The Risks of TikTok's Rise — With Bloomberg's Shelly Banjo

Shelly Banjo is Bloomberg's New York Bureau Chief. She's also the host of Foundering, a podcast mini-series that documents TikTok's rise. Banjo joins Big Technology Podcast for a conversation about how TikTok's massive global reach creates serious data security risks and also opens up rival countries to influence operations from the Chinese government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is Shelly Banjo. She's Bloomberg's New York bureau chief and host of the latest season of Foundering, a narrative podcast that tells the inside story of TikTok's rise. Shelly, welcome to the show.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's great having you. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to your season of Foundering across six episodes. We'll do one here today, and then hopefully everybody after our conversation gets a taste of what's coming and goes and listens to your season. It is really good. I think the best place for us to start is to ask this question. What is TikTok? Because it's not like a social network, like you aren't adding friends. Maybe you're following people like a Twitter, but it's also very algorithm-heavy. So how should we think about TikTok? What sort of box do we want to put it in when we think about social networking, social media? Media, what is it?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so for people who've never used TikTok, it's an app where you open it up, you swipe and videos start automatically playing in bite-sized pieces. The way I think about it is way less like a social network like Facebook and Twitter, and way more like an entertainment portal like YouTube, where you really, you really use it to waste time, to be entertained, to get music and, you know, fun.

• 2:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And can you give us a sense, and also, I guess, one interesting thing about it before we go to the next question, is that it is already an appear on Facebook in the form of reels, and TikTok is, uh, sorry, YouTube has its own copy called Shorts, which looks exactly like TikTok, so it is interesting to see it start to pop up in these other platforms. How popular is it on its own right now?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so TikTok is just starting to grow like crazy all around the world, becoming the first non-Facebook app to hit three billion downloads. So this is, this is huge. I mean, basically half the world is, you know, downloading TikTok on their phones, and it's the fastest-growing app, certainly in many parts of the world as well.

• 3:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think the data from Sensor Tower shows that month after month, it is the most downloaded app in the world, beating everyone else. Is that, is that something you've seen as well?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when you talk to people about what new apps they're getting, you're definitely seeing that growth. And it's not growing as fast in the US as it is, I think, globally, but the US, it is certainly up there, because, you know, they started with young teens, and now they're really expanding to, you know, adults. And I think the pandemic was what supercharged that growth. And, you know, you don't have to be just a teenager to download TikTok anymore.

• 3:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So it's obviously run into some controversy here in the United States. So I'm just gonna throw this question out there. Was Trump kind of right to ban it? I mean, I know he did it sort of in retribution for, or trying to use China as a scapegoat for the pandemic, but, you know, there is this China National Intelligence Law that requires organizations in China and citizens to, quote, "support, assist, and cooperate with the state intelligence work." And there was also this CNBC story that talked about how the boundaries between TikTok and ByteDance, Chinese parent company, were so blurry to be almost nonexistent, and TikTok employees, I believe, actually had to ask the ByteDance employees for data on their own users.

• 4:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  So just from a national security standpoint, you know, it's this big burgeoning social app here in the US and across the globe. Is there some worry there? And is there some legitimate concern that the government should have in terms of the way that data is collected? We'll start with data and then we'll move on to culture, but let's start with data. Is there some legitimate concern there?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I don't think anyone who has studied this will tell you that there is not a concern there. So nobody took issue with the content of what Trump was trying to do, which is to take a really close eye at this app and all the data that it was collecting. I think from a bipartisan, you know, across the board, even teenagers that we spoke to for the podcast said, you know, this is something that we should be keeping an eye on. The issue from a Trump perspective is, okay, how do you go about doing that? And if you just, you know, randomly go and ban an app, is that really going to achieve the goals that you want? Because it might be TikTok now, but what about all the other companies as well? And, you know, what's going to happen there?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And so creating kind of, you know, an actual law or an actual kind of framework in which to judge these companies and which to research them, I think is something, you know, everyone can agree on.

• 5:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it's kind of where I went with kind of right. Like, I think that the action that he took was pretty, it was blunt, a blunt action, and maybe something more surgical would have been better. But I do really wonder, maybe, you know, there's that we can, I guess, agree that there were some legitimate concerns there. So I'm curious, you know, and I guess Trump initially signed this law that it should be banned, or did this executive order that should be banned, and then said, maybe, you know, my friends at Oracle can buy it. Microsoft was in the game. Eventually, I think nothing really happened. But the original concern that, you know, you're allowing this app in.

• 6:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  From a country that has a pretty poor record in terms of preserving people's data privacy. And that initial concern hasn't really been resolved, wouldn't you say?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Right. So just to, you know, take a step back, you know, this was this most important business story of the year that didn't happen. Because it was like this constant news headlines, like what's gonna happen to TikTok? Is it gonna be banned and and who's gonna do it? And am I gonna not be able to use TikTok anymore? What's gonna happen to all these creators? And there was so much angst and buildup. And then in the end, it didn't happen. And, you know, we talk about in the Foundering podcast that one of the most stressful and upsetting and kind of frustrating parts about the whole process is that you never really get down to the bottom of this. Like, is this a national security risk or not? And, you know, the answer is like, two things are true.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Like, one, TikTok is creating tons and tons in data. They say they're not giving it to the Chinese government. And two, the Chinese government by law can go into any Chinese company and say, give me your data.

