While I often say that I don’t respond to recent business news here, I have also recently broken that rule a few times. So I decided to look at the potential Tiktok ban in the US. To connect this potential ban to my other writing I’ll go back to Merton’s five causes of unintended consequences to point out some less discussed reasons for why the ban might be good or bad.
Related to the discussion around Tiktok, I was reminded that this week marks the 30th year since I first visited mainland China. I remember this because I was in Beijing at the same time that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait — the first week of August 1990. The hotel TV did not black out that specific part of the news.
Since that time I went to mainland China perhaps around 50 times both for work and to travel. For a large country with big regional differences, I don’t count 50 trips as a lot. But I’ve found my perspective to be different from that of others who spent more time there simply because I have seen the country over a longer time.
While it’s now been two years since I have been to China, also for work, a lot of my experience was of a China that doesn’t really exist anymore. Many of my trips to the country were in the 1990s and early 2000s. First off, that was a cash society and not the mobile payments-driven one of today. On longer trips, I had several occurrences where I needed to coax bank employees through a long process of filling out long handwritten forms so that I could make an international withdrawal. Today’s China of mobile payments (and monitoring) is one that I haven’t experienced that much personally. For example, in a previous article I used a picture of stacks of bike share bikes which were plentiful, but not accessible to me because I didn’t have a bank account linked to the relevant app.
Many of my trips in China were also before smart phones were common. It did not hinder anything about my experiences there, it just made them different than they would be today.
In a way connected to the previous two, another experience I had in China was that a lot of my trips were during a period of growing freedom. I did many things that are probably unusual or impossible today, including making friends with Uyghurs in Xinjiang, seeing multiple arrests (related to Deng Xiaoping’s funeral and Falun Gong), having thoughtful discussions with people I met on China’s development, the US, Taiwan, and other topics.
But back to Tiktok, a popular short video app that is an American company owned by ByteDance, a Chinese parent company. Tiktok’s corporate behavior and the history of non-reciprocity of tech in China is problematic. Does a ban or potential sale to an American company (perhaps Microsoft) make sense?
Others have pointed out that an issue with Tiktok is not only that it censors political information unwanted by China’s government, but its algorithmic feed determines what content users see. Tiktok has hundreds of millions of users which means that at scale it can influence what ideas become the norm, whether by suppressing undesirable ones or encouraging users to avoid ones that would lead to their own accounts being suppressed.
And as others have mentioned, Tiktok’s users were responsible for low turnout at Trump’s political rally in Tulsa. How should we look at the potential to ban an app in the US — something that is common to do in China?
Merton’s List
Robert Merton’s five causes of unintended consequences are ignorance, basic values, short vs long-term interests, the self-defeating prophecy, and error. His list is high-level, but it will do for today.
Let’s take a quick look at each related to Tiktok and why we are in a situation to have this discussion.
Ignorance
One of the differences between the US and China is that it is easier to learn about the American side than the Chinese side. The exchange of people is relatively lopsided (more Chinese citizens studying and working in the US than the reverse). American customs are easier to learn. In spite of the above, the China side invests more time to learn about the US than the reverse. This is a fault of interest and expectations on the US side.
As I wrote in my article on ignorance, “First-order effects of ignorance include incorrect decisions. Second-order effects include not understanding why the decisions are incorrect.”
Basic Values
From the typical American perspective, a grating part of a ban is that “it’s not who we are, it’s just not something we do.” Let users decide where to put their time. After all, if they want to use a well-designed app that has millions of users, but also concerns around security and influence, it’s their choice. The best ideas will win out. The problem with this argument is that most of the past examples of this argument have been domestic products. The US has also been quite critical of (though seldom willing to ban or break up) domestic tech companies that gain too much power.
Should the same be extended to foreign companies, at least those owned by antagonistic countries? Tiktok’s own censorship, including that of protests in Hong Kong, treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and even of unattractive users, is also contrary to US basic values.
Short vs Long-Term Interests
Tiktok’s American management of course came out against the ban. I have no idea what they actually think, though I do remember that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Tiktok claims that it will create 10,000 jobs in the US over the next three years. The company is rallying its users in its defense. Why wouldn’t it?
