Don't think for one second that TikTok getting banned is for our safety.

Today, the House passed a bill that unanimously bans TikTok. It wasn't even a close vote, so don't even get me started on how easy it is for them to get something done when they all come together.

'They use the same after they tried to ban to get exposure, and let Gen-Z and everybody else know how to vote for them.

I will move to another country. I'm never deleting this app.

That was the sound of TikTok creators responding to a bill that passed the US House of Representatives last week. The legislation would restrict the app if its Chinese owner doesn't sell the app to a company approved by the US government. President Joe Biden has said he's willing to support the bill if it's passed by Congress. Now, you may be wondering this is a politics show. Why on earth are we talking about TikTok? Well, TikTok creators aren't the only ones weighing in on this. Democratic strategists are expressing concern that Joe Biden's support of a potential ban could spell trouble for his efforts to energize voters under the age of 30. Is it possible that TikTok is quickly becoming an election year issue, and could it actually make a difference in 2024? Joining me now to answer these questions and more is Emily Baker White. Emily is a San Francisco based technology reporter for Forbes. She's currently writing a book all about the app called 'Time Bomb: How TikTok Captured the West's Culture, Commerce, and Attention.' Emily, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

So let's talk about the bill that the United States House of Representatives passed last week. Can you give our listeners a sense of what exactly this legislation proposes to accomplish?

Yeah. So some people are calling this a ban bill. Some people are calling it a divestment bill. What this bill would require is that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, which is the Chinese company, would have to sell its U.S. TikTok operations to another company within 180 days, or else the US government would take measures to ban TikTok in the United States and make sure that it was removed from the app stores.

Is there any prescription in the legislation for the kind of company ByteDance would have to sell TikTok's US operation to?

Yeah, so it wouldn't necessarily have to be a U.S. company, but it would have to be a company that the U.S. government and the president was satisfied would ameliorate the national security risk at play by it being owned by a Chinese company. So it probably couldn't sell to another Chinese company, probably couldn't sell to a Russian company or North Korean company if they wanted to sell to a French company, might be okay.

So this sounds like a pretty big dramatic step to me that the US government, or one branch of it at the moment, or one half of one branch of it at the moment, I guess, is sort of getting directly involved in the business of a private company here. But as you alluded to, it seems the impetus behind this is a concern about a real national security risk that the current construct of ownership presents to the United States. How do you understand how at least members supportive of this bill believe that risk to exist?

'Yeah. So this is a big escalation, but it's also sort of a long time coming. And it's something that people in Washington have been talking about for a long time. There are two related primary concerns, where people say there is a national security risk posed by TikTok being owned by ByteDance, which is a Chinese company. And the first of those two risks has to do with the information that TikTok collects about users. It collects a whole bunch of information. Some of that information is it's public. It's the videos that people post, right? And anyone can see that. But it also collects private information about people, their location, their passwords, things about their Wi-Fi networks, like all kinds of private information. And the fear is that being a Chinese company, ByteDance, can be forced by the Chinese government to turn over data that it has access to about Americans. And if the Chinese government orders ByteDance to turn out of that information, ByteDance is going to have to give them what they've got. And so if ByteDance has information of sensitive information about United States citizens, people in the military, for example, or Chinese dissidents or other people that the Chinese government is particularly interested in, they could be forced to turn that over to the Chinese government. The second concern, that first concern is the sort of data collection. The second concern has to do with what information is is shown to us on the TikTok app. And of course, TikTok is a recommendations based app. So it's not like you go and you search a term and you get results. It's just a feed of stuff coming at you, a feed.

Sorry to interrupt you, but a feed that I assume based on some algorithm is constantly being fine tuned to your interests, correct?

And so I don't know what's at the top of your TikTok feed, just like you don't know, what's at the top of my TikTok feed. And that's that's really important, because the fear is that the Chinese government could order ByteDance or lean on ByteDance to subtly influence the messages that we see in the TikTok app. And because it's all so personalized, we wouldn't necessarily know if that was happening. And so that is the second half of the national security fear is that because these feeds are all personalized and because the company has so much discretion over what to show us, they could be influencing our stream of information consumption in ways that we don't even fully understand.

And for a nation state that our intelligence community has said in the past and believes has an interest, perhaps in meddling in our elections, you could imagine instantly the kind of thing that that kind of information distribution preferences set by a competitor nation state could indeed influence, perhaps, how Americans are making political decisions.

Yeah, absolutely. And the Chinese government runs influence operations targeted at Americans. We know this. They've done it on other platforms. They've done it with ads on Twitter and Facebook. They've done it for years. And so we know that the Chinese government does have an interest in influencing our. Uncertain things, often things that have to do with the Chinese government, right. They're trying to make themselves look better in Americans eyes, and they're trying to make our government look worse to us in our eyes. And so we know they have a history of doing this.

What was TikTok's response to the bill that passed through the House of Representatives last week? And I should know with bipartisan support and a pretty substantial majority.

