From The Stupid To The Bizarre: Trump Demands That His Government Should Take A 'Substantial' Cut Of TikTok's Purchase Fee

from the you-have-to-be-kidding-me dept

The whole TikTok story keeps getting dumber. While we still believe that the weird moral panic about TikTok is overblown and Trump's threat to ban the company from the US over the weekend is crazy and unconstitutional, people are still taking things seriously. On Friday evening Trump said that he planned to issue an executive order banning the company (which is not quite how any of this works). He didn't actually do this. He also said he was against an American company like Microsoft buying TikTok, which apparently put the ongoing acquisition talks on hold.

Instead, Microsoft had to call up the President and grovel before him, before he apparently told the company it had until September 15th to work out a deal, and if no deal was made by then, he'd again "ban" TikTok (again, an almost certainly unconstitutional move that would not work). Still, it would be a mess, and I'm sure TikTok and ByteDance (the company's current owner) knows that it's probably best to take what it can get from Microsoft while it can. Of course, Microsoft also knows that it's in a good position because ByteDance has a ticking time bomb on its hands, and the value of TikTok could decrease drastically on September 15th if no deal is made. Even if a ban is unconstitutional, fighting it will take time and money.

Also, it's not clear if there would be much competition for TikTok from anyone other than Microsoft. I mean, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg would love to buy it, but pretty much everyone knows that there's no way in hell that would get approved by the Justice Department. Even if Facebook weren't already facing a shit ton of antitrust scrutiny from Congress, the FTC, and state Attorneys General, the Bill Barr DOJ has made it clear that it will abuse antitrust to hurt companies Trump is mad at. And contrary to some conspiracy theories, Trump and friends still insist that Facebook is "biased" against them (it's not). So that wipes out most of the large internet companies that would actually have the capital to buy TikTok. There could be a surprise buyer, but it remains a fairly limited market, at best.

Still, things went from just stupid to downright bizarre on Monday when President Trump announced that he thought most of the money from a TikTok acquisition should go to the US Treasury:

"The United States should get a very large percentage of that price, because we're making it possible," Mr Trump said.

"It would come from the sale, which nobody else would be thinking about but me, but that's the way I think, and I think it's very fair," he added.

This is dumb on so many levels. First of all, people have been discussing the possibility of ByteDance having to sell TikTok to get away from questions about its Chinese ownership since long before Trump ever heard of TikTok. So the idea that it's only because of him is just yet another one of his narcissistic fever dreams. Second, you're not "making it possible" any more that the local organized crime fixer "makes it possible" for your restaurant to not burn down if you pay up your protection money. That's called extortion and it's not the kind of thing that the President should be advocating for. Third, it's incredibly stupid because even just saying that gives the Chinese government a ton of ammunition, as they started deploying almost immediately:

The state-run China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday that Beijing would not accept the "theft" of a Chinese technology company.

It also warned in an editorial that China had "plenty of ways to respond if the administration carries out its planned smash and grab".

Considering how much US officials have been whining and screaming about supposed Chinese attempts to "steal American intellectual property," giving the Chinese government a talking point to argue that the US government "does the same thing" is just a huge diplomatic stupidity.

Everything about this story is ridiculous, but it's 2020, and you always know that President Trump can take a stupid story and make it stupider.

Filed Under: china, cut, donald trump, extortion, mergers
Companies: bytedance, microsoft, tiktok

Update: The TikTok Clusterfuck: Trump To Order A Block, Microsoft Wants To Buy, And Competition Is Still There

from the say-what-now dept

Update: Sooo... we already have a bunch of updates on this story. Trump has said he's banning TikTok entirely and is "against" allowing a US company to buy TikTok. Below is the original post, with only a slight clarification regarding Ben Thompson's thoughts on TikTok, which I didn't present very clearly in the original. Then, beneath the post I'll have more thoughts on Trump's comments.

There's been a panic over the last few weeks about TikTok, the rapidly growing social network that is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance (by way of history: ByteDance purchased a startup called Musical.ly in 2017, and rebranded it TikTok in 2018, and then it started growing like crazy). A few weeks ago, the Trump administration started suggesting it would ban TikTok, and a story was built up around the idea that TikTok was some sort of national security threat, despite very little evidence to support this. A separate narrative was simply that Trump was annoyed that TikTok kids made Trump look bad in Tulsa by reserving a bunch of tickets to his rally that they never intended to use.

Either way, it was announced today that the Trump administration was likely to order ByteDance to shed TikTok and immediately with that was the news that Microsoft was a likely buyer.

