TikTok and the Tech Oligarchy

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Hey. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kevlar. What's up? What's up? Very brief bit of housekeeping. We are running our latest FOIA forum.

0:49This is a live stream event where me and Jason teach you how to file freedom of information requests, public records requests. This is, you know, local, state and federal agencies. We do these whenever we can. The last one was about court records. This one's going back to FOIA. And I think especially about the federal government, just with a new administration coming in, I think there are a lot of things that people may want to find out about. So we're going to talk about how to get records related to the federal government, even if you might FOIA, you know, a state or a local agency. Enough of that ramble.

1:28The timing is Thursday, 23rd of January at, oh my God, I got to say the right time. Is it 1 p.m. Eastern? give me one second 1 p.m eastern on thursday 23rd of january if you're a paying subscriber i'm going to email out the live stream link uh it's actually already payable on the site but i'm going to email it out on the morning of so if you're listening to this and you're not already paying and you think that'd be something you would like to join please try to sign up uh sign up as soon as possible just because it might get a little bit messy trying to get the live stream link on the day. But if for whatever reason you're hearing this later or you can't make it, it will be recorded and it will be archived onto the website.

2:16We have a ton of stuff to talk about for that. We have a ton of FOIAs to do as well. So we're looking forward to that. All right, let's get into the news. The first story, Jason wrote this, and it's broadly about the TikTok ban and everything that happened there basically the biggest story in tech decentralized social media is the only alternative to the tech oligarchy super quickly jason do you want to run us through the tiktok ban and i mean super quick because i could you go all the way back to when trump initially wanted this ban because k-pop stans uh were basically mocking him on the platform can you go from there and we'll run through why it got banned yeah i will try to speed run it i think back in 2017 maybe 2018 trump issued an executive order that was trying to ban tiktok for the reasons you said more or less uh there's sort of been a bipartisan political agreement that the The Chinese government is using TikTok in some form to either influence youth and or spy on Americans.

3:34But they have not made really any of this public whatsoever. But the Biden administration picked up the idea of potentially doing a ban last year. and then it was pushed through Congress in a very interesting way, which is there wasn't enough support to kind of push it through on its own, more or less. And so it got added to a budget bill. I believe it was the Defense Reauthorization Act, which funds the military. I think it was that one. Yeah. It was tacked on, and that's kind of how Congress does legislation these days, where many, many, many laws get jammed into one specific law, which is usually a budget bill.

4:28And it passed both houses of government, and it essentially put this deadline for ByteDance to disinvest from TikTok in the United States or to face a ban. And that deadline was January 19th, which was the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated. So Saturday the 19th comes around and everyone starts panicking. The Biden administration says that they are not going to enforce this law. Trump sort of starts saying that he doesn't want to enforce the law. Xu Chu, who is the CEO of TikTok, says that he's working with the Trump administration to figure out how to keep TikTok online. And meanwhile, as part of some of the earlier threats to ban TikTok, ByteDance put American data into Oracle servers in this big thing called Project Texas, where basically Americans' data is hosted on Oracle servers and then also is mirrored in Singapore.

5:43And so Oracle at some point says that they are not willing to risk running afoul of this law. And so ByteDance shuts down TikTok on Saturday evening. Then Sunday morning rolls around. Yeah, go ahead. Just before we get into that, so it's banned. And look, I know that some people think TikTok is a silly app. I don't know if many of our listeners think that, but plenty of lawmakers or just other members of the public think that, oh, it's just this silly little thing. you know even if it poses a theoretical threat from china it's not even really a big deal but there are tons of business on businesses on their small american business owners as you go into the piece a little bit jason uh i know people who have found communities and people they can really relate to on the app and they just can't do that necessarily on other social media platforms or discovery platforms tiktok is much more about discovering sort of small creators that you just wouldn't on Instagram or elsewhere.

6:55So I just wanted to ask, when it's banned on that day, and we all know it comes back, but when it was banned, what were you seeing? Because, you know, the people I know who enjoy that app perhaps more than others, I mean, they were devastated, right? Yeah, well, a peek behind the curtain, I was drunk at a bar when this occurred. No way. Yeah, way. But I was scrolling through and you basically got this pop-up. saying, you know, TikTok has taken down the United States and we're working with the administration to get it back online, which was very quickly replaced by where President Trump has indicated that he is potentially willing to work with us to get TikTok back online.

