Trouble at TikTok

0:00Jonquilyn Hill:Your algorithm is under new ownership. A mostly American group of investors recently took over American TikTok. American lawmakers forced the sale, citing data and privacy concerns because of the app's Chinese ownership. Since the handoff, things aren't going great. Oh, we're definitely being censored slash silenced. Who else is having issues with TikTok muting a portion of their videos when they upload them? Y 'all, TikTok is going downhill fast. I fear. It turns out, lots of people miss their corporate Chinese overlords. And that's not the only trouble at American TikTok. I'm John Glyn Hill, sitting in the host chair.

0:44Jonquilyn Hill:The trials of TikTok coming up on Today Explained from Vox.

1:00Support for this show comes from the Working Forest Initiative. The working forest industry is committed to planting more trees than they harvest. More than 1 billion seedlings are planted in U.S. working forests every year. From biologists to GIS analysts, hiring managers, accountants, and more, working forest professionals have dedicated their focus towards sustainability, using their expertise to help ensure a healthy future for America's forests. You can learn more about Working Forest Initiatives at WorkingForestInitiatives.com. WorkingForestInitiatives.com. When you want your spring break to feel like...

1:39And your kid's pool day to feel like... And your hotel bed to feel like... Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like... Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton for this day. You're listening to Today Explained. David Pierce, I'm the editor-at-large at The Verge.

2:11Jonquilyn Hill:All right. So American TikTok has new owners now. And almost immediately after they took over, people started reporting issues with the app. I want to start with the big one. People said that they were being censored. What's going on there and what are the complaints? That is the big one. It's also the most complicated one to sort through because fundamentally it's about feelings. So a thing to understand is that everybody has always believed they're being censored on social media. Since time immemorial, this is the story of social media. What's happening on TikTok is at this particular moment, I believe less about censorship and more about normal internet problems.

2:55There were a lot of people reporting that they would upload videos around what was happening in Minneapolis and those videos would get no views or those videos would actually not upload properly. So I can't post anything about what happened yesterday in Minnesota, so I'm going to be very selective with my words. If you talk about ice or anything political, if you're even talking about the weather, zero views. We're already seeing proof of suppression. There were people who were saying that if you DM'd the word Epstein to somebody else, that that wouldn't go through.

3:24Jonquilyn Hill:Insanely, you now cannot use the word Epstein in TikTok DMs and are immediately flagged for community violation. Can't use the word Epstein on TikTok since Trump allies took ownership. Absolutely CCP levels of censorship. All of this is more easily and just as successfully explained by normal corporate ineptitude. Which is that TikTok's new data center provider, Oracle, had a huge outage. What we think we know is that it was a big data center in Virginia had what they called a weather-related issue, which I live in Virginia and I have spent a whole week having weather-related issues. Oh, there's still snow on the ground where I'm from.

4:07Yeah, I have a very hard time imagining anybody not having weather-related issues right now. So there was a big power outage. They've had big issues at the data center. And that seems to be the actual culprit here. There are lots of good reasons to be worried about censorship. There are lots of potential censorship problems coming to TikTok. But rationally speaking, the likelihood that this new group would have taken over TikTok and immediately like smashed a big red censorship button is pretty unlikely anyway. Very hard to do technically when you take over a platform this huge to change it in any meaningful way just takes time.

4:41And it was in the middle of huge, disastrous technical problems that I think are probably the real answer here.

4:48Jonquilyn Hill:Is there a way for us to actually know? I mean, people are pretty skeptical of TikTok right now. I think one useful analog here is when Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter. And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he just said out loud all of the changes he was intending to make, right? We want to be just very reluctant to delete things, just be very cautious with permanent bans. And this was after years of conservatives in particular saying that they were being censored by Twitter's existing leadership. So Elon Musk comes in and essentially says, I'm gonna reverse that. Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don't like to say things you don't like.

5:29And then does a bunch of very obvious things that you go on the platform and you spend five minutes on it and it just felt different. You were seeing different posts. So I think there is a version of this that feels very obvious. It's just that for right now, there are better, simpler sort of Occam's razor-y explanations for what's going on.

5:45Jonquilyn Hill:California Governor Gavin Newsom says he's going to investigate TikTok censorship. Is there anything to that? Or is he just, you know, someone with 2028 on the brain? In that particular one, I think it is 2028 brain pretty aggressively. Gavin Newsom was responding very directly to all of these reports that the word Epstein was being censored in DMs. That problem has largely gone away as Oracle's technical problems have gone away. But I think the fact that if you're Gavin Newsom, that is a politically useful thing to do is very telling. We've had this six-year saga of what's going to happen to TikTok all the way back to the first Trump administration.

6:25At first, Donald Trump wanted to ban TikTok. We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. And then Trump discovered pretty clearly how important TikTok was in getting him elected again in 2024. for. The U.S. should be entitled to get half of TikTok. And all of a sudden saw it as a politically useful platform and then engineered the thing to be sold to some of his close friends and allies. American investors, American companies, great ones, great investors, the biggest. If you just look at the set of things that has happened, it would be surprising if it doesn't end up being a politically geared right-wing coded platform.

