Episode 264 - Talking Tik Tok, Privacy, and Propaganda with Adam Kovacevich
Max talks to Adam Kovacevich, the Founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress in DC, to talk about several issues that have caught to attention of policymakers. We discuss the concerns of the rise of Tik Tok as a potential arm of the Chinese government, and whether similar concerns about domestic services are warranted.
Adam Kovacevich
Links
Chamber of Progress
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Adam Kovacevich
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The Local Maximum: Email
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to the Local Maximum episode 264.
Narration: Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to the Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: Welcome everyone, welcome! You have reached another Local Maximum.
This is going to be a really, really interesting, really fascinating discussion today. I think it was a very fruitful conversation. Even though, as you'll see, I brought on someone who I have some disagreements with when it comes to the state of social media and regulation and all that.
We're gonna answer a lot of tough questions today. First of all, why are there calls for TikTok to be banned? What is TikTok anyway? Why the controversy around TikTok and not anywhere else? We're gonna get into that. Should we, in the US, ban Tiktok or at least ensure that it is sold to an American-run subsidiary? And what about the state of the internet media and social media in the US overall? How much of a free exchange of ideas, is it and should we be worried about someone having their fingers on the scale?
Well, we're gonna hash all these out today because my next guest is the founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress, a new center-left industry policy coalition promoting technology's progressive future. So we now take you to DC.
Adam Kovacevich, you've reached the Local Maximum. Welcome to the show.
Adam Kovacevich: Thanks for having me.
Max: Before we get to the main topic of today, which is TikTok, which is why you reached out to me to begin with, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your organization. How did you get involved with it? And how did this issue of TikTok wind up on your radar?
Adam: Sure, well I started the organization about two years ago, really in an attempt to shape the conversation that democratic policymakers are having about technology and regulation. I think that for a long time, Democrats viewed tech as kind of their industry. Republicans had Wall Street and the energy industry, and the Democrats had tech. I think some Democrats took a more negative turn towards tech after Trump was elected. But everything I've seen has shown that Democratic voters continue to be very positive towards tech.
It struck me that you had a situation where, again, many Democratic policymakers were, I think, assuming that their own voters were much more critical or worried about tech than they are. I wanted to kind of close that gap. We really work at the intersection of democratic politics and tech policy, which is kind of where I've spent most of my career.
Max: When did you start this? I’m sorry, what's the organization called?
Adam: Chamber of progress.
Max: Chamber of Progress! Right. So when is it started?
Adam: In early 2021. So almost two years ago.
Max: Oh okay. So somewhat recently. Interesting. How did the issue of TikTok come up? Why is this important right now?
Adam: Well, I think for me, when I started the organization, we made a decision that we were not going to have any Chinese companies among our partner companies for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted the freedom to be sort of proudly patriotic and even a bit nationalistic about American tech. And secondly, is concerned that when you have those kinds of entanglements, you sometimes feel pressured not to speak up about what's happening in China.
We've had that rule for a while and frankly, I think it was the writing earlier this year by folks like Ezra Klein in the New York Times and Medea Glacus on Substack about their concern that really, I think, energized me as well. Particularly the concern about, we now have one of our most, certainly the most growing in popularity, social network in this country, owned and operated by the Chinese, in some ways, one of our most important national security rivals. That's really an unprecedented situation, one that I think is really important for us to take seriously. So it was just growing as a concern of mine.
Max: What's the difference, would you say, between TikTok and other social media like Instagram or Twitter? Although, I'm thinking mostly Instagram where you have short videos and things like that people like. TikTok maybe has some different features. But what do you see as the selling point for TikTok, the reason why people are downloading it now? What would you say to people who say, well, I have all these other apps, what's the big deal?
Adam: All credit to TikTok.They've built an amazing app. It's incredibly popular, it's offering people something totally different. It's, I hate to use the word addictive because that implies kind of more than I think it really should be, but it's an appealing app. It's a place where people want to spend time. I think that's great. I think that's awesome.
The big difference is that it's owned by the Chinese and none of these other services are owned by the Chinese. I think when you have any kind of service that deals in information, that's really important because, again, that was sort of a propaganda concern and a security concern.
People may not be super familiar with it but the Russian government, for years, sponsored a television network called RT, which used to stand for Russia Today. We used to allow this on American television on cable systems. When Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, effectively, RT in the United States was shut down within a couple of days because the cable systems that carried it faced all this pressure, carrying it. Same thing in Europe.
I look back on that situation, I think, man, that was kind of weird. That we allowed the Russian government to operate a propaganda network in this country for as long as we did. I just have to kind of wonder if we won't look back at the TikTok situation someday and ask the same question.
Max: When you say that TikTok is owned by the Chinese, is it a private company in China? What kind of control or influence does the Chinese government have over it? How does that work?
Adam: You have to understand that it's a private company within China but there's really… What it means to be a private company in China is completely different than the way we understand a private company. Which is to say that in order to operate in China, you have to really be entangled with the government. They can essentially shut you down at any time. They also have to really have guaranteed access to your data.
In this country, in America, if the Justice Department wants somebody's data from their iPhone, they have to come with a judicial warrant and serve that on Apple or Google for somebody's Gmail contents. We have a judicial process. One of the things that's interesting is that all of the companies disclose in numbers, how many of those requests they get from the American government.
China doesn't have a front door like that. They have a backdoor. They have a stake. They have a national intelligence law that's broadly worded to require that any organizations, including companies, participate in domestic intelligence activities. Every company is conscripted in this. That's why this distinction of private company, public, it doesn't matter in China.
Max: If I download Tiktok, what kind of messages am I going to get from the Chinese government? Isn't it mostly just fun videos? What am I going to see there?
