Under different thumbs: a scant TikTok deal

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1:05The Economist.

1:12Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:27Dengue fever is a horrible illness. And as the planet heats up and we're getting more mosquitoes in more places, our correspondents consider what, if anything, we can do to respond. And some archaeologists would be happy simply to find old jugs and pots and amphoras. For Patrick McGovern, that was just the start. Our obituaries editor reflects on a life spent teasing out the recipes of, and then recreating, boozy beverages of the past.

2:04First up, though.

2:11It started out as what seemed like a pitched battle for the digital soul of America. Could TikTok, a wildly popular app with Chinese owners, be allowed to operate in the country? The Biden administration said no. The Trump administration repeatedly said not sure yet. Then, yesterday, with little pomp. I spoke with President Xi. We had a good talk. I told him what we were doing. And he said, go ahead with it. It is an executive order that, in America, puts control of the app in non-Chinese hands. But which hands? We don't know all the details yet, but it looks as if the key investors here are going to be American allies of the president, led especially by Oracle, the big tech company that is already closely involved with TikTok.

2:59Tom Wainwright is our media editor. They've got 120 days now to finalize all the details, and hopefully more will become clear during that period. Now let's wind back. This is a long-running story about whether TikTok could or could not operate in America. Give me the backstory again. There have been worries about security in TikTok now for some time. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is a Beijing headquartered company. And the concern is that the government of China might lean on ByteDance to compromise the security of TikTok's American users. And there are really two key concerns. One is what you can call the data risk.

3:36There's a worry that the Chinese government could press ByteDance to hoover up all the data of TikTok's users. The other risk, which I think is somewhat more serious, is the possibility that the government could lean on ByteDance to manipulate the TikTok algorithm so that people see a particular kind of content in their feed. TikTok is used these days by a lot of people to catch up on the news. And you can imagine that if TikTok were to change its algorithm so that American users saw a particular diet of news, that could be quite a powerful tool in the hands of the Chinese government. And that's something that people in America are worried about.

4:13So last year, finally, after a lot of deliberation, Congress passed a law saying that TikTok had to be divested by ByteDance. It could not any longer be Chinese owned. That law came into force in January, but its enforcement has been delayed now four times while the government tries to figure out what to do. This deal now looks like it could be the beginning of the end of the matter. But it's interesting, we still haven't had confirmation from the Chinese that they are happy with what Donald Trump has proposed. So you say we don't know all the details yet. Tell me what we do know in terms of who's going to get a stake.

4:48Well, we're relying here on a mixture of kind of offhand comments by the president and anonymous briefings by officials. So take all of this with a pinch of salt. But it looks as if Oracle, the tech company which already does a lot of back office function work for TikTok in America, is going to be a big investor in it and will continue to play the technical function that it already plays. Silver Lake, a private equity company, is said to be taking on a big stake. MGX, which is an investment vehicle ultimately funded by the government of Abu Dhabi, is supposedly going to control quite a large chunk of it.

5:21So it's quite an interesting collection of investors. ByteDance, the Chinese company which currently owns TikTok, will retain a stake. It's going to be just under 20 % to comply with America's law. As for the rest of it, various names are in the frame. General Atlantic and Susquehanna, which are both existing investors in ByteDance, are expected to retain a stake in the business. And then various other names have been thrown out. Donald Trump has said that the Murdoch family might be involved in this. He said that Michael Dell from Dell Technologies could have a role. So there's a lot which is still to be confirmed.

5:54But broadly, it looks as if it's going to be mostly made up of a group of American investors, most of whom are on friendly terms with the president. As you say, it is notable on that list that it is a lot of allies of the president, and in particular, media-savvy ones. What do you take away from the notion that the likes of Oracle and possibly the Murdochs would be involved here? It's really interesting. And I think there's something of an irony in some ways. One of the big reasons for taking TikTok out of Chinese hands is that people were worried about potential government influence on TikTok from the Chinese government.

6:27And now that it's shifting into American hands, I think you're going to hear some people saying, well, actually, there's now a kind of parallel risk of some influence from people who are allied to the American government. I think Oracle is a particularly interesting case here because Oracle is, of course, controlled by the Ellisons, who also control Paramount, one of the big Hollywood studios. And supposedly they are about to put in a bid now for Warner Brothers Discovery, which would make their Hollywood presence even bigger. And if they are to have big stakes in both the sort of old media world of Hollywood, film, television, and also now this new media world of social media through TikTok, that puts them in a powerful and I think more or less unique position of having big stakes in both of those worlds.

