U.S. TikTok Hysteria Teeters Toward The Idiotic

from the do-as-we-say,-not-as-we-do dept

Last Friday, the internet exploded with the news that Amazon was banning its employees from installing TikTok, the hugely popular social media app by Chinese company ByteDance. An entire day's news cycle was dedicated to Amazon's decision, with an ocean of press reports implying that the Chinese social networking platform was a privacy nightmare directly tethered to the Chinese government. The story came on the heels of months of allegations by the Trump administration that the app was doing things so vile and atrocious that the only solution was to ban the popular app from the United States entirely.

But then, at the end of the day, something odd happened. Amazon suddenly backtracked, stating that its announcement to employees urging them to uninstall TikTok was a mistake. An entire day's news cycle, filled with allegations that TikTok was a privacy nightmare, was based on little more than an administrative brain fart.

It was just the latest example of how, upon closer inspection, much of the hysteria surrounding TikTok isn't based on much of anything... substantive. There's been no limit of pearl clutching from the Trump administration and its allies about the app, but when it comes to actual supporting evidence to justify an outright ban, there's just not much of it beyond "it's from China." Case in point: Senator Ken Buck penned one of a flood of editorials over at Newsweek, declaring that TikTok was aggressively nefarious and a diabolical threat to US consumers:

"As evidence, TikTok's privacy policy for U.S. residents is upfront about the vast quantity of user data it collects and shares with the CCP. "We automatically collect certain information from you when you use the Platform, including internet or other network activity information such as your IP address, geolocation-related data..., unique device identifiers, browser and search history (including content you have viewed in the Platform) and Cookies," the policy reads."

There are a few problems there.

One, an "up front" privacy policy is a good thing. Two, there's no evidence that TikTok actually shares that data with the CCP yet, and while it's certainly possible it still does and may in the future, having actual evidence of this connection is kind of important if you're going to blacklist a company based entirely on said allegation. While it's true you might want to avoid installing Chinese-made apps on security-sensitive devices, that's true for a laundry list of apps, services, and hardware made all over the world that sees nowhere near the same level of hyperventilation.

Three, numerous security experts have taken a very close look at the app and found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Four, the data Buck hyperventilates over is collected and shared by an absolute universe of companies and services thanks in large part to lax US privacy oversight and sloppy security practices. Given the endless security hacks, leaks, and data just left stupidly unsecured in the cloud, it's not hard for Chinese intelligence -- or anybody else with unlimited time and resources -- to get a hold of this kind of data if it wants access to it. Banning TikTok without addressing a myriad of other issues doesn't thwart that.

As such, if you're genuinely concerned about US consumer privacy, banning TikTok isn't going to do you much good. Chinese hardware is in literally everything, from your shitty router and "smart" fridge, to the millions of crappy internet of broken things devices Americans attach to their home and business networks with reckless abandon. Like the NSA, Chinese intelligence really doesn't need TikTok to spy on Americans. There's a million other attack vectors to choose from, most of which (like the IOT) we're not actually doing much about, yet likely provide the Chinese government with far more data than TikTok ever could:

The reality is that most of these lawmakers making such a heated stink about TikTok couldn't give any less of a shit about US consumer privacy, rampant data collection, or ensuring US integrity from foreign operators with malicious intent (see: Mr. Putin). In fact, most have gone well out of their way to ensure privacy regulators like the FTC lack the resources or authority to police privacy. Most have worked tirelessly to kill any and every attempt at even the most modest of privacy laws, oppose improving election security, and were utterly absent during the biggest scandals of the era (see: wireless industry's location data fracas).

Either you care about consumer privacy or you don't, and the majority of those making the biggest noise about TikTok have made it clear, repeatedly, that they don't. If we actually cared about US consumer privacy, we'd pass some baseline privacy protections, craft holistic strategies to tackle the IOT dumpster fire, heavily fund election security reform, stop tearing down and defunding our privacy regulators, and actually impose more than theatrical wrist slaps against companies--foreign and domestic--that are provably incompetent or downright malicious when it comes to data privacy and security.

Many of these lawmakers had nothing to say when it was revealed that US wireless carriers were selling access to sensitive location information to every nitwit with a nickel, including stalkers and those pretending to be law enforcement. Many (like Pompeo) cry endlessly about China's hacking efforts, but do nothing to help fund election security. Many refuse to condone our failures to secure SS7 wireless network vulnerabilities likely exploited by most foreign intelligence agencies for the better part of the last decade.

