S4 Ep26: Hands Off My TikTok (with Andrew Egger)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Secret Podcast. I’m Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark. And this week, we’re talking about TikTok. Now, it’s hard to get Joe Biden and Lauren Bobbert on the same page about anything, but that’s exactly what happened in recent weeks when a bill passed the US house that could end up banning TikTok unless it’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it. Even if the bill passes the Senate and president Biden signs it, as he has said that he would, it is likely headed for a legal battle.

So TikTok still gonna be part of our lives in the short term. But I was curious about the impact TikTok has on voters, political news diets, especially young voters. And what we heard from them in our focus groups was not great. My guest today is Bulwark, White House correspondent, and co author of our Morning Shop newsletter, Andrew Edgar. Andrew, thanks for being here.

Hey, Sarah. Thanks for having me on.

Are you like me a bit of a TikTok skeptic?

I consume all of my TikTok content like a good, millennial via reposts to Instagram reels. I have never, I’ve never had the the app on my phone. And, yes, I think, especially as I have been covering this bill as it’s worked its way through in some of the national security concerns. I have become more and more of a of a TikTok skeptic myself personally.

Yeah. So I am not on Instagram. I’m in tech I guess I have an Instagram account, like, at some point, someone set one up for me, but I don’t use it. And I definitely don’t have TikTok. Like, you don’t have to tell me your age but I bet were at least a decade apart.

And so, you know, I live with Twitter and, like, the very occasional Facebook. And I just can’t learn any new apps. Like, I didn’t even learn threads when it got really hot despite JBL’s, you know, insistence that I do. I just can’t. So The TikTok thing has been hard for me.

I think to follow from a policy standpoint because I don’t care about it or experience it. And so I have worried I worried that my opinion on TikTok was too colored by a, like, you kids get off my lawn elder I’m not even an elder millennial. I’m a Zeniel. I was born in nineteen eighty. And so, you know, right between sort of the gen, xers, and the millennials.

You’re like a firm millennial. Right?

That’s right. Sweet spot millennial.

Safe to say. Sweet spot millennial. Okay. So Why don’t you level set for us? What is the debate happening right now?

You’re like our White House correspondent. You’re our morning shots, newsletter. You’re a political guy. So just like tell us what’s happening now and what would have to happen for TikTok to be banned in the United States or at least not be Chinese spyware?

It was fascinating listening to some of these focus groups because it turns out there are two completely different debates happening about the bill, but let’s talk about the one the way that policy makers are talking about it first, which is that you had this bill came out of the the bipartisan house select committee on the Chinese Communist Party and it came out with a lot of kind of bipartisan agreement about some specific national security concerns around this app. And the problem is that it’s owned by this Chinese company, ByteDance, and that Chinese tech companies in particular, but but just Chinese companies in general operating out of China are forced to kind of maintain very close ties with the Chinese Communist Party. And there are basically two main issues that the committee alleges, and puts forward, are basically problems with them specifically having ownership of a social media app that a hundred and fifty odd million Americans use. And the first is data privacy concerns. Obviously, it’s been, you know, we’ve had data privacy concerns about the apps we’ve been using, for decades, whether they’re owned by foreign companies or American companies, doesn’t seem like there’s this enormous, kind of public pushback on any of this stuff.

There’s a lot of data that gets vacuumed up. That said, TikTok in particular just in its terms of service is extra extra invasive in the amount of data it collects, even data outside of its own app. So that’s led some national security analyst to essentially consider it spyware. I mean, that TikTok in theory could be collecting, you know, stuff you punch into your banking app. And then sending that off to a company that, you know, has the Chinese Communist Party has his fingerprints all over.

Nobody’s saying that they have actually done that, but there’s nothing really stopping them according to their own terms of service. And, that’s one one problem. The other problem, is about just kind of the algorithmic delivery of content to people who use TikTok. I mean, it’s TikTok’s one of these kind of like infinite scrolling apps. Right, where where you really are just kind of hooking your brain up to, you know, a pipeline that there’s a handshake agreement between you and the app.

The app’s like, Here’s the pipeline that we’ve made just for you that we think you’ll really like. And, apparently, they’re very good at that because people really like their TikTok and they’ll scroll it for hours. But that kind of content delivery is extra susceptible to kind of letting these algorithms that are not visible to the consumer really shape the content you see things that you see on a given issue. So for political content, in particular, there’s this danger that well, you know, on issues where Chinese geopolitical interests are involved. That government has shown a really alarming willingness to throw its weight around even for American companies, and certainly on TikTok, the app has been shown to kind of suppress certain political elements that are not conducive with Chinese interests.

And so at a time of rising kind of geopolitical tension between the United States China, there’s this fear that, you know, we perhaps should not be, super happy about letting hundreds of millions of Americans shape their political views about that conflict on this app owned by this Chinese company with these ties to this party. So those are kind of the two main things. That policy makers are talking about. And what the bill would do, I know I’m talking a long time.

That’s good. Go.