The whole thing is kind of silly. The most compelling argument I've seen for why the US should ban TikTok came from Ben Thompson at Stratechery, who more or less says (this is a very simplified version of his argument, so read the whole thing) that since China is engaged in a war to impose its ideology on the world, and that it will make use of TikTok and other services to effectively attack Western liberalism, it is effectively dangerous to allow it to operate in the west under Chinese ownership. He supports selling TikTok off to a American company, or barring that, banning the app in the West. I tend to lean the other way: to me, banning TikTok strikes me as effectively proving China's views on liberalism, and allowing them to claim hypocrisy on the west, and use these actions to justify its own actions.

On top of that, if the concern is about China, then the fact that most of our network and computer equipment is built in China would seem like maybe a larger concern? But beyond a weird, similar freakout about Huawei, no one seems to be taking any serious interest in that. And that doesn't get into the fact that US intelligence has leaned heavily on US internet companies to try to get access to global data -- meaning that there does seem to be a bit of US exceptionalism built into all of this: it's okay when we do it, but an affront if any other government might do the same thing...

Separately, this whole situation with TikTok and Microsoft demonstrates the pure silliness of the antitrust hearing in the House earlier this week. Note that there were claims that the four companies there represented "monopoly power." And yet, just days later, we're talking about how a recent entrant in the market, which has grown up quickly, and which Facebook certainly sees as a threat, is so powerful on the internet that it needs to be sold from its Chinese owners -- and the leading candidate to purchase it, Microsoft, is not even one of the "too powerful" companies who were on the panel.

If a new entrant can rise up so quickly to be a "threat" and then needs to be purchased by another giant... it certainly suggests that the internet market still remains pretty vibrant, and not at all locked down by a few monopolies.

Updated thoughts: So that's the original above. Now that Trump is saying he really is going to ban TikTok and is against its sale, there are multiple issues raised. Trump seems to think he can do this under his emergency economic powers (effectively declaring TikTok to be a national security issue -- the same "tool" he used to impose tariffs on China without Congressional approval). If he goes that route, there will be lawsuits -- and there will be significant Constitutional issues raised. The Supreme Court has in the past declared software speech, in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (the case about whether or not the government could regulate video games and require age warnings). And, in the 2nd Circuit, a somewhat frustrating decision regarding the publishing of some code that would break DRM, Universal v. Corley, it is at least notable that the Court made a clear statement that software is protected under the 1st Amendment:

Communication does not lose constitutional protection as "speech" simply because it is expressed in the language of computer code. Mathematical formulae and musical scores are written in "code," i.e., symbolic notations not comprehensible to the uninitiated, and yet both are covered by the First Amendment. If someone [*446] chose to write a novel entirely in computer object code by using strings of 1's and 0's for each letter of each word, the resulting work would be no different for constitutional purposes than if it had been written in English. The "object code" version would be incomprehensible to readers outside the programming community (and tedious to read even for most within the community), but it would be no more incomprehensible than a work written in Sanskrit for those unversed in that language. The undisputed evidence reveals that even pure object code can be, and often is, read and understood by experienced programmers. And source code (in any of its various levels of complexity) can be read by many more. Ultimately, however, the ease with which a work is comprehended is irrelevant to the constitutional inquiry. If computer code is distinguishable from conventional speech for First Amendment purposes, it is not because it is written in an obscure language.

And, later:

Computer programs are not exempted from the category of First Amendment speech simply because their instructions require use of a computer. A recipe is no less "speech" because it calls for the use of an oven, and a musical score is no less "speech" because it specifies performance on an electric guitar. Arguably distinguishing computer programs from conventional language instructions is the fact that programs are executable on a computer. But the fact that a program has the capacity to direct the functioning of a computer does not mean that it lacks the additional capacity to convey information, and it is the conveying of information that renders instructions "speech" for purposes of the First Amendment.

There were other issues with that case, but it remains law in the 2nd Circuit. TikTok suing over being banned would present an interesting 1st Amendment issue at the very least.

As to whether or not Trump could block the sale to a US company -- ordinarily the answer to that should also be no, with a few caveats. However, as was recently revealed in Congress, the Bill Barr-lead DOJ appears to have no problem at all weaponizing its powers against companies the President is annoyed with -- meaning that the DOJ could trump up some ridiculous excuse for why TikTok cannot be sold to an American company, and it's possible a court would buy it.

