Brooke Gladstone: The House passed a bill that could ban TikTok in the US unless it separates from its Chinese parent company.

Rep. Kat Cammack: Why in the hell would we want and allow the Chinese Communist Party to have access to our private data?

Brooke Gladstone: A moment of unity in an era of dysfunction and discord. From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Fears around TikTok abound, but would forcing a sale really protect our data?

Julia Angwin: The reality is that TikTok, as far as most people can tell, collects pretty much the same types of data that every other app on your phone collects

Brooke Gladstone: Also on the show, after failing to gain any seats in the last midterms, the press all but sounded the death nail for the book-banning group, Moms for Liberty.

Jennifer Berkshire: Moms for Liberty is really part of a broader ecosystem that's aimed at sowing distrust in our public schools.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Well, they finally did it, sort of.

News clip: The House has voted to pass a bipartisan bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of TikTok.

News clip: If the bill becomes law, it would give TikTok's Chinese-based parent company ByteDance six months to sell the video-sharing app, or it would be removed from app stores and web hosting services here in the US.

News clip: Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle worry that TikTok poses a national security threat because it's owned by a company based in China.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw: You wouldn't allow a radio tower owned by the Chinese to be put upright in the middle of Washington DC and then allow it to just put out Chinese propaganda. That's exactly what TikTok can be used for.

Micah Loewinger: The question is how much of this concern is fact-based and how much exaggerated? There's no disputing that TikTok has had its problems.

News clip: According to a new article in the Washington Post, if you're in China and you go on TikTok, you can't find anything about the Hong Kong protests that continue.

News clip: What appears to be a beauty lesson is actually 17-year-old Feroza Aziz trying to raise awareness about the detention of Uyghur Muslims in China.

TikTok clip: This is another Holocaust, yet no one is talking about it.

News clip: Following the posting of her three-part tutorial, the American Teen TikTok account was suspended. ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of TikTok apologized for the suspension blaming a human moderation error.

News clip: The spread of false COVID-19 vaccine claims is going viral on TikTok, according to a new study. Those videos have over 20 million unique views and over 1.6 million likes.

Nancy Pelosi: This is not a ban on TikTok. I understand the entertainment value, the educational value, the communication value, the business value for some businesses--

Micah Loewinger: Nancy Pelosi, this week responding to criticism of the bill, including its apparent threat to free speech.

Nancy Pelosi: It's attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-tac-toe a winner.

Micah Loewinger: President Biden has said he would sign the bill into law if and when it passes the Senate, but writing in The New York Times this week, tech journalist, Julia Angwin, founder of the new outlet Proof News argued this legislation wouldn't really address concerns around misinformation, national security or data privacy, and in fact, she doesn't find claims about TikTok's unique power as a propaganda tool. All that convincing,

Julia Angwin: The office of the director of National Intelligence put out a threat assessment report in February and said that TikTok accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm were targeting candidates from both political parties during the US midterm election cycle in 2022. Now, it sounds a little bit scary, but the reality is that anyone can set up account on TikTok to "target a candidate." This is exactly what the Russians did in 2016 when they set up accounts on Facebook to try to influence the US elections.

They didn't have to buy Facebook to do that. They actually paid in rubles. Facebook didn't notice. It's also worth noting that that threat assessment from the National Intelligence Director does not say that TikTok's algorithm promoted those accounts. I'm guessing that if they had evidence of that, they would've stated it. I think the thing that we basically can learn from this is that whatever evidence they have, they're not sharing it or they don't have it.

Micah Loewinger: Say more about the data privacy concern. What are they collecting? How could it be misused? Has it already been misused?

Julia Angwin: TikTok, as far as most people can tell, collects pretty much the same types of data that every other app on your phone collects, which is where you are, what kind of device you're accessing it from, how often you're using it for, how long you're on, and then while you're in the app, what kind of content you're looking at. There have been data abuses at all of these companies.

Both Microsoft and Google have been found to promote their own products over those of their competitors. Employees have actually gone in, looked at personal data, and tried to figure out things about their ex-girlfriends or whatever. As we all know, from the looking at the privacy policies, basically all of them say, we can do whatever we want with your data, so we don't really know what is going to happen with our user data.

