#133 - TikTok & Ted Cruz

The Geopolitics of Addictive Algorithms

Jul 31, 2022

Hi 👋 - Ezra Klein and Ted Cruz are unusual bedfellows, yet both see something nefarious in TikTok. The algorithm powering the addictive short-form video app is its greatest asset. It might also be its Achilles' heel. As always, thanks for reading.

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Dirty Dancing

Ted Cruz and I seldom agree, but when it comes to TikTok, he has a point. Cruz, a Senator from Texas who enjoys poorly timed trips to Cancun, is worried that the addictive short-form video app, owned Chinese tech firm ByteDance, can influence a lot more than dance moves1:

TikTok is a Trojan horse the Chinese Communist Party can use to influence what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think.

Effortless Addiction

Getting started on social media usually takes some effort. On Facebook, you connect with friends and join groups. Twitter’s onboarding is notoriously labyrinthian. There are PhD programs in astrophysics that are easier to complete. In contrast, TikTok is frictionless. It doesn’t require a social graph or even a login. Just download the app, start watching videos, and soon you’re hooked. The magic is in the algorithm, where half of ByteDance’s engineers are focused2:

The beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is passive personalization, learning through consumption. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high. Because the videos are entertaining, this training process feels effortless, even enjoyable, for the user.

TikTok’s algorithm is able to pinpoint user interest - food being cooked in Air Fryers, life hacks, DIY smokey eye - with the precision of a laser guided bomb. The result is a massive, engaged user base and a company that understands what makes them tick. The app reached the one billion user milestone about four years after launch, a feat that took Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube eight years (albeit at a time when smartphones were less ubiquitous)3. The service is particularly popular with the under-25 crowd. In the US, users spend about 45 minutes per day on TikTok, more than YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram4.

Source: The Financial Times, How to become TikTok famous, November 9, 2019.

The user base, engagement, and interest graph are catnip to advertisers, e-commerce firms, and subscription services. Consequently, TikTok’s revenue growth has been as meteoric as its user base. Revenue is forecast to rocket to nearly $12 billion in 2022, up from $4 billion in 20215, giving Mark Zuckerberg heartburn.

Kiss The Ring

Zuckerberg isn’t the only one concerned. American politicians are hot and bothered too. That’s because ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing, making it subject to potential influence from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). There are two fears. First, that sensitive data from users outside China could be accessed by the Chinese government. Second, that the CCP could influence the content watched by a majority of American teenagers. While a recent investigation by BuzzFeed News found that ByteDance employees in China have accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users on numerous occasions, the latter risk is more pernicious. Come for the pranks, stay for the propaganda6.

The Chinese government has an iron fist when dealing with local tech firms (foreign firms too, many aren’t allowed to operate in China). Chinese regulators have spent the past two years cracking down on tech companies, fining them billions of dollars and making sure their executives don’t fly too close to the sun. Most recently, it fined ride-hailing app Didi $1.2 billion for lapses in data security. Additionally, within China, the government manipulates social media and runs a sophisticated censoring operation akin to a cyber panopticon. The worry for Cruz and others is that this heavy handedness could seep beyond China via TikTok.

The New News

Inflaming matters is that TikTok is increasingly viewed as a news source. According to Pew, 6% of American adults regularly got news from TikTok in 2021, up from 3% in 2020. While those percentages are small today, they’ll be much larger in a few years given the app’s meteoric growth trajectory. Additionally, for younger adults, Tiktok’s core demographic, the numbers are already much higher7.

Source: Pew Center Research, News Consumption Across Social Media in 2020, January 12, 2021 and Pew Center Research, News Consumption Across Social Media in 2021, September 20, 2021.

This is nothing new for social media. A decent sized chunk of American adults gets their news from Facebook. As people spend more time on TikTok, it’s natural for use cases to broaden8. What’s new is that TikTok is potentially beholden to a geopolitical rival. American teenagers are increasingly getting both their entertainment and their news from a business genuflect to the CCP. If during the Cold War, American teens were glued to a TV station that answered to The Kremlin, it wouldn’t have aired for long. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough to make you stop and think.

TikTok is a bona fide tastemaker. Its cultural wake is wide. For example, many of this year's best selling books became popular on TikTok (BookTok). Interestingly, most of these trending titles were a few years old, highlighting the power of TikTok’s algorithm. Typically, if a book sells well, it’s strong out of the gate9. The risk is that TikTok becomes a new vector for information warfare, influencing more than just the best seller list. We’ve already seen other social media apps become pawns in geopolitical chess. For example, Russian influence operations around the 2016 US presidential election.

The passive consumption model and crack-like algorithm that makes onboarding frictionless and the service so addicting also make TikTok a dangerous potential vehicle for propaganda. The ability to control what people see (or don’t see) is powerful. In a recent oped Ezra Klein argues that whoever controls our attention, control our future:

TikTok’s billion users don’t think they’re looking at a Chinese government propaganda operation because, for the most part, they’re not. They’re watching makeup tutorials and recipes and lip sync videos and funny dances. But that would make it all the more powerful a propaganda outlet, if deployed. And because each TikTok feed is different, we have no real way of knowing what people are seeing. It would be trivially easy to use it to shape or distort public opinion, and to do so quietly, perhaps untraceably.

Some Like It Hot

There’s no evidence of the CCP putting its thumb on TikTok’s algorithm and the company has gone to great lengths to say this won’t happen. Still, there’s the appearance of impropriety. The Chinese government manipulates social media at home and makes tech firms dance to its tune. There’s no fire, but things are warming up, because Ted Cruz is heading in TikTok’s direction.