On a related noted, it's also entirely possible that the President would try to lean on both Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. And while I'd like to believe both companies would push back -- the fact that there are realistically just those two bottlenecks to blocking TikTok entirely from the country, it could also get... interesting.

I get the feeling we'll be writing about all of this for quite some time.

Filed Under: china, competition, donald trump, internet, ownership, trade war
Companies: microsoft, tiktok

Banning TikTok Will Accomplish Nothing. Fix Our Broader Security & Privacy Problems Instead.

from the adulting-is-hard dept

Earlier this month I noted how the calls to ban TikTok didn't make a whole lot of sense. For one thing, a flood of researchers have shown that TikTok isn't doing anything any different than a flood of foreign and domestic services. Secondly, the majority of the most vocal pearl clutchers over the app (Josh Hawley, etc.) haven't cared a whit about things like consumer privacy or internet security, suggesting it's more about politics than policy. The wireless industry SS7 flaw? US cellular location data scandals? The rampant lack of any privacy or security standards in the internet of things? The need for election security funding?

Most of the folks hyperventilating about TikTok haven't made so much as a peep on these other subjects. Either you actually care about consumer privacy and internet security or you don't, and a huge swath of those hyperventilating about TikTok have been utterly absent from the broader conversation. In fact, many of them have done everything in their power to scuttle any effort to have even modest privacy guidelines for the internet era, and fought every effort to improve and properly fund election security. Again, that's because, for many it's more about politics than serious, adult tech policy.

That's not to say there aren't security concerns when it comes to installing Chinese-made apps on American devices, but that same argument can be made (but somehow isn't) for an absolute ocean of foreign and domestic services, hardware, and apps. Over the weekend, Kevin Roose at the New York Times made some similar points, noting that things tend to get stupid when you fuse politics with policy and domestic financial interests with national security (especially given lobbyists adore taking advantage of the lack of transparency in the latter):

"There are also reasons to be skeptical of the motives of TikTok’s biggest critics. Many conservative politicians, including Mr. Trump, appear to care more about appearing tough on China than preventing potential harm to TikTok users. And Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook, whose executives have warned of the dangers of a Chinese tech takeover, would surely like to see regulators kneecap one of their major competitors."

It took a while for this opinion to form out of the internet news and policy murk, but it's nice to see folks realizing that banning TikTok, but doing nothing about an absolute ocean of foreign and domestic hardware, services, and apps that pose similar threats, is kind of pointless and stupid:

"I’ll be honest: I don’t buy the argument that TikTok is an urgent threat to America’s national security. Or, to put it more precisely, I am not convinced that TikTok is inherently more threatening to Americans than any other Chinese-owned app that collects data from Americans. If TikTok is a threat, so are WeChat, Alibaba and League of Legends, the popular video game, whose maker, Riot Games, is owned by China’s Tencent.

And since banning every Chinese-owned tech company from operating in America wouldn’t be possible without erecting our own version of China’s Great Wall — a drastic step that would raise concerns about censorship and authoritarian control — we need to figure out a way for Chinese apps and American democracy to coexist."

But the piece goes a step further in smartly arguing that if you want to deter TikTok-esque privacy issues, you're better off fixing the underlying rot that has resulted in the cavalier treatment of consumer data. And using TikTok as an example of how to do security and privacy oversight correctly, you start by forcing the company to embrace open source, by finally getting off our collective, befuddled asses and passing a basic but tough US privacy law, by demanding greater transparency of TikTok (and every other company), and by ending our myopic view of security and privacy:

"I think TikTok is a bit of a red herring,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer and a professor at Stanford University, told me in an interview. Ultimately, Mr. Stamos said, the question of what to do about TikTok is secondary to the question of how multinational tech giants in general should be treated.

“This is a chance to come up with a thoughtful model of how to regulate companies that operate in both the U.S. and China, no matter their ownership,” he said."

Granted that requires nuance and a holistic view of the real problem, and that's the last thing most of the folks crying about TikTok want. And they don't want that because they're not genuinely interested in consumer privacy and internet security, they're interested in putting on a little stage play for political reasons. Adult, good faith tech policy solutions that solve actual, real world problems is the very last thing on most of their minds.