• 7:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there's a law there.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  There's two things.

• 7:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can't trust it.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Like, there's two things that they can't, that they don't necessarily get along. And TikTok's way of describing how they do that is just being like, oh, yeah, there's a wall between us. Like, we don't share data.

• 7:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  So sure, you know, you could trust them.

• 7:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Says that that's not true, so.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, or even if it is true, there's nothing to stop them from doing it in the future or with the next CEO. Like, let's really say that TikTok is like a hundred percent honest here. And they are have not given one morsel of data. There's no way to prove a negative that it couldn't happen in the future. And by that time, they have a dossiers on three billion globally around the world that the Chinese government could get their hands on.

• 8:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what type of data do they collect? Because there has been some discussion of the fact that TikTok might collect what you have on your clipboard, your keystrokes. What do you know about that?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So if you go into their Terms of Service, which I highly recommend, it sounds really boring, but it's super interesting because it just says it all out there. We collect your keystrokes, we can collect your GPS data, we can figure out where you are, what you type, what you like, how much, how many seconds you spend, um, you know, watching X type of videos, where your eyes are going, how old, um, you know, you are, and also matching it up with reams and reams of data from bot services, like paid, you know, data on there. The keystrokes, they, I mean, the, the clipboard thing, they say they've stopped doing, but there was a time where if you copy and paste something into your clipboard,

• 9:14Speaker 01

  they'd be able to see, um, you know, what, what's going on there and then also what you're messaging to other people on, you know, Facebook and, and whatnot. And what I'm saying now could be totally different in three, three months or even, you know, a few weeks because things are just constantly changing.

• 9:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, so how do you, and so this is again, getting back to like, how does a government address this stuff? It's, I would say, the hottest app in the US right now, probably the world. People are continuing to spend more and more time on it. I mean, people give a lot of crap to Facebook for its data privacies, uh, issues and, you know, the worst case scenario we've seen with Facebook is that someone broke their Terms of Service and then passed it on, past, you know, years old data on to Cambridge Analytica, which used them in probably poorly targeted ads in the 2016 presidential election. This to me seems far more concerning. I mean, think about all the data you, you've just listed, uh, being ticked off, the fact

• 10:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  that this is becoming, uh, an extremely popular app worldwide and the Chinese government is not too far away from accessing some of that data. You could think of all different types of ways that they end up using that, whether it's to...

• 10:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, profile American users, get data on some, you know, people of interest, use it for blackmail, or just, you know, you know, intelligence, pure curiosity, use it for location monitoring of people in the military, et cetera, et cetera. I'm saying they've done any of this stuff, but the concerns are valid. So how do you handle something like that?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  I mean, most of the, you know, a lot of people are, I guess, the most like, idealistic viewpoint is that if you have actual rules on the books against all companies, then Chinese companies would also fall under that. So right now, you know, the whole, the Chinese, you know, you talked to a lot of Chinese diplomats and it's like this whole what about-ism. What about Google? What about Facebook? They're also collecting these things. Look at what they did with all these things. And they're right, in the sense that like, if you prevented all internet companies from collecting some of this data that probably no one should really have, then you would also scoop that up from, you know, you would also prevent the Chinese companies from doing that. So if you speak to folks like Sam Sachs

• 11:34Speaker 01

  from the New America, or some of those kind of think tank folks, that's what a lot of them suggest doing, is saying if we had an actual cybersecurity rules and laws on the books, then, then it would also prevent Chinese companies. And the best way to look at that is like, the only real laws we have are protecting children, you know, the COPA laws around Children's Privacy Act. And TikTok, before, before they got YouTube, was the biggest Children's Privacy Act fine that they had given out. And it's not because they were a Chinese company, but just because they were a company that was violating the law.

• 12:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, they were thrilled to have young users on. And I think, as you pointed out in the podcast, they don't even, or didn't even ask for age beforehand. And they got pressed on it, and they're like, meh, we don't, we trust the parents.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which is this ridiculous sort of-

• 12:30Speaker 01

  All the parents know what their teenagers are doing. Of course they do.

• 12:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, right. So it is, so, okay, so you think that the best way to handle this is just laws across the board preventing any type of this data collection? It sounds, it sounds interesting. I don't know, you know, I guess-

• 12:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, can you trust them? That, you know, it always comes down to that, that question. And are our regulatory bodies able to actually enforce any of the laws we have? Because look at the track record right now, seems like that answer to that one's a very clear no. So do you think that's sufficient? Do you think, do you think it should be able to operate in the United States? What would be your solution as opposed to what these folks are? And I know you're a reporter, so you can go so far. But I'd like to hear your perspective because you've been pretty deep in this.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think you got to start somewhere, you know, rules are obviously can be broken. But if you don't have any rules to begin with, then, you know, everybody can kind of claim ignorance. So I do believe that having actual rules on the books for what data people can collect. You know, that way, Apple and Google Play, like, they still hold a lot of power and they still often follow the rules. And so, you know, they could be the ones enforcing that as well. If there was actual, you know, laws preventing these companies from doing that. I mean, it's not to say that like intelligence shouldn't be looking into it. I think for too long TikTok was, you know, dismissed as this silly thing. Because they're like, oh, what do I care if they're collecting data on American teenagers who are singing songs in their bedrooms?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  You know, they didn't realize, they didn't, they weren't aware of like the actual gravity of the stuff that people are, are collecting.

