It's partially a parenting issue and partially a teaching healthy boundaries and realizing... And TikTok has those prompts, right? If you scroll too long on TikTok, it is the only app that tells you to get off. You hit that. Have you ever hit that limit?

Yeah. But it's also like a war in my house over TikTok. It's a parenting issue, but this is like giving kids crack, and then we're constantly fighting with them to get the crack away. And the fact is, two parents working, the pandemic, people remote working at home. Parents are done with this lifestyle. And if you have to give the kid a phone for two hours so they can finish some work, they're going to do it. But then you can't get the phone back from the kid because they're like, I just I'm going to poke this crack and I'm insane.

Yeah. Easy to say, let's just ban it. It's just that, fundamentally, these are issues that we need to figure out in the context of parenting. We do not want to restrict the Civil Liberties necessarily of 170 million Americans instead of quite dangerous precedent because we are not China. The government does not traditionally control our app store. Is that trade-off worth having a conversation? And by the way, I don't think TikTok is going to be relevant forever. These social media apps have life cycles of their own. Tiktok is already getting full of spam. I think this freak out of it's the most addictive app. It is this year, sure. I think in four years, it actually won't. Who knows? They have a good product team. But I just think we have to be careful about that. But I'm sympathetic to the parents. I mean, I know I'm totally to it myself. I, by the way, was addicted to watching TV. I mean, I was a crazy TV addict, and I would sneak downstairs. And young people are always going to get addicted to the media of their time. But we just need to figure out ways to manage that and set them up for success.

There's a big debate over whether this stuff is harming our kids, quote, unquote.

It's not clear-cut, certainly not as clear-cut as Jonathan Hyatt likes to say.

No social media until 16. The kids They say this themselves. Eighteen-year-olds say this. They wish that this didn't exist, but they're stuck, they're trapped on it.

It's not that clear-cut. I can see how there's a lot... It's multifactorial of why kids have a different profile today than they used to. And yeah, of course. I mean, personally, my parents control TV a lot, and I was miserable, but I was always running off to people's houses to watch MTV. And that is something that I do see, which is if you don't have TikTok, it's really hard to be popular now. In high school, in middle school. You don't know the dances, you don't know the lingo.

It's like the media of our time. I was not allowed to watch Jocelyn's Creek, and I remember that was a huge in middle school. You would have to lie and pretend you saw the last episode or whatever. I think it's really good for parents to set restrictions that work for their household. But I think it's also just kids themselves need to learn to navigate these apps. And we really need to teach kids media literacy, and you don't teach kids media literacy by keeping them off the internet and not exposing them to anything.

Right. And so we've been talking about the arguments that these US politicians on both sides of the aisle are using to further this ban. So there's the stealing user data argument, the it's ruining our kids argument. And And then the algorithm fuels propaganda. This is something else that I've seen where there's a huge debate. I mean, Marco Rubio is saying that TikTok is a secretive propaganda engine built to manipulate American teams for Chinese geopolitical goals.

What really makes TikTok so effective is that it has an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to combine all of this data and your usage. And what that does is that basically that algorithm, it knows you better than you know yourself. It knows the videos you're going to like before you even know you're going to like them.

And all of this is fear over a TikTok's algorithm, which is opaque. Can you talk a little bit about the fear mongering around TikTok's algorithm?

It's positioned as the scary, all powerful discovery mechanism. It's basically like if you took Instagram's Explore page and made that the primary thing that the app opened to. It's just showing you a bunch of content that it thinks that you will like. Now, ironically, right as they're fear mongering over TikTok's For You page, every other app is pivoting to algorithmic recommendations and away from followers. It's actually quite a huge burden on the user to make you sign up for a social media app and then manually, you as a user, have to go find to people and then follow them. It actually is quite archaic when you think of tech design. So that's why more of these apps are inserting content algorithmically based on harvesting data into our feeds. Tiktok's algorithm is just the best at doing that because they've been doing that for the longest. I don't think Meta has wanted to invest in this area and compete, and we can talk about that after, too, because a huge part of this is also just Meta and Google lobbying and not wanting competition and having to invest in recommendation algorithms now because they have to compete with TikTok.

They don't want to do that. They just want to have this captive audience.

Why does Meta get to decide? Which is, by the way, so stupid. Can they just be called Facebook?

This is so stupid.

That was such a mistake.

I know. They don't talk about the metaverse anymore either. They renamed the whole company, and they were like, Oh, just kidding. That It's like a fad. Anyway, these notions about this algorithm that's programming young people are just not borne out by anything. It's complete conspiracy theories. We have no evidence of any of this happening. All of these political beliefs that they ascribe to to TikTok, were shifts that were happening prior to TikTok. And when you listen to young people, too, and they talk about, well, Gaza or something, right? I was covering the campus protests at Harvard, Columbia, and then UCLA. When you talk to them about why do you feel this way they do, maybe it's because of TikTok, because they're seeing that information through TikTok. But it's fundamentally what is happening there that they object to. And so it's just a ridiculous thing to just cut off their access to information because it's this powerful algorithm. Even if you strip the algorithm, they could still get information and circumvent traditional media, and many of them would still hold these beliefs.