Micah Loewinger: You've pointed out that even if TikTok is sharing data from American users with the Chinese government, which the company says it's not, the data might not be as consequential as its critics fear.

Julia Angwin: What's interesting about TikTok is they don't actually have as much as maybe a Facebook or Google because they don't actually have a lot of personal information on your friends. Usually, people don't upload their address book. It really is about what video you watch and how long you watch it for.

Micah Loewinger: What does TikTok know about you?

Julia Angwin: Well, TikTok knows, unfortunately, that I watch too many cooking videos and too many makeup tutorials.

Micah Loewinger: They're going to take you down.

Julia Angwin: [laughs] It's possible that this is one reason I'm not that worried because I'm just like, "Good luck." I don't know what you're going to do with this information about my love of cheesecakes.

Micah Loewinger: As you've pointed out, even if TikTok, let's say, just vanished from the app stores overnight, China, or anyone for that matter, could buy oodles of pretty granular personal data that are routinely hoovered up by American tech companies and then sold into the data broker marketplace.

Julia Angwin: Yes, you can buy all sorts of things. There was a really shocking story about a Muslim prayer app. It turns out the Defense Department was buying the data from that app in order to track the location of Muslims in the United States. We have definitely seen governments, not just China, using these data brokers to get information that they would otherwise have a hard time getting hold of.

Micah Loewinger: Can you give us a laundry list of some of the abhorrent practices from social media companies, just to help us understand who TikTok's peers are?

Julia Angwin: Yes. I'll start with genocide. Facebook was accused of enabling a genocide in Myanmar where the government essentially blanketed Facebook with lies about a minority population and incited violence against them. We have seen Facebook enabling just hate speech. I wrote a story years ago about how Facebook had a category that advertisers could choose from called Jew Haters, where you could just literally target your ad to people who hate Jews. Anyone who opens up the website, formerly known as Twitter, now X could see all sorts of examples of misinformation and disinformation sometimes being promoted by the owner of the site. It goes on and on. [laughs] It's a cesspool is what I'm saying.

Micah Loewinger: There are real concerns with TikTok too, right?

Julia Angwin: A couple years back, there was an allegation that TikTok had not been showing Chinese dissident information and they apologized, but we really don't have a lot of evidence of how often this might be happening. TikTok is probably a little bit less transparent than most of the other social media platforms, largely because it's newer. It took a long time to force Facebook into the level of transparency that it has now, and it's still not perfect.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to TikTok, lawmakers are using national security to justify the bill, but there are other concerns in the background. This week, Mike Pence wrote a Fox News op-ed urging Congress to act because the app is "digital fentanyl." We've been hearing this phrase a lot from right-wing officials over the past couple years. Speaking from The House floor this week, Republican Mike Gallagher, who's one of the bill's sponsors, emphasized its popularity among young people.

Mike Gallagher: Foreign adversary control of what is becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30.

Micah Loewinger: This particular concern that TikTok is unique in its harmfulness to young people has been buoyed in part by the tech whistleblower, Tristan Harris, who on 60 Minutes made a point that's been kind of floating around social media in recent weeks.

News clip: Harris says, the version that served to Chinese consumers called Douyin is very different from the one available in the West.

Tristan Harris: In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos. It's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids' development and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok while they've shipped the opium version to the rest of the world.

Julia Angwin: You have to think about that in the context of China. China is very much about controlling speech and they want to control it so that kids are focused on educational goals. That is just not how the United States views speech. We are very much in favor of free speech. The idea that we would limit kids from seeing certain things. We haven't done it on any front. It's just in general, we have had a very different approach to how we treat youth and their access to information.

Micah Loewinger: As the Washington Post observed, members of Congress and the Biden administration have put out pretty conflicting messaging on what the real goal of this bill is. For instance, Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw posted on X that this bill really is a ban, but then he backtracked that recently. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, on the other hand, said that what this bill is about is really pushing a sale, but you don't think forcing a sale is a good idea either.

Julia Angwin: It gets rid of China's direct access to user data for sure but basically there's only a few people who can buy TikTok because it's huge.

Micah Loewinger: When you say huge, you're saying in the ballpark of $84 billion.

