What’s Behind the Bipartisan Attack on TikTok?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A ban of the Chinese social-media app TikTok, first floated by the Trump Administration, is now gaining real traction in Washington. Lawmakers of both parties fear the app could be manipulated by Chinese authorities to gain insight into American users and become an effective tool for propaganda against the United States. “Tiktok arrived in Americans’ lives in about 2018 . . . and in some ways it coincided with the same period of collapse in the U.S.-China relationship,” the staff writer Evan Osnos tells David Remnick. “If you’re a member of Congress, you look at TikTok and you say, ‘This is the clearest emblem of my concern about China, and this is something I can talk about and touch.’ ” Remnick also talks with the journalist Chris Stokel-Walker—who has written extensively about TikTok and argued against a ban—regarding the global political backlash against the app. “I think we should be suspicious of all social media, but I don’t think that TikTok is the attack vector that we think it is,” he says. “This is exactly the same as any other platform.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Given the level of partisan rancor between the two major parties, and honestly, ranker feels like a huge understatement at this point.
0:21.4	You would think that the parties share absolutely nothing in common.
0:24.5	But that isn't exactly the case.
0:27.3	Here are two points of agreement between many Democrats and Republicans.
0:31.6	An increasingly hardline toward China and a general suspicion or hostility toward tech companies.
0:36.9	So the idea of banning TikTok,
0:39.9	which is owned by a Chinese company, is getting real traction in Washington. A ban had been
0:45.1	floated during the Trump administration, but at the recent congressional hearing with TikTok's
0:49.6	CEO, members of both parties were in full display of performative outrage,
0:54.8	even members who wouldn't know TikTok if they saw it on their screens.
0:59.4	So if I have a TikTok app on my phone,
1:02.0	and my phone is on my home Wi-Fi network,
1:04.1	does TikTok access that network?
1:05.9	You will have to access the network to get connections to the internet?
1:09.9	That's not enough for me.
1:11.6	That's not enough for the parents of America.
1:13.6	Can you say, with 100% certainty that TikTok does not use the phone's camera
1:19.6	to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation
1:25.6	should be amplified by the algorithm.
1:29.2	Can you tell me that?
1:30.2	The Chinese government has that data.
	...

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