This is Speaking of Teens. I’m Ann Coleman

Have you ever heard of ByteDance? They’re the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok. And I know you’re familiar with TikTok – your teenager certainly is, they may even post content on the app. When TikTok was first introduced in the US back around 2018, everyone just thought it was a fun but mainly innocent way to pass some time watching cute videos of silly dances.

But the innocence and charm wore off pretty quickly with many parents. And in the past months TikTok has been all over the news. The CEO testified before Congress in March, he was just interviewed at Ted2023 conference in Vancouver last week. The federal government and many states want to ban the app – Montana just did ban it, although the governor has to sign the bill and then they have to figure out how to enforce it. A few days ago, Bloomberg reported how the app’s algorithm pushes suicide content to depressed and anxious kids. A report from CNN last week also questions the algorithm.

This week on Speaking of Teens – I’m diving into all things TikTok – the app that over 150 million Americans have downloaded to their phones, many of them, kids and teens. Why do many people feel this app is so dangerous for our young people? Why are governments so concerned about it? What about the company’s terms and privacy policy – is it really as bad as people say? And is the Chinese version of TikTok really that different?

In recent years TikTok challenges and other inappropriate and downright dangerous content have caused too many issues for teens to even begin to list - destruction of property, bodily injury, serious illness, hospitalization and even death.

Just last week a 13-year-old boy in Ohio died after attempting the Benadryl Challenge. His friends took a video of him as he downed 6 times the recommended dose of the drug to supposedly induce hallucinations. TikTok responded by replacing search results for “Benadryl Challenge” with a page warning that, “Some substances can be dangerous when used or misused.”

These challenges have caused the FDA and the CDC to issue warnings at various times and in response, TikTok redirects any challenge hashtags to a Challenges Warning Page that advises people to assess challenges wisely and report them to the app.

But it’s not just the challenges that are concerning. There’s content being thrown out at our kids that encourages eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, drugs, and even sexual exploitation.

One 16-year-old boy who took his own life last year had more than 3,000 videos tagged, liked, saved, or bookmarked in the app. His mom was able to get into his account after his death and found her son had searched for things like Batman, basketball, weightlifting, motivational speeches but the algorithm had sent him lots of content on death, suicide, hopelessness, and depression.

So, what’s the deal? Why are kids seeing this stuff on the app? Well, that’s because of TikTok’s algorithm, which is all about curation and not socializing like other familiar apps - Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook. It’s not really a social media app.

So, the app’s internal computational process, or algorithm, collects information about the person on the app (and we’ll talk about that shortly) and then it supposedly analyzes their interests and what they choose to search or watch and like and then serves up more of it. It’s similar to YouTube, Netflix, or Spotify’s algorithm, where they make suggestions based on what you’ve watched or listened to.

This interest-based algorithm is what makes TikTok so valuable for advertisers and so addictive for kids and teens. The reward system in the teenage brain puts them into endless scroll mode – they can’t put it down. It can literally become very similar to an addiction. The New York Post calls it the equivalent of heroin and they’re not far off.

Let’s talk about this algorithm. I had heard before I started doing my research that the algorithm was different for TikTok in China than it is in the US and other places. Well, it’s much more than that; there is no TikTok in China.

ByteDance, the parent company, first launched an app called Douyin (doo-yin) in China in 2016. Douyin is also a short-form video hosting service. But TikTok is an entirely different app that ByteDance launched worldwide outside of China a couple of years later. It’s similar to Douyin only in that it’s a short-form video hosting service.

Could we really TikTok and Douyin to be alike? Our cultures, our politics and worldviews are completely different.

First of all, China is a communist country, so politically, we’re worlds apart. The government there exerts extreme control over citizens – they’re not allowed to speak out against the government and personal monitoring and surveillance is a real thing there.

And, Chinese people are taught to value the group, to function based on the good of the whole, whether it’s your family, your school, your town, or country. But in the US, it’s all about individualism and looking out for oneself.

Their communication style is more indirect – honor and respect are more important to them and in the US, we tend to focus on the need to speak our truth. They give much more respect and deference to authority figures – their society is very hierarchical and more formal than in the US. And they value humility and downplay their achievements, while it’s really just the opposite here.

And critically, China’s flow of information, by way of any type of media, including the internet, is heavily censored. Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook aren’t even available in China. Many Western Newspapers are also blocked online.

