TikTok Is the Superweapon in China’s Cultural Warfare - Bloomberg

TikTok Is the Superweapon in China’s Cultural Warfare - Bloomberg

The U.S. won the Cold War by
exporting its values, and China has a similar plan for Cold War II.

By Niall Ferguson

August 9, 2020, 1:00 PM GMT+1

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He
was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and
Oxford. He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New
York-based advisory firm.

I spent half an hour trying to make sense of the endless
feed of video snippets of ordinary people doing daft things with their dogs or
in their kitchens or in the gym. I figured out the viral memes of the moment:
animals dancing to Tono Rosario’s “Kulikitaka,” the suspenseful unveiling of
hunks or hounds to the repeated words, “Please don’t be ugly.” I asked my
eight-year-old son what I should look out for. He recommended the dancing
ferret. I never found it.

Thirty minutes of TikTok left me with just one burning
question: How can this thing be a threat to U.S. national security?

And then I had the epiphany. TikTok is not just China’s revenge for the century of humiliation
between the Opium Wars and Mao’s revolution. It is the opium — a digital fentanyl, to get our kids
stoked for the coming Chinese imperium.

First, the back story — which you’ll need if you, like me,
never got hooked on Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, and still use the
Internet like a very fast version of your university library, and begin emails
with “Dear …”

The year is 2012, and
Zhang Yiming, a Chinese tech entrepreneur who briefly worked at Microsoft,
founds ByteDance Ltd. as a
smartphone-focused content provider. His AI-powered news aggregator Toutiao is
a hit. In November 2017, he pays $1 billion for a lip-synching app called
Musical.ly, which already has a growing user community that tilts young (12 to 24) and female and
is established in the U.S. Zhang then merges Musical.ly with his own
short-video app TikTok, known in China as Douyin.

The thing spreads faster than Covid-19: TikTok now has
800 million monthly active users
around the globe. And it’s far more contagious: Just under half of U.S. teenage
internet users have used TikTok. If it were a pathogen, it would be the Black
Death. But it’s an app, so ByteDance is now worth $100 billion.

So what’s the secret of TikTok’s success? The best answers I’ve seen come from Ben
Thompson, whose Stratechery newsletter
has become essential reading on all the things tech. First, Thompson wrote
last month, the history of analog media already told us that “humans
like pictures more than text, and moving pictures most of all.”
Second, TikTok’s video creation tools are really “accessible and inspiring for
nonprofessional videographers.” Translation: Idiots can use them.

Third, unlike Facebook, TikTok is not a social
network. It’s an AI-based algorithmic
feed that uses all the data it can get about each user to personalize content. “By expanding the
library of available video from those made by your network to any video made by
anyone on the service,” Thompson argues, “Douyin/TikTok leverages the sheer
scale of user-generated content … and relies on its algorithms to ensure that
users are only seeing the cream of the crop.”

In other words, “think of TikTok as being a mobile-first
YouTube,” not Facebook with cool video. It’s “an entertainment entity
predicated on internet assumptions about
abundance, not Hollywood assumptions about scarcity.”

So what’s not to like?
The answer would seem to be quite a lot.

In February, TikTok was fined $5.7 million by the Federal
Trade Commission over allegations that it illegally collected personal
information from children under the age of 13. In April, the app was
temporarily banned in India by the High Court in Madras for carrying child
pornographic content and failing to prevent cyberbullying. (The ban
was swiftly reversed.)

But Zhang’s real headache was elsewhere. Last November, the
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (known as CFIUS) began a probe into ByteDance’s
acquisition of Musical.ly on the ground that it potentially affected U.S.
national security. Seriously? A teenage video app is a threat to the most
powerful nation-state on the planet? Well, these days CFIUS regards just about
any Chinese investment as a threat — in 2010, it forced the Chinese gaming
firm Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. to sell the gay dating app Grindr.

I’ve written before in this space about Cold War II. Well,
TikTok has become the Sino-American conflict’s latest casualty.