• 14:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the laundry list that you cited is, is, you know, now that we're sitting on it for a moment. It's actually somewhat shocking that any of this stuff is actually allowed.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and one of my favorite interviews from the Foundering podcast was this economist, Claudia Bankati, who talks about at the time that military TikTok became such a thing. And all these like, you know, 21 year old guys were doing push up contests like in the middle of like, you know, Afghanistan or Iraq. And like, you could just figure out exactly where these people were because no one was taking it seriously. And so I think that's a problem that like. We kind of, and I think that that is shrouded a little bit in not taking Chinese tech seriously for too long, that they just didn't, they just dismissed it, you know? We're the tech giants, we're the tech overlords in America and like, what, what are the Chinese building, you know what I mean?

• 15:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we talk about data, so, okay, I think we've established there's some concerning data collection that's going on there. And we don't really know what's gonna happen, once that data is collected. To me, something even more concerning is the way that TikTok can shape culture. And, well, actually, that, you know, we're gonna go into that, but first, is TikTok a Chinese company? Because I know that you, you mentioned that it is, and then you got chewed out by their representatives. Um, it might be Hong Kong, a Hong Kong company. What's, what is, uh, because I wanna talk about China's influence on US culture as we go on to the next part of this discussion, but I also wanna hear your perspective, like, is it accurate to be calling it a Chinese company?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think TikTok can say, left and right, and all over, that they are a global company with global headquarters and global employees. But at the end of the day, they are a Chinese company, hands down.

• 15:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  You know, you have a Chinese CEO, um, uh, you know, uh, you have a, uh, Zhang Yiming, his whole future, his life, his family, they're all based in Beijing.

• 16:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Zhang Yiming is.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Um, Zhang Yiming, well, was the CEO, just stepped down, now chairman of the board, I think is his, his current title, but was, you know, he founded the company, built the company. By all, you know, intents and purposes, kind of still runs the company, um, even though not by name, and, um, and also, you know, one kind of tidbit that kind of brings it home to you is, during new hired weeks, like orientation.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  They, one of the things that they show a lot of the TikTok employees is this like plugin that allows you to translate Chinese into English in a way that does it better than Google Translate. And it's like built by TikTok. It's like a special TikTok plugin that everybody has because so much of the stuff, new employee handbooks and all this stuff like is still written in Chinese. And so one of the things that you'll talk to any new employees about is like, oh yeah, that plugin, that translation thing that like you have to hit all the time to figure out what everybody's talking about. So, you know, I think the PR people can say whatever they want. That's their job. But, you know.

• 17:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a Chinese. So they say it's global company, but the truth is base is based in Hong Kong or or

• 17:25Speaker 01

  No, I mean it's

• 17:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Actually based in the mainland.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  They uh, they are a ca- technically Cayman Islands registered company. Um, their biggest presence is in Beijing and then they have um, different, you know, their US oper- biggest US operations are in Los Angeles.

• 17:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And they're a subsidiary of this other, the bigger company called ByteDance, which is very clearly China based.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 17:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  So th- this is kind of what I want to get to as, as we're, we're moving through this discussion. The data collection, obviously an issue. You're talking about operation based in Beijing and that there's, there's a big China presence. I've read that what the law, the national's uh, uh, security law that they have out there uh, enables the Chinese government to do with companies that are based in China. So that's the data concern. Now, the other concern, and I think this is probably even a bigger concern is how can it shape our culture? Because I, I, yeah, let me just set this up quickly. There was one really uh, fascinating anecdote that you had in the uh, podcast where

• 18:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  the Black Lives Matter protests were starting to be censored or there were there were phrases that were censored on, on the um, on the platform. Then they apologized and sort of, you know, they, they tweaked their algorithm to really turn up that style of content. And next thing you know, Gen Z is participating in these protests and sort of unseen numbers for that generation. They also uh, very famously kind of uh, ruined a Trump rally by having this uh, trend that had everybody sign up and reserve tickets and. The Trump campaign was like, we're gonna be triple sold out. It turns out it was an empty arena filled with TikTok claimed tickets. So, but let's just, um, you talk a little bit about, yeah, how they shape culture.

• 19:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And if an app that's based in China can, can literally put its, you know, pull a lever and end up having, uh, you know, stoking big protests from Gen Z, uh, what else can it do in our culture? So I'm curious what you think about that.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Before I answer your question, I want to say, uh, when I was talking about being based in China, I was mostly talking about ByteDance. I mean, TikTok, the subsidiary, um, you know, a lot of the, so TikTok doesn't operate in China. It actually doesn't operate in, in Hong Kong either.

• 19:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  But it's, uh, so they walled that off. There's a separate app called Douyin that operates in China. Um, so TikTok, the app only operates outside of China. Most of their employees are outside of China. But at the end of the day, they roll up.

• 19:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're owned by ByteDance.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. Um, so just to get that out of the way. And then, uh, from a cultural perspective, yeah, I mean, a- as you know, and you've talked about so much on your podcast, like algorithms are these black boxes that nobody really knows how they work. But you can see when something takes over on TikTok. And that, um, you know, that becomes noticed quite quickly. And the cultural ramifications of like, hey, I, if I want to turn up Black Lives Matter, I can. If I want to turn down Hong Kong protests, um, which is something, you know, we discovered during our reporting, I can.