Right. And it really strikes me that these causes and political beliefs just wholly line up and correlate to the age users on TikTok.

Tiktok is a hub for climate activism huge progressive activism. It's where a lot of these student protests have been coordinated. It's a place for young people to really voice the issues that they care about. And that's why Trump wanted to ban it. And ironically now, why the Democrats want to ban it, because they're speaking out against Democrats right now.

So we've already mentioned Metta and this idea that Metta doesn't want to compete with TikTok. And one of the big arguments that I've also seen is this foreign media argument, right? There's a concern among politicians about a foreign company owning such a big slice of US media. And has always struck me as a little bit hypocritical that they would be worried about ByteDance controlling such a large amount of US media. But It's US users.

They say, Foreign media, the vast majority of content that US users consume is content from other US users.

So can you just tell me why Metta is pushing so hard for this ban?

Well, let's not forget that Metta is one of the biggest lobbyers in DC. They spend more money than almost every other company, period. And Google as well. These companies, ironically, right before TikTok really started to take off, there was a lot of conversation around anti trust and regulating them and breaking them up. Then TikTok comes up and pops off and they're like, oh, look, no. See, this actually shows that we do have competition. And it's like, yeah, the only competition you have is from this app that is backed by a multibillion dollar Chinese tech conglomerate. That's the level of resources that you need to meaningfully compete with meta these days. Otherwise, they destroy you. Look at what happened to Snapchat. Look at what happened to every other app that they've really tried to compete with. I'm surprised that Snap is still holding on, but barely. And not to mention all the other apps that they've just driven. I mean, Vine, so many apps, they've really contributed to their demise. Now, of course, nobody's talking about antitrust anymore. They don't want the competition. Tiktok has been a huge threat to these platforms. And so a couple of years ago, two years ago, Metta hired this big right wing consulting political strategy firm to smear TikTok in local news and spread all of these conspiracies and lies about the company in local news.

And they were quite successful. And the conspiracies that Metta's comms firm spread in local news were then echoed and repeated directly by members of Congress in a recent hearing. And by the way, we heard from Metta comms before I heard from TikTok coms. They are so aggressive, and then they wipe their hands. They're like, Oh, well, we...

Just being like, Hey, hey, did you hear there's going to be a TikTok?

Yeah, and like, Oh, wow, this is so great for the American people. But they'll never be like, Wow, they should ban TikTok. They're just like, Well, this is the most dangerous, insane app ever. And it's actually making children kill themselves. And we're not saying ban it, but...

It's like, look, the problem's over here. It's definitely not us. It's over here, guys. This is the problem.

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This is a done deal, right? They're banning it. They've got nine months. They're going to do it.

I think it really is these two court cases. We'll see how much they hold up, right? The company itself is suing the US government, and then the content creators are suing the US government, which TikTok is essentially funding and backing. And that's the lawsuit that I read about earlier this week with Davis Wright-Chimayne, which is one of the best free speech law firms of the country. Unfortunately, we are not in the same place we were even four years ago when it comes to free speech, generally. We have seen our Civil Liberties chipped away and chipped away, especially the past four years and the four years prior, really, with all the Trump appointees. So I think Americans, one thing, unfortunately, that is happening is you have the Conservatives that cry about cancel culture, but fundamentally want to restrict speech as much as possible. And then now you have the Democrats as well that have been pushing for speech restrictions, often under the guise of cracking down on misinformation, which is well meaning, but leads to the same level of speech restrictions that can then be used in bad ways. And so we have both political parties aligning to restrict Civil Liberties in speech.

So it seems like there's four outcomes, right? Bite dance, fights the law in court and wins. Content creators, fight the law in court and win. Or three, TikTok leaves the US. Or four, TikTok sells to a US company.

Which they can't really do, and it would just be a joke of a sale. They would just sell the design of the app and then none of the underlying technology. And it would allow lawmakers to be like, Look, we forced the sale. But this essentially shuts the app down.

I love it that it could be the guy who owned parking lots in Boston and then bought the Dodgers and bankrupted them. He put a bid in.

Project Liberty founder and billionaire, Frank LeCourt. Welcome to the show. How much money do you actually have to be offering to TikTok?

Well, it's too early to know how much the TikTok is going to be sold for or if it's going to be sold. We happen to believe it will be sold, and we're betting on that.