The bill would do is essentially present this company ByteDance with a choice. It would say you need to divest this company within a hundred and sixty five days. If not, it would not actually be banned within the United States, but it would be forced to be delisted from app stores people would not be able then to download it. I mean, you could not actually kind of reach into everybody’s phone and make them delete it, but it would essentially be the long term kiss of death for the app in the United States. So the hope policymakers hope would be that that would compel ByteDance, to offload the thing to sell it to an American company.

There’s some tactical reasons why that might be tricky. I mean, it’s a very valuable app. There’s perhaps antitrust concerns. So it’s maybe a little less cut and dry than the proponents, would want it to be, but that’s the idea is hopefully they force this sale. Everybody still gets their TikToks.

We’ve just dealt with this national security concern on the back end.

Yeah. Okay. That’s a great level set. So for this show, we talked to three separate groups. We talked to Trump to Biden voters commonly known on the show as flippers who have school aged kids who use TikTok.

So these were grown ups. But then we also talked to gen z conservatives who use TikTok and gen z progressives who use TikTok. And we found that there was a real disconnect between the urgency and consensus around this issue in Congress and how it’s trickling down to voters who use the app. Put a different way. People love them some TikTok.

And I Again, as a non user of TikTok, basically whether it’s Chinese spy or not, like, the level of devotion people have to this the extent to which it is shaping how they think and more importantly, the extent to which they feel like truth is being delivered via TikTok, it gave me the heebie Geebies, the whole way down. So I’m gonna start with the Trump to Biden parents. So let’s listen to how they talk about it.

They assumed that the owner of TikTok was Chinese. I saw something on the news where they asked him over and over. If he was affiliated to China, I just It just seems like they’re trying to distract people from other things. I mean, you know Yep. They push this bill And they passed it so quickly, but they couldn’t pass a bill quickly to lower the cost of everything in their country.

So it just doesn’t make any sense you know, where they put their efforts in?

I feel like it being, you know, created in China and and it being web recognized that is essentially what they’re trying to push the agenda. I personally think it’s not in our government’s right or, you know, any to tell us what we can and can’t consume

I think the whole thing is very hypocritical. I hear that they’re saying blah blah blah security this and security that very hypocritical. Seeing as how no one cared about the spy balloon that was flying over the country. And there’s plenty of other things that are violating our security and everything like that. No one cares about that.

Why are they acting TikTok, you know. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist by saying all those things, but that’s kinda where I’m at, mainly the hypocrisy around all of it.

Okay. I will just say as a broader context, we’ve done a lot of focus groups just over the course of time. I’ve done them about social media, especially. We talk to a lot of parents with kids who use social media. And I would just say overall, This group struck me as pretty similar to what we’ve seen, which is and I think this is the way I would put it, which is kids who use social media, have parents who use social media.

Like, I know a lot of parents who are exercised about how we’re gonna deal with kids and their phones. But we might be in the minority about that because I listened to a lot of parents. They don’t like if their kids are on it too much, whatever, but, like, they’re on TikTok. Their kids are on TikTok. They’re kinda like, Oh, well.

And the young people and everybody seems to not be that worried about data collection. And I guess, do you think all of the talk about election interference by Russia in twenty sixteen, relating Trump’s first impeachment in twenty nineteen, and now Trump’s accusations that its criminal cases are election interference. Is that all just, like, desensitized people to the threats from foreign governments? Like, no one seems to care. Why are we all just fine with this?

Yeah. So there’s a couple things. One, I think that’s absolutely correct. But I also think there are a lot of other things that have desensitized people to some of this stuff, just kind of the broader data collection issues for American companies that, you know, dating back decades, some some of the fights that were had about, you know, how much Facebook is scraping off of your or things like that, you know, the sale of that data to to third party categories. The fact that the kind of hold the whole modern internet is kind of based on on those sorts of transactions, I mean, I think it makes it hard to to make these kind of sales.

I I was really struck listening to specifically the parents on the focus group. They really did not seem to break TikTok out from any of those kind of, like, larger those kids and their phones kinda concerns. I mean, it was all kind of one parcel. Of, okay, you know, our our kids are on their phones too much. But, you know, they weren’t thinking about that really in, like, political terms.

They were thinking about it more and, like, oh, you know, they don’t really go outside and play with friends kind of concerns. I was struck also by how many of the parents said they themselves had, you know, downloaded TikTok. In particular, because they saw that as kind of like a a bonding thing with their kids. So so there it was almost, like, they saw TikTok as as one of the less poor uses of time the kids could be doing on those devices because, you know, well, you know, maybe they’re not having a childhood like I had where they’re getting outside and and maybe they’re spending too much time on their phones. Maybe it’s hurting their attention span.

But at the same time, this is something that he and I can kinda do together. A couple times, some of the the stuff that we were talking about with the specific concerns about China, came up in that parent’s focus group. But overwhelmingly, my my read of it was that they basically just see this action as Congress is trying to ban one of the apps my kids use for some reason.