Julia Angwin: Yes. Really, we're going to be looking at buyers like Meta, Google, maybe Microsoft, the big tech firms.

Micah Loewinger: Because they're the people who could afford it.

Julia Angwin: Also, they're the people who are interested in it. TikTok really created this short-form vertical format video that has been just incredibly popular. YouTube has tried to copy it, Instagram has tried to copy it, but no one's really succeeded. Those are the ones who are going to want to buy it. Then what you're going to have is a TikTok that's owned by one of those giants, and all the data will be used and monetized for whatever reasons they want, sold to anyone they want it to be sold to. These are all the same problems we have.

Micah Loewinger: Would that even be legal? The antitrust implications seem pretty bad.

Julia Angwin: I think there's also antitrust hurdles to any of those acquisitions, but if the US government is forcing the sale, then maybe they would also say, we'll give an exemption? [chuckles] Then also maybe they'll have some other buyers who step up. Steven Mnuchin, he announced that he wants to buy TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: Steven Mnuchin, who is the former Treasury Secretary.

Julia Angwin: Yes. I think it doesn't even prevent China from being manipulative, Associated Press found. China is setting up influencers on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to promote the Chinese agenda. It's not like they're not acting on other platforms. I just am not entirely sure that we have done that much by forcing TikTok to a sale to one of these other tech companies that's entirely unregulated.

Micah Loewinger: What do meaningful regulations for TikTok and Meta and X and the like look like?

Julia Angwin: Luckily, since the US is so late to the game on privacy regulations, we have a lot of models to choose from. [chuckles] Nearly every country in the world has a federal baseline privacy law. Probably the most obvious model for us to work from is the EU, which passed the Digital Services Act. The companies themselves have to say, what are the risks that my algorithm is creating towards, for instance, youth and mental health or towards democracy? Then they have to publish these reports and the EU government will actually audit them and see if their risk is being assessed correctly. Also the public will get to see what those risks look like.

I think this is a really interesting approach because regulating algorithms is something that's difficult. We don't have a lot of experience with it, but it is in most ways the most important piece of this. In Europe, you have a right to see the data that's held against you. You have a right to ask for it to be deleted. There's limits on third-party sales of data. There's restrictions. You can only use data for the purpose for which it was collected.

Micah Loewinger: How has the EU been enforcing these regulations and have we seen tangible results?

Julia Angwin: We've already seen, for instance, like the TikTok published a transparency report that shows just in Europe what ads are appearing on its platform, which is something really helpful to see. We've also seen that the EU is already investigating X, formerly Twitter, for not meeting its requirements of transparency and responsiveness to content moderation requests.

Micah Loewinger: This all sounds pretty good, pretty common sense. Why have we not done something similar in the US?

Julia Angwin: I just am amazed at how far behind we are in even passing a bare minimum federal privacy bill. We got really close in the last session of Congress, but because there's no federal law, several states have started passing their own laws. The goal right now with the tech companies is actually get all these state-level laws passed, basically that they've written themselves. Then those states are actually opposed to the federal law because it would gut their law.

Micah Loewinger: In your New York Times piece, you cited polling that shows that only 31% of Americans favor a nationwide ban on TikTok. If most Americans aren't behind it, why are lawmakers?

Julia Angwin: Unfortunately, the gap between where Americans are and where lawmakers are is wide on a lot of issues. 72% of Americans want more government regulation of what companies can do with their data. That hasn't spurred Congress to act. There's wide popular support for gun control, abortion access, et cetera, that remain unaddressed. At the federal level, government policies in the US are increasingly not reflective of public opinion, unfortunately.

I think one thing that's happening right now is that people were not aware this was coming, and so it passed really quickly, and constituents didn't have a chance to mobilize but now people are aware and are mobilizing, and so I think the Senate offices are going to get flooded with a lot of really angry people, because the reality is it's a real marketplace of small businesses. I think it will be interesting to see if the Senate passes it because I think it actually could be politically unwise in an election year to piss off this many constituents.

Micah Loewinger: Julia, thank you very much.

Julia Angwin: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Julia Angwin is the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Proof News, a non-profit news organization, which you can find at proofnews.org.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the conservative movement gets a lot of mileage out of motherhood.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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