Hello, I'm Lyse Doucet. From the BBC World
Service, this is The Global Story. Today the United States has called China its most active
and persistent cyber threat. It's warning, Beijing could interfere in the 2024 election.
Washington has been consumed in a debate over the Chinese-owned app TikTok. Intelligence
officials say the danger of Chinese espionage and influence stretches far beyond the
realm of social media. How worried should Americans be about Chinese interference
in this year's
presidential election? Joining us today is my colleague,
John Sudworth, a BBC North America correspondent based in New York. For nine
years, he was based in China. Welcome, John. Thank you Lyse, nice to be here.
Also joining us from New York is Makena Kelly, senior politics writer for the news website Wired.
Good morning, Makena. Good to be here.
I know a lot of our Global Story listeners will be TikTok users, but many of them
won't be. So remind us, how popular is TikTok? How many people ar
e using it first around the world?
Hundreds of millions of people use TikTok globally. In the United States, about 170 million
Americans use it, and it's people of all ages, very young folks, the app has a big reputation
for talking to Gen Z and young people. But a recent Pew study actually pointed out that
the average TikTok user is about 30 years old. Of course, there's people of all ages on the app.
I was really struck by a Pew Research survey last year that found about one third of US adu
lts
under the age of 30, not just use TikTok, they get their news from TikTok. And I think for a
lot of us, we still associate it with dancing dogs and fashion videos, but it's not, is it?
At this point, it's more of a short-form YouTube, but where you can find just about
anything on the app. There's, of course, news content, the dance content you mentioned,
but other things as well. I love using the app to find crochet patterns. There's crochet creators on
there. Those are some of the peop
le that I follow. John, what about you, TikTok, crochet patterns?
No, I'm not into the TikTok crocheting community. I don't think that is the part of TikTok
that the US political establishment is all that concerned about. But as a journalist
here in America, you can't help but be on it. What is abundantly clear, that a pretty well
always divide House of Representatives voted with overwhelming bipartisan support to demand
that TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance, either sell TikTok or s
ee it banned
in the United States. John, why do you think suddenly TikTok has united the House of
Representatives? Is that how big an issue it is? The whole issue of China is, if you like, a rare
space of bipartisanship within a very divided US political landscape that has shifted very
quickly over the past sort of few years or so, you know, from a position where most US
administrations, going back, Clinton, Bush, Obama, took a relatively pragmatic view towards
China. From the moment of Do
nald Trump's election, that began to shift and the whole political
spectrum has moved very dramatically. But Makena, I was really struck when
opposition was expressed to the bill, it was the business community saying
my business is going to go under, I rely on TikTok for my advertising,
that would be an election issue. Tiktok's For You Page is a very accurate
algorithm and if someone is selling whatever they're selling, t-shirts that have a specific
slogan on it, or, I don't know, hand soa
ps, or all kinds of, for me, crochet patterns on
the TikTok shop, it's very easy to do and it's very easy to find your audience on TikTok, the
people who want to buy those things. So yeah, there's many, many small businesses, whether
it's just someone in their house making little soaps that they want to sell to even
bigger enterprises, like huge makeup companies that sell on TikTok shop as well.
If you do ban TikTok, you make the others, already powerful, even more powerful. And
Makena, Don
ald Trump said banning TikTok would make Facebook more powerful and he's already, at
least on the day he spoke, said that Facebook was the enemy of the people. They must be just
sitting back and watching this and waiting. Meta isn't exactly just standing by either. In
2018, I believe it was reported that Facebook was paying a GOP marketing firm called Targeted
Victory to plant op-eds in newspapers across the country that made TikTok look really
bad. They were part of this series of, if you
remember, pointing out the Tide Pod
Challenge and all these dangerous challenges that were on TikTok. Facebook was part of
spreading a lot of this in local newspapers. So the bill has been approved by the House of
Representatives. Then it goes to the Senate, it could take time there. Then
it goes to the president's desk. Then there may be legal challenges. So will there
ever be a day where this will actually go through? The question is not whether you can ban TikTok,
but whether you can ba
n TikTok without undermining your own values of freedom of speech and there
will be almost certainly room there for TikTok to challenge this on those grounds.
I think a good example is to bring up that Montana, the state of Montana here in the US,
tried to ban TikTok last year. They passed a bill, it was signed by the governor. And then TikTok
and a group of creators sued the state of Montana, saying that it was in violation of the
First Amendment. That case hasn't been totally resolved yet,
but the argument was valid
enough for a federal judge late last year to at least file an injunction so it wouldn't go into
place until it is totally resolved in the courts. Do we actually know what, if anything, the Chinese
government is doing when it comes to TikTok? It's extremely unclear. Last week, I know that
the House and Senate were briefed on security threats related to TikTok before that vote that
took place, but some people came out of it saying that they felt extremely troubled,
and other
lawmakers came out of it saying that this wasn't really anything that we hadn't heard before.