Yeah, so this is really funny. TikTok encouraged all of its users in a fairly aggressive way to call their lawmakers and oppose any ban that would force divestment and potentially ban the app. And so when people opened their TikTok app, they saw a message that said TikTok is at risk of being banned. Call your lawmakers to oppose a ban. And many, many, many people did, some saying that they couldn't find a way to get back to their normal TikTok feed without calling. It sounds like the message was pretty hard to dismiss, hard to get around. But many people called their legislators, and that was alarming to the legislators because the the fear is that TikTok could be used as an engine of sort of political division, and the fact that TikTok could so effectively mobilize so many people to call their lawmakers and try to influence policy. Some of those lawmakers said, this just proves our point. This proves our point that this app can change people's opinions about how laws should be made in this country and can drive them to activism.

So the bill passes the House, and as anyone listening to this podcast knows, it now heads to the Senate. Does the political landscape in the Senate seem similar in that there's some big, broad, bipartisan majority eager to take on ByteDance and TikTok here? Or no, it's a little more complex.

They might get to a majority, but this is certainly not moving as quickly and in the Senate as it is in the House. And so there are a number of senators who have said we support this. We think this is important. We want to do this, but they also want to do it their own way. And so there are a lot of negotiations happening on the Senate side right now. And people are trying to think, okay, how would we want to change this bill? What do we think is the optimal way to address this concern, and how would we want to modify the House bill?

Now, can you explain to our listeners, Emily, if TikTok is just a land of young people, you know, the kids are on TikTok or what can you give a sense of, like, how much of American culture do you think TikTok impacts? Reaches is immersed in the numbers on how many people actually have this on their phones, and do we have demographic information?

Yeah. So according to the company, 170 million Americans have TikTok. And I believe the average TikTok user is in their 30s. So this is not just singing and dancing teens anymore. It started out that way. But TikTok has reached the sort of ubiquity of a of a meta or a Google, right? It is an everything app. Now you can find any niche subculture you want on there. There are simply so many people that there are all sorts of discussions about all sorts of things taking place, and it has a huge effect on our culture.

And as somebody who reports on TikTok, are you on TikTok?

Well, it's kind of a long story, but TikTok, tried to surveil me in order to figure out who my sources were when I was reporting on the company. And after that, I removed TikTok from my personal phone. I have used burner phones to access TikTok to report on TikTok.

Wow. Having been surveilled by TikTok, it seems that perhaps you might have keen understanding to some of the national security threats that the members of Congress speak to.

Yeah, I mean, I think the truth is, if the Chinese government really, really wants my IP address, there are other ways they can get it right now. And I know that there are some lawmakers who are worried about that, too, trying to restrict data brokers selling our information to foreign adversaries. But, yeah, TikTok knows where I live.

'We'll be right back with more in just a moment from Forbes technology reporter Emily Baker White. Stay with us. Welcome back. We're here with Forbes technology reporter Emily Baker-White, who's telling us all about TikTok. And I want to delve into the politics of this. As, you know, the kind of legislation that passed similar legislation had been previously introduced. And Donald Trump was actually supportive of it when he was president of the United States. He then flipped on it and was suggesting maybe that this didn't need to take place. What what do you make of Donald Trump's pronouncements around this TikTok bill that did indeed pass the House?

So not only was Donald Trump supportive of previous legislative attempts, Donald Trump trying to ban TikTok by executive order when he was president and, he came out swinging saying, this is an urgent national security threat. We have to deal with it right now. And so we are going to ban TikTok under my executive authority. And he issued a set of executive orders to try and do that. Now, those executive orders did not stand up in court. And then Donald Trump lost the election. And Joe Biden came to power and took a different strategy. But the fact that Donald Trump has completely won a lead on this and now says, oh, maybe we should keep it around, because a lot of people like it certainly does make you question the. Sincerity and thoughtfulness of his additional national security concerns.

You said Joe Biden came to office and pursued a different strategy. How would you characterize the Biden administration strategy around this?

Yeah. So, after the Biden administration came to power, they they negotiated with TikTok for a long time, an interagency panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, also known as CPS, negotiated with TikTok to try to come to, national security agreement that TikTok would sign, that ByteDance would sign. And that agreement would have allowed ByteDance to continue to own TikTok. But it would have placed a bunch of national security restrictions on TikTok. The government would have been able to come in and examine their records at any time. The government would it even have, like, veto power over things like their content moderation policy changes? This would have been a real escalation of government power over TikTok. This isn't something we've seen with, meta, a Google Snap, but at the end of the day, they negotiated this for a long time and they couldn't come to a resolution. And the Biden administration was still worried that even this agreement, which which was really strong, would not be sufficient to address their concerns about Bytedance's owning TikTok. And so, about ten months ago, Sophia said to TikTok and ByteDance, they said, we're not going to we can't do it, you guys, by chance, you're going to have to divest. And after that, there was sort of a lull in the conversation, and a lot of people were wondering, okay, you said this. Are you going to make us do it? Like what happens now? And the fact that we're seeing this legislation now, it seems like it, it is related to to that determination by the Biden administration that they really didn't see another way.