• 20:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, wait, say more about the Hong Kong protests.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So during the podcast and actually beforehand, uh, I was based in Hong Kong at the time. And there was this just flood of content around Hong Kong protests on Twitter and Facebook and Telegram and all of these things. And then you flip open, uh, TikTok and there's nothing. There's just like videos of people like by the Hong Kong skyline and eating dumplings. And, you know, things like that. And so, you know, I worked with one of these researchers to kind of test it out. And he was like, yeah, there's definitely not. It's taking hours to post things. Um.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  You know, they they kind of keep it in purgatory for for a number of hours. I'm TikTok itself, so they weren't censoring it, that people just weren't posting about Hong Kong.

• 21:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  You don't believe that?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  I don't, I think it's hard to prove a negative. But it's um, it's just really like noticeable. In the sense that if it's everywhere else, but not on TikTok. Um, why not, you know?

• 21:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so what do you think about the fact that this app, again, it's controlling, it's it's not controlling culture, but it's driving culture. They were, you know, its predecessor Vine would be the thing that sparked trends and memes, and I would say TikTok is even more powerful. And it does seem like, maybe this is a stretch for me to say, but it does seem like the Chinese government is not shy to use the power of that app to turn things up and turn things down when it comes to uh protest and social unrest and, you know, whether that's because it's for its own political memes, or maybe it's not the Chinese government, maybe it's, you know, the company working in conjunction with them. Um, but but what are the implications of the fact that such a culture driver

• 22:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  is, you know, uh, subject to Chinese Chinese law? And as, I mean, I worry about this more than the data, to be quite honest. What do you think about it?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are two sides of the same coin. It is a it's a power that TikTok has. And that if they don't use it wisely, the same way we've seen what happens with Facebook when it comes to elections and whatnot, you know, it's certainly something that matters a lot. And people totally downplayed it. They're like, oh, it's just TikTok, whatever, you know?

• 23:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And the thing with Facebook is like, Facebook didn't want that stuff. If that happened, its platform was manipulated, whereas here, maybe it's TikTok doing it. Clearly, it is with those with the Black Lives Matter protests, TikTok doing it on its own.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you you speak, we spoke to a number of people who were there in the early days of TikTok. When they were really strict on these rules of not having any politics on that. So if you talk about politics of any kind, any kind of controversy, they would take you, they would basically shadow ban your, you know, make it so that people wouldn't see your videos.

• 23:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Or, you know, just say you're violating terms of service. And they've changed that over the years. And now it is being used a lot. It was used a lot to get out the vote around.

• 23:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pretty political.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Trump, yeah. I tuned in on election night, watching a lot of these live streams. Um, and it was, it's really quite scary to think about, like, you know, to have these ten, fifteen, sixteen year olds watching this. And it's like the same thing as news to them. Like, they don't really differentiate what's in the New York Times and what's on TikTok. And, you know, that's dangerous.

• 24:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what was your experience living like, uh, living in Hong Kong like? And you were, you know, I mean, as a reporter out there, you were looking at what the Chinese government was doing, you know, pretty close up. So like, do you, do you trust them with this power?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  TikTok?

• 24:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  But well, the Chinese government and the power they have over ByteDance. Like, do you, I, I wonder where you think this, this ends up going?

• 24:43Speaker 01

  No, not at all. I mean, as we saw, uh, like just recently, and this, this stuff came out after the podcast, um, ended, but you know, the ByteDance put up, put out this, uh, put a hold on their IPO. Um, because.

• 24:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because of these concerns?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Because of these concerns, but also because the Chinese regulators started really put, coming down hard on a lot of the Chinese tech companies. And so, you know, if you're gonna basically put your IPO in hold because the government wants you to, what else are you gonna do? Because the government wants you to, you know, it's just like kind of a slippery slope. Um, and there's no, there's no clarity around any of it.

• 25:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it does seem like the Chinese government is, we've talked about this on the show in the past, but it does seem like the Chinese government is moving more toward. An authoritarian stance and less, less freedom. I mean, you were in Hong Kong. I'm kind of curious what your experience was like, but they obviously have just gone through this moment where this national security law was put into place and a lot of the freedoms they had are now gone and some of their pro-democracy papers are, had to fold because of it.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and covering the protests was quite eye-opening because a lot of the young people who are in the protest grew up in a place where it was different. It was not like China. They could post about basically whatever they wanted to post about online and they were very active and very internet-friendly. And then you suddenly have to worry about what you say and what you do and you're in jail, you know, in your twenties and like.

• 26:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's a heck of a progression.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  It's a big difference for somebody in that generation, you know? So that, so ByteDance, so pull TikTok out of Hong Kong altogether to just not even deal with that, basically. They're like, we don't even want to play a part in any of it.

• 26:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah, I know, this is, this is sort of the reality here where TikTok keeps making its incursion and more and more downloads, three billion, as you mentioned at the top here. And we don't really know what's behind it and it doesn't get talked about too often. And when Trump did bring it up, obviously he had his reasons, but it became this big political war, but it is something that's going to persist. So, all right, when we come back from the break, I want to talk a little bit about the TikTok versus Facebook battle. I know you mentioned that TikTok is more like a YouTube, but it seems like the one that's most afraid is Facebook. Let's talk about that right after the break. We'll be back here in just a minute on the Big Technology Podcast. This episode is brought to you by AVPoint.