Just to underscore this point, because you’re a hundred correct, that that’s what I heard too, is I wanna play the sound, actually, just where it is, like, yeah, this is just another social media thing, and I have broad concerns about how social media is impacting my kids, but not specifically TikTok. Let’s listen.

I can definitely see that, like, when I take the phone from her, She definitely cops like a crazy attitude, and she’s upset for, like, a little period of time before she forgets about the phone. So I’ve actually been minimizing her phone usage completely. It seems like they no longer want to go out and they refer to play with people online and not really interact physically.

The way that the algorithm works in order to to get you to consume the content, it really on the psychological side, it really trains your mind to not be able to accept any information past a certain amount of time. Like, if you’ve noticed all these videos are two, three minutes long at Mac, How many times after that do you kids enjoy watching, like, a a TV show or a movie where it’s content to an hour long I feel like it’s ruining the attention spans of kids. I feel like having the accessibility to it all the time on your phones, that’s a problem as well.

My niece ended up saying something based off of a TikTok that was just very out of character, something she didn’t even understand. To my son and it really upset him because he understood he’s older. Just sometimes you cannot parental control the content. And so you get those times where they say something, they don’t even know what it means.

My twelve year old son will be playing video games with an iPad open next to him. And his phone on his lap?

That’s my son too.

Nine too.

Like, you know, to be able to focus just on one thing is hard to focus on all of those is even harder But then if they don’t have all of that, it’s the inability to focus this, the inability to pay attention because they need that over stimulation, and if they don’t have any here, things like, well, I’m bored.

I’m like, okay. Oh my god.

I hate to play. Go through something. Go rebut. Go through some homework. I don’t wanna hear that you’re bored.

You and I both have young ish kids, and I can just like see this coming for me, like, barreling down. I’m like, they can’t have a phone until they’re sixteen. Like, I don’t even care about TikTok. It is this idea about how fast everything moves and how I I mean, there’s somebody in the group talked about their five year old having a phone. And like, I just oh, oh, the phones.

The phones and the social media. But the thing is is like, that’s not the issue here. Like, it’s true. We have this, like, broader cultural problem of how we’re gonna deal with social media in our lives, what it’s doing to our brains, what it’s doing to our attention spans. All that is true.

TikTok, though, the problem with TikTok isn’t that it’s like a fast delivery mechanism for content, though it is that. The problem with TikTok is that it’s owned by the Chinese government. But I was surprised I hear from especially Republicans all the time about what a threat China is. Like, people seem aware of China as a threat, but no one here seem to care about China having access to their information. At least not enough that it, like, in any way would curb the use of how they, like, engaged with TikTok.

Yeah. I wonder whether there is a sense in which the kind of algorithmic specified personalized delivery that we were talking about before kinda plays to TikTok’s benefit in the sense that if you’re a parent with young kids, and you see that they’re using TikTok and just like, you know, getting video game content on there or piece or silly drama between, like, these tween personalities, you know, I mean, like, the u the YouTuber thing. And then you hear about this this debate that’s about, you know, the way that political content is fed on this app, you might just be kinda like, well, come on. I mean, like, I’m on TikTok. My kids are on TikTok.

We don’t see political content on TikTok. That’s not what the system’s delivering up to us. So it feels a lot more abstract, whereas, you know, it tends to be older kids, young adults, I mean, people who have started to care about these things, when you start to care about these things, the algorithm notices that when it feeds you something like that, you actually pay attention. It starts to give you more and more of that content. And I’m sure we’ll talk about that a little bit when we talk about the the gen z or groups because they were getting content on TikTok.

But I can definitely see where if I’m a parent who’s like struggling to make my eight year old or or what have you, spend less time on her phone, more time on her homework, more time reading, more time outside. I can see, well, the political nature of this stuff is maybe the least of my worries, or the data collection, is the least of my worries. Like, my kid does not have a banking app on her phone, you know, that kind of thing. So I can see how for that particular demographic, it doesn’t come in nearly as much as it might for others.

I’ll offer this too. The one I’ve done a lot of the focus groups about parents and social media, their number one concern for boys tends to be porn. And their number one concern for girls tends to be, like, creeps on the internet and, like, people reaching out to them. And I don’t know enough about TikTok, but it seems like neither of those things are a big problem on that platform. And it was like self esteem too for young girls.

It was like creeps and also like what it was doing to their their feeling about who they were, and they were much more concerned about Instagram in that regard. And so I don’t know if it’s something about TikTok where it has this personalized delivery, but it it doesn’t have some of those other negatives that are like the chief concerns of parents. You’d have to tell me. But is that possible?

Well, so so one thing I’d say about that is that while while some of this stuff is not the key focus of this fight because this is such a national security fight, there is a whole other group of people who don’t like TikTok, you know, kind of on the merits. It’s not it’s not porn so much. My understanding is they have pretty stringent controls around you know, like, specifically adult content or even, like, you know, much swearing and and things like that. It’s supposedly. And again, I don’t have TikTok, but, you know, reportedly, it’s very easy to surface different kinds of concerning content.