Unlike everything else in America, including Covid-19, Cold
War II is bipartisan. Last October, the Senate minority leader, Democrat Chuck
Schumer, and Republican Senator Tom Cotton jointly called for a
national-security investigation into ByteDance. The issue, they said, is that
as a Chinese entity, ByteDance is subject to China's cybersecurity rules,
which stipulate that it has to share data with the Chinese government.
TikTok admits as much in its privacy policy: “We may share your information
with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group.”

Zhang Yiming is a great entrepreneur. Though he is
personally no authoritarian, he is also a political conformist. ByteDance’s first app, Neihan Duanzi
(“inside jokes”), was shut down in 2018 by the National Radio and
Television Administration. Zhang had to apologize that its content had been “incommensurate
with socialist core values.” He solemnly promised that ByteDance would
henceforth “further deepen cooperation”
with the Chinese Communist Party.

Until last month, Zhang’s game plan was voluntary separation
of ByteDance from China. Like other Chinese tech giants, ByteDance is a “variable interest entity” incorporated
in the Cayman Islands, positioning it for an offshore initial public offering
in Hong Kong or New York. ByteDance claims that all American data from
TikTok are stored in U.S. data centers and backed up in Singapore. The
appointment in May of Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive, as TikTok’s new
chief executive and ByteDance’s chief operating officer, was the clearest
signal yet of where Zhang was headed.

Then, President Donald Trump blew Zhang’s game plan apart.

On June 31, he threatened to ban TikTok in the U.S. On Monday,
when Microsoft appeared set to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations, Trump made the
characteristically unorthodox and probably illegal suggestion that the U.S.
government should get some kind of arrangement fee. “It’s a little bit like the
landlord-tenant,” explained the former real-estate developer from Queens.
“Without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So they pay what is called ‘key
money’ or they pay something.”

Then on Friday, he issued an executive order banning TikTok
in the U.S. in 45 days unless it is sold to a non-Chinese entity. (Tencent
Holdings Ltd’s even more popular messaging app WeChat will also be banned.)

Trump is wrong to ask
for a piece of the action. But he’s right that TikTok needs more than an
American chief executive to continue operating in the U.S. Vacuous though
its content may seem, TikTok poses three distinct
threats.

The first is a good threat: the one it poses to over-mighty,
under-regulated Facebook Inc., which
the Department of Justice should never have allowed to acquire Instagram and
WhatsApp. TikTok has eaten Facebook’s lunch as a platform for video,
prompting Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg to try to rip it off with Reels —
launched on Wednesday — in the same way that Instagram’s Stories ripped off
Snapchat.

Whatever else happens, Reels must not succeed. Nor
should Facebook become the owner of TikTok. Facebook’s enormous and malignant
influence in the American public sphere is a threat not to national security
but to American democracy itself. Its efforts to regulate itself since 2016
have largely been a sham.

The second threat TikTok poses is to children. Like Facebook, like YouTube, like Twitter, TikTok is optimized for user engagement, algorithmically
steering users to content that will hook them via its “For You” page. In
essence, the AI learns what you like and then gives you more of it. And more.
Future historians will marvel that we didn’t give our kids crack cocaine,
but did give them TikTok.

Like crack, TikTok is dangerous. For example, TikTok’s
users, who are still mostly young and female, love lip-sync videos. These have
become a magnet for pedophiles, who
can use the app to send girls sexually explicit messages and even remix videos
and dance along with them using a feature called Duet. Cases of sexual
harassment of minors are easy to find: In February, a 35-year-old Los
Angeles man was arrested on suspicion of initiating “sexual and vulgar”
conversations with at least 21 girls, some as young as nine.

TikTok’s third threat is
geopolitical. For Ben Thompson, who is based in Taiwan, the past year has
been revelatory. Having previously played down the political and ideological
motivations of the Chinese government, he has now come out as New Cold Warrior.
China’s vision of the role of technology is fundamentally different from
the West’s, he argues, and it fully
intends to export its anti-liberal vision to the rest of the world.

“If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only
within its borders but within ours,” he asks, “it is in liberalism’s interest
to cut off a vector that has taken
root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans
exactly what they want.”