• 27:25Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 28:07Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 28:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back on the Big Technology Podcast with Shelley Banjo. She's the bureau chief of Bloomberg in New York and the host of Foundering, which tells the inside story of TikTok. It's a great, great series. I recommend you go listen to it. But stick around with us for the second half here and then make your way over there. So let's talk a little bit about this TikTok versus Facebook battle. I'm seeing TikTok just occupy more and more of people's time, of the mind share. It's where the energy is in social media right now. It used to be on Facebook. It used to be on Instagram. Now it's entirely TikTok. So I look at that and then I'm also seeing the movement against Facebook in Washington.

• 29:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I've been scratching my head and asking myself, is Facebook really a monopoly? So what do you think about that?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the Founding Podcast, we did not set out to make Facebook a large part of it. And as we were reporting and talking to people and uncovering things, we just kept coming across like Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. So it starts the very beginning, one of John Gibbons, the former CEO of ByteDance, founder of ByteDance, coming to California for the first time, hosting this kind of lecture at a conference, being like, this is the future of news, and kind of laying out his whole playbook in Menlo Park to everybody. And like, nobody taking him seriously and nobody paying much attention. And then meanwhile, Musically, the app that ByteDance bought that was flipped into TikTok,

• 30:01Speaker 01

  actually had talks with Facebook to acquire them.

• 30:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, they almost sold.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what we know is TikTok could have been something totally different. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, for a time, as you know, tried to woo the Chinese government, tried to be like, hey, we could coexist in China.

• 30:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, the guy almost allowed Xi to name his kid.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, there was this huge love affair. And till he realized, like, it's just not gonna work, we're not gonna, we're never gonna do this, or at least not now. He sees the rise of TikTok and ByteDance, and seeing just how many people are going over there, how kids don't want to use Facebook anymore, and how he's gonna miss out on this generation. Tries to build apps to copy it, doesn't succeed, and then completely turns against China, starts giving testimony to Congress, saying, you know, we're not a monopoly. We're your last hope for competing with China and competing against TikTok. And, you know, literally going to congresspeople and saying,

• 31:11Speaker 01

  We are the ones who should be worried about. Look over here, people at TikTok.

• 31:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I know it's a convenient talking point, but he kinda has a point there.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was whoever advised him on this, or maybe he came to this realization himself, I think is quite genius, right? Because you wanna deflect your attention away from how big Facebook is and say like, oh, well, where are your real hope against? Against fighting off China. Meanwhile, we're gonna copy you completely, launch Reels and um, try to just completely rip you off.

• 31:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it does seem that that TikTok is, so this is the thing that I'm trying to get at, which is that TikTok is in a different category. We'd like put it in the YouTube category and according to the FTC, which is suing Facebook for trying to amend its suit or has sued Facebook for this monopoly in personal, personal social networking, you know, maybe it's in a different category. But I really view this stuff as a zero sum game where the time that you were spending on Facebook, you're now spending on TikTok. Obviously, Facebook feels the same way. So I'm curious, like, is this, you know, I guess we have, there's two questions of how the Facebook party will come to an end. Cause it will at a certain point, right? Is it gonna be government regulation or is it gonna be competition? And it seems like TikTok is proving the case that competition is gonna be a fairly effective challenge.

• 32:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  And maybe there is no real need for a government breakup there. I'm curious what you think about it.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, it proves that the competition does work, but that, that, that competition has to be global. And so there's lots of different ways. I mean, there was no US company necessarily. I mean, Facebook bought all the US companies that could have proven, you know, real competitive, I guess, other than Snapchat.

• 32:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they tried.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  And they tried, right. I mean, they tried to buy TikTok too, and it didn't work out.

• 33:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  I remember going to the Facebook offices and there was a Snapchat lens of like, it was a contract and there was like a Snapchat ghost crying. Sort of like, kind of mocking Zuckerberg for like trying to, to acquire them. And it turned out that Evan Spiegel was right to turn that down, cause he went from a three billion dollar offer to twenty something billion dollar company. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  And no, and same with TikTok, right? Had they just become a part of Facebook, they would have just been a feature on Instagram, the way Reels is versus.

• 33:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  You know, mega, um, you know, however, however you wanna monetize, however you wanna like value what TikTok has become. Fifty billion, hundred billion, depending on. Who you talk to, uh, you know, clearly was right in the sense that, you know, they didn't need Facebook to grow and could go on without them. Um, but eh, yeah, I mean, I think that Mark Zuckerberg does have a point in the sense that Chinese tech companies should be taken seriously and they prov- uh, produce some real competition, but that doesn't really absolve Facebook for their, you know, monopoly, mon- monopolistic practices.

• 34:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see what happens with Facebook, but it is, it is, um, it's interesting to watch, you know, this company that has been anti-competitive in some ways. I don't know, I would, I would argue that Facebook has been one of the least anti-competitive in terms of the big tech companies. You look at Apple and Google, their app stores they have, Amazon, what it's doing to suppliers. Facebook still doesn't even have its own operating system. So, you know, they're, they're basically zeroed in on the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and even still doing all that, Facebook is so vulnerable to a TikTok. And I do think that it's scaring the crap out of them out there in Menlo Park or wherever virtual Zooms they are that

• 34:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  uh, originate in those servers because I don't know if you saw this, but Instagram's doing these experiments where they're exper- I think Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram was talking about how they're gonna start experimenting with full screen, more full screen video. And what does that remind me of? You know, TikTok, they have reels already. And they're starting to put, uh, experiment with putting stuff you don't follow that the algorithm selects into your feed versus using the follow signal primarily, which again is like TikTok, you can you, you'll see stuff from people you follow here and there, uh, but by and large, the algorithm is gonna select what it thinks you wants and put its priority over the signals that you give the app and that's what Instagram is moving to as well.