So, even the idea that China would have an app available to its citizens that is anywhere near the likes of TikTok is actually laughable. No - they saved that good stuff for our kids.

But the most obvious difference between Douyin and TikTok is in the type of content their young people see – what their algorithm delivers to them – it’s specifically curated “inspiring” content only.

While the rest of the world’s teenagers are seeing mind-numbing idiocy, and content that literally can put their life at risk, the youth of China are being shown videos that promote the sciences, educational videos, information of China’s history, content that promotes unity and good citizenship.

In 2021, Douyin even introduced “teenage mode”, which limits users under 14 to 40 minutes a day and makes it unavailable to them between 10 pm and 6 am. The app also has a built-in delay of 5 seconds between videos to try and curb endless scroll.

China’s regulators actually force tech companies to add safeguards to keep minors from spending so much time on their apps. They even have a law called the Minor Protection Law which forces their internet providers – including social media apps – to “set up corresponding functions such as time management, content restriction and consumption limits for minors.” Good idea – even if they do it in a communistic way.

Now, if I were a member of US Congress or the President, I might look at TikTok as a genius covert op by the Chinese government to gain world domination – just sayin’.

While our kids are destroying property and themselves based on the stuff they see on TikTok, China’s kids are becoming better educated, more patriotic and inspired to do great things. But it’s not only the overall content that’s available to see on TikTok, there are real issues with how the app delivers on search terms – actually, even the search terms themselves are suspect.

Just last week CNN’s Business Reporter, Clare Duffy worked with a 14-year-old to set up and then take over a TikTok account and see what the algorithm served up. She watched and scroll the app for 6 days. The first couple of days she scrolled the For You page about 30 minutes a day (the average teen stays on for about an hour and a half).

At first she got cute little funny videos but about 17 minutes in on the first day, some random video of a girls butt pops up. Then about halfway into day 2 with the hashtag mental health they get this young man playing a guitar in a hospital gown in what looks like a run-down mental hospital – and it’s basically making fun of being mentally ill and killing yourself.

The third day she started searching using search terms mentioned in a complaint filed against ByteDance by the Indiana Attorney General’s office and research from the online advocacy group, Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The Indiana AG’s complaint alleges that TikTok’s autocomplete finishes search terms for kids by suggesting alternative searches. For example, the complaint specifically states that no results will come up if a kid types in Shrooms (which is how you’d spell hallucinogenic mushrooms). But, if you just type “shr” in the search bar, the autocomplete finishes the word for you and spells shroomz with a Z, which gives you thousands upon thousands of search results directly related to hallucinogenic mushrooms. When asked to comment, TikTok of course said it wouldn’t comment on pending litigation, but that user safety is a “top priority”.

The reporter next tried another search term mentioned - she typed ki (like they were looking for “kiss”) and autocomplete gave her “kintiktok”, which once tapped gave them all sorts of sexual content. The search results also came up with all sorts of stuff behind the word kintiktok like kintiktok for her, kintiktok daddys girl, kintiktok scenario rough, kintiktok men, kintiktok rope bed.

In case you don’t know what kintiktok means, the word kin is used to show love and admiration in the world of TikTok.

Then the reporter used the search terms suggested by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and she was shown all sorts of videos related to eating disorders and self-harm. These videos are especially dangerous for teens – they make them feel this behavior is normal and it can even instigate them to take on that behavior.

Something else the reporter did was searching in TikTok’s “restricted mode” which is supposed to limit exposure to content maybe a kid shouldn’t see. But she found no difference at all using the same search terms, she saw mostly the same videos. So, restricted mode did basically nothing to actually restrict content.

She did, however, get one of TikTok’s new warning pages about eating disorders, which suggested support resources, if she had an issue. Luckily CCN’s reporting did sort of force TikTok to update a couple of eating disorder hashtags so they now do show that warning page.

One other protection TikTok has put in place is the Family Pairing mode but it’s not without problems either. Once you put your phone in Family Pairing with your kid, they see a constant reminder that mom is watching, and they can’t see what they want to see – plus, they can actually just turn it off in their app!

So, no doubt there are issues with TikTok’s search function, search terms, algorithm as well as the features they’ve put in place to supposedly protect kids.

For many in congress (both democrats and republicans) there’s simply nothing TikTok can do or say that will make them feel any better about allowing the app to exist in the US. The most vocal critics, including the President and his administration, see the app as not only a danger to teens, but to the country as a whole. They want it sold to a US company or banned altogether.