7:05And so if you're Gavin Newsom to say, I am going to be your champion to keep TikTok as the thing that you want and not turned into the kind of cesspool that X has become, it's a smart move.

7:17Jonquilyn Hill:I think something that's poured gas on this is something that you mentioned, which is who these new owners are. Tell us about them. Sure. So the new owners of TikTok are essentially three players that matter. One is Oracle, the huge old Silicon Valley company owned by Larry Ellison, who is a very close friend of President Trump's. Which we've covered on the show. Ellisons, meet the Ellisons, the newest right-wing billionaire family. MGX, which is an investment firm located in Abu Dhabi, and Silver Lake, which is a huge private equity firm that is invested in just everything you can possibly think of.

7:58Each of them has 15 % of this new company. The new company is called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, which really just rolls off the tongue. Yeah. But everybody just calls it TikTok US. So for all intents and purposes, it's Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake are the controlling new investors in this company. And most importantly of all is Oracle, right? Oracle is in charge of the algorithm. It's in charge of the privacy. It's in charge of the data security. All of the things that made this a national security issue in the first place are now up to Oracle to solve. So I think Larry Ellison is the single most important person for the new TikTok.

8:37Larry made his money with technology. You have this group of people with very similar politics, with a very clear understanding of what you can do when you own a platform like this. And if you look at TikTok and you say, okay, this is actually an incredibly valuable just information dissemination product in the United States, and you are a political animal, of course you're going to look at that and say, actually, this thing that we've been railing against, which is fears of the Chinese government, you know, melting our brains with dance crazes, we can just do that for our own purposes. There are lots of good and fair questions to ask about what the Chinese government was doing, both in terms of the data they were collecting about U.S.

9:18citizens and the way that the Chinese government might be skewing the algorithm to show certain things to Americans or not. But the difference now is we see what the government is doing right now instead of saying, OK, it's this sort of abstract big bad that is China. But you look around and it's like, OK, it's actually very obvious what the Trump administration is up to and the ways in which they want to control information and the ways in which fascism is creeping across the way that we communicate with each other in so many ways. And that is not abstract. And you can just say, oh, OK, if if you give Donald Trump the means of showing people videos that they watch for hours a day, Like, it's not unclear what he's going to do with it.

9:58And so I think this stuff is both sort of literally closer to home for a lot of these users, but also it's just much more obvious what it would look like if it goes wrong.

10:06Jonquilyn Hill:You know, what is also not abstract is that there were new terms of service that folks had to agree to. What do we know about what's changing? Okay, this is a tricky one because one of the very funny things about terms of service on apps like these is that they're always terrifying. And they're often terrifying for totally non-terrifying reasons. What happened in this case is there are some new things in the terms of service. The new TikTok US is going to collect more precise location data if you allow it. It also gives TikTok permission to collect a bunch of data around kind of nebulous AI things that make it clear they're going to do a lot of sort of gen AI stuff inside of TikTok.

10:49And that's data it can collect. But there was one thing that a lot of people got really nervous about. Your immigration status, your geolocation, your mental health diagnosis. This is the private information that TikTok is now lawfully collecting from you. They're going to know your citizenship and immigration status, your religious beliefs, your mental and physical health, sexual life, sexual orientation. Also, if you're transgender or non-binary, it's just a lot. All of these things. And actually, that data has been in TikTok's terms of service for some time. Oh. Again, I think it is reasonable to be alarmed by this data is going to be collected by a new group of people.

11:25And I think it is fair to be worried about who that group of people is and what they might do with your data. But the sheer collection of that data is not new in TikTok. It's just that people finally read the terms of service. Okay.

11:39Jonquilyn Hill:So all of this is the business side. But let's say, you know, I'm out here scrolling. and right now cooking videos, videos about makeup, videos of men cleaning horse hooves. Will my experience on the app change now? Is all of that gone for me? Okay, A, we have shockingly similar timelines. This is very exciting. I love the horse hoof cleaning video. Shout out to Nate the Hoof Guy. Yes. In the past, I've said that this is one of my favorite tools. And in today's video, I'll show you exactly why. And all the comments are always like, doesn't that hurt? Anyway.

12:13You and I would never have searched for horse hoof cleaning videos, but the TikTok algorithm is clever enough to have shown them to us. And that is the thing that actually no other platform has done a good job of replicating. But now one of the stipulations of this deal is that there has to be some meaningful separation of that algorithm from Chinese control. The new owners are going to quote, retrain, test and update the algorithm. That is a very vague phrase, but it means in some way the algorithm is going to change. But that we're going to not see for a while.

12:48Jonquilyn Hill:Okay, and wait, one more question before we go. Sure. Got to close the loop on the horse hooves. Does it hurt them when they get them cleaned? It doesn't hurt them because they don't have feelings on that part of their feet. And actually, it feels good for them. You want to be a professional to do it, though. You and I should not be cleaning horses hooves. No, we should not. But I'm glad that Nate's out there doing it.

13:15Jonquilyn Hill:Coming up on Today Explained. Some major lawsuits allege social media platforms are designed to be addictive. TikTok settled the first big one, but most of the rest of the social media world's headed to court.