7:14And I think the ability of them to bring together the kind of data and the recommendation algorithm of TikTok with the professional media production capacity of Paramount plus Warner Brothers would be a really powerful force. So I'm keeping an eye on them. You know, the Ellisons are not seen traditionally as being a kind of media dynasty, but I think we could be witnessing the birth of a new family of media moguls here. The Murdochs, of course, another very interesting one. They have a kind of frenemy type of relationship with the president that the Wall Street Journal, which they own, is currently being sued for running a story about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

7:56But Fox News, of course, which they also own, has been a big backer of the president over the years. And so their involvement in this is another thing which I think is going to be one to watch. I guess the ultimate question, if it can be answered at all at this point, is does all of this accomplish the original stated goal of taking it out of Chinese hands and protecting American consumers? Well, I think the devil's going to be in the detail of this deal because when it comes to the algorithm, which is the really central thing that people are worried about, who is determining what Americans see, who's tweaking this algorithm, it's still not totally clear exactly what the deal is going to be.

8:32It's reported that ByteDance will somehow license the algorithm to the new American entity, which will retrain it on American data. Now, that might mean that it's sort of independent-ish, but if ByteDance is licensing this thing, then that implies that they ultimately still have some control over it. Presumably they can withdraw that license, for example. So I think we're probably going to see certainly some kind of China hawks in America say that actually this deal doesn't really cut it and it doesn't accomplish those aims. We also haven't yet fully heard from the Chinese about this. Donald Trump, as he sometimes does, has announced that a deal has been done when it seems as if quite a few of the details have yet to be nailed down.

9:14The last we heard from China on this was that talks were ongoing and that they were moving towards a deal, but we've not yet heard confirmation from their side. So I think in the days and weeks ahead, we need to see both how China hawks in America react to this. Are they going to be satisfied with the emerging deal? And we also need to see how China reacts to this. Are they as on board with it as Donald Trump is claiming? Thanks very much for your time, Tom. Thank you.

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11:33In the shanty towns of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, dengue has recently become a serious problem. Brazil and Latin America is experiencing its worst ever recorded outbreak of dengue fever. Long insulated by their coastal location, these Brazilian super cities have, since 2023, turned into hotspots for the mosquito-borne disease, which can cause fever, headaches, and even kill. Alessandro Ford writes about Brazil. Walk into Rio's slums and you'll see signs warning residents to cover water tanks, comply with fumigators and get vaccinated.

12:19This resident says to avoid contracting the disease, she's changing the dog's water and spraying insecticide twice a day. Everybody knows someone who's had it, and people are panicked. We've known for a long time that epidemics are linked to climate change. What we didn't know is how close that link was. As global warming worsens, Brazilians will likely pay with their health and their lives.

12:51I'm joined by Rachel Dobbs, our Environment Editor, and Oliver Morton, our Planetary Affairs Editor. to discuss the connection between dengue and climate change. Rachel, just how bad is dengue? As anyone who has had it will tell you, it is a pretty brutal disease. It causes severe headaches, high fevers, awful, awful joint and muscle pain. It's sometimes nicknamed break bone fever. And in severe cases, hemorrhaging, shock and organ failure, all of which can kill you. Normal cases are debilitating, given what I've just described. but a few percentage of cases become severe and then you require hospitalisation and if you're not getting proper medical care the mortality rate starts to go up to about 10-20%.

13:35And we heard at the top about Brazil but it's not just in Brazil that dengue is a problem is it? No it thrives across the tropics and subtropical zones of the planet and so you see it a lot in Southeast Asia and South Asia as well but it's not very constant in its attentions because the survival of the mosquitoes depends on a lot of climate variables, which obviously change from time to time and place to place. But one thing that people have known for some time is that up to a point, hotter tends to be worse because the mosquitoes breed more quickly and the virus can thus spread farther. The dengue virus takes about 15 days to incubate at 25 degrees, but only seven days at 30 degrees.

14:16But the thing you have to remember, which makes all this stuff really complicated is that you're dealing with the effect of climate on the people and their behaviour, on the mosquitoes and their behaviour and on the virus itself. Haven't we known for a while that there's a relationship between climate change and dengue? Yes, we have. But there's a new piece of research that interestingly tries to put better numbers on it by comparing rates of dengue in different countries at different times and in different climate conditions. It finds a quite interesting curve whereby the danger goes up to about 27 degrees then starts to top off as other factors come into account.

14:53But that means I can say there've been something like 4 million additional cases per year in the countries they were looking at, which was mostly the Americas, but also Cambodia and Indonesia. And as you can see from that analysis, the implication is quite strongly that cooler countries getting hotter is going to be a bigger problem than hotter countries getting hotter still. Something I thought was really notable from that paper was also just how big the increase you're looking at even under medium emissions trajectory, so the kind of trajectory that we were actually on, they reckoned that incidents would go up by 61 % worldwide by mid-century, which is obviously a huge jump.

15:27So even if it's not as apocalyptic in climate terms as we fear, we're still going to see a big jump in cases? Yes, that's for the trajectory that we are currently on. And the fact that climate change will have this effect, even if emissions are moderately constrained, does suggest that there is some progress already on viruses. There's recently been a live attenuated vaccine approved, but I'm sure that there's more that can be done because vaccine research and vaccine development is normally horrendously underserved by the global scientific community and the pharmaceutical companies it relies on.