DC's hysteria over TikTok is oddly disconnected from our broader privacy and security failures, and intellectual consistency is utterly lacking. It's also hard to imagine that DC in its current state is capable of separating our obvious domestic financial and competitive motivations from genuine national security concerns.

Yes, the Chinese government is a brutal authoritarian mess, and its treatment of Uighurs Muslims is utterly repugnant. But the idea that you can somehow fix Chinese authoritarianism or US privacy issues just by banning an app rife with dancing teens is laughable to the extreme.

Filed Under: apps, china, hype, ken buck, privacy
Companies: bytedance, tiktok

Pompeo Says US May Ban TikTok; It's Not Clear That It Can

from the or-should dept

New day, new nonsense. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did his Pompeo thing and went on Fox News saying that the US is looking at banning apps from China in the US, with a focus on TikTok, the incredibly popular social media app that is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance:

The United States is "looking at" banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday.

Pompeo suggested the possible move during an interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham, adding that "we're taking this very seriously."

Pompeo was asked by Ingraham whether the United States should be considering a ban on Chinese social media apps, "especially TikTok."

"With respect to Chinese apps on people's cell phones, I can assure you the United States will get this one right too, Laura," he said. "I don't want to get out in front of the President [Donald Trump], but it's something we're looking at."

It's difficult to know where to start on this, but let's at least start by admitting that TikTok has some sketchy issues. We've talked about how its content moderation practices may be driven from Beijing's moral stance (despite denials) and there were recent claims from someone associated with anonymous claiming to have reverse engineered TikTok, saying that it's a security disaster (it's not at all clear how accurate that is). At the same time, India just banned TikTok and other Chinese apps over security fears.

So there may be some legitimate concerns here, though a lot of that is based on innuendo and rumor rather than concrete evidence. And, again, we've seen this game before. The US spent years spreading security panic about Chinese networking equipment from companies like Huawei and ZTE, without ever actually proving any problems with the hardware (in fact, a massive US government investigation turned up nothing).

But, as we've noted, it's often been difficult to tell where the complaints against Chinese networking hardware end, and where the lobbying from American telco equipment firms like Cisco begin, as there appears to be substantial overlap. There's no evidence to say that's true with this new story of an app ban, but it should be noted that Mark Zuckerberg is clearly very, very worried about TikTok, so the US banning the company that seems to be a favorite of the younger generation certainly wouldn't be protested very much by Facebook.

That said, there are real legal questions about whether or not the US even could ban TikTok in the US. Under what law would they do so? While owned by ByteDance in China, TikTok has spent the last few years separating TikTok's business from ByteDance, hiring a ton of people in the US and insisting that data from TikTok users is kept in the US (or Singapore) and not in China. ByteDance has also considered selling off TikTok to avoid these concerns.

So it seems incredibly likely that any effort to bar TikTok would raise a whole bunch of legal concerns -- starting with a basic 1st Amendment concern. The US government can't just say "you can't use that social media app." That may be how things work in China or India, but not in the US. And, of course, it would likely set off a chain reaction elsewhere as well. China already bans most major US apps and services, but we're still dealing with a pointless trade war that would only be exacerbated by such a move.

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about TikTok, it's connections to China, and the security of the app. But none of that means that the US government has the right to just ban it. While Trump may want to pretend he's a dictator, and Pompeo may want to pretend he works for a dictator, that's not how any of this works.

Filed Under: apps, banning apps, china, mike pompeo, state department, tiktok
Companies: bytedance, tiktok

TikTok Users In China Temporarily Banned For Speaking Their Own Cantonese Language Instead Of Using The Official Mandarin

from the linguistic-censorship dept

Most people know about TikTok, from the company Bytedance, but not many know that it is the international version of the similar, but separate, Douyin app. The What's on Weibo site has a good explanation of why the two versions came about, and how they differ:

Why would Bytedance go through the effort to create two apps running on different systems? The answer partly lies in China's strictly controlled online environment, where (social) media companies have to adhere to local policies on what is and what is not allowed to be published on their (user-generated) platforms.