13:43Support for Today Explained comes from Shopify. Starting a new business has never been easy, says Shopify, but without the right tools, it can feel almost impossible. Perhaps Shopify can set you up for success. Shopify is a commerce platform used by millions of businesses around the world. They say they can help you tackle important tasks, inventory, payments, analytics, so much more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. Let Shopify be your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond.

14:21You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. It's time to turn those what-ifs into shit with Shopify today. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash explain. Go to shopify.com slash explain. What's that? That's shopify.com slash explained.

14:47Support for today's show comes from SelectQuote. Life insurance. You might already have it, but do you know how much you're paying for or for how much you're being covered? There's a decent chance you're paying too much for too little. But SelectQuote says that they can help you sort out a term life insurance policy that makes you happy. For over 40 years, SelectQuote says that they've been one of the most trusted brokers in insurance, helping more than 2 million Americans secure over$700 billion in coverage. Their mission is simple. They want to help you find the right life insurance policy for your unique needs.

15:23They shop, you save. And they partner with providers offering same-day coverage up to$2 million without needing to visit your doctor. You can get the right life insurance for you. for less and save more than 50 % at selectquote.com slash explained. Save more than 50 % on term life insurance at selectquote.com slash explained. Today to get started. That's selectquote.com slash explained.

15:56Support for this show comes from American Giant. As we inch toward the spring and temperatures begin to rise ever so slowly, it can be tricky to figure out the right amount of layers to put on. But one article of clothing you can always count on, no matter the weather, is the hoodie. That's why American Giant says that their classic full-zip hoodie is made to last a lifetime, ready to bring you warmth and comfort year after year. But it's not just the hoodie. American Giant says that they have a wide range of clothing options that are built to last. Recently, our colleague Andrew Melnicek got to order some American Giant.

16:33American Giant just sent me a pair of their roughneck pants. The material's great, and it's made up of a cotton canvas. It's one of those types of pants where you can wear while really doing anything. And this season, you can snag the hoodie that will bring you comfort for life, the American Giant Classic Full Zip, and save 20 % off your first order at American-Giant.com. When you use the code EXPLAINED at checkout, that's American-Giant.com and use code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's 20 % off your first order at American-Giant.com slash EXPLAINED. Code EXPLAINED.

17:17What do you think today explained this?

17:21Jonquilyn Hill:I don't know. My name is Naomi Nix. I am a reporter at The Washington Post. I cover social media. Okay, so there are some big social media lawsuits just getting underway. Why are these such a huge deal? Well, this is really, you know, the first time that social media addiction cases are going to be headed to a jury trial. Hundreds of parents, school districts, and state attorneys generals have filed lawsuits alleging that the way tech companies like Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat have designed their products, have made them especially addictive to young people, and that that has harmed teenagers and fueled a mental health crisis in today's young people.

18:13Today, the tech giants behind some of the most popular social media apps are headed to trial. This case is the first of thousands of lawsuits that claim platforms like Metasnap, TikTok, and YouTube knowingly created harmful products. A 19-year-old anonymous plaintiff claims she got hooked to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at just 10 years old due to features like endless scrolling and frequent notifications. TikTok and Snapchat were also named, but they have already settled out of court. Essentially, jury selection has begun in the first of a cohort of social media addiction cases. It focuses on the story of a woman who's now a young adult.

18:54She is anonymous, but goes by KGM. And essentially, you know, she says she used all those social media platforms, you know, throughout her childhood. KGM has testified that social media use, quote, contributed to her anxiety and her depression and caused her to feel more insecure about herself. We should expect testimony from top executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Masseri, as well as this sort of debate about, you know, her own life. We've already seen in filings that the companies like Google have alleged that, you know, there are other things going on in her life that may have contributed to her distress.

19:42And so that case will play out and they'll pivot to the next Bellweather case.

19:49Jonquilyn Hill:Okay, so just to clarify, this is about whether teens are being harmed by addictive content or whether the platform themselves are addictive? It's really about the platform design. And so they focus on things like, you know, an endless stream of content, right? They focus on features like autoplay on YouTube, right? Notifications, product features like that, that they say are really designed to just keep people returning to their sites over and over and over again, leading to really harmful consequences, whether that's anxiety, whether that's depression, untimely deaths. And so they're kind of making claims that are similar to, you know, some of the claims that were hit to big tobacco companies, you know, way back when, when they said, hey, these products have been especially designed to be addictive.

20:43The companies also know that based on their own internal research. And they haven't really been upfront about the risks. In fact, they've been perhaps deceptive and have failed to protect young people in the way that they should.

20:59Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, you know, these lawsuits are all about the addiction and harm that might be caused by social media. But what do we actually know about how addictive these platforms are? What do these studies tell us? It's a little murky, right? There's no such thing as like social media addiction and the DSM that, you know, a psychologist is going to like give you as a diagnosis and put on your insurance form. But there is a body of research, outside research, certainly, that raises the question about whether social media usage can lead to or contribute to potential harmful mental health outcomes. And so there has been research that has perhaps done the conclusion that problematic use of social media or long periods of time of social media is correlated with poor mental distressing outcomes.