7:42And it was offline, I believe, for like 13 hours or so. It was not offline for that long. I will say that I've spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out where people would go. I think that the obvious answer is Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, more or less. And that's what a lot of TikTok creators are telling people to go do. I will say, as we've talked about before, these places are cesspools and they're disasters. And I think one reason why TikTok does feel more human and different is because whatever ByteDance is doing with the algorithm is keeping out a lot of obvious spam type stuff.

8:26It's not perfect, but I was scrolling YouTube shorts and Instagram reels on Sunday morning hungover as I might scroll TikTok while it was banned. And it was just horrifying, the stuff I was seeing. I mean, it was nothing that was even remotely related to my interest nothing that i would have wanted possibly wanted to see but anyways uh tiktok more or less seems to have cut a deal with the trump administration and the trump administration seems like they are willing to basically look the other way in the short term and so tiktok is back online now yeah and to sort of bring it back to the piece that you just wrote, again, it's more talking about the need almost to move away from all of these, right?

9:15And you touched on it there, that some of these other platforms have turned into complete cesspools, basically. You mentioned Meta, you mentioned Twitter slash X. Just very briefly, sort of what are the problems with that, that they are bending to whatever coming administration is? Like, what's your issues with them in the context of this piece? Yeah, I mean, you look at the inauguration on Monday, and you have Mark Zuckerberg there, you have Sundar Pichai there, you have Shu Chu there, you have Jeff Bezos there, Tim Cook is also there. And you sort of have this tech oligarchy that we've been talking about for months at this point.

9:55And all of these platforms, every major corporate social media platform is now beholden to the Trump administration in some way. You have TikTok, whose existence in this country literally depends on them staying in Donald Trump's good graces. You have Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg has made a shift right because Trump once threatened to put him in jail. You have X, which is literally being run by someone who's now in the administration because Elon Musk is part of this Doge group, which is now formally a real-ish organization within the federal government. And I think this is a drum that we've been beating for a while.

10:41But if you are making a living on any of these social media platforms, which includes YouTube, you need to find ways to have some resiliency and to make sure that your audience can find you elsewhere. And that doesn't just mean for journalists and for creators. It also means for your friends and family and stuff like that, for the average user, in my opinion. And we're actually in this situation now where there are technologies and there has been groundwork laid that is allowing for resilient, decentralized social media platforms. And that's a long way of saying that Blue Sky and Macedon exists.

11:24They are working social media platforms. They're very small when compared to TikTok or to Twitter or to Facebook or Instagram. But they're getting bigger. They're getting more usable. They're getting more interoperable. And I think that's a very good thing. And that's something that creators who are worried about suddenly losing their platform overnight should definitely be thinking about. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of stuff with YouTube where... this was kind of before my time when it came to content moderation. And it wasn't so much the platform shut down or anything, because obviously YouTube is still there.

12:02But, you know, there's been the adpocalypse and stuff where advertisers have pulled money out. And lots of creators, you know, either rightly or wrongly, it really depends on the individual creator and the content, right? But they suddenly have a massive slice of their revenue gone overnight or whatever. And that's very, very similar here, just in that the very existence of the entire platform now rests on whether Trump basically feels like it or not. Or, of course, there are the legal stuff as well. We don't fully know how the executive order actually is really going to gel with the law that banned it in the first place.

12:39I think that the future of TikTok is still very much up in the air. Apple, it's not on either App Store anymore. So if there's some sort of problem with it where it needs to be updated, you know the current version could start degrading it's not clear whether trump is going to continue to fight for this and by dance has made no indication that it actually wants to sell and so in the past when there have been ban threats uh the national conversation has just kind of changed and tiktok has continued to be able to exist but now there's a deadline again And I feel like everyone is probably sick of talking about this.

13:23I know that other journalists who cover TikTok are really, they're just saying, ban it or don't ban it. Like, I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick of the back and forth. And I think that that is actually a fair thing to think because you have this platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use that is being used as a political football in a lot of ways. and it's being used as a scapegoat when something like Luigi Mangione happens and Republicans can point to TikTok and say, look, they're celebrating this person who killed the CEO. Or TikTok was being used by a lot of leftists and young people to talk about free Palestine and things like that.