Like eating disorder content is apparently, very, you know, it’s very easy to kind of stumble into these sort of rabbit holes or or, you know, like, insanely radicalizing, like, political content in one way, like, kind of the red pill sort of thing. You know, those sorts of, like, like, kind of weird niche internet hardcore subcultures that for a lot of parents, they kind of imagine these as existing in some, like, dark, dusty corner of 4chan or Reddit or something like that. Actually is pretty easy just to kind of like stumble into that stuff just by, like, kind of following a little bread crumb trail of video. So that is a concern for a lot of people. It’s just not really the fight that we’re having with this specific bill because of the nature of the the kind of national security focused, group that put the bill together.

Okay. See, that’s bad. Alright. I wanna talk, get into how the the yutes, the u talked about this stuff, because I found the way the kids talked about TikTok to be just like super eerie. Alright.

Let’s listen to the gen z progressives first.

There’s a certain congressman named Jeff Jackson of North Carolina. He literally, like, gained his following. I didn’t know about him till I saw his and like, I like I was like, wow, like, he’s being so transparent. Like, he’s telling us what’s happening in the rooms that we can’t see, and then he voted to ban it. And I’m not suggesting a conspiracy or anything, but it did stop to make me think be like, what do they know that we don’t?

Like, why would he do that? I’m not really concerned about, like, kinda taking our data or, like, the US even is, like, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with global entry. It’s, like, like, a higher level TSA. You literally walk through the security. I don’t even go up to a kiosk.

They take somehow take a picture of my face I go up to the counter and they say, hey, yeah, you’re good. They have all my information. Like, I think there’s no stopping it at this point.

Obviously, we do have more pressing issues. The government should be addressing, but at the same time if TikTok were

to get banned, I just feel like another app exactly like TikTok would pop up.

It’s not the fact that they’re banning it. It’s why they’re banning it, and it’s mainly because again, they can’t control the narrative, they can’t control the algorithm and what goes on there. And one thing I’ve noticed is that most of the politicians that voted yes on this ban are on TikTok. And a lot of times they’ll be talking down to their audience being like, well, we’ve seen documents and stuff that you guys haven’t seen. And it’s like, I don’t believe that.

I think that this has to do with the fact that a lot of the support for Palestine is coming from that app and they don’t like the fact that a lot of people are now more knowledgeable politics wise because of TikTok.

Okay. You know, the thing that I hear that freaks me out the most, I think, is that they think the American government is stealing their information. They think the American government is trying to control what information they have and it’s TikTok that is giving them the real information, the truth. And this is a psychological thing I’ve noticed, you know, like Tucker Carl And one of the things, one of the ways that he really relates to his audiences by being like, those guys over there, they’re lying to you. They’re lying to you.

I’m the only one who will tell you the truth. And there’s a a connection that you can build with an audience that way of making them feel like you Elon does that. Right? Like nowhere else can you get free speech? You forget media.

You can’t trust the media. You can trust what you see on this platform. Which of course is just like, you know, dope idiot two two nine can just, you know, say whatever nonsense Elon will retweet it. And so, like, This idea of they trust TikTok more than the American government, which, I mean, I’m not a big believer in loving and trust the government myself. But, like, this idea that TikTok is the one and true arbiter, where they can go to get free and unfettered information, that feels pretty not great.

Yeah. So two things I’d say about that. And the first is just as kind of like a long time sort of prickly libertarian guy on some of this data stuff. I wanna, like, grab, like, the federal government and or Facebook and Google, like, by the lapel shake them and be like, you did this. You

know, like, you’re the reason they’re correct. The kids are correct

that you’re already vacuuming up all their data, and you can say till you’re blue in the face that you’re gonna be a more possible steward of it than the app they like, but you’re not the app they like. The app they like is the app they like. And if you’re both vacuuming up their data, like, I think some of this is chickens coming home to roost and problems that are decades old that should have been addressed. And now we’re kind of paying the consequences of that. On the question of the the trust thing.

I think that’s really interesting. And I think that there is a a way in which TikTok, it really does kind of nurture in it’s attractive to people who who find kind of other institutionalized information networks to be kind of suspect on just because they’re institutionalized, if you look at, like, a broadcast TV network where you have your broadcaster. He’s there in a suit and tie. He’s got all the graph behind him is all very slickly presented. I mean, all of that is there to convey a certain kind of trustworthiness, but if you’re the kind of person who who is like, oh, there’s somebody, like, behind the scenes kind of pulling the strings, telling that guy what he can and can’t say, then all of that works exactly the opposite direction, and maybe you look at TikTok, and it’s not that guy at all.

It’s some dude on his couch in a hoodie with his little iPhone mic held up to his mouth while in front of, like, a green screen, just kinda talking about the news, and you’re saying, that’s unfiltered. That’s unvarnished. That’s the real dope. Nobody’s telling this guy what to say. He’s just telling it how he sees it.

And I’m judging that based on, you know, what I think, and and that’s how it’s supposed to work. And what goes completely unremarked upon because it’s invisible is the delivery system that put that particular guy on your particular screen. It’s it’s not at all unfiltered. I mean, you did not search that guy out by name. You might have searched the topic, but but there’s a filtration system is completely opaque and behind the scenes.