16:00And there are other studies, aren't there, Rachel, that are also substantiating this link between climate change and rising cases of dengue fever? Yes, there are. One very interesting one that came out at the end of August shows just how closely linked outbreaks in the Americas are to specific weather patterns and temperatures. So based on about 30 years of data across 14 countries, they found that the major, major outbreaks tend to follow about five months after the start of an El Nino event, and local outbreaks follow about three months after summer temperatures peak, or about one month after rainfall peaks.

16:36they see those trends rising and falling in sync across different regions, even if they are quite geographically far apart. I think that's absolutely fascinating, not only because it gets into this sort of like incredible ecological fine detail about what's going on between the three species involved, the people, the mosquitoes and the virus, but it also suggests that we can get a better grip or when people are most at risk. And that also paper goes in something about who is most at risk because it's people in slum areas. And what can they actually do to prevent or slow the spread of the disease?

17:12Well, I think if you have a clearer indication of the time periods in which these outbreaks are likely to happen, you can then start planning more proactively. You can have your resources ready to be deployed and start factoring that in into your annual and future health plans. But as Ollie noted, one thing to also think about here is the type of people that are affected. and one of the reasons that dengue in particular is growing so much as climate change increases is also that it really really thrives in urban environment and we obviously have simultaneously more and more people living in urban environments than in rural environments so you've got these two factors going on simultaneously.

17:49That point about the environment is really important when people think about mosquito-borne diseases they think first of all about malaria and the ecological setting of dengue is just so different from that of malaria. And so in malaria, you really want to have a building around you that allows you to put a treated net over your bed. And when people are made homeless by natural disasters, that's when malaria can really strike in dense populations. At the same time with dengue, it's when you're already in a dense population because the dengue is being spread by mosquitoes that bite outside during the day.

18:23It's just a very, very different dynamic. I'll be interested to see whether the recent dengue outbreaks in Brazil fuel this conversation about the public health threats of climate change, particularly because COP this year is going to be in Belem in Brazil, which is a dengue hotspot. That's another example of these sort of like fine connections that we've talked about between lifestyles and temperature and climate things. We have an annual COP that moves around the world. If it's particularly helpful for this cop to be in a dengue hotspot in terms of getting people to think about dengue, well, that's got to be taken as one of the pluses.

18:57I think there are going to be a fair few minuses about this cop as well. Although I will say, as the one of the two of us who is actually going to this cop, I'm slightly less enthused by the prospect of getting dengue. Rachel, I wish you luck. Thank you. Oli, thank you. Thanks, Rosie. Thank you.

19:31If you went into Professor Patrick McGovern's lab at the Biomolecular Archaeological Project in Pennsylvania, you might find an odd substance boiling on the stove. It looked a bit like rather weak coffee. Anne Rowe is The Economist to Bitchery's editor But far from coffee, it was actually a solvent made of ethanol and chloroform And what he had also put in there were tiny little specks of ceramic that he'd scraped from the bottom of a vessel that was thousands of years old He was hoping to release from these little specks any organic compounds that might tell him what had been in the vessel before If what he found looked interesting, he might try to recreate it.

20:20And if what he recreated was at all palatable, he might try to get it into the glasses of Americans generally.

20:32Professor McGovern had been engaged on this interesting pursuit for quite a long time. It was a delightful one. He had been investigating pots before excavating sites in Jordan, and then he had become much more interested in the residue that was left in them. Because he had also come to the realization that alcohol was incredibly important. First of all, because almost every living creature was enticed by it, from fruit flies to elephants. And then that there was a huge cloud of alcohol floating in the middle of the Milky Way. which suggested the whole cosmos was somehow infused with it. And then that human bodies were not only attuned to alcohol through their senses, but also their livers were wired to cope with it.

21:24And all this persuaded him that alcohol was vital to human progress. It seemed to him that alcohol had spurred civilisation, that most of the great works of the world, for example, had been done under the influence of alcohol. The cave paintings in France, he thought, had overtones or suggestions of alcoholic rapture in all those handprints and frisking wild beasts. And when he looked at the pyramids in Egypt, he remembered that the builders had been paid by being given four to five litres of beer every day. And he thought that without this alcoholic prompt, the pyramids might never have been built at all.

22:12But what exactly had a lot of these Neolithic peoples been drinking? It was very difficult to find out because alcohol evaporates fairly quickly over time. But if he boiled up these organic compounds and investigated them and subjected them to spectrometry and chromatography and all the modern technologies he could find, he could find trace elements that put him in the right direction for reconstructing the drinks. So when he had discovered the world's oldest fermented beverage at Jiahu in China, and when he had discovered the oldest grape wine in the Georgian Caucasus, He owed that to the fact that he had very carefully investigated the compounds and found a biomarker for fruit, mostly grapes, which was tartaric acid.

23:16So he could tell that most of these alcoholic drinks had been made first with fruit of some sort, whatever the locality provided, and then with a grain. so they were a mixture, these Deolithic drinks, of grape and grain.