The video transcript focuses on the ongoing concerns regarding TikTok's use of data and its broader implications on global politics and ideological influence. While much of the discourse in the US revolves around data security issues, the speaker outlines an even more significant threat, stating that TikTok serves as a powerful tool for ideological persuasion and disruption as intended by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By manipulating the algorithm to amplify certain content and suppress others, TikTok allegedly aims to influence democratic systems by fostering division and discrediting Western governments.

The speaker discusses the ownership and control structure of TikTok, highlighting that the app is under the influence of the CCP. The company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is depicted as being intricately linked to the Communist Party, with senior executives also holding party positions. This raises concerns over the app's global influence and the consequences of its control by an autocratic regime. The speaker emphasizes the insidious nature of algorithmic control, arguing that TikTok can selectively promote or hide content based on political needs, diverging from other platforms like Instagram or Facebook.

Main takeaways:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. megaphone [ˈmɛɡəˌfoʊn] - (noun) - A device or means for amplifying a message or voice, often used metaphorically to describe a powerful or influential means of communication. - Synonyms: (amplifier, broadcaster, speaker)

They want to use it as a megaphone in what he calls a smokeless battlefield for ideological persuasion and also destruction.

2. manipulated [məˈnɪpyəˌleɪtɪd] - (verb) - Controlled or influenced cleverly, unfairly, or covertly. - Synonyms: (controlled, influenced, directed)

And so it's very clear that the algorithms are being manipulated, and those algorithms are subject to the control, very explicitly subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party.

3. authoritarian [əˌθɔrəˈtɛriən] - (adjective) - Favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom. - Synonyms: (autocratic, dictatorial, oppressive)

...authoritarian model for global governance that they feel safer with.

4. erased [ɪˈreɪst] - (verb) - Removed completely from existence or memory as if it never existed. - Synonyms: (deleted, obliterated, wiped out)

But there are ways to go back and look at websites that have since been erased and piece this together.

5. airbrushed [ˈɛrˌbrʌʃt] - (verb) - Altered or edited an image or account to improve the appearance or conceal undesirable features. - Synonyms: (retouched, altered, revised)

They've airbrushed out all of this history.

6. adversarial [ˌædvərˈsɛriəl] - (adjective) - Involving opposition or conflict, often used to describe relationships or proceedings that are confrontational. - Synonyms: (antagonistic, hostile, opposing)

It's to make sure that that speech is actually organic and unfettered and is not manipulated and suppressed or amplified according to the dictates of a totalitarian, adversarial government.

7. linguists [ˈlɪŋɡwɪsts] - (noun) - Professionals specializing in the study of language, including aspects of language form, language meaning, and language in context. - Synonyms: (language experts, philologists, grammarians)

I have the benefit of working closely with a number of extremely talented historians, linguists, technologists who are focused on China.

8. propaganda [ˌprɒpəˈɡændə] - (noun) - Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view. - Synonyms: (advertisement, indoctrination, dissemination)

...China sided itself in terms of its propaganda orientation, in terms of becoming the main lifeline economically for Russia.

9. continuity [ˌkɒntɪˈnjuːɪti] - (noun) - The unbroken and consistent existence or operation of something over a period of time. - Synonyms: (persistence, stability, sustained momentum)

There are certain things that we did throughout the cold War that served us very well, where there was a continuity in our cold war policy, from Democrats, from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy, and on the thread makes curves, but you can string that thread through the overall policy of containment with some variations and so forth

10. totalitarian [toʊˌtæləˈtɛriən] - (adjective) - Relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state. - Synonyms: (autocratic, despotic, tyrannical)

Think for a moment how preposterous it is that we're in a situation where the main platform is controlled by a hostile totalitarian government, the main platform by which a whole generation of Americans communicate and acquire their news

The Dangers of TikTok

There's been a lot of discussion about some of the risks of using TikTok. And most of that discussion in the US is focused on the data security aspect. You know that this app, once it's in your phone, it goes everywhere. It pulls everything. Now, famously, although people have forgotten, TikTok was using that data to track American journalists, to try to figure out who their sources were, so they could fire those sources from TikTok. So they go in and actually look at where specific users are to track their activities and who they know and what they're doing.

So that is a risk. It's actually secondary to the bigger problem with TikTok, which is not being discussed head on very frequently. And that is that the Chinese Communist Party has stated explicitly that it wants to use tools such as TikTok, specifically short form video apps, of which TikTok is the really key one to, in the words of Xi Jinping, win the global majority. That's his phrase. They want to use it as a megaphone in what he calls a smokeless battlefield for ideological persuasion and also destruction.