My eyes were kind of bugging out listening to some of these people too when they would use words, like, unfiltered to talk about kind of the the news they’d get through TikTok.

And even though they look at the rest of the news media with a critical eye, right, They are very uncritical about the actual PR campaign that TikTok has been running in the United States. Right? So TikTok knows obviously TikTok knows that this legislation’s happening. They’re fighting it actively, and they’re fighting it through their users. And so I know what TikTok is putting out to their users.

And what’s weird is how the TikTok users just repeat it right back to you. Like, the information that TikTok is giving them about why they need to keep TikTok is the exact reasons we heard from the young progressives. It’s just like straight up propaganda. Let’s listen.

I saw an article that said that I think TikTok generated, like, two point five billion dollars for the US economy. So it’s like, If they do take that app away, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. Last year after the first hearing to get the politicians office back, I do remember The CEO made it so that all of the US data is stored on American soil. So, like, all of the servers that hold our information is like in some database in Texas. So, like, our information isn’t even held with everyone else’s around the world.

So they can’t even say that it’s the data.

No. It’s starting to get political because, you know, that’s how our generation is, and this is our main source of entertainment, passing free time. It’s just crazy because this ban not will only affect us politically, like, getting our news out there. It’s gonna affect so many small businesses. And, all the other things like that as well.

There’s so many people that rely on TikTok for, like, engagement with their business or whatever the the case. With that band. I’m like, there would be a mass response.

I’ve only gotten the chance to listen to some of the earlier hearings where, It just sounded like politicians were kinda just like grasping for straws at why TikTok should be banned. Touching on like, oh, do you have any association with the Chinese government? No. I’m Singapore. And it’s like, what’s the point here?

What are we really trying to get at? Because I think the fact that we can’t trust politicians is because they’re just throwing these things out, and it does feel like a distraction.

They’re trying to distract us. Okay. I am shocked by the amount of information. People knew about TikTok, and it’s all the information that TikTok has provided them. Like, you hear this over and over and people Will Saletan taking people’s jobs away.

I mean, that person was able to say the amount of money that it’s generated for the United States economy. Do you know what a young person could tell you about any other industry in the United what they generate for the US economy is zero. I listen to a lot of them. So what do you think the political implications would be if Joe Biden did sign like, if the bill went through and Joe Biden was forced to sign it, because I gotta tell you, if I were him, I’d be nervous about signing it how rabid and informed and, hijacked these voters are on this.

Well, and that’s what makes it such a such a weird kind of fiddly political issue because nobody knows what will happen if he signs the bill because it’s up to ByteDance. Right? It could very well be that ByteDance will agree to sell and some American company does put together an offer, and the handoff is seamless, and it works. And then everybody wins because the kids still get their TikTok, and Joe, and a lot of these people get to run on this bipartisan thing they did to shore up your data security, or it could blow up. There could be no more TikTok all of a sudden, and a lot of people could get really mad about that.

And it would cause a lot, like, like you say, or, like, that kid said. I’m a little like, not I don’t wanna say a little bit. It would cause some economic pain because the a but zillion people use this app, and it’s true. I mean, like, people have launched their small businesses on there and things like that. And so it’s because nobody knows, which of the two it is, it has caused, you know, some weird coalitions because people are making different kind of judgment calls as to what’s likely.

I will say on on the specific thing of the PR campaign, The reason there has been so much time for them to spin this up, even though this bill only just kind of has been talked about in the last few weeks is because Donald Trump tried to do this unilaterally like, five years ago. He had initially tried to do basically this exact thing for us by dance to divest via executive order, and it didn’t really go anywhere. It got kinda held up in the courts. But I think that TikTok really saw is like, oh my gosh. Wait a minute.

There’s this coalition over there that doesn’t want us there, and they kind of put a full court press out. So, I mean, you can watch I I see ads on TV all the time about, you know, how good TikTok is for this or that content creator who’s kind of reorganize their lives around it and feel good stories and things like And and so it’s tricky to say because there would be some pain if it were to actually cease to exist in America. It’s just not clear whether that is what would happen if the bill passed.

Yeah. You know, I was just having a thought. You it’s going back to something you said before about being a cranky libertarian about this stuff. And me too. I too am a cranky libertarian about this stuff.

And so I generally am like, don’t ban things. You know, people can make their own decisions. But it bumps up against a different part of my libertarianist, which is that, like, I want you to be able to think freely. We get all kinds of inputs. Right?

And people can choose what those inputs are. You can read books. You can read newspapers. You can read the news. You can read poetry.

You can, you know, where you get your information. Like, no one can control that, but there is something that’s like nineteen eighty four ish of the hijacking of the brain that also hits my libertarian Ron DeSantis. And, like, You think this is free thought, but it’s not free thought. Someone is controlling this, but some of the points that people make back to me of Well, that was, you know, Facebook started, you know, they were influencing how you think. God knows Twitter influences how we think.

