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Is tiktok over like over over tiktok has nine months to sell
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or else it's not allowed in the United States.
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But why do they have to sell?
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Well, one of the reasons is privacy concerns.
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And today we actually have Emily Baker White,
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a tech reporter for Forbes who has a very interesting relationship with
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Bytedance, the parent company of tiktok.
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Emily, hey, it's great to be here.
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So we'll, we'll just jump into it.
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So Emily, how do you feel like what was your
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experience with Bytedance? So I've been reporting on Tik Tok and
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Bytedance for several years now and I ended up reporting a big
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leak in 2022 that showed that lots of people in China
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had access to us user data.
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So things like our email addresses,
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our private messages, our private videos,
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etcetera were accessible in China.
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And that mattered because in China,
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there isn't due process and the government can just come and ask
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any employee to turn over all the data and they have to
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do it right. There's no way that they can meaningfully challenge
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that. And so the US government was concerned that the Chinese
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government could be using tiktok to capture data that I wrote this
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big story. The company got really anxious about it and
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a number of employees,
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some of whom were in China tried to figure out who had
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leaked the information to me.
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they use the Tik Tok app to surveil me to try to
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see where I was physically and then to try to compare that
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information with information about where tiktok and byte dance employees were physically
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And what they were trying to,
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to do is figure out am I in the same coffee shop
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at the same time as a bite dance employee or a tiktok
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employee? Are we in the same public park?
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Are we in the same library?
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Right? Because that might be an indication that those people were
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talking to me. And so that caused a huge
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problem for the company when it came out.
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I heard about it from a source and was able to
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corroborate it and publish it.
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And the company later acknowledged that,
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yeah, this happened.
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they fired the people involved but it was a really bad
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look because they, they had been surveilling me in part from
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China while they were assuring everyone that there was no risk that
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their data was accessible in China.
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And so how did I feel when the bill went into
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effect? I felt really nervous and anxious,
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generally speaking, because we're in uncharted territory here.
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The US has never banned an app before.
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And Tik Tok and Bytedance have said they're going to challenge the
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constitutionality of the bill that would require Bytedance to sell or that
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could result in a ban on tiktok.
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And so we're about to be in uncharted legal territory.
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This is gonna be a big case and an unpredictable case and
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it's gonna would be a really important one to
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watch most definitely. So would you say this is what the
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Like, do you think that's why they're banning it or it's
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definitely one of the things they're afraid of?
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So there are two major concerns that the US government has expressed
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about tiktok. One of them is data harvesting and frankly,
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they're probably not that worried about like my general location information,
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that's not that sensitive,
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but the general location information of people who are deployed,
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right? They're worried about that.
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You could also think about like Chinese dissidents,
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people who have stood up to this government before could be a
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sort of additional interest of the government and thus could be an
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additional risk here. The Chinese government also they collect a
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lot of data generally speaking.
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And so they, it it's possible that they and other governments
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are sort of hoovering up all of this data to think what
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might they want to do with it someday.
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And that was expressed as a risk too.
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But the sort of really important other bucket here is the idea
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that the Chinese government could control what we see on tiktok.
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And I know that that's a concern for a lot of lawmakers
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there was some research that was put out suggesting the messages on
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tiktok skewed much more pro Palestine than the messages on other platforms
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And some people use that to say,
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oh, that means that the Chinese government is interfering in what's
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on tiktok. I'm not sure that's what that means.
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There are a lot of young people on tiktok who have
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strong feelings about Israel and Palestine and I,
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I think it may just be those young people expressing their opinions
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and there are different sort of constituencies on every app,
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right? So some lawmakers were really using that as a sign
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I'm not sure I would use that as a sign personally
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But the the concern still exists that if there are people
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in China who are working for this company just doing their jobs
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you know, not doing anything nefarious,
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the government could show up at their,
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at their door one day and say,
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yeah, you're going to have to make this tweet to the
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algorithm and if that happened,
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we wouldn't necessarily know about it.
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we have Tik Tok has nine months to you know,
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but why do you think they,
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they're not going down to fight?
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It sounds like why do you think they won't settle by tiktok
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Yeah. So there are a couple of reasons.
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One reason is that the Chinese government actually gets a say in
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whether by dance is allowed to sell.
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So when Trump tried to ban tiktok several years back,
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he also was trying to force a sale of the app
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And when that happened,
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there were meaningful sale negotiations.
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And at the last minute,
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the Chinese government changed their export rules and said that recommendations,
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algorithms are a sensitive type of asset and that you need to
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get a license before you can sell them.
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And the sort of writing on the wall was,
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yeah, and we're not going to give you a license.
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So it's possible that by dance could get such a license.
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It does not seem likely the Chinese government has said that it
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fully opposes by dance divesting of this asset and by dance itself
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it said it doesn't want to sell,
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it wants to go to court.
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It says this law is unconstitutional.
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We should be forced to sell and think about if,
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if Google or Meta were forced to sell their core tech by
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a government, they go to the government and say,
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I don't think so too.
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So I think we've got two major things going on here.
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We've got a company that doesn't want to sell its core tech
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and I sort of can't blame them.
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And then we've also got the fact that the Chinese government could
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forcibly stop them. Well,
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thank you so much for your time.
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This has all been wild.
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I mean, I have tiktok on my phone.
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Do you still have tiktok on your phone?
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I do not have tiktok on my personal phone anymore.
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I do have a phone through which I can access to it
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Ok. So you're still on the app somehow but not
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through your personal device.
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Well, thank you so much,
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Emily, we really appreciate you being on the show and,
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and telling us, you know,
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exactly what happened or what's going on with tiktok.
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where can people find you and keep up with all this tech
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news and updates? I'm on most of the social platforms.
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I'm reluctantly still on the app that was formerly known as Twitter
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but I'm also on Blue Sky.
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I'm on threads. I'm checking Master on,
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you can find my author page on Forbes.
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that lists my email address.
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I'm pretty easy to find,
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hey, if you know interesting things about tiktok or by dance
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I want to hear from you.
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you can get ways to contact me and please do.
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I'd love to hear from you.
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There you go. Thank you so much for your time and
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We'll be here. Thank you so much.
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