Emily Baker-White on TikTok's Chinese ownership, global reach, and content challenges
Reliable Sources
CNN
3.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the TikTok app becoming more popular and powerful by the day, BuzzFeed News contributor Emily Baker-White discusses her string of scoops about TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. She says ex-employees have opened up to her because they feel "weird" about "the power that ByteDance has now amassed through TikTok in the US." Regarding TikTok's Chinese ownership, "we've seen a lot of concern from the US government; we haven't seen a lot of action," she says. She also points out that "they're distributing information at a scale where it's incredibly hard to get it right."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | TikTok is in the news every day in dozens of ways. |
| 0:07.1 | The app continues to grow in popularity, causing big tech giants to scramble and try to catch |
| 0:13.3 | up coming out with copycat features. |
| 0:17.8 | TikTok is a business story, it's a cultural story, an entertainment story, and also very |
| 0:23.4 | much a geopolitical story, with lots of questions and concerns about its Chinese owner |
| 0:31.2 | bite dance. |
| 0:33.8 | So what is the status of TikTok? |
| 0:37.0 | What does the company know about its users? |
| 0:40.9 | What might Chinese officials do with that data? |
| 0:45.3 | Those are a few of the questions for this week's Reliable Sources Podcast, so let's cue |
| 0:49.2 | the music. |
| 0:52.2 | One brand stouter and this weekly podcast is our chance to go in depth with media leaders |
| 0:57.0 | and newsmakers, exploring how the media world really works. |
| 1:03.8 | And right now TikTok is reinventing media, changing the way untold millions of people consume |
| 1:10.4 | entertainment, and sometimes news. |
| 1:14.2 | And that's keeping reporters like Emily Baker White, very busy. |
| 1:19.2 | She's been on the tech beat for BuzzFeed, writing about TikTok's owner bite dance, and |
| 1:24.8 | the ways that this Chinese company is trying to wall off American user data in order to make |
| 1:32.1 | sure that American regulators and lawmakers don't try to shut down TikTok in the US altogether. |
| 1:38.0 | Emily's most recent story is titled TikTok owner bite dance used a news app on millions |
| 1:43.8 | of phones to push pro-China messages. |
| 1:47.3 | Ex employees say bite dance says it did no such thing. |
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