On March 23^rd TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified before Congress for 5 hours, answering questions about the company’s part in US kids’ deteriorating mental health and how much influence the Chinese Communist Party has over the parent company, ByteDance.

Those causing the biggest ruckus are not only upset about the impact TikTok has on the youth in America, but they also claim that the company is basically just a vehicle for the Chinese government (the Chinese Communist Party) to conduct covert operations again the US.

The argument is that the app, once installed on our phone, and via TikTok’s terms and privacy policy, we give ByteDance free rein to all sorts of personal data, which can then be transferred to the Chinese government. They’re also concerned about how the Chinese government might be able to push information to our phones that would somehow benefit them – maybe election tampering for example.  China passed a law in 2017 requiring private companies to hand over their data about customers to their Communist government, upon request. So, this is what most of the fuss is all about.

And actually, the hackers group Anonymous feels the same way. They point out how much more data TikTok collects on us than other apps and they flat out call the app spyware. Other investigative journalists and cybersecurity experts have also chimed in to say that with the massive amount of data TikTok pulls from our phones, it really can put our country at risk. When you’re able to collect the type of data they collect from 150 million phones all across the country, you can make some pretty accurate inferences about an entire population.

TikTok or its parent company, ByteDance, has settled at least $92 million in lawsuits over the data it’s collected and has been fined for illegally collecting data on minors (and now, of course, they have a kids-only mode).

This data collection and storage is a pretty big deal even without the Chinese government aspect. Right before Christmas 2022, Forbes broke a story stating that an internal investigation by ByteDance, found that company employees had tracked several different journalists who were writing stories about the company. These employees had gotten ahold of the journalists IP addresses and other personal data collected by the app, to try and figure out if those journalists had been in the same locations as the employees.

But, as an article in the New York Times points out, there’s no evidence to support the claim that the Chinese government is spying on US citizens (despite the amount of data TikTok collects). Which is, in fact, true. There has been no hard evidence at all that the Chinese government has ever requested TikTok’s data or ever will.

However, the possibility that our data will end up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party is not an exaggeration because their own law allows it. And the fact is, TikTok does collect more data on us that other apps, which is very clear when you read their own terms and conditions and privacy policy.

So, whether you’re naturally suspicious of their government or not, the facts are straight up. But the problem is none of us ever read the terms and conditions and privacy policies for apps we download to our phone! As an attorney, you’d think maybe I would – but I don’t. It’s just the box we have to tap to download the app we already know we want.

I’ll tell you – I downloaded TikTok to my phone maybe a year ago and deleted it in under 24 hours. First, I knew I’d spend too much time on it and second, my 22-year-old son told me the company took too much of my data. I was suspect but it turns out, he was right. I pulled both the Terms and conditions and the privacy policy and read both documents – all 32 pages. And I would say, for the most part, they read just like any other app’s I’ve actually written these documents before myself and I compared Meta’s privacy policy (Facebook and Instagram) in some sections just to see the differences.

The fact that they collect information like names, email, phone number, images and videos shared, age, password – things like that – shouldn’t come as a surprise – many apps do that. We should really read this stuff more often.

TikTok collects the messages we send through their apps just like others do, they collect credit card numbers just like others do, social network contacts, browser search history, including the content you view in the Platform. None of that seems all that odd.

Of course, they collect what we watch in the app. But then there’s this - Tik Tok goes a bit further here – they say they collect “app and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices” (could that be an Alexa maybe, other smart speakers? I’m not sure.)

Anyway, Meta just says they collect “device signals, IP, other identifiers to tell your device from others.” Big difference.

Again, TikTok says they automatically collect “app and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices”

They go on to say, “We automatically assign you a device ID and user ID. Where you log-in from multiple devices, we will be able to use information such as your device ID and user ID to identify your activity across devices. (okay – so far, I get it) We may also associate you with information collected from devices other than those you use to log-in to the Platform.” So, I believe they’re saying if you’ve ever logged in to TikTok from your laptop but then you use it mostly on your phone – when you’re on your phone they can still access your laptop – I wouldn’t swear to it though.