14:07And that was being used by lobbyists in DC as a reason that it should be banned. So it wasn't just that it's a Chinese app. It's also that it is more or less poisoning the minds of the youth, which I wholeheartedly disagree with that take and think that it's sort of an unconstitutional take despite this going through the Supreme Court. I don't think that the proper... I don't think that the... I think that the people whose speech is being limited here are Americans who use the platform and who are being pushed to these other platforms. At the same time, I think that putting all of your eggs in the TikTok basket, thinking that this is now over, is a big mistake.

14:50Yeah. So you do have these alternatives. Blue Sky, Mastodon. There's this other one. What's it? Is it Pixel Fed? Pixel Fed. And is that based on Blue Sky or something? I haven't followed that. PixelFed is based on ActivityPub, which is what Macedon runs on, and it's an Instagram competitor. It's incredibly small, but it's notable because links to it were being blocked by Facebook, which led to a Streisand effect where even more people were going to download it. And then Blue Sky has said that it's going to launch an Instagram competitor soon. Um, so I think that it's like, yeah, I think that it's very early.

15:37And I think that one thing that TikTok and Instagram have is that they have straightforward ways for people to have businesses on these platforms. Whereas the decentralized social media ecosystem doesn't really have advertisements. A lot of the people who are there are, uh, you know, anti-advertisements, anti-surveillance capitalism for reasons that I totally understand and broadly support. But on TikTok, if you go viral, you can get direct payments through a creator's program. I keep getting ads for this chewing gum company that sells its products directly and only on TikTok shop. On Instagram, it's like clothes companies are able to buy ads there and then you can launch bunch of whole business there.

16:27And that's not really an ecosystem that exists on the decentralized social media world. But I think that nonetheless, people need to start building platforms elsewhere. And I guess, very quickly to explain what this all means, for it to be decentralized, it means that you can create an account on Mastodon or on Blue Sky, and the dream is not fully here yet, but let's say that Blue Sky Corporate does something really shitty, you can take your followers, port them over to another instance of Blue Sky run by a different company or a different server, a different person, and that won't really affect your day-to-day life.

17:14You will be able to take those followers directly with you and continue posting because the underlying protocol can't be easily censored and it's not going to be controlled by just one entity. So it makes doing things like banning a technology very hard or banning a company or social media platform very hard. But it also protects people in case the owner of it becomes, you know, like and shitifies it to a point where you don't feel comfortable being there anymore. One of the reasons we picked Ghost as a platform for ourselves as well. Just the idea that if Ghost makes some disastrous decision, the technology is such that we can pick it up and leave with our business and take it somewhere else.

18:06Do you just want to explain that briefly, Emmanuel? Like why, especially when it comes to distribution, why do we have so much of an emphasis on email? That's almost like, I know it's not quite the same, But that's almost like our protocol that we're relying on because we don't necessarily have to deal with the sort of, you know, a social website, a social media network shutting down overnight, that sort of thing, at least as much. Like, why do you just talk about that a bit? I mean, I think it is very similar. One of the most valuable things we have as a business, maybe the most valuable thing we have, is being able to contact our readers directly without going through one of these platforms, and that's via email.

18:50And that's one of the things that we can take with us if we leave Ghost and decide to build our own website or go to a different service, which is obviously not something you can do if you're on tiktok right it's like if you have three million followers on tiktok and that's your livelihood and they shut down tiktok as they did over the weekend then that's it it's over you can beg people to follow you and they might or some portion of them might but you you can't just take your audience with you and i i think this is one of the main things jason says we should pursue and i agree and it's definitely something that But we practically, totally separate from this TikTok question, just as practically thinking about how to run a business, we said we have to own this audience.

19:42We have to have more control over our business than, I don't know, a sub stack would give us, for example. Yeah, or just even throwing back to the years old when all of these new media companies were posted onto Facebook and you know what we're going to put all of our resources there and then it turns out that the facebook pivot to video thing was just an entire grift based on fake numbers basically right and they just kind of screwed with that um so i think well it's just harder though right because if if you're then a tiktok creator or something and you need to then pivot to email i mean it's not straightforward but i agree with everything jason says that it's worthwhile doing i guess just to well not wrap it up because then i have another question for jason but just one thing i want to say about like the risk and the tiktok ban it's still important to remember that tiktok has done some weird stuff like it did spy on journalists um forbes did some really good reporting on this and the reporter there has a book coming out you know it followed their location through ip addresses that sort of thing.