Although driven by Republicans in the House, not necessarily the Biden administration allies here. This is one where Partizan politics may not play exactly as people expect. But President Biden has said if a bill gets to his desk, he would sign it. Now he's saying that at precisely the same time his campaign is employing, the utilization of TikTok to try and reach younger voters they desperately need in his coalition in his reelection year. That is an inherent tension.

This is like one of the most scrambled political situations that I think we have seen this cycle. It's truly bizarre. The Biden administration was working with House Republicans to get this bill, to get this bill drafted and passed. You've got Donald Trump coming out with a 180. I think that's making some Republican lawmakers go, oh, I was going to support this. But now I don't know because Donald Trump says otherwise. So it's unclear how hard he's going to lean on his coalition to vote no. It's unclear how hard the Biden administration is going to lean on their coalition to vote. Yes. And yeah, this is a thing that before, a month or two ago was very much Republican led. It was not exclusively Republican led. You did have leaders in the Senate like Mark Warner in the House, like Raja Krishnamoorthi, who, like, were out there on the dem side saying, we need to do this, but we are really seeing unusual bedfellows here.

And I know you said that. In TikTok's response, they urged users to call their legislators. But have you seen more organic response from the user base of TikTok to what is going on?

Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, a lot of the most, most popular people on TikTok do not want TikTok to be banned at all. There's really been outcry on the app from the app's most popular influencers, creators, right, who say, don't take TikTok away. This is super important to us, and I think there are a lot of...

But wait one second. I'm sorry to interrupt you. One sec, though, but divestiture from ByteDance is not necessarily banning TikTok.

No, I'm super glad you asked that because, that's right. Again, so TikTok and ByteDance themselves are describing this as a ban bill, not a divestiture bill, which is a little bit revealing because it suggests that TikTok and ByteDance don't seriously think divestiture is an option. And there are a few reasons why they might not think it's an option. First of all, TikTok is really expensive and there aren't that many potential buyers for it. And so and some of the people who or the companies who might be able to buy it don't want to buy it for antitrust reasons. So there's that. But perhaps more importantly, the Chinese government can block a sale of the TikTok algorithm. And we know this because last time President Donald Trump pursued a ban, there were a lot of advance sale conversations. Oracle was interested in buying, Microsoft was interested in buying. Right. And they got very close to a deal. But the Chinese government at the 11th hour changed their export regulations for certain sensitive categories of international sales. And one of those categories was recommendations algorithms. And nobody thought that was an accident. And so there's a question of even ByteDance found a willing buyer who was able to get together that much money. And even if by chance wanted to sell, would the Chinese government let them? We don't know.

And can you speak to how? Influential youth think TikTok as an app is in American politics. How you see it playing out with it. Sometimes I think in these tech spaces, users can reject politics and not be all that interested in other. Obviously, for those that are politically engaged, they get a ton of their political information from these apps. And I'm just wondering how you have observed in your reporting how campaigns utilize it. Is it a really successful tool for them? Do you see it as a motivator for voters to make choices? How do you assess TikTok in the political space?

It is clearly a motivator for a lot of voters to make choices. So a study from Pew in late 2023 said that 43% of TikTok users get news from TikTok that's still less than half, right? So that does more than half the people on TikTok or on TikTok to get other fixed entertainment, whatever. But still, that is millions and millions of people. If we if we take TikTok with the word that there are 170 million users in the United States, if 43% of 170 million people are getting news from their app, that is a lot of people. That is a lot of influence. And of course, news doesn't equal political news, but we have to look at at least tens of millions of people who are getting political information on TikTok. And that's just a huge responsibility. And this is something we see with Facebook and Google, too. But we cannot overstate the importance of these apps in shaping discourse and shaping civic discourse in the US.

And we talked about this last week on this podcast. But is misinformation and disinformation on the app as big of a problem as it is in other places?

Yeah, I think it's it's not fundamentally different. Right? TikTok has had a lot of turnover in their staff, and that can make it difficult to fight complex issues like misinformation and disinformation. Now they're trying just the same way that Google and Facebook are trying, but it can really feel like a losing game of whack a mole. And even defining mis and disinformation is really tough. You got a lot of poorly informed people who think they're spreading the truth, but they're not right. And and as with all of these apps that prioritize engagement, right, they prioritize keeping people coming back for more, keeping people on the app. We know that prioritizing engagement also tends to feed us more outrage bait, more content that will get us riled up. And that's not necessarily helpful in a political climate.

'That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing, and we want to hear from you. Is there a question you'd like answered about this election cycle? Is there a guest you really want to hear from? Give us a call at (301) 842-8338, or send us an email at CNN Political Briefing at gmail.com. And you might just be featured on a future episode of the podcast. So don't forget to tell us your name, where you're from, how we can reach you, and if you give us permission to use the recording on the podcast. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Grace Walker. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Licktieg is executive producer of CNN audio. Support from Alex Manesseri, Robert Mathers, John Dionora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. And special thanks to Katie Hinman. We'll be back with a new episode on Friday, March 29th. Thanks so much for listening.