Which he's never spoken to ByteDance about. He just said that in the media, and then people reached out to ByteDance, and they were like, No, he has not even actually put in. I mean, no one has the money either. This is an incredible I believe this would be buying Facebook. Also, it's just so crazy to me that we have no problem when all of these other companies, like Metta and Google, interfere in elections, spur genocide in Myanmar. They do all of this crazy stuff around the world. But as soon as we have a single social platform that is not owned by a US company, it's code red. And it's like we are experiencing what all of the other countries around the world have had to deal with with Facebook for the past decade. Right.

That's very true.

So you're really bearish on anyone buying TikTok?

It won't be a real sale. It'll be a joke. They could sell the bones of the app without any of the underlying technology. They can't separate. First of all, separating it and making a separate entity, then that app would compete with TikTok globally. It doesn't make sense. Also because of the Chinese export laws, it's just unlikely that that would happen. They could potentially license the algorithm through some way. I know that was in part in these Oracle discussions. I mean, let's not forget that TikTok already did this whole deal with Oracle, where all US user data is stored on US soil by a US company, Oracle. They addressed those things, but of course, now they're I'm like, Oh, now you got to sell. So I'm skeptical that it will... I just don't see how that's going to happen.

Not Microsoft or Google. You don't think that they would buy.

Well, Google can't buy it because of antitrust. Google and Meta are out. I mean, it's all of these... A lot of antitrust concerns would be raised with any of the major top tech companies. So, I mean, Nilai Patal, who I talked to recently at The Verge, was like, Maybe Snap, because they're flailing. I don't see it. I Maybe, but I...

Snapchat doesn't have the cash at the end to buy.

No, so they would have to get some institutional backers. But again, it just doesn't make sense. And also this is quite politically expedient for China, as a lot of China experts have pointed out. Actually saying the US banned our app and they talk all this stuff about free speech, and look at what they do. They don't actually support free speech. It is a political win for China for this ban to go through. So just geo-politically, I don't know that they would even sell it.

And I mean, on the other end of it, there's a million smaller content creators like yourself who have been creating content for TikToks whose small businesses would be completely destroyed, right?

I mean, TikTok funded this study, but they contribute billions and billions of dollars to the economy. The minute the TikTok is banned, and by the way, this sale, the likelihood of a buyer coming in, all the sale happening within the next 180 days or whatever we're left at now is so far fetched. Immediately, we'd lose hundreds of thousands of American jobs from the actual TikTok staffers that TikTok in the US. And also just the ripple effect on small businesses is devastating. It was to be a huge blow to the economy.

So give us the bottom line. Will my horse videos be gone tomorrow or in nine months?

It could. I think that the only way it won't really... I mean, there's many ways it won't go away. We'll see. I'm not very optimistic about the legal challenges just because I just have seen the way the courts have gone recently. But I'm certainly not a First Amendment expert, and maybe they will persevere. I think that unless there's public outcry about this, and unless older people really start to care and contact their representatives and really make it clear that this is not politically good for whatever party is in power, that's the only way that we're going to get out of it. And most people don't seem to care. I mean, young people care.

Well, because it does go back to the thing of a lot of the older people are just, This is great. The government's going to step in and do my parenting. I'm super into that. And then you have a lot of people who are like, Some newfangled thing. I don't understand. I don't want to be left out of that. Everybody come back and watch CNN with me.

It's just scary. I want them to think about the precedent that this sets, and especially the way this law is written, which allows the President basically authority to ban any app or website that is a threat to national security without having to show proof that it is an actual threat to national security. That is very dystopian. And all those people, especially the liberals that have been backing this, it's like, what if Trump is in office? Do you think that that law would be used well? You have to consider how these laws will be used by the political factions that you oppose. You have to. And they refuse to do that. And so this law should scare anybody that cares about Civil Liberties, in my opinion.

And skincare videos.

Yeah.

All right, Taylor, thank you so much for coming on. Tell the people where they can find you.

I have a podcast, too, called Power User. So we've been breaking all this down. So it's definitely subscribe to that. I'm on YouTube, @TaylaLorenz. I'm still on TikTok, but also Instagram and everywhere else.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right, that's it for Infomers this week. As you know, if you've been listening to this show for a while, we do some lighter episodes and some darker episodes, trying to give you stories that we enjoy and we think you'll enjoy. Next week, we're starting a long series for you about Ruby Franki. She's the Mormon momfluencer who went from popularity to disgrace. She is now in prison for many, many years. This is a true crime story with heavy themes about religion, parenthood, sexuality, and abuse. We're really proud of it, and we hope you'll listen. The episodes will roll out weekly free, but they'll drop all at once for Binge subscribers, the Binge being our subscription platform with Sony Music Entertainment. So next week, we're bringing you to Utah and into the world of Ruby Franky.

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