But this is where the interests of Tiktok (the short-term) don’t match with the interests of the US (the long-term). Yes, banning Tiktok would leave its users without the entertainment (until they find a new app or a workaround). The ban would probably eliminate some jobs. But in the timeline of social media companies, perhaps we shouldn’t care. We rarely mourn for MySpace today, even if it’s decline was for market reasons. Other products will fill Tiktok’s void. Long-term detriments or benefits of its ban may include the slippery slope of banning other apps, opening the way for other countries to ban apps, and more.
Another view on the ban is that it comes up within 100 days of the presidential election. Government timescales in the US are shorter than those in China not because of the different ages of the countries but because the US has elections every four years and the political party in the executive branch often flips, while China has one party and Xi Jinping might last for decades now that he removed term limits.
The Self-Defeating Prophecy
I’ll just quote my earlier article on this type: “I think of this phenomenon as a tortoise and hare situation. Not the “slow and steady” part, but instead that the unexpected nature of who would win a tortoise-hare race is baked into the participants’ behavior. The hare only stops to rest because it is so obvious that it will win, which in turn becomes the reason it loses.”
Error
A common error in American discussions of Tiktok is assumptions about a bilateral nature of its ban. China has banned or blocked many American companies for years now. A partial list of these American companies includes Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Instagram, and Twitter.
It was a mistake to not require reciprocity for the years these companies have been blocked in China. That being said, Tiktok is the first China-owned tech company to gain the consumer mass market in the US.
The explanations for banning US tech companies in China includes both information flow but also the ability for Chinese versions of these products to have a chance. It’s like saying that the US should ban Tiktok so that domestic companies have the ability to build their own short video apps. That’s a concept typically not considered for Americans.
And what happens when the movement is in a different direction? What about Zoom, an American company that has banned user activity in the US at China’s request? Actually, the list of non-Chinese companies companies complying with pressure from China (to say nothing of those doing so proactively) is quite long.
The Opposite Trap
There is a common lack of critical thinking about Tiktok but a prevalence of imagination for reasons Trump has for its ban. One of the frequent explanations is the Tulsa Rally. From a recent Forbes article: “What if this has nothing to do with China, nothing to do with national security? What if this does have everything to do with Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June?”
Such an argument actually is connected to national security. Such an outcome could have just as easily happened to Biden (or to Clinton had she been elected). I read much of the argument against Tiktok’s ban as being more about supporting the opposite of whatever Trump says rather than critical thinking about outcomes.
Quotes like this one from Wired also make me question the supporting examples: “For the past several years, I’ve warned that the biggest threat to the internet is the technological cold war between the reasonably open, free internet of the West, and the closed authoritarian internet of the East. Now, with the President’s repudiation of free speech and open markets, I worry whether there isn’t as much difference between the two sides after all.” For the long lists of companies above and the large volume of domestic speech critical of Trump when there is no such comparison for Xi — I take this to be, well, hypocrisy on the part of the writer making this claim.
Even the ACLU seemed to be both against and for a Tiktok ban in recent tweets: “Banning an app like TikTok, which millions of Americans use to communicate with each other, is a danger to free expression and technologically impractical.” But the prevented free expression on Tiktok, noted above, is a great danger too. And since when does the ACLU care about technological impracticability?
Another ACLU tweet: “To truly address privacy concerns with companies like TikTok, Congress must ensure that ANY company that services US consumers cannot hand over our data to any government without a warrant or equivalent. Letting the president selectively ban platforms isn’t the solution.” That tweet seems to be in favor of the ban and a process for banning other companies as well.
Let’s look a bit more into the history of American tech companies in China. Google, for example, used to be incredibly popular in China, both with the enthusiasm people had for the company and potentially working there to its search market share, which at one point was 40% in China. But that changed along with Google’s approach to censoring search results — first against, then for, then against, and then blocked (along with its other products) in China. This NY Times article from 2006 explains something about the transition.