Earlier this year, year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released
a report calling China, and I quote, "the most active and persistent cyber threat to
the US government, private sector and critical infrastructure networks." It warned of Chinese
hacking and even more of espionage and said Beijing wanted to sow doubts about US leadership
and undermine democracy. John, d
o you recognize all of this? Is the threat that big, that serious?
Well, in general terms, I don't think it is a controversial thing to say that China has
an interest in undermining US democracy. It says so itself, to a large extent,
from the chairman of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, down they have made it very clear
that they see themselves in a sort of existential battle with western values. And in that context,
we've seen over the past few years, decade or so, right across the full arra
y of tools that the
Chinese propaganda machine has at its disposal, efforts to push that message, not only
to its own citizens in China, but to take that message to global audiences as well.
As John pointed out, they're only targeting TikTok because it has a Chinese owner, although
ByteDance has tried to separate itself from China. Is there ever a discussion, there is a
discussion about the tech giants and how they control so much and it seems not many people
are willing or able to do anyth
ing about them. I feel like that Congress has been in this big
discussion about data privacy and data security, not just for companies stationed abroad,
but even like US based companies like Meta, Twitter, now X, Instagram, all
kinds of different platforms, YouTube, Google. And I think the last time this
conversation really heated up around privacy was 2018, and the fallout from Cambridge
Analytica with Facebook. And there's a lot of calls to pass data privacy regulation,
it was the hottes
t the topic had ever been, and it has totally fallen out. We still don't
have anything similar to the GDPR or any kind of data privacy or security regulation here in
the United States. And so a lot of experts and people who are critical of this bill banning
TikTok have suggested, well, if you're really, you know, concerned about data security, data
privacy, why not go after, you know, everyone. Is it possible that ByteDance could sell? You know, many people would say this is one of
the fund
amental flaws of this legislation that is going through Congress. You know, almost all
proposed solutions have serious pitfalls. This is why this is such a difficult and thorny issue.
An outright ban, were it essentially to stop TikTok operating, risks undermining US values,
as we've discussed in the eyes of some critics, freedom of speech groups, et cetera. The idea
of forcing a sale is very difficult because the question of the price tag on a social media
platform of this size and reach w
ould mean that the only possible buyers would already be very,
very large players. You would have the question of the anti-trust legislation. Would you want to
hand TikTok to a company like Meta, for example, Microsoft? The sort of people with the sort
of money and the sort of expertise that would be needed to take over a company like TikTok.
These are very, very difficult questions. And TikTok's own solution, which is essentially
to try to reassure lawmakers that it is doing everything it
can to separate itself from
the Chinese government, as we have seen, has faced its own sort of struggles and pitfalls,
these leaks about the kind of ways that some of these systems appear to be a little bit porous,
information being shared on group chats between America and China. An exchange, a sort of
pipeline of executives brought from China to America. Almost everything TikTok does is,
of course, then held up to even greater scrutiny and people can constantly find ways to criticise
the
safeguards it's putting in place. So again, I know it's not great for a podcast in which we're
kind of trying to pin down answers and look for, there really are no very easy solutions here,
at least no solutions that don't themselves throw up further questions and problems.
The critics will say that TikTok has had a lot of time to prove that it was transparent.
It set up what's called the Texas Project and John alluded to this, that it moved TikTok's user
data to servers owned by a US compan
y, Oracle. But I've seen some writing by some of the technology
journalists saying that they're just paying lip service to transparency. Is that a fair criticism?
It's such a huge question in tech regulation right now because a lot of what we talk
about and what influences people on these platforms and all this is in a black box.
We have no idea what these algorithms do. We have no idea, real insight into
where data is. And I think, you know, we've had questions like Senator Elizabeth Warren
and others have proposed, creating a new agency in charge of like data and tech and regulating
that space. Because right now, even with the agencies that we have, and there isn't a lot
of ability to oversee these kinds of questions. Before we let you go, I think we have
to end on a different note. We've, all of our discussion has been on the threats
and the risks and the power of technology. But this is also a time where there is a fight back,
including at the BBC, where we have something
called BBC Verify. Even some of the technology
companies have put in preventive measures, whether they're good enough or not. How can people
spot, including our listeners to The Global Story, whether or not a post is true, whether
they should believe what they're seeing, whether it's TikTok or Meta or BBC or
Wired, wherever they get their news. I think you just need to remain sceptical.
These things are moving at a lightning pace, AI has become a major threat in elections,
we just recently
saw the Joe Biden Robocall ahead of the New Hampshire primary
that was telling people not to vote, which was wild. So my only advice is really to
remain sceptical and if something is too good or too silly or too strange or too whatever
to really question it and look and see if it can be confirmed by other sources
that you trust like the BBC or Wired. Makena Kelly in New York from the news
website Wired, John Sudworth BBC North America correspondent both of you in New York, Thank you
very
much for joining us here on The Global Story.
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