Having two distinct apps allows Bytedance to enforce China's strict rules for the domestic market, while granting foreign users more freedom in what they can post. Overt censorship is unacceptable in many other countries, and would probably have throttled TikTok's rapid rise. As a result of this split market, people outside China are generally unaware of the rules imposed on Douyin content. David Paulk is Head of News on the Sixth Tone site, which provides valuable independent news and commentary on the country. A recent Twitter thread from him offers a rare chance to see the kind of thing that happens on Douyin:

On Monday, the Guangzhou-based WeChat account Yangcheng Net posted an article detailing how several Douyin users had received 10-minute bans from the platform for speaking their native Cantonese during livestreams.

A pop-up notification told the streamers to "Please speak Mandarin to involve more users from other areas (of China)." Among the suggestions for "rectification" was "please speak Mandarin."

A person who manages a Douyin account promoting Cantonese culture to its 230,000 followers said he had received two bans and multiple warnings for using Cantonese. Clearly, using Mandarin instead of Cantonese would nullify the whole point of the account. Naturally, Paulk wanted to know why Cantonese was being discriminated against in this way:

When we contacted PR for ByteDance, TikTok's large & powerful parent company, they strongly advised us against pursuing the story. We said we were going to anyway, but they went over our heads to get it canned.

Paulk wrote that he suspected Douyin was under pressure from the Chinese government to make sure nothing "objectionable" was being said, and a Mandarin-only rule made that easier. His suspicions seem to be confirmed by a later comment from Douyin's PR:

Douyin is building out content safety capabilities for additional languages and dialects. As one of the most widely spoken dialects in China, Cantonese is a top priority, and we hope to have it fully supported in the near future.

Cantonese is already supported in livestreams -- you just start talking. In this context "support" clearly means censor. It's also interesting that Cantonese is dubbed a "dialect" in Douyin's statement. There are around 68 million native speakers of Cantonese -- more than most languages around the world -- notably in Hong Kong. Moreover, Cantonese is not merely a "dialect" of Mandarin, as Douyin implies when it talks of "languages and dialects": they are quite separate languages that derive independently from Middle Chinese. As Wikipedia notes: "Middle Chinese texts sounding more similar to modern Cantonese than other present-day Chinese varieties, including Mandarin." Maybe Mandarin users of Douyin should be told to speak in Cantonese so they can get closer to their language's ancient roots.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: cantonese, censorship, china, content moderation, douyin, mandarin, tiktok
Companies: bytedance

Facebook's Failure To Stop TikTok Shows, Once Again, That Big Companies Often Can't Just 'Copy' Disruptive Upstarts

from the it-ain't-that-easy-folks dept

With all the recent talk of breaking up big tech in the news again lately, one of the most common refrains is that the big internet companies (mainly Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple) are so big and so dominant that no upstart competitor can possibly succeed against them, in part because if they get too big, those giants will just "copy" the competitor and put them out of business. This narrative has gotten a lot of support from the story of Facebook effectively copying SnapChat a few years back. But, it's important to note just how rare this actually is. The history of tech innovation is littered with disrupted giants which often tried, but utterly failed, to "copy" the upstart.

For many, many years, we've talked about this. Part of the problem is that "copying" features or or services is what we've referred to as cargo cult copying, where you're really just copying the tacit, visible features, but without a deeper understanding of why people really use a tool or service. It's why Microsoft failed in trying to just copy Intuit out of business. It's why Facebook failed when it tried to just copy GroupOn (back when people thought GroupOn was a disruptor to Facebook's local ads). It's why smaller companies frequently out innovate giant, dominant incumbents. Part of it is that the incumbents don't notice the innovation until it's too late, but more often because they don't really understand why an innovation is so disruptive -- often because it attacks their position in a tangential way. That wasn't the case with SnapChat and Facebook, where the competition was more direct and more core to Facebook's business.

But the difficulty in "just copying" is driven home by a really great recent article by Josh Constine at TechCrunch, talking about how Mark Zuckerberg totally misunderstands TikTok and why it's a threat to Facebook. TikTok, of course, is a giant in its own right (part of Chinese internet giant ByteDance, which creates its own problems). However, in recently leaked recordings of Mark Zuckerberg addressing Facebook employees' questions, he notes that TikTok is a threat, and how they're trying to copy its service in markets where TikTok doesn't have a hold yet.

Are we concerned about TikTok’s growing cultural clout among teens and Gen Z, and what is our plan of attack?

MZ: So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way that we kind of think about it is: it’s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We’re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it’s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they’re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It’s good.