• 35:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Facebook is, you know, potentially gonna, um, if, if they go through and actually roll this stuff out. You're potentially sacrificing one of the crow- it it's crown jewel. Like, Facebook isn't Facebook anymore. It's Instagram.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they're like, thinking about about betting the crown jewel's future to try to copy TikTok. That means, that to me means that there's like, you know, uh, red alert inside Face- Facebook headquarters. What do you think about that?

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're a hundred percent right that they probably regret not uh, taking TikTok seriously earlier. And has have realized that you can just grow a lot faster when you don't bet things off of your friend graph. Like, your friends have a, you know, have a certain stopping point, whereas TikTok never has a stopping point, you know?

• 36:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. It's just so, it's so interesting, cause it is, you know, betting your friends, so it's the people you know. And this is one of those instances where in technology, we clearly have the algorithms have surpassed the capabilities of humans to find what they want.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Or like, you don't care as much about that anymore, you know?

• 36:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  You wanna be, you wanna be entertained on the internet, not necessarily keep in touch with people. Um.

• 36:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  You know, Facebook may have outgrown its use case from that perspective, uh, you know, a little bit. There's only so many people a human being can keep in touch with, you know?

• 37:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or wants to keep in touch with.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 37:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I would much rather speak with my, you know, my group chats than

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  the thousand people I've added on Facebook and two hundred of which I have no idea how I ever met them.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Well, Facebook has a solution for you there, too, with WhatsApp.

• 37:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, they they're, they've definitely covered their base as well. Um, although Signal, I think, is a really interesting challenge, which is being pushed forward by one of the WhatsApp founders. One of the interesting things, so you mentioned that, um, people want entertainment. It's interesting to note that Adam O'Seary, Instagram head, was talking about how Instagram isn't a photo sharing app. It's an entertainment app, which sort of mirrors what you're saying here. And I think one of the real brilliant things that TikTok did, which you highlight in the show, is its strategy with influencers. So there used to be this theory that you build, you build it, they will come. Social media is a high-margin business that's propelled by user-generated content,

• 38:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  and the users will make stuff for free because they are interested in exposure and clout, and the platforms will benefit. And then what we saw was there was this rise of this influencer class, and these companies didn't really know what to do with them. Should they pay them? Should they not pay them? Should they answer their phone calls? I remember before the Snapchat IPO, the influencers were like, Snapchat won't return our calls, we're going elsewhere. And I think Snapchat took a real hit from that. But brilliantly, I think TikTok learned from that and worked to coddle and pay the influencers. I think you mentioned in the podcast that they even were paying some salaries. So could you elaborate on that a little bit and how important courting influencers has been to their business?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the influencers and the creators and the focus on them was such a huge differentiator for TikTok from the very beginning, even going back to the Musically days. The founder of Musically, Alex Chu, would, you know, take these folks out to dinner, and take them and their parents out to dinner, because a lot of them were, you know, nine, 10 years old at the time, and get to know their birthday, send them swag. There was a lot of, a lot of attention and artist management, the way that, you know, some people might just treat, you know, a Kardashian or Donald Trump, or like someone

• 39:24Speaker 01

  like that who, you know, Instagram will do that for someone like really big. But Musically and TikTok were doing that for hundreds of people and developed this entire kind of part of their company, whose whole job it was to know when so-and-so's, you know, birthday was and send them, you know, a box of cookies or something like that. And, you know, the amount that these kids, many of them kids, but not so much anymore, felt connected to the company, willing to do anything for the company that they asked them to do, to me, like really came across in a big way, and also...

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Came through at the end because during the Trump ban, it was the influencers that, you know, were willing to sign on to a lawsuit. And it was that lawsuit that actually was the one that stopped the Trump ban. It was these three kids who made their career on TikTok.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Got into contact with a TikTok, a lawyer, the TikTok suggested, the TikTok put them in touch with. And they were like, yeah, I'll sue the US government on your behalf because I love TikTok so much. And my whole life is geared toward that. And you don't see that with Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram at all.

• 40:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is really this undeniable truth right now about social media, which is that it all comes down to the people creating the content for the platforms. It's never going to be propelled by user-generated content, whatever that was supposed to mean. There's going to be a handful of stars that will basically push a network forward or go somewhere else and help propel that one. And I think it's interesting to watch all these platforms suddenly realize that. And I think TikTok probably did the best job, but Facebook right now has a billion dollars they're going to put towards creators, which is quite fascinating, a real about-face. And there used to be some money that would go to media companies like Facebook paid BuzzFeed when I was there.