So it really is a tough issue. For me, the the Chinese spyware thing though is, like, pretty clean-cut.

There was one young guy, and I don’t remember whether it was in the young Trump voters or the young Biden voters it was just so striking to me the thing that he said where he was like, you know, I use TikTok. I like TikTok, but I I, you know, I really don’t think I’d have too much of a problem if it got banned because I really have kind of noticed it’s deleterious effects on my mental health. It’s hurt my attention span. You know, it’s made it harder for me to focus and things. So I really don’t I I think it’d be okay with me if it got banned.

And I was just delete it from your phone, you know, like, you, just get

it out of there. You don’t have to be on there. You know, just, like, go on Facebook or YouTube or read a book, you know, please. Like, you I I I don’t even know what political point to make about that, but but it was very strange. Like, like, you have the power to to fix this in your own life, I don’t know.

But it goes to the kind of the compulsion and the the hijacking of of the kind of pleasure centers in your brain that you were you were alluding to.

Yeah. But, it’s also like, you know, I know the war on drugs didn’t work, and the war on social media is not gonna work either. But, like, Do you think that the Chinese government wants Donald Trump to be our president?

I genuinely do not know the answer to that. And I think they were probably as surprised as anybody when he came out against this bill because he had supported it in the past, which had to do more with domestic politics seemingly. I genuinely don’t know. They’ve been roughly same. Biden has kind of carried on a lot of Trump’s economically aggressive trade policies toward China.

I have a hard time parsing out the differences in how they are on Taiwan and things like that. So I I I genuinely don’t know the answer to how Xi Jinping is likely to feel about the election.

I just know that as a matter of, like, freaking out, the Democrats are very freaked out by how much pro Trump content there is on the site. And even pro trump is, like, not even quite that. It’s all the, the, like, bar stool sport and even like men’s rights advocates that are all over there that I think ultimately sort of benefit Trump as a movement or as a way of thinking

I think there is kind of an an asymmetry there because the we’ve talked about how it’s it’s the kinda anti institutional iconoclastic content that thrives on there. And there’s an asymmetry because the iconoclastic right wing content favors Trump, but the iconoclastic left wing a lot of it is anti Biden because a lot of it is about Israel and Palestine.

It’s such

a good point. And Biden has been pretty staunchly pro Israel or argue a little, but a lot more staunchly pro Israel than a lot of his young progressive base. And so, I do think that young right wing people are probably getting stuff that makes them like Trump more. And young left wing people are getting stuff that makes them like Biden less.

That is such an essential point. An essential point. We did ask the young progressives about politics. I didn’t really include it, but, like, here’s the fact. The fact was they’d all voted for Biden before, and a bunch of them didn’t wanna vote for him again.

The young progressives were mad at Biden. It was mostly over Gaza, and they saw TikTok is where they could get their real Gaza information, the young progressives. And so I do think there’s an asymmetric problem. I think you just nailed the dichotomy of it. Okay.

So let’s talk about the young conservatives because here’s the thing. I would have expected. And so one might expect that Republican kids these days would be China hawks because Trump talks about China you know, being so bad all the time, the China virus on, you know, whatever. But that’s not what happened. Let’s listen.

A lot of the content that I also see on TikTok that isn’t directly about politics is calling out the government for what they put in our foods the prescriptions that we’re given from pharmaceuticals, things about the vaccine, things about money that we’re giving to other countries, things that the government doesn’t really wanna to know and doesn’t really want us to see and it’s very heightened. And, I mean, personally ever since I’ve seen these things on TikTok, I I’ve changed my lifestyle, what I eat, the food that I buy, I read all the labels. I cannot believe what the government allows us to eat. And I just I don’t think that they like that. I think that they don’t want us to have that raw information.

I think it’s interesting that the government wants to suppress something that they can’t control. Or I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s surprising that they want to suppress something. They can’t control. I was only interested about it when I heard that the US wanted to ban it because I’m like, well, this is interesting.

We’re in a time right now where cancer culture is like a really big thing.

The whole TikTok tournament band is so silly. I think a lot of it has to do with a lot of the senators and congressmen and women having stock other things like Facebook, and since TikTok isn’t a publicly traded company, that’s our biggest competitor, it’s a huge competitor. Now, they don’t like that.

ByteDance were to divest TikTok to another American company. It’s not any different than Facebook. Facebook is also a private sector company that controls the media as is Fox News, as is every single media source that we gain all of our, you know, information from. So I think the ban is silly just because it’s just not gonna change.

The reality is this company’s owned by the Chinese government. I don’t think it’s crazy that politicians are concerned about the content. You know, I think security might be a little bit of a joke, but the content, I think that’s very real. I mean, just look at You mentioned the gender stuff earlier, right? How did the gender stuff become such a big topic here in America, social media, and school?

Like, you control both of those things. You control all the minds of America.