However, as Constine points out, this shows that Zuckerberg totally misunderstands why TikTok is so successful.

TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else’s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.

That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren’t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook’s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don’t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else’s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn’t offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph and retrain users’ understanding of these apps’ purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. T

This is the same exact story that we've told a bunch of times in the past (including a few of those links above). Even if Zuckerberg recognizes (correctly) that TikTok represents a competitive threat, the company can't just copy its way out of that competition. Because TikTok's entire approach and audience is different, and the core reasons why people use TikTok are fundamentally different than the reasons they use Facebook or Instagram even if they look similar on the surface. As Constine astutely notes, Facebook could easily offer the same features as TikTok, but that wouldn't lead to usage.

Again, that would just be cargo cult copying: copying the visible parts, without being able to understand or effectively copy the real reasons why TikTok is so successful, which is the cultural, community aspects of what makes it such a big deal. This is not a unique story. It's what happens time and time again. Cargo cult copying is easy. It's easy to see certain features or a certain app and make a clone. But that won't make people use it. This same issue was explored quite well by Ben Thompson in a recent Exponent podcast, in which he notes that Zuckerberg, for all his success, still doesn't seem to fundamentally get what makes Facebook, Facebook -- and this could lead to significant problems down the road.

Facebook is large and powerful -- there is no doubt about that. But the idea that it can simply copy any upstart competitor and put them out of business is a premise that is not supported by history at all.

Filed Under: competition, copying, disruptive innovation, mark zuckerberg, social media
Companies: bytedance, facebook, tiktok

China-Based TikTok Actively Banning The Gay Away When Not Helping Authoritarians Be More Authoritarian

from the when-your-core-users-don't-actually-use-the-app dept

TikTok is the new Vine. (I apologize if this sentence is incomprehensible. If I wasn't raising teens, it would be pretty much incomprehensible to me too.) The social media platform that allows users to upload short video and encourages remixing via duets or reaction videos has roped in a billion users in a surprisingly short amount of time.

It's fun for (almost) all ages. The younger you skew, the more popular it is. Fun for all ages, but not all sexualities apparently. The app was created by Chinese company ByteDance, so it's more than receptive than most to calls to censor content based on countries' desire to mute those who aren't heterosexual. (h/t K'Tetch)

The Guardian has been reporting on ByteDance's censorial efforts on behalf of governments around the world. Unsurprisingly, censorship begins at home.

The documents, revealed by the Guardian for the first time, lay out how ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered technology company that owns TikTok, is advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.

The revelations come amid rising suspicion that discussion of the Hong Kong protests on TikTok is being censored for political reasons: a Washington Post report earlier this month noted that a search on the site for the city-state revealed “barely a hint of unrest in sight”.

The proxy censorship is applied in two ways. ByteDance will delete content it finds unacceptable -- including content it finds unacceptable on behalf of others. It also bans users for repeatedly posting content it later deletes. In other cases, the content stays up, but ByteDance severely reduces its visibility. The end result is a video-sharing platform that contains almost no videos highlighting the protests in Hong Kong.

But it's not just political, even if TikTok's content-burying efforts come at the behest of political parties. The follow-up report from The Guardian notes TikTok has been instrumental in excising plenty of content that fails to denigrate non-hetero relationships and lifestyles.

TikTok’s efforts to provide locally sensitive moderation have resulted in it banning any content that could be seen as positive to gay people or gay rights, down to same-sex couples holding hands, even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal, the Guardian can reveal.

[...]

[An] entire section of the rules was devoted to censoring depictions of homosexuality. “Intimate activities (holding hands, touching, kissing) between homosexual lovers” were censored, as were “reports of homosexual groups, including news, characters, music, tv show, pictures”. Similarly blocked was content about “protecting rights of homosexuals (parade, slogan, etc.)” and “promotion of homosexuality”. In all those guidelines, TikTok went substantially further than required by law.

TikTok's overzealous content moderation goes further than just muting pro-gay content. It also covers a ton of content various governments find somewhat offensive, but not enough to actually outlaw it. TikTok prevents users in Turkey from mocking the ultra-mockable Recep Erdogan, as well as posting depictions of "non-Islamic gods."

ByteDance calls its content-blocking efforts a "localised approach." But it's really just an extension of something that's all too familiar to citizens of ByteDance's home country: the elevation of governments above citizens, even though its citizens that use the app, not governments.