Filed Under: china, privacy, security
Companies: tiktok

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

Don Henley Tells Senators: We Must Change Copyright Law... Because The People Like TikTok?

from the what-are-you-saying-now-old-man? dept

As we noted, last Tuesday, in the midst of a pandemic and nationwide protests about police brutality, the Senate Judiciary Committee's IP Subcommittee (well, three members of it, at least, one of whom seemed to think that Section 512 of the DMCA was actually Section 230 of the CDA) decided it was a priority to host a hearing on copyright law. Specifically, the hearing was in response to the Copyright Office's bizarre, ahistorical take on Section 512 of the DMCA that ignores the public as a stakeholder. It seemed particularly bizarre to have as the first speaker on the panel, Don Henley, who is one of the most successful recording artists of all time -- his albums are literally the 1st and 3rd best selling albums of all time -- with a history of being wrong about the internet.

Henley seemed to recognize that it was a bad look for a super successful, aging rocker to be the voice of musicians on the panel (good for him) and insisted that he was really there to speak up for less well known musicians who didn't have his reach.

I am present, today, not to be contrary, not to advance a personal agenda (at age 73, and indefinitely homebound by the Covid‐19 pandemic, I am in the final chapter of my career), but I come here out of a sense of duty and obligation to those artists, those creators who paved the road for me and my contemporaries, and for those who will travel this road after us. It is truly unfortunate – and patently unfair – that the music industry is perceived only in terms of its most successful and wealthy celebrities, when in fact there are millions of people working in the industry, struggling in relative obscurity; people whose voices would never be heard were it not for hearings such as this one being held, today. So, I am compelled to seize this rare opportunity to discuss aspects of the fundamental issues that are foremost in the national conversation, at this anxious moment – fairness, rights, mutual respect and … in this case, economic justice and equal opportunity.

Of course, in the paragraph immediately after calling for a "national conversation" and "mutual respect" he trashed the entire tech sector and anyone who criticized him as a shill:

But, the smear campaign has already begun. I have been targeted by the digital gatekeepers and their many shills and surrogates. It began last Friday in the newspaper that belongs to Mr. Bezos, and it continues, today. Big Tech was probably hoping that this hearing would be canceled, or that I would be intimidated to the extent that I would not testify. But, I will not be silent on this issue. I want to do everything in my power to strengthen the property rights of music creators of all ages, races and creeds; all styles, from hip‐hop to honky‐tonk, from rock, to rap, to rhythm & blues. From jazz to folk, to heavy metal. To change or improve outdated laws and regulations that have been abused for over 20 years by Big Tech … the enormous digital platforms that facilitate millions of copyright infringements, monthly.

From there he gave a bunch of strained and mostly debunked talking points about the notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA which he finds (of course) to be inadequate. Having discussed all of those in the past, I don't really want to revisit those silly talking points all over again. But I did want to point out, yet again, how Henley's "those darn kids these days" attitudes, undermines his claims of wishing to support up and coming artists. In particular, he attacks TikTok:

In a world where more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, more than 1 billion videos are viewed on TikTok per day, and there are over 500 million daily active users on Instagram, it is clear that the massive online services are flourishing while artists have no ability to combat the rampant infringement that occurs on these platforms

That's an odd choice to pick on. While the labels and publishers have been fighting over licensing on TikTok, this line of argument -- that TikTok is just some den of piracy -- seems completely at odds with its cultural impact.

Indeed, TikTok has become the new music discovery platform of the younger generation, and some argue it has taken over the music industry because of that. It's also created a bunch of new music superstars, most notably in the persona of Lil Nas X, the hugely successful young, black, LGBTQ role model.

So, it becomes difficult to square the idea -- put forth by an aging white rocker claiming to represent those "struggling in relative obscurity" -- that TikTok is some damaging tool to up-and-coming musicians, when we see how it has enabled a young, black, LGBTQ star to rise from that obscurity.

And, yes, of course there are some legitimate points buried within Henley's talking points. It's difficult to make a living as a musician. But that's not piracy's fault. It's always been difficult to make a living as an artist. But the internet and the freedom that it's created has enabled many, many, many more artists to have a chance -- including some who would never have had a chance under the old system. As we've discussed for many years, under the old label system, through which Henley grew up, you had record labels acting as gatekeepers. They, and they alone, chose who would be successful and who would not. The internet has obliterated that system. There's still a place for labels, but they don't control the gates anymore. There are now new avenues for artists to go direct to their fans -- to build followings and fans and supporters, with TikTok just being the latest in a long line of platforms that have brought us new artists, doing an endrun around the old system.