• 41:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know if they paid Bloomberg, but they basically sprayed the money around. And now they're like, oh, wait a second, it's the individual creator, not the not the media company that we should be working with. And that's why, I mean, I just wrote this, wrote about this in Big Technology Newsletter, but it's a great time to be talent because you're going to be courted by these companies.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  But these people work hard. I mean, it is not, you know, a free-for-all. When you talk to these kids, they are spending ten, twelve hours a day. Putting out content and also like their whole life is like an A B task. Do I look better in this dress? Or like, do I look better in this dress? One of the creators that I uh became close to during the uh TikTok podcast, um you know, she's a high schooler, was getting ready for prom. Basically, put out like eight different dress, prom dress announcements to figure out like which one did her TikTok followers like the best, you know, like this, this ticks over your life and you're working hard and

• 42:28Speaker 01

  and you're making a lot of money for it. And so everyone kind of wins in the end, but you can see that it might not be sustainable for everyone forever.

• 42:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, messes with your head. And it also addicts you to the analytics. And people start to judge their self-worth based off of subscriber numbers, watch numbers, like numbers, and that's a problem.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Occupational hazard.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  You know, you see Addison Rae, who's one of the top stars of TikTok, um, you know, at the fight in Vegas next to Donald Trump. And you're like, okay, TikTok create, like literally created this human being, you know, as a star. Um, and we'll keep doing it. As long as everyone's making money.

• 43:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so far, seems to be the case, so.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what people I don't think realize is like two of the things that made, really made TikTok are such Chinese concepts, like paying people to do stuff was like so such a Chinese thing, like, of course, we're gonna pay people to work, you know, whereas in America, it's like oh, well, like, these influencers should want to be on our platform and, you know, like to

• 43:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Fascinating.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Their candor spirit, you know, like and um, and the other thing is what we were talking about earlier with the social graph, like, it's a very American thing to like, wanna connect everybody by each other. But in China, like, you don't wanna be connected with anyone because you don't wanna even suggest to the Chinese government that you're gonna organize or create some sort of, you know, organizational structure to like rise up against authority. And so TikTok's whole algorithm was built out of necessity, not necessarily out of some grand scheme of thinking like, oh, this will allow us to grow bigger. And so, you know, and now it's funny that like Facebook is copying them. Um, so it's like, it's, it's, it's interesting how all those things kind of come around full circle.

• 44:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, can you stick with us for one last segment? All right. Why don't we take a quick break and then do like a quick rapid fire?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, segment at the end about, uh, a few things that I found really interesting. I'll just have you riff on that. All right. We'll be back right after this.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com slash superior access to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 45:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for one final segment on the Big Technology Podcast. We're here with Shelley Banjo, your chief of Bloomberg's New York bureau and the host Foundering. You can find it on your podcast app of choice. Just type in Foundering. Okay. So quick, quick rapid fire round.

• 45:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you mentioned in your podcast TikTok's issues with child safety.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Child safety, the most disturbing episode of the six part episode, especially if you have children. I'm sorry, but it's worth listening to.

• 45:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Especially if you have kids, you should listen to that one.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yes, it will strike terror into your heart to not let your children, uh, download it. Especially young children who are under 13 and shouldn't be allowed to use it anyway. But yeah, I mean, for a long time, like many other apps, they turned, they turned a blind eye, um, to what was happening. And it's continuing to happen. And so TikTok is doing lots of things to ameliorate it and make it a better place.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  But at the end of the day, like my personal opinion, I think parents need to do a better job of, um, Of, you know, keeping tabs on what kids are doing because a lot of parents are like, oh, they're fine. I trust them. It's like, no, I'm sorry. You can't trust an eight year old. Like, just can't.

• 46:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can you tell the story of, it's somewhat disturbing, but um, I feel like it's worth relaying. There was a kid who had people sending him messages. And next thing you know, he's like, dancing in his underwear and that video ended up getting copied and, you know, sent out to thousands of people.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we uh, speak to a woman who tells us about a family member of hers who's eight, eight years old at the time, who downloaded TikTok because actually his teacher suggested him to um, to kind of stay in touch with his friends and make fun videos. Uh, suddenly he started getting contacted by um, you know, a lot of older men who were asking him, oh, can you make this video? Can you, here's a video I made. Can you copy this video? Here's a link uh, to um, to this. Can you copy that? And you know, long story short, ends up making videos of him, eight year old, dancing in his underwear that, you know, maybe only four or five friends of his saw, but then uh, people downloaded, reposted,

• 47:31Speaker 01

  and you know, went out to thousands of people. Uh, there's, it's really hard to get that stuff off the internet. And as an eight year old, he just had no idea because he doesn't understand that those videos could go all around the internet and follow you forever. And you, and you're, you can be blackmailed for those things. Uh, and a lot of kids can end up in, in a lot of trouble for it.

• 47:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's extremely disturbing. I guess it's a commentary on just the nature of, of some of the, you know, there's gonna be a lot of good people out there, but there's a lot of bad people out there and, and they all seem to use the internet. Uh, so, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  No, just that TikTok seems like such more of a safer.