Weirdly, ByteDance is far more permissive than many social media apps when it comes to questionable content involving children. Sexualized content featuring children tends to avoid moderating efforts -- something TikTok encourages by telling moderators to treat every video subject as over the age of 18 unless they have proof otherwise.

As a private company, TikTok is not a censorship body on its own. It can moderate content however it sees fit without trampling on people's rights. The problem is TikTok has become an unofficial extension of multiple governments by adopting their rules for acceptable content, rather than applying its moderation consistently across the board.

This doesn't necessarily make ByteDance worse than US-based social media platforms. The only difference is its country of origin, where broad censorship is considered normal, rather than an aberration. But US social media companies do the same thing. To avoid being blocked in more authoritarian countries, platforms aid and abet the oppression of citizens by agreeing to follow whatever censorial laws these governments have put in place, even if it means suppressing dissent and making things more dangerous (and less appealing) for their users.

Filed Under: china, content moderation, tiktok
Companies: bytedance, tiktok

An English-Language, Algorithmically-Personalized News Aggregator, Based In China -- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

from the no-social-graph-required dept

Techdirt has been exploring the important questions raised by so-called "fake news" for some time. A new player in the field of news aggregation brings with it some novel issues. It's called TopBuzz, and it comes from the Chinese company Toutiao, whose rapid rise is placing it alongside the country's more familiar "BAT" Internet giants -- Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. It's currently expanding its portfolio in the West: recently it bought the popular social video app Musical.ly for about $800 million:

Toutiao aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets and has become one of the world's largest news services in the span of five years. Its parent company [Bytedance] was valued at more than $20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, on par with Elon Musk's SpaceX. Started by Zhang Yiming, it's on track to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising.

An in-depth analysis of the company on Ycombinator's site explains what makes this aggregator so successful, and why it's unlike other social networks offering customized newsfeeds based on what your friends are reading:

Toutiao, one of the flagship products of Bytedance, may be the largest app you’ve never heard of -- it's like every news feed you read, YouTube, and TechMeme in one. Over 120M people in China use it each day. Yet what's most interesting about Toutiao isn't that people consume such varied content all in one place... it's how Toutiao serves it up. Without any explicit user inputs, social graph, or product purchase history to rely on, Toutiao offers a personalized, high quality-content feed for each user that is powered by machine and deep learning algorithms.

However, as people are coming to appreciate, over-dependence on algorithmic personalization can lead to a rapid proliferation of "fake news" stories. A post about TopBuzz on the Technode site suggests this could be a problem for the Chinese service:

What's been my experience? Well, simply put, it's been a consistent and reliable multi-course meal of just about every variety of fake news.

The post goes on to list some of the choice stories that TopBuzz's AI thought were worth serving up:

Roy Moore Sweeps Alabama Election to Win Senate Seat

Yoko Ono: "I Had An Affair With Hillary Clinton in the '70s"

John McCain's Legacy is DEMOLISHED Overnight As Alarming Scandals Leak

Julia Roberts Claims 'Michelle Obama Isn't Fit To Clean Melania's Toilet'

The post notes that Bytedance is aware of the problem of blatantly false stories in its feeds, and the company claims to be using both its artificial intelligence tools as well as user reports to weed them out. It says that "when the system identifies any fake content that has been posted on its platform, it will notify all who have read it that they had read something fake." But:

this is far from my experience with TopBuzz. Although I receive news that is verifiably fake on a near-daily basis, often in the form of push notifications, I have never once received a notification from the app informing me that Roy Moore is in fact not the new junior senator from Alabama, or that Hillary Clinton was actually not Yoko Ono's sidepiece when she was married to John Lennon.

The use of highly-automated systems, running on server farms in China, represents new challenges beyond those encountered so far with Facebook and similar social media, where context and curation are being used to an increasing degree to mitigate the potential harm of algorithmic newsfeeds. The fact that a service like TopBuzz is provided by systems outside the control of the US or other Western jurisdictions poses additional problems. As deep-pocketed Chinese Internet companies seek to expand outside their home markets, bringing with them their own approaches and legal frameworks, we can expect these kind of issues to become increasingly thorny. We are also likely to see those same services begin to wrestle with some of the same problems currently being tackled in the West.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: aggregator, ai, china, fake news, journalism, news, toutiao
Companies: bytedance