Of course, whenever that happens, the old guard complains. Not because it's actually harming music. But because it's a lessening of their exclusive power. This is the same thing we've always seen from the antiquated wing of the legacy copyright industries. Every "new" thing is painted as a den of piracy. Back in the early 20th century, songwriters flipped out at player pianos and the "piracy" they created. The 1909 Copyright Act was literally a response to player pianos. Indeed, in the hearings over that Act, composer John Philip Sousa -- the Don Henley of his time -- testified before Congress whining that:

“When I was a boy—I was born in this town—in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. To-day you hear these infernal machines going night and day. ... Last summer and the summer before I was in one of the biggest yacht harbors in the world, and I did not hear a voice the whole summer. Every yacht had a gramophone, a phonograph, an aeolian, or something of the kind."

The horrors of hearing a gramophone from your giant yacht. I'm sure Don Henley can sympathize. Of course, in retrospect this all looks silly. Here was Sousa complaining about the record player -- the very thing that eventually built the entire recording industry. But, really, what he's hooked into is the nostalgia of how things "used to be." The nostalgia of "young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs."

And of course that trend continued. When radio came on the scene, the makers of records screamed about how it was "piracy." And when recordable cassettes came on the market, we were told that "home taping is killing music." Napster was supposed to be the death of industry, as was any number of other services.

Meanwhile, if one spends any time with TikTok, I'd argue that unlike Henley's view of it, it seems like the perfect example of technology and innovation -- including the innovation-promoting setup of the DMCA's provisions -- and brings us right back around to a situation in which "young people today" are "singing the songs of the day or the old songs." Indeed, some of the most popular parts of TikTok, and those that have helped people like Lil Nas X become superstars, is the fact that TikTok encourages people to copy and sing and dance along with the "songs of the day or the old songs." And it, and other similar platforms, are helping new artists break through every day -- without those artists needing to get the approval of an old has been exec at a record label.

History tells us which path makes sense. Henley is choosing the Sousa path -- the successful old musician, complaining about what he's hearing from the biggest yacht not being to his liking.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, dmca, dmca 512, don henley, lil nas x, notice and takedown, piracy
Companies: tiktok

Be Careful What You Wish For: TikTok Tries To Stop Bullying On Its Platforms... By Suppressing Those It Thought Might Get Bullied

from the this-shit-ain't-that-easy dept

Be careful what you wish for when you demand that internet platforms police the internet for any and all bad stuff. There was a lot of fuss and cringing when this story broke that part of TikTok's content moderation strategies included suppressing videos by disabled, queer, and fat creators.

Leaked documents reveal how TikTok hid videos of people with disabilities. Queer and fat users were also pushed out of view.

No matter how you look at it, this looks bad. And for good reasons. But, as the company itself claims, it had good intentions behind this, even if the execution was atrocious. There have been tons of reports of bullying on the platform -- and like with so many social problems that are making themselves more widely known thanks to technology, the first reaction of many is to blame the tech platform, and to demand they "fix it."

And, a la the infamous paperclip maximizer thought experiment, what's the most efficient way to stop bullying? Some figured it might be to hide the likely-to-be-bullied rather than the actual bullies:

The relevant section in the moderation rules is called "Imagery depicting a subject highly vulnerable to cyberbullying". In the explanations it says that this covers users who are "susceptible to harassment or cyberbullying based on their physical or mental condition“.

According to the memo, mobbing has negative consequences for those affected. Therefore, videos of such users should always be considered as a risk and their reach on the platform should be limited.

TikTok uses its moderation toolbox to limit the visibility of such users. Moderators were instructed to mark people with disabilities as "Risk 4". This means that a video is only visible in the country where it was uploaded.

And, yes, there is a very reasonable argument that the content moderation team at TikTok/ByteDance should have recognized that this is a horrible way to deal with bullying, you can see how those desperate to deal with "the bullying problem" might end up thinking that this is the simplest path to get people to stop screaming at them about bullying.

This is a key point that we keep trying to raise in the mad dash currently happening to put responsibility on platforms to "clean up" whatever mess politicians and the media see. There's this weird belief that the platforms can wave a magic wand and make bad stuff go away -- when the "easier" solution (if a morally questionable one) is to just figure out a way to hide the real problems or sweep them under the rug.

This is why I keep trying to argue that if we're highlighting societal problems that are manifesting themselves on social media, expecting tech platform companies to magically solve societal problems is not just going to fail, but it's going to fail in spectacular and awful ways. This TikTok "hide the people we think might get bullied" is just one example of sweeping a societal problem under the rug to avoid having to improperly answer for it.

Unfortunately, I fear most people will just blame TikTok for it instead.

Filed Under: bullies, bullying, content moderation, content moderation at scale
Companies: tiktok

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