So there’s one guy who seemed to be concerned about the Chinese government thing. But, I mean, across these three groups, it was just that was not the thing. I don’t know what to say about the conservative kids other than They were not China hawks. Everybody hates the American government, and it’s funny because as a young libertarian ish person, I too was very skeptical of our government but I don’t know that my instinct would have been like to trust, like, China’s government more. Like, I think the problem here is it is one thing to be skeptical of our government’s another thing to be like, and so I trust the Chinese Communist Party to give me the straight dope on America.

Yeah. I don’t know that I necessarily read them US good China bad it was more just kind of the sense that, like, the cat was already out of the bag with with the data collection stuff. And with, you know, everybody’s gonna be giving you some kind of spin, some kind of angle anywhere you look. This is a little more unvarnished than, like, turning on the nightly news, and so maybe it’s the truth kinda slips through even despite the slant. But but, yeah, I mean, just very, very little distinguishing from really anybody between, okay, US actors have my data.

And Chinese actors might also have my data, and US actors might be trying to sell me a bill of goods, and Chinese actors might be trying to sell me a bill of goods. And I don’t know of maybe that one guy right at the end would have said that the latter was worse than the former. But for the most part, I mean, they were just, like, our data’s out there, whatever. People are trying to spin us, whatever. Basically think this bill is a big waste of time.

It was very interesting to see. I mean, just just very little kind of foreign policy, geopolitics thought at all.

The thing is I know this to be true as a, as an essential truth now. When we develop our content for Republican voters against Trump, like when I wanna do persuasion content, you know, people are always like, well, get a celebrity or whatever. I’m like, no. You know who people trust? People like them.

Like, and they want it to look authentic, and they want it to look like the person isn’t trying to isn’t trying to spin them, isn’t trying to gain them. And so real people like them from their tribe. Like, that is who they trust now. And there’s part of me that’s like, well, this is sort of how content democratizes, right? It, like, makes sense that people don’t want some, they don’t want the government, or they don’t want a company, or they don’t want some big institutions deciding things for them.

And so what they want is to get information from people like them. The downside of that is the absolute, hollowing out of expertise of people who actually know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about these things. You know, there was this meme or this thing I saw one time that I always always stuck with me. I said, the internet did to our parents what they said video games were gonna do to us. And that always struck me as, like, kinda true.

Right? Like, we always think about sort of like the boomers who are not native to the internet suddenly be, you know, going down rabbit holes and telling you how they have to do their own research on x y or z, you know, we’re all dealing with our parents saying weird things they read on the internet. But that I think is too generous to us and to the generations that are native because I think at the end of the day, there’s always someone in control of the information people are getting. And one of the other things that has jumped out at me as I’ve done research into just persuasion efforts is the number one thing that makes let’s say, we’ll call like a swing voter open to being persuaded about something. So, like, let’s just I’ll just take one example.

So if seventy percent of Republicans think the election was stolen, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about, okay, what does that other thirty percent think? And the number one thing that makes somebody who’s a Republican not really think the election was stolen, is that they have a mixed media diet. They watch Fox News, but they also watch CNN, and they also watch their local news, and they’re taking in a bunch of different sort of things, and that allows them to kind of say, well, Fox News said it was stolen, but literally everybody else says it wasn’t, they’re like, I’m not sure. You know, there’s somebody that they trust in their media diet, and they’re getting alternatives, whereas for people who start with Fox News and then further down the rabbit hole of Steve Bannon and social media and they get trapped in there, they don’t even hear the alternative ever. It’s like a fait accompli.

Of course, the stolen. What kind of idiot wouldn’t think it was? I’ve heard a thousand people I trust talk about it. So my point being that The need to have sort of a bunch of different, outlets to help balance people out is what people need, but instead algorithmically, they just get drawn further and further into these other places by things like TikTok, but also other social media platforms. And there’s always someone in control, I guess, is my ultimate point.

Like, the idea that no one is you are in control is like, no, man. They’re taking all your data. They’re hijacking your brain, and they’re sending you, like, stuff that further radicalizes you. And so none of us are immune, I guess, too. That question of like it’s all it’s all doing something to all of us.

Yeah. You’ve alluded to it a couple times, but I should probably say in my own voice too that I am I’m no dummy and I also realize that a lot of these problems we’re discussing are internet problems. They’re social media problems. They’re not TikTok problems. They’re they’re distribution problems.

The kids are correct about a lot of that stuff. There are the specific problems we’ve talked about with TikTok. And one of the one of those specific problems that I wanted to kinda highlight on the on the issue of trust that you just brought up when people talk about, like, the idea that the app could kind of, like, disseminate essentially Chinese regime propaganda, I think a lot of people find that kind of silly. On its face, like, like, that these kids are sitting there and they’re seeing, like, videos of, like, some Chinese broadcaster in his weird suit at his weird desk with his, like, kinda glazed eyes just kind of reading off the prompter, the the Progy stuff. But the app would does not have to do that.

Accomplish that purpose because what what the genius of the the sorting mechanism is is you find the, like, three or five people who are already kind of saying similar things on there who are already like the viewer. They’re like random Americans sitting at home on their couch who happen to be like more CCP you know, favorable than the median American, and then they just get boosted. You know? I mean, and the the boosting mechanism is the thing that’s so invisible when you’re using the app because don’t see what other people are seeing. You just scrolled to this because it was the next thing in your feed.