If you need an update on how the Communist Party is using AI
to build a surveillance state that makes Orwell’s Big Brother seem primeval —
it’s actually more akin to the dystopia
imagined in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel “We” — read Ross Andersen’s
recent essay in the Atlantic, “The Panopticon Is Already Here.”

As Andersen puts it, “In the near future, every person who
enters a public space [in China] could be identified, instantly, by AI matching
them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication,
and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms
will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources —
travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases — to predict
political resistance before it happens.”

Many of China’s prominent AI startups are the Communist
Party’s “willing commercial partners” in this, which is bad enough. But the
greater concern, as Andersen says, is that all
this technology is for export. Among the countries importing it are Bolivia,
Ecuador, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Serbia, Sri Lanka,
Uganda, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Chinese response to the American attack on TikTok
gives the game away. On Twitter, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the
government-controlled Global Times, called the move “open robbery,” accused
Trump of “turning the once great America into a rogue country,” and warned that
“when similar things happen time and again, the U.S. will take steps closer to
its decline.”

Ah yes, our old friend the decline and fall of American
imperialism. And its corollary? In a revealing essay published last April, the
Chinese political theorist Jiang Shigong, a professor at Peking University Law
School, spelled out the imperial nature of China’s ambition. World history, he argued, is the history of
empires, not nation-states, which are a relatively recent phenomenon.
(By the way, this has long been my own view.)

“The history of humanity is surely the history of
competition for imperial hegemony,” Jiang writes, “which has gradually
propelled the form of empires from their original local nature toward the
current tendency toward global empires, and finally toward a single world
empire.”

The globalization of our time, according to Jiang, is the
“single world empire 1.0, the model of world
empire established by England and the United States.” But that
Anglo-American empire is “unravelling”
internally because of “three great
unsolvable problems: the ever-increasing inequality created by the
liberal economy … ineffective governance caused by political liberalism,
and decadence and nihilism created by cultural liberalism.” (Come to
think of it, I agree with this, too.)

Moreover, the Western empire is under external attack from “Russian resistance and Chinese competition.”
This is not a bid to create an alternative Eurasian empire but “a struggle to
become the heart of the world empire.”

If you doubt that China is seeking to take over empire 1.0
and turn it into empire 2.0, based on China’s
illiberal civilization, then you are not paying attention to all the ways
this strategy is being executed.

China has successfully become the workshop of the world, as we used to be. It now has a
Weltpolitik known as One Belt One Road,
a vast infrastructure project that looks a lot like Western imperialism as
described by J.A. Hobson in 1902. China uses the prize of access to its
market to exert pressure on U.S. companies to toe Beijing’s line. It conducts
“influence operations” across the West, including the U.S.

One of the many ways America sought to undermine the Soviet
Union in Cold War I was by waging a “Cultural Cold War.” This was partly about
being seen to beat the Soviets at their own games — chess (Fischer v Spassky);
ballet (Rudolf Nureyev’s defection); ice hockey (the “Miracle on Ice” of 1980).
But it was mainly about corrupting the Soviet people with the irresistible
temptations of American popular culture.

In 1986, the French leftist philosopher and comrade-in-arms
of Che Guevara, Jules Régis Debray, lamented, “There is more power in rock
music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in
the entire Red Army.” The French Left sneered at “Coca-colonization.” But
Parisians, too, drank Coke.

Now, however, the tables have been turned. In a debate I
hosted at Stanford in 2018, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel used a memorable
aphorism: “AI is Communist, crypto is libertarian.” TikTok validates the
first half of that. In the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese
children denounced their parents for rightist deviance. In 2020, during the
Covid-19 lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests, American teenagers
posted videos of themselves berating their parents for racism. And they did it
on TikTok.

Those inane-seeming words are now lodged in my brain:
“Please don’t be ugly.” But TikTok is
ugly, very ugly. And severing its hotline to Xi Jinping’s imperial panopticon
is the least we can do about it.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net