But this next piece of the Privacy Policy is, I believe what some of Congress was referring to when it emphasized all the many data points the company collects – listen to this:

“We may collect information about the videos, images and audio that are a part of your User Content, such as identifying the objects and scenery that appear, the existence and location within an image of face and body features and attributes, the nature of the audio, and the text of the words spoken in your User Content. We may collect this information to enable special video effects, for content moderation, for demographic classification,

for content and ad recommendations, and for other non-personally-identifying operations. We may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under U.S. laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints, from your User Content. Where required by law, we will seek any required permissions from you prior to any such collection.”

When questioned about this kind of data, the CEO said they do not “collect body, face or voice data to identify our users” He mentioned filters that need to know where your eyes are so they can slap sunglasses on there and that kind of thing. And that seems perfectly reasonable to me, but the truth is, we simply don’t know.

And I’m going tell you a couple of other things about it and then I’ll let you take a look yourself:

“We are not responsible for the privacy practices of our service providers and business partners, and the information practices of these service providers and business partners are not covered by this Privacy Policy.”

Just by comparison, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) says in their Privacy Policy:

“We don't sell any of your information to anyone, and we never will. We also require Partners and third parties to follow rules about how they can and cannot use and disclose the information we provide.” Big difference.

And another thing that bothers some democrats and republicans in Congress is it says:

“As a global company, the Platform is supported by certain entities within our corporate group, which are given limited remote access to Information We Collect as necessary to enable them to provide certain important functions.”

According to the CEO the data from US citizens is in the process of being moved from servers at a data center in Virginia to a supposedly more secure location in Texas with Oracle. But what this piece of the privacy policy states is that there are people who have access to that data in other areas of the world – which makes total sense when employees are in other parts of the world. That’s why I don’t understand how having US data on a US-based cloud server does anything to protect that data – it’s in the cloud. It can be accessed from anywhere – that’s the point of the cloud. Am I missing something here?

Okay, so back to the CEO’s testimony before Congress, he was a little evasive with Congress when it came to the Chinese government having access to the data – because he can’t guarantee they won’t – it’s written in their law.

 

Chew answered lots of questions from the lawmakers back on Capital Hill in March and told Congress the company has 3 priorities: “safety, particularly for teenagers”, to “firewall US data from unwanted foreign access” and he said that “TikTok will remain a place for free expression and will not be manipulated by ANY government” (referring at least to both the Chinese and US governments).

In the end, he didn’t help his cause. And many in the government are concerned, not just about the data Tte Chinese government can steal but about the information they can push out to all our phones by taking control of TikTok – some fear propaganda and control of the news, messing with elections.

When Chew, the CEO, was interviewed by Ted2023, last week and asked about whether he could say that TikTok would not allow the Chinese government to interfere in US elections, he said, “We are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening." "And I’m very confident that with an unprecedented amount of transparency that we’re giving on the platform, we can reduce this risk to as close to zero as possible." Not 100% convincing – and again, it’s clear the Chinese government can do what they want.

The bottom line is, some lawmakers and US national security officials feel TikTok’s US operations pose a national security risk. The federal government’s already banned the app on government cell phones and a few states have done the same thing. Actually, so have a few other countries, including Australia, Canada, The UK, Estonia and New Zealand and others.

A bipartisan bill has been introduced in the US Congress that would either force TikTok to sell it’s US operations to an American company under threat that it would be banned in the US altogether. The bill has both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition.

And there are a lot of people upset at the thought of banning TikTok in the US. There are plenty of people who make their living on social media and there are others that would be lost without zoning out on TikTok a couple of hours a day.

Is a nationwide ban even a real possibility? Trump attempted to use an executive order to ban TikTok when he was in office and a federal court threw it out within months finding that he had overstepped his authority.

President Biden’s administration has demanded (not ordered) that ByteDance sell its US operations to a US company under threat of banning the app.

And at this point, many experts say TikTok’s price tag would be somewhere in the range of Elon Musk money and he already owns a social media company. They also say that the other biggies like Microsoft, Google, Meta will not likely touch it for fear of antitrust concerns (owning too many media companies basically). Oracle tried to buy it back when Trump was forcing the issue, but the deal fell through.

So, if restructuring or selling doesn’t work out, will Congress actually pass a bill to make a nationwide ban a real possibility?

Well, there are a few issues with this. First, there are millions and millions of US citizens, including lawmakers, who don’t want their TikTok taken away. That causes a bit of a political issue for both sides of the isle who support the bill. There have already been protests on Capital Hill and TikTok has had lobbyists on the issue since Trump had them in his sights.