And so I think that’s the zeroing in on on that is why we are actually seeing this translation now. But it’s it’s kind of opaque to the average viewer. So it’s not surprising that it it’s hard for it to filter down to the people who actually use TikTok right now.

Well, yeah. And also, it’s not that they need to make them trust the Chinese communist government. Right? They just need to make Americans trust America’s government, not at all. Right?

It’s like Yes. It’s like there is sort of a healthy balance, I think, for freedom loving Americans in which you don’t take everything our government says as gospel, but you need to have some faith that, like, the vaccine isn’t going to, like, fill you with nanobots too.

At least it’s better than China’s.

You

know? Come on.

And so I think that there’s this idea of just like constantly making people increasingly skeptical skeptical to the point of the government having no credibility with its own voters, which is obviously a real problem. And then makes it more susceptible to propaganda from other countries, who are our active enemies.

The government and the media and all our tech companies and you know, your local grocery store. I mean, it’s it really is kind of amazing how pervasive some of this, like, anti institutional. I mean, you played the clip of the the girl who had changed your whole diet. I mean, it really goes deep, and and it it does leave yeah. It leaves it leaves people without kind of defenses to compare, you know, the people who are maybe somewhat bad with the people who are really quite bad on a lot of this stuff.

And I think that’s what we kinda saw throughout the group.

Yeah. Which leads me to sort of my last observation about the progressives and the conservatives, which is they sounded the same, basically, when it came to TikTok, Like, they were all distrustful. Like, they, they were different. I mean, they were different in terms of the issues that it elevated for them. But in terms of how much they liked TikTok and how much they disliked and distrusted, the American man, that was like horseshoe theory all over the place.

I don’t know if that jumped out at you.

Yeah. I think that they were getting very different political diets on TikTok and likely diets that kind of played to and flattered their own sensibilities in in various ways. Again, like all of us do on social media all the time. But, yeah, the way that that kind of united them around the world is telling us kinda how it really is. The unvarnished truth was was very striking to me as well.

Yeah. Okay. Last point I wanna talk about before we get out of here, Can you just walk us through the intramaga infighting on the TikTok front? So Kelly and Conway is over in one corner with Trump donor, Jeff Gas, and Steve Bannon, and Laura Lumer are in the other corner. And, like, trump, just like flip on what he thought about this?

Like, what is going on?

Yes. We’ve spent all of this time on sort of how much of a shame it is that all of these kids don’t trust institutions and our our total annihilists and all this stuff. And now here’s a really good reason why you should completely be a nihilist because the it’s all about money, all of this in fighting. It’s it trump, trump, had a lot of China hawks in his term, perhaps his first term as president, and they kind of prevailed on him to try to go after TikTok in his executive order. However, since then, TikTok has tied a lot of strings to Trump in in kind of indirect ways, not TikTok directly, but Kelly Ann Conway, close eight of his, is lobbying on TikTok’s behalf on Capitol Hill, not directly on TikTok’s behalf, but on behalf of the Clubford Growth, conservative organization that gets a lot of donations from this guy Yass, who is a hedge funder who has a giant giant giant investment in TikTok in ByteTok, in his hedge fund.

And Yas has met with Trump, and, Trump says they didn’t talk about TikTok, but Trump says a lot of things. Oh, yeah.

Speaking of great arbiters of the truth. Yeah.

Yeah. And just this morning, it was reported that that Yas also owns a pretty large stake in the company that is trying to acquire truth social, take it public, which would be a gigantic windfall for Donald Trump personally, and maybe even on on a scale that would get him out of the issues he’s having financially, where he might have sell a lot of his big beautiful buildings and things like that. So, I mean, there’s remarkable, like, kind of direct explicit financial connections on Trump. Yass as well. Jeff Yass has he donates to a lot of Republicans who, who opposed the TikTok ban.

And and and it’s not to say that they’re all necessarily on the dole. A lot of them are, you know, cranky libertarian types like Thomas Massey who already had the predilection. Trump is really the one guy who very nakedly flipped on it. So so, yeah, there’s all sorts of weird kind of financial pressures. But then you mentioned, like, people like Steve Bannon and and and Laura Lumer, a lot of horrible things about them, but one of the bad things about them is not that they get a lot of lobbying money from Republican hedge funders because they don’t.

They’re grassroots, populist people who, you know, are crowd funded, basically. So they have been kinda clanging a bell, yelling at all the Republicans, not yet trump, but all the other Republicans, who have have taken yass money, and it’s all been very interesting. And and and kind of a zoo to watch.

Okay. Well, nothing about this podcast made me more likely to download TikTok onto my phone. But Andrew Edgar, it did make me more likely to invite you back on the Focus Secret Podcast because it was excellent talking to you. Thank you so much for joining us. And thanks to all of for listening to another episode of the Focus Secret Podcast.

We will be back next week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe, and talks in. Bye.