20:51But there is no evidence of what is alleged and what is sort of the theoretical fear, which is that China is going to turn the app into a massive propaganda machine, pushing what it wants to tens of millions of users and sway public opinion in the US. And I think a really good post about this came from Kevin Collier, NBC News, and he posted the Blue Sky, presumably other decentralized networks as well. I just happened to see it on Blue Sky. He said just before the ban, this TikTok ban eve, it's worth remembering how much the Biden administration declassified on foreign bad actors. There was Russia's plans on Ukraine, RT funding conservative influences, Russia Today, the Russian channel, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean hacking operations.

21:40It makes it even more striking. It never gave evidence of TikTok being a PII suck or a propaganda machine. It basically was a theoretical risk. And, you know, there is the risk there. But I think many people would agree that you don't ban an entire social media platform and app and violate the constitutional rights of tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans because of a theoretical threat. but just to wrap this up jason you actually wrote a piece way back in march back when this sort of ban was going through the motions and you had a piece called the u.s wants to ban tiktok for the sins of every social media company and maybe i'll try to paraphrase this but you said the situation is an untenable mess you know a ban will have the effect of further entrenching and empowering gigantic monopolistic monopolistic American social media companies that have nearly all of the same problems that TikTok does.

22:42We highlight again the using mainstream social media platforms run by corporations, do not actually own their followers or their audiences, etc. etc. including for businesses. That was in March 2024. Do you think that all played out? I mean, I think that is very much the case where I've not seen anything like this happen in the United States before. I think it is without precedent besides Sam's reporting on what's happening with Pornhub in several states, a third of the United States now. But having a platform that was accessible one minute and then unaccessible to Americans the next minute is, I think, pretty chilling and I think pretty scary.

23:30And we can make fun of the influencers who were crying about losing their platforms and losing their monetization and saying like they're taking it too seriously. But it's pretty crazy that this happened, I think, even though it was only for a few minutes. I think that we are used as Americans to being able to access pretty much anything on the internet. And I call this an untenable mess. And I think I was talking about the uncertainty surrounding this. But I will also say that the ban itself while it was enacted was really interesting in that a VPN couldn't get around it. It wasn't something where you could just turn on a VPN and access TikTok if you were in the United States.

24:21It seemed to have something to do with where your account was created. It had some some metadata that suggested you were an American user, meaning a friend that I have in Japan was locked out, for example. You can also tie accounts to Apple IDs, which is not as easy to circumvent. You can tie it to phone numbers and things like that. So I think that this did show that there's various ways that internet censorship can occur and that it's not always it's not as easy as turn on a vpn to circumvent it and i think that the technical details of how this ban was implemented are pretty interesting yeah and i didn't have a fully enough time to dig into it before tiktok came back, but we should definitely look into that more to see if it does get banned again, or if they start banning other platforms.

25:20Who knows? All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back, we're going to talk about a story I wrote about a new AI tool that can geolocate photos in seconds, and it's being marketed to law enforcement. We'll be right back after this.

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27:32we're back this next story is from joe the headline is the powerful ai tool that cops or stalkers can use to geolocate photos in seconds joe maybe very quickly geolocate let's explain what we we do it a lot but maybe to readers who don't know what that is what what is geolocating yeah so it's when you'll take a photo and maybe on clues inside it such as huh there's a road sign i i imagine it's at this intersection uh or maybe there's very distinctive architecture and you get a sense of what country it's in or the vegetation or then even more advanced ones where you know the open source uh collective organization bellingcat you know they'll look at shadows and then figure out the exact points where american journalists were beheaded by isis all of that sort of thing there's a massive spectrum of techniques and sophistication but it's basically using clues inside a photo to figure out where and potentially when um it was taken as well i mean you say we do it a lot like uh i do it to i think find where criminals may be and that and that sort of thing is that what you're thinking yeah whenever there's a viral video or just something that we want to report on that starts with a video on social media and you want to figure out is this real when did it take place you start looking at the image and trying to see where it took place, when it took place, and so on.

29:09It is one of the techniques, as you say, that fall under the umbrella of open source intelligence. And to simplify it even further, we'll circle back around to this, but I'm sure people have seen the very viral geoguesser champ, Rainbolt. When you watch him do his thing, he's geolocating, that's what he's doing. But this company, GeoSpy, how did you first hear about it and maybe tell us what it does yeah so i heard about geospy actually months ago and it was sort of on the back burner and i'll cover that later that sounds interesting i saw people posting on i think twitter and definitely linkedin and that was the recent sort of impetus to kick me into gear to finally write about it um so geospy is this company that basically automates that geolocation process so instead of a human looking at the soil the architecture the buildings that sort of thing it's an ai doing it and rather than open source intelligence investigator or journalist or researcher or whoever spending months or years building up sort of the muscle necessary to quickly identify photos um this ai obviously built on a massive data set of millions of images we don't know exactly what images but millions of images uh it can do that um in seconds you know which is uh obviously very interesting if you were not if you don't have the capability to do it yourself uh you know and the thing that finally pushed me over the edge to finally write about it was that i saw they were more explicitly at least than I remember, more explicitly marketing to law enforcement and governments.