Namely, if you look at how TikTok trends certain content, and you compare that, which is not easy to do, TikTok makes this hard to do. But you could use some of their proxies, some of the data that they share for advertisers, which they've since shut down because they didn't like the fact that people were starting to look. But what you found was that anti-american, anti-democratic, anti-Israeli content after the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas in southern Israel occurred. That stuff trends at multiples of what it does on things like Instagram or Reels or X.

And it's not because of the demographic, because people have done control studies to look at how Taylor Swift trends across those platforms, and it turns out she trends almost exactly equally across all these different apps and platforms. But when it comes to things that are embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party, that stuff gets minimized on TikTok through the algorithm. There are things that they want to amplify pro communist party things, or things that make Americans hate one another or lose faith in their system of government. That stuff gets amplified inordinately.

And so it's very clear that the algorithms are being manipulated, and those algorithms are subject to the control, very explicitly subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party. So Xi Jinping back, I think it was in 2021, he had a study session, right? He's the chairman of everything in China. He's a dictator par Excellency. He holds a study session for the Politburo, which is the highest body of communist party officials, and it's on external discourse mechanisms.

And what he's talking about is it doesn't matter what's true and what's false. It only matters who controls the platform, and therefore we need to use this platform to win the global majority and TikTok. So Xi Jinping holds this study session, the People's Daily, which is the communist party mouthpiece newspaper, a couple weeks later, makes clear that what he was talking about were short form video apps, and they talk about TikTok specifically. So it's a weapon. It's a weapon pointed at our democracy.

To double click on a few things. First is in terms of company structure or parent company structure, people involved. Is there anything that would be instructive to point out there? Let's begin with that. Why should we take you to be an expert in TikTok? How have you studied this?

Well, look, I have the benefit of working closely with a number of extremely talented historians, linguists, technologists who are focused on China. We run a small private company. We do research, open source research, about what China is doing, where it's going. My colleague John Garneau and Matthew Johnson, two colleagues of mine. Matthew's great. He was an Oxford professor of Chinese modern government before we kidnapped him to come do work for us.

John Garneau was a journalist, like me, in China, and Australian. He wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald. And eventually, a little bit before I went into government, he was working for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as one of his China advisors in Canberra. Anyway, they decided to do a very in depth study looking at the history of TikTok, trying to figure out things like the structure, who's it beholden to?

And what you have is this interesting saga of a truly innovative Silicon Valley type company that emerges from the mind of Zhang Yiming, a very, very bright, talented entrepreneur and technologist in China and some of his partners. And it quickly catches on in ways that catch the attention of the Chinese government. And so, over time, what the Chinese government does is it inserts itself, the Communist Party, which is superior to the Chinese government, inserts itself into the heart of that company.

In fact, the company I'm talking about is ByteDance. ByteDance is the parent company that fully controls TikTok, along with a number of other apps, including a Chinese version of TikTok that's called Douyin. And it turns out they share the same engineers. It's all in China, the same engineering core, same algorithms, but adjusted very, very differently.

So if you go to Douyin in China, you're not going to see any of this awful content. You're going to see wholesome content and pro communist party content. You're not going to see things that pit Chinese people against one another or that agitate them, even though it's the same algorithms, same back office, same engineers. And by the way, the editor in chief of ByteDance, with responsibility for all of the apps and their content, is also the communist party secretary who was assigned by Xi Jinping and his general office to babysit that company and to make sure that it is serving the purposes of the Chinese Communist Party.

His deputy is the deputy editor in chief of all apps, and he's also the deputy communist party secretary for the company. So it took a lot of digging to piece all of this together, because TikTok and ByteDance have erased this history. But there are ways to go back and look at websites that have since been erased and piece this together. They've airbrushed out all of this history.

And TikTok masquerades is a foreign company. They say, oh, no, no, we're Singaporean. It's nonsense. It has nothing to do with Singapore. I mean, there's only a handful relative to their overall staff of people there.

And the guy who's the CEO is really just a front man, is sort of a spokesman. He doesn't have any power compared to the Communist Party secretariat that actually governs TikTok's parent company. So a question about the airbrushing for a second, because I'm trying to think of the most, let's just say, obvious closed case examples that you could point to where you might find a contrast between, let's just say, the Taylor Swift being relatively equally surfaced or not surfaced by different platforms.

So you said there are things that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government. Are there examples of any particular things that you could give where there's much less visibility? Because people might be wondering, well, yeah, maybe it's how you torture the data, right? Maybe it's like, yeah, it appears 10% on Instagram and 8% on TikTok, but really, is that conclusive? Are there any, to your mind, a very clear cases?

Yeah, I would point you to the House committee in Congress. It's called the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. And this is a committee that's been chaired by Mike Gallagher, who's a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. And the ranking committee member is Congressman Krishnamurthy, who's a Democrat from Illinois. Very bipartisan group of 20 or so congressmen and women who are in that committee.