• 48:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know. It feels like it's so wholesome. And you, you hear these stories and you're just like, God. Um, maybe wholesome isn't the right word to use for it in the beginning, but yeah. You know, I mean, Facebook in the beginning also was supposed to be this like cool thing where you can stay connected and the next thing you know was wasn't exactly that. So there then there's no perfect platform and bad actors will always find a way to um, abuse them and do bad things. Okay, so we, you know, I, I think this is sort of well known, but I think it's worth going over. Can you talk a little bit about the nine nine six culture? Inside ByteDance and um, is that something that translates over to TikTok's US employees?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so nine nine six is the Chinese term that you're working nine AM to nine PM, six days a week. Uh, when you talk to a lot of folks, they're like, oh, it's a 24 hour work culture, but um, when I was living in, in Hong Kong and traveling to mainland China, you know, uh, very often you'd go visit these tech headquarters and ByteDance is not so different from big tech companies like Tencent or Xiaomi or Huawei. The lights are on all night. People are working around the clock. There is no such thing as work-life balance. And I think it can sometimes be worse for the US employees in the sense that they have to be awake to have meetings with their Chinese colleagues as well. So they have like these early morning or late night meetings because so many of the decisions are made

• 49:45Speaker 01

  in China that you'll talk to a lot of them and they're like, yeah, it's like this 24 hour cycle because like when the Chinese bosses wake up, then it becomes, you know, even more. So it's a lot. It's a big um, kind of a workhorse type uh, company culture where you're constantly working, you have meetings that you're required to be in on Saturdays. And um, you know, I think they've imported a lot of that over to the US.

• 50:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it sounds kind of miserable. Why do you think people go along with that?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Well, the growth is unbelievable, like the, you know, where else are you gonna grow? And it's fun, you know, it's a fun place to work for a lot of people in the sense that you can see the growth and also the stars and celebrity and the culture and kind of depending on where you work. Um, you know, it can be exciting, especially for young people. Um, we had this really sad interview with um, this woman who worked there who was like, I just would look out my window and see this tree and the seasons would change and it went from like spring to summer to fall and I hate making, I don't wanna make fun of her, but it's just like, it's this poetic, almost, you know, sadness.

• 50:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Beautifully sad.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, wild. Okay, last question for you. Do you use TikTok?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't use it from, I don't post. I don't make my own TikToks. I have, I have made my own TikToks. My favorite thing to do on TikTok is to tune the app, like to take a social experiment question and like, try to see if you can finagle the app to do what you want. So when I was doing research into like kids, uh, this didn't make it into the podcast, but when I was doing research into like kids and cutting, like cutting themselves, you can kind of like train the app to like show you those things or like during the election, to tune the app to be like all Trump, like basically all Trump TikTok.

• 51:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  How would you tune it? You would like like and comment and watch the video on a couple of loops?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, and you would just spend more, you just go down the rabbit hole for a couple of hours and then you could kind of see where, and it just shows you like the different corners of the app. And um, you know, and that's the lives that a lot of people lead because you talk to anyone who downloads TikTok, I guarantee you, after saying this, you will hear this from people. They will say to you almost verbatim, yeah, I didn't really get it at first because it was showing me all these pictures of girls dancing in bikinis and but then after like a week I became obsessed with it, you know, because that's about how long it takes for it to learn, you know, who you are and what you like.

• 52:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there was one point in the pandemic where, I mean, I had it on my phone. And I was like, all right, I need something new. I think I like probably watched all of Netflix. And I hiked all the trails in San Francisco and was like, all right, time for something new. Let's get into this TikTok and see what it's all about. And it addicted me hard. And I would find myself spending like two hours on it and just not wanting it to end because every video, the algorithm is just so good at finding you a stream of videos that you're going to find really compelling. It was it was basically the best, it'll be like the best two hours watching video that you could ever possibly have.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  What's your corner of TikTok of choice?

• 53:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, so this is the second half of the story. I gave up. I said, I can't have this in my life and just deleted the app.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  So. Yeah, well, the thing is now you can't really escape it because it's on Instagram with reels and YouTube shorts and you know, it's infinite scrolls. So I end up finding myself just diving back in and being like, oh, we're here again. I thought I took it off my phone, but it's highly addictive and um I'm sure my productivity for those few months that I was on it was just like totally off a cliff.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Right. But were you like into the cooking videos or music or like the tricks?

• 53:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  I liked a lot. I liked a lot of the pranks. I'll be honest. Like the guys who would run up to people and yawn their ears or um.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Right. It's like a pandemic and everything around you is horrible. And then you're like, oh, this is funny.

• 53:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is hilarious. Yeah. And um.

• 54:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  And yet, I definitely, I mean, my YouTube is completely surfing videos. And so I tried to stay away, but eventually I just ended up like, you know, getting into the surfing TikTok and that's, you can, and I'm on it on Instagram now with reels, but you just can't like, if you're into surfing, you just are like, I can't turn away because it's, you know, amazing wave and you learned something different from the form and then you see an epic wipeout and you laugh and you watch it again and then you go to the next one. And it's very hard to get out of that stream.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which is why I understand why this thing is, is growing the way it is. It's, the experience is amazing. Once you stop thinking about what it's doing to your life.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would never bet against TikTok.

• 54:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, that was, that's a great thought to leave it on. The podcast is Foundering. You can find it on your podcast app of choice. I recommend listening to it if there's a couple of episodes that piqued your interest. Going to that, it ends with the battle that Trump has with the app and brings us to our common day and some of the questions we got at, at the beginning. Shelly Banjo, thank you for joining the show.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. It was so much fun.

• 55:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great having you. It's a long time coming and I'm glad we got a chance to do it. Thank you to Nate Guatney, our editor at Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads and all of you for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday with a new edition of the Big Technology Podcast. Until then, wishing you all the best. We'll see you next week.

• 56:01Speaker 03

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• 56:11Speaker 04

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