31:01And when an AI tool pivots from consumer access, which is you can just sign up until very recently, just start using GeoSpy and lots of people are doing that. When any company pivots from consumer to law enforcement, I'm obviously going to be interested. What are some examples that you saw of people? How did they use GeoSpy? And also as someone who has geolocated images the old-fashioned way what is your assessment of how well it works are you impressed with the results yeah i guess the first i'll say the examples i did first which is that i went to geospy.ai and made a free account and at the time it allows you to do five or six lookups a day and you upload a photo it thinks for a few seconds does its thing and then it provides a google map style interface of where it believes that photo was taken or you know approximately where that photo was taken and then a um a description of how it's analyzed the photo um as well so one i took a photo from a story that sam wrote several months ago about a man who was harassing a woman in a waymo like jumping in front of it and like not letting the autonomous vehicle pass um we know that's in san francisco um just through the nature of writing the article but i just wanted to see like huh this photo of a guy standing in front of a car will geospy be able to pick up on that and i uploaded it and it replies with you know this particular motel sign is in the background so it indicates the sound is in san francisco the architecture of the buildings is very similar all of that sort of thing um i think the ultimate location put on the map was not one-to-one it was like in that area but it wasn't exactly on the intersection but it still picked out uh you know a missable landmark in the background and if you were doing this manually if you had this photo and you're trying to figure out where it was this is exactly what you'd be doing you're looking for a business or something in the background that you could then figure out so that there's that and that's kind of on the lower end um i uploaded some inside public transit systems as well it's still got those based on like the style of the chairs and that sort of thing jason gave me one from the la wildfires which he took which is interesting because that's obviously a very very current event and it's not going to be the same as google image reverse image search where you upload that it's just going to send you photos of other fires not necessarily this fire although it could do depending on timing but it's not going to tell you where it is probably and this said huh based on the architecture of the buildings this looks like i think it said huntington beach or something which is actually south of la it's not perfect but it's clearly looking at the content of the image and like giving it context which i found quite um amazing and then just the last couple of ones i'll say is that i went into the geospy community discord and the founder uh there had uploaded examples that he apparently run and it was stuff like oh these cobblestones are very distinctive to boston or this these trees are very distinctive to boston as well and the way he phrased it was something like, well, you've gone from the entire world where this photo could be, and now you've narrowed it down to just a few kilometers, essentially.

34:42Now, I don't think anybody would disagree with the fact that that just saved a bunch of time for sort of anybody using it. Yeah, there's another example in the story that I thought was the most impressive, and it's not one that we uploaded. I think it's something you found in the community, and it's just a dirt road, like a rural dirt road. And it was able to identify that I think it's in Thailand, which, I mean, is obviously a big country. It's not a very specific location, but there's really no landmark. It's just dirt and trees. And the fact the AI is able to narrow it down to a country even, I thought was really impressive.

35:25And also very similar, if you watch Rainbow play, he'll see an image and be like oh that dirt that's iceland you know what i mean this tree that's that's that's uh hawaii um so it's doing something very similar and it's it's one of those ai things where it's at once mind-blowing you can't believe that the ai can do this but then you think about the data and you're like oh well obviously somebody built this and obviously it works pretty well and it will you can imagine google for example that has all the street view data and every street view image is pinpointed to a geographical location, they could probably build something like this fairly easy and much more accurate.

36:04One thing I wanted to say about the Geoguessr and Rainbolt being able to see some dirt and say, oh, this is Mongolia or whatever. One thing I learned that maybe listeners know, maybe they don't, is that there are a lot of tells in that game where they're not necessarily identifying that that dirt could be from Botswana, but there are essentially eras of street view cameras that maybe they had a certain resolution and you would then know based on something in the image that Google was serving the continent of Africa during the era when this image artifact would be in there. So it's a mix of people both knowing a lot about geography, but also a lot about Google Street View in particular.