They did a hearing in November last year, which is worth looking up, because they actually share some of the data, some of the studies that they did comparing TikTok information, it wasn't like an 8% incremental difference. We're talking from three to five to ten to 50 x, certain content that would appear on other US based platforms.

So pro Chinese military propaganda multiples, anti Israeli, and some of it really nakedly just anti semitic content. Quick question on that, because people might wonder, why would that be a potential CCP government priority? It's perfectly aligned with Beijing's policy. What Beijing did when Putin reinvaded with a full scale invasion in early 2022, Ukraine. China sided itself in terms of its propaganda orientation, in terms of becoming the main lifeline economically for Russia, in terms of becoming the main diplomatic champion for Russia and its war in Ukraine.

Why did China do that? If you read through as colleagues and I have some of the internal Chinese communist party textbooks, they say explicitly that we want to see Europe in chaos, we want Russia to become more aggressive, we want to see America weakened, because those things actually provide an opportunity for the Chinese communist party to advance an authoritarian model for global governance that they feel safer with. That's going to be advantageous to Xi Jinping and his party. So when the attack occurred on the 7 October in southern Israel, Hamas did their worst depraved terrorist attacks.

China immediately oriented its propaganda to blame Israel and to blame the United States, just like it blamed Ukraine and blamed the United States for the war Vladimir Putin undertook. So they take the side of the aggressor and try to spin the aggressor into a victim, because anything that embarrasses, humiliates, discredits the United States is a good thing under that model. And that's why China had okay relations with Israel until October 7. And now they've demonized Israel because they view that as a way to discredit the United States.

So I have to say, there's a part of me that's excited to have you on the show. Number one, because I enjoy having conversations with you. Number two, because you have such deep familiarity with sort of native source material, you can actually look at the actual words used, these sort of stated objectives in Chinese. And I also must admit, I have this admiration for the 4D chess that China has played with respect to things like access to natural resources in South America, building infrastructure in Africa. It's really remarkable how good they seem to be at playing a very, very long game. It's incredibly impressive.

And also, just to give credit where credit is due, I guess. I mean, there are trade offs, of course, with all these things. But I went to a very fancy event where I'm not going to name the country, but a country in Europe, Middle Eastern area, was talking about partnerships with China, and they said it's simply more stable and predictable with the US every four years, we have no idea what's going to happen. We don't know if this, that and the other agreement are going to change.

There's a certain predictability that is advantageous for certain countries that might want to, say, partner with one or the other, and we can come back to that. I just wanted to mention that first. But coming to TikTok, just as a way of studying the micro, to study the macro things, that might be embarrassing. And if we look at, for instance, these may or may not be the right examples, but Tibet, Uyghur, or ethnic minorities in China, are those 10%, 20% less than other platforms, or is it. It's almost zero. It's almost zero on TikTok. Very hard to find.

There was famously one woman who was doing. Wanted to talk about the genocide. According to our Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, there's a genocide taking place in Xinjiang, northwest China, against ethnic minorities, including the traditionally Islamic Uyghur people. She wanted to get word out about that on TikTok, so she recorded an eyelash video where she's showing doing a. How to. How to curl your eyelashes. While she's doing this, she suddenly cuts into talking about the genocide, what's going on there, and eventually, tik tok, even erased that content.

But look, I agree with you. The 4D chess is no joke. It's why I think we need to be a lot more candid about what China's doing that does harm our interests, harms the interests of other democracies. A lot of autocracies in particular, talk about. Well, one thing we like about dealing with the Chinese Communist Party is they don't really bug us about our own human rights problems.

And there's often a consistency in that approach. We're a democracy. It means that we're an x factor, probably more than we should be. There are certain things that we did throughout the Cold War that served us very well, where there was a continuity in our Cold War policy, from Democrats, from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy, and on the thread makes curves, but you can string that thread through the overall policy of containment with some variations and so forth. We'd be well served to remember what Senator Vandenberg said.

Remember who Vandenberg was. He was an isolationist Republican before World War Two who ended up becoming an internationalist, bipartisan partner of Democratic President Harry Truman. And he ended up getting the Marshall plan through the Senate. He's the one who got NATO through the senate. And so Vandenberg had a famous line. He said, politics stops at the water's edge. That is a great motto that we should return to and actually try to.

What does that mean? It means we can have bitter debates internally between left and right, Democrats, Republicans, independents, Trump, Biden. But when it comes to our national interest, there must be a general consensus that prevails, that we are on the same team, and that there needs to be some predictability and continuity in our policies. And, in fact, by and large, even that still continues to some extent.

