Lots of TikTok thoughts

The app, not the Kesha song, but I have thoughts on that too

March 24, 2023

So That TikTok Ban

This week TikTok’s CEO went on a multi-front charm counter-offensive against the looming threat of rare bipartisan support for potentially banning the app. He made a TikTok to announce that the app’s reached 150 million monthly active users in America (I think that number is sus) and to discuss the potential ban. He testified before congress on Thursday, telling the Energy and Commerce Committee, “our commitment is to move their data into the United States, to be stored on American soil by an American company, overseen by American personnel. So the risk would be similar to any government going to an American company, asking for data”

Congress didn’t seem particularly impressed by his testimony, and I don’t think I’m convinced either. While much of the rhetoric around TIkTok coming from politicians feels primarily anti-China, if not outright xenophobic, there are legit issues around data security to consider. 

Just a few days ago, a former TikTok employee appeared before congress to criticize Project Texas–TikTok’s plan to manage all American user data from within the US through Oracle. The former employee characterized the program as deeply flawed and suggested that a “truly leakproof arrangement for Americans’ data would require a “complete re-engineering” of how TikTok is run,” according to reporting from The Washington Post. 

We’ve already seen TikTok and their parent company Bytedance abusing access to user data. Notably using the app to spy on journalists while attempting to identify their sources sharing information about the company. It’s a pretty awful violation of user privacy, but something many of the other companies who place apps on our phones could be capable of. 

I have a lot of complicated feelings about TikTok and a potential ban. Most of them boil down to the fact that I don’t trust TIkTok or Bytedance, but I don’t really trust any of the other social platforms either. But I do want to unpack some nuances and tensions around how I, and I suspect many others, view the app right now. So we’ll get into that right after the links. 

Platform Updates

Instagram 

The Rest of Meta 

TikTok

Twitter

YouTube

LinkedIn 

Pinterest (disclosure: I’m currently a contractor with Pinterest) 

Snap 

Culture Movers 

Laws

Music 

Gaming 

AI 

Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day did a good job of digging into most of this news and what it could mean for the ongoing development of AI tools. Rather than type out an opinion that’s pretty similar to his, I’m just gonna link y’all there. 

Scams

Unpacking My TikTok Feels

Let me start by airing my professional grievance with this company. TikTok rose in popularity as I transitioned from being a team of one social media manager to managing a team. I’d fought to get leadership to understand the scale of work required to build the kind of social program they expected for the company. Then TIkTok enters the chat. All of a sudden senior leadership sees their kids obsessed with dance trends and thinks we need to be doing that somehow. 

Many social managers were expected to become onscreen talent for brands on this app seemingly overnight. The video editors we’d built relationships with weren’t familiar with–and sometimes uninterested in learning–TikTok’s approach to video editing tools. So we’re expected to learn that too if we wanted to even start testing out how our brands would show up on this growing platform. My job at the time had other issues, but this dynamic in the background didn’t help. I resented needing to learn a new app for a while. 

Once I let that resentment go, I found a lot of content I loved on the app. The focus on short video inspired a lot of the same creative editing that characterized the heyday of Vine (RIP). The algorithmic feed actually helped me discover artists, activists, comedians, and conversations that I found valuable–and wasn’t discovering on other apps. When I got laid off last summer, I made a point of learning how to use the editing tools in the app better. I’d now characterize myself as speaking conversational TikTok creation. 

Stepping back to think about TikTok’s role in the industry and media landscape, I’m again conflicted. I’m excited to see another social platform growing in a way that might actually disrupt the Meta/Google digital ad duopoly. I generally think competition is good for the industry, individual companies, and the end users in this space. Ideally, we’d have a social media and digital advertising landscape that offered a variety of different experiences. But many of the companies in this space have built their business models around needing to be the winner take all platform of the market. So instead of Instagram leaning into what makes Instagram special, we got Reels. Spotify is relaunching their app to chase TikTok’s impact on the music industry. Everyone’s rushing to be a vertical video platform. Without regulation, competition in tech leads to acquisitions and imitation instead of innovation and differentiation. 

Then there are all the data security and user privacy issues I’ve mentioned above that are, at least on paper, the core motivating issue behind a potential ban. I don’t trust Bytedance to respect user privacy. I don’t think they have the leverage to resist a direct request from the Chinese government for private data about global users. I don’t trust many other tech companies either, and view the differences between the Chinese government and the US government on this issue to be fragile or largely semantic. Our government requests, and is granted access to, more user data from tech companies than our peer nations. Meta, in particular, has an abysmal track record protecting user data and privacy. 

Ultimately I think targeting TikTok with a ban will be unproductive toward achieving any goal other than individual politicians scoring points for being anti-China. We need industry-wide regulation that sets a level playing field around what companies are supposed to do to protect user data, a functional way of enforcing penalties for violating those standards, and even stronger guardrails against any government being able to compel the disclosure of private data without meeting a very high bar for demonstrating why they need this data. 

I guess in conclusion, I like this video a lot. 

Unrelated Reflection and Request 

New Year's resolutions never really resonate with me. January is a dreary time of the year to set goals and put energy toward starting new habits. Aries season on the other hand? I vibe with. Spring begins, and my birthday comes around. It just makes more sense. 

One goal I’m setting for myself this year is to get better at graphic design. My role at Pinterest has required me to get somewhat good at Canva, but I’m noticing places where I’d like to do more than that tool allows for easily. I want to level up into being able to do some work in Figma or Photoshop. Ideally, I’d like to find a tutorial or course that’s designed for getting from my mid-level of skill on the approachable tools into more comfort with these pro tools. So if you know of something like that, please send it my way.