After Chew’s testimony last month literally thousands of videos made their way onto the app with lots of younger people making fun of some of the most ridiculous points in the hearing and some of the asinine questions, that were asked - like the one from the Gentleman from Georgia that asked Chew “Can you tell me right now, can you say with 100% certainty that TikTok does not use the phone’s camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the algorithm? Can you tell me that?” (I can use that accent, I’m from the South).

Congress clearly needs to learn a bit more about technology before asking questions.

If it’s our data that the government is so worried about the Chinese getting their hands on, Glenn Gerstell who served as general counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020 says the Chinese government could easily just buy limitless amounts of data legally from data brokers in the US, who buy it from US companies. But actually, I’m not so sure any other tech company collects the same information on us that TikTok does.

But maybe it’s not only the Chinese government they should be worried about.  Just last Friday, Forbes reported other security issues at their current Virginia Data Centers. The reporter on this story is Emily Baker-White, one of the journalists that ByteDance is under investigation for surveilling. She interviewed current and former employees and reviewed stacks of documents, photos and videos clearly indicating a major security problem. Things like boxes of hard drives just randomly sitting around, unmarked flash drives plugged into servers, unescorted visitors roaming around.

Notably, she also found that one of the suppliers of the data center’s servers is a company that according to the Pentagon is controlled by the Chinese military and has been added to a sanctions list by the Commerce Department. Additionally, (quote) “as recently as last week, server work orders were sent to data center technicians by Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., a ByteDance subsidiary partially owned by the Chinese government, which TikTok has repeatedly insisted has no control over its operations.”

Pretty damning information.

But let’s just say that despite the political pressure from millions of citizens, the bill still gets enough votes to pass, then there’s the enormous hurdle regarding the constitutional issue of free speech. And it’s a pretty big hurdle.

Last month at least 16 public interest groups including the ACLU and the Authors Guild, issued a letter to Congress warning that a ban on TikTok would not be wise as it would impair free speech and set a troubling precedent.

The free speech argument isn’t that TikTok has the right of free speech but the millions of Americans who use the app have that right and to ban the app would be treading on that right.

The basic constitutional matter is that the government can’t regulate speech just because of the message, the ideas, the subject matter or content. The only way the government can regulate content is it must show there is a compelling governmental interest to do so and that the regulation of that content has been applied in the least restrictive way possible. For the most part, the government can’t pass the test in a court of law and in this case, a wholesale ban on the app in the US, would probably be considered way over-broad.

But the government is probably going to argue that it’s not even talking about speech here – they’re talking about regulating commerce – the business of TikTok in the US. That argument could hold some merit but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens in Congress and then what happens in the court system. Either way, no one’s shutting down TikTok in the US anytime soon.

But even if it’s not banned, should you have it on your phone? Should your kid?

The answer to that question depends on so much. How much do you trust TikTok with all that information they have on you? Will the Chinese government use their 2017 law to force the company to hand over our data? Or, if the government wants our data will they just go find a legitimate way to buy most of it?

Do you trust the app’s algorithm to deliver only proper content to your kid’s phone? Do you trust your kid not to search for things they shouldn’t search for? Is it any different from having the entire internet at their beck and call? These questions seem so unfair for today’s parents. The decisions we have to make - our parents have no idea. And I suppose our kids will have even more critical issues to deal with.

But the best thing we can do for our kids is to work hard on our relationship with them. To make sure they feel comfortable and safe talking to us about the things they see online, what they’re concerned about, what they’re feeling.

And to be that parent, we have to let the positive interactions outweigh the negative. We have to listen to them without judging or scolding, lecturing, or fixing. We have to accept them for the individual they are, guide them rather than boss them around, have faith in them and treat them with respect, appreciate their input and perspective.

If we can get that right, TikTok moves down the list of things to worry about.

Thanks so much for being here with me today – it means a lot. And if you enjoyed the episode, please consider sharing it with someone or many someones.

Speaking of Teens is sponsored by neurogility.com, produced and edited by Steve Coleman, researched, and written by Ann Coleman. I so enjoy doing this show, if you have any ideas or suggestions please reach out to me at acoleman@neurogility.com.

I’ll see you back here next week. Go write your teen a sweet note and put it on their pillow.