“Google posed a unique problem for the censors: Because the company had no office at the time inside the country, the Chinese government had no legal authority over it — no ability to demand that Google voluntarily withhold its search results from Chinese users. And the firewall only half-worked in Google’s case: it could block sites that Google pointed to, but in some cases it would let slip through a list of search results that included banned sites. So if you were in Shanghai and you searched for “human rights in China” on google.com, you would get a list of search results that included Human Rights in China (hrichina.org), a New York-based organization whose Web site is banned by the Chinese government. But if you tried to follow the link to hrichina.org, you would get nothing but an error message; the firewall would block the page. You could see that the banned sites existed, in other words, but you couldn’t reach them. Government officials didn’t like this situation — Chinese citizens were receiving constant reminders that their leaders felt threatened by certain subjects — but Google was popular enough that they were reluctant to block it entirely.”
Result: here’s a screenshot of Bing (not Google) search results that I took in China in 2018. Among the big American tech companies, Microsoft may be the most comfortable working with China.
People sometimes assume that Zoom is a Chinese company. But it’s actually an American company that responds outside of China to instructions from the Chinese government. From Zoom’s own website:
“In May and early June, we were notified by the Chinese government about four large, public June 4th commemoration meetings on Zoom that were being publicized on social media, including meeting details. The Chinese government informed us that this activity is illegal in China and demanded that Zoom terminate the meetings and host accounts.”
“How We Fell Short: We strive to limit actions taken to only those necessary to comply with local laws. Our response should not have impacted users outside of mainland China. We made two mistakes:
“We suspended or terminated the host accounts, one in Hong Kong SAR and two in the U.S. We have reinstated these three host accounts. We shut down the meetings instead of blocking the participants by country. We currently do not have the capability to block participants by country. We could have anticipated this need. While there would have been significant repercussions, we also could have kept the meetings running.”
If the Western assumption that openness should be the default approach is not reciprocated, what should be the response?
On the one side there is setting a national policy for what’s allowable and then requiring international companies adhere to that. That’s the choice some international companies made years ago, first to comply and then in some cases to stop operations in China. It’s another thing for non-Chinese international companies to comply with Chinese government policy in their own operations outside of China.
There is a difference between open discourse in good faith and one that uses the culture of openness to remove its own opponents.
While I don’t follow breaking news, I was drawn in the this story’s evolution. A very interesting dialogue about Microsoft’s potential acquisition of Tiktok came on August 3rd. This quote is by Trump, referencing a call with Microsoft’s CEO about a potential acquisition of Tiktok:
“If you buy it, whatever the price is, that goes to whoever owns it, because I guess it’s China, essentially, but more than anything else, I said a very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States. Because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen. Right now they don’t have any rights, unless we give it to them. So if we’re going to give them the rights, then it has to come into… this country.”
I take the effect of that comment to be on the upcoming acquisition negotiation. The comment lowers Tiktok’s potential purchase price in Microsoft’s favor. I don’t expect that the US Treasury actually receives a direct cut of the acquisition. (But who knows?)
Here again, there is widespread criticism (justified) of Trump’s comments. Criticism of one’s own political leaders and country can be a way to improve, however chaotic those discussions can be. What’s less common in the US is for comments to be understood as part of push-back, negotiation, or responding to non-reciprocity with chaos. Actually, all things that make sense.
And what of ByteDance’s founder, Zhang Yiming? He’s mostly left out of the story in the US press, a common lack of perspective. Well, in Zhang’s case, he might not be faring too well either. You can read this article titled “Chinese social media users call ByteDance founder unpatriotic and weak in the face of U.S. moves against TikTok” to get a bit of insight there. “While the news about Microsoft’s potential acquisition of TikTok was a huge relief for its American users, it was received poorly on the Chinese internet, with many calling Zhang Yiming, ByteDance’s founder and CEO, a ‘spineless traitor’ and a ‘despicable coward,’ among other insults.”
Would it be a bad thing for Tiktok to be banned in the US or acquired by a US company? An acquisition and overhaul of practices may work better than an outright ban. Will there be other unintended consequences of the ban itself, should it go ahead? Certainly. Do I think that the lack of reciprocity should make for a serious discussion around its potential ban? Absolutely.
I hope that the two countries have better relations if I last long enough to look back on this after another 30 years.
Consider
- Future version of the Tulsa rally ticket trick. Charge a fee to attend that is then reimbursed upon showing up. That however may just lead to better-funded chaos campaigns targeting specific candidates.
- The best influence activities go unreported. Stated asks and claims may be negotiating tactics and something different than what they appear.
- Where is the China view in US media reporting about this situation?