You have bitter fights over things like, what should our approach be to Iran? But you also have strong alliances. We've got NATO. It's probably the most successful multilateral alliance in world history. And you've seen it strengthened by Putin's attack on Ukraine, President Biden's meeting with the Japanese prime minister. We've got a very strong relationship with Japan, with South Korea, with Australia, the Philippines.

And those things serve us well. Those are shields that protect us. We're going to segue to Taiwan in a second. I want to put a little button on top of TikTok, and then we'll move on in terms of weapons or offensive techniques, or let's just call it overall threats from China against, say, US national interests. Where would you rank TikTok, and what would you like to see policymakers or others do in terms of next actions?

If they're like, hey, this is a lot for me to digest. Just tell me what we should do. Just a quick note before we get back to the interview. This conversation with Matt was recorded prior to the April 23 passage of the Tick tock bill in the Senate. Go to Tim dot blog TikTok to learn more about the bill. Now back to the episode.

Look, I'm telling you this sincerely. As a former Marine deputy national security advisor, I was juggling the most serious national security threats facing the United States. I think tick tock is near the top. Near the top. Okay. Think for a moment how preposterous it is that we're in a situation where the main platform is controlled by a hostile totalitarian government, the main platform by which a whole generation of Americans communicate and acquire their news. Remember TikTok you say, oh, no, it's just cat videos. It's actually a primary source of news for people under the age of 30.

We would never have allowed the Nazis to control all of our newspapers and radio stations in the 1930s. And in fact, we passed laws under FDR Roosevelt that made sure that you could not concentrate media ownership in the hands of any foreign power. So we have simply not updated those rules. Those are longstanding, hundred year old rules almost, that are blessed by the Supreme Court. They are sound.

With our First Amendment rights, why is it that we've allowed the Chinese Communist Party to be the primary arbiter of what content trends and what content gets suppressed? It's insane. And so what would we do about it? I would say that the United States Senate right now, specifically Senator Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, is the most important person in America at this moment because she's the one who's either going to stall and water down the bill. Very good bill. That's already passed the House overwhelmingly.

I think it was 362 votes for this TikTok bill. President Biden has said he'd sign the bill if it came to his desk, and now it's stalled on her desk. Several of her top aides are now full time lobbyists for TikTok. Several of them, okay? So I'm hoping that she does the right thing for the country, that she doesn't say, no, I'm okay with the Nazi party owning all American newspapers and radios, radio stations, which is, this is the equivalent of, and by the way, it's not a ban of TikTok.

This is what TikTok has spread information and disinformation about. All it says is that TikTok cannot be owned by a Chinese entity and subject to Chinese Communist Party control. They simply have to sell it, and then the thing will still happen. The idea is not to suppress or ban the speech that people are contributing to TikTok. It's to make sure that that speech is actually organic and unfettered and is not manipulated and suppressed or amplified according to the dictates of a totalitarian, adversarial government. It's very reasonable. It's certainly not a First Amendment threat.

It's interesting to me, the ACLU, I mean, TikTok owns Washington, DC now, okay? They've thrown millions and millions of dollars at this. They've managed to get on the left, the ACLU, and by the way, look at who the ACLU's donors are. It includes perhaps their largest donor, is one of the biggest American shareholders in TikTok. And so the ACLU says, oh, no, this is a First Amendment issue. B's. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment.

This has to do with ensuring that people really do have free speech on these platforms and that it's not being suppressed or amplified according to a hostile government. And then on the right, you've got Jeff Yass, who is one of the other largest shareholders in TikTok and its parent company, and he's a republican donor. And he is giving huge amounts of money to any Republican that is willing to ensure that TikTok stays under Chinese control. So here we are. It comes down to some big money investors, both left and right. It's an equal opportunity.

It's a bipartisan effort by big stakeholders in TikTok to try to ensure that TikTok remains under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. It doesn't make any sense. And what was the senator's name who you mentioned? Cantwell. Cantwell. And those you said? I guess it was, I think, two or three lobbyists on staff. Well, they're not lobbyists, but they're.

They don't work for her anymore. This is her former deputy chief of staff and one or two other senior aides to her who have left to lobby for TikTok. What are the incentives? I don't really understand lobbying. How does that work, in brief, just why would they do that? They get millions of dollars. I don't know exactly how much they're getting paid, but lobbying firms, their firms get paid millions of dollars to try to block the US senate from allowing this House bill to pass.

It's as simple as that. They have a huge campaign, advertising campaign, disinformation campaign, saying that it's an attempt to block free speech to ban TikTok. No, it's saying TikTok can thrive, but we're not going to let it be edited and controlled and manipulated by a totalitarian dictatorship that doesn't even have the rule of law, much less free speech rights.

Technology, Politics, Global, Chinese Communist Party, Social Media, Data Privacy, Tim Ferriss