Adam: I don't think it's the kind of thing where… With Russia Today, it was almost a kind of almost cartoonish attempt to propaganda. They would do kind of pro-Russia messages but the main thing that Russia Today was trying to do was highlight the vision in the US society.
When it comes to TikTok, I want to be clear. We don't see evidence that the Chinese government is overtly injecting pro-Chinese messages into people's feeds. But, I think there are two concerns. One is that they do have access to all user data. I think that's undeniably true. Secondly, they can influence what TikTok’s content policies are. They can influence which videos get promoted, which videos don't get promoted.
If you were to film a video criticizing China's human rights record, pretty sure that that would not get promoted by TikTok's algorithm. Even if it was really salient to what you're interested in. That kind of thing, I think, is the concern that many people have about TikTok.
Max: Even the app I used to work on 10 years ago, Foursquare, wouldn't be allowed in China even though it was a very apolitical app. But people would check into Tiananmen Square-
Adam: You raise a good point, which is that I think there's also an interesting argument. This is not my primary concern but, basically, China has foreclosed access to its own market to US companies.
Google cannot operate in China. Facebook cannot operate in China. Amazon… They foreclosed the market and yet want access to our market. There is an argument that I've heard some people make just on pure fairness. That it's unfair of us to give them access to our market when they deny us our company's access to their market.
Max: So what's the solution to this? Does Congress want to ban it? Are there any alternatives to banning it? What are people talking about here?
Adam: Well, over the last couple months, you've seen more action taken to ban TikTok on government-owned devices. At the end of the year, a sort of the big year-end legislation that passed Congress included a provision that bans TikTok on federal government employee websites or devices rather.
You've also seen a number of state governments, sometimes for their state legislature, sometimes the governor has done this unilaterally, issue similar orders for state government devices and employees. Mostly Republican states, but increasingly democratic states as well. So you're seeing that.
Some of that has trickled down to state universities. Might be banning students from accessing TikTok on State University WiFi they. They can evade that pretty easily by going through their mobile data plan so I don't think that's a big deal.
I don't think the bans… I think the bans are an interesting indicator of political concern. But I don't think that by themselves, the current government bans are that significant. I also don't think that the federal government will ultimately end up banning TikTok. But I do think there is a path there to do what they've done in other situations, which is insist that the company be sold, divested, to a US owner, which I think would address many of the concerns.
Max: So would that be your preferred outcome?
Adam: Yes, I do think it's the smartest path. In some ways, it's the easiest path. Frankly, it's the path with the most precedent.
This is not very well known. But about three years ago, I guess, four years ago now. Maybe even five years ago, the app Grindr was sold to a Chinese holding company. When that deal happened, that had to go through review through what's called the CFIUS process. It’s the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. It's a cross-government agency working group that looks at these questions about foreign investment in United States companies and determines if there's a national security risk or some of the risks and gets a chance to veto them.
The concern that was raised at the time was that Grindr is a gay dating app. Had a lot of sensitive data on Americans, on their sexual orientation, on their HIV status. That could include prominent policymakers, politicians, business people, maybe, who may not be out of the closet. That could give the Chinese government, basically, blackmail material.
So CFIUS, in that situation, pretty quietly actually, insisted that the Chinese company that had taken ownership of Grindr sell Grindr to a US company. Again, they did this very quietly. There was no press conference. About a year later, in March or April of 2020, it was announced that Grindr had been sold to a US company.
This is typically the way CFIUS works. It's really a kind of a behind-the-scenes, kind of quiet diplomatic negotiation. I do think there's a precedent there and many of the same concerns would, I think, also be true in the TikTok case.
Max: When I hear you talk about the case against TikTok, it's hard for me not to make an analogy to what American companies are also doing to us. Injecting propaganda, deciding who can speak, who can't speak, gathering our data in all sorts of unknown ways. I suppose from the US government's perspective, they're like, we're in control of that. But it seems like, even if you want to say having that in control, the Chinese government is worse, it still seems like that's a bad thing.
Adam: I'm not one on drawing an equivalence between the United States and the Chinese government. I think they're pretty bad. We have due process in this country. We have rights under the First Amendment, under the Fourth Amendment. We require government to go through process. We have jury trials. We have a lot of process. We have a lot more rights in this country.
The Chinese government, in contrast, has made people just disappear. I think that it's really not… We're not dealing with some kind of cute, cuddly, innocent country here. They have an extremely authoritarian regime. I do think it's just dangerous, in my view, to compare the two regimes, the US to China, when we have so many more freedoms and due process protections in this country.
Max: I totally agree with you about China. But I still see the fact that the FBI, for example, is telling companies what to show and what not. Private actors, like pharmaceutical industries, are telling our social media, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, what they can and can't post.
Over the last few years, it's been pointed out that a lot of people have been banned for saying things that are true. Even if it's not true, should be fair game in a democratic society. That concerns me a lot. I have a much higher bar for the US than I do for China. I don't want to live under the Chinese regime.
Adam: The distinction I would make is that Twitter banning somebody who's engaging in election denialism, that's Twitter's decision. That's not a government action. Twitter actually has their own First Amendment right to allow or disallow people on their platform. Parler has a First Amendment right to allow people to traffic in election denialism even if the Biden administration doesn't like it.
We have a First Amendment in this country, which allows platforms here to make their own decisions about what to allow and disallow. Without any threat of the government… The government can't shut any of these services down because of one of their decisions. That's just not true in China. You cannot operate in China without staying on the right side of the government.
Yeah, you have situations here where the FBI, I think there were some Twitter file stories, says to Twitter, “Well, you might wanna take a look at these accounts. It might violate your terms of service.” I understand some people's concerns about that. But on the other hand, if Twitter-
Max: Mark Zuckerberg said that the FBI told them to do this and that. It's hard to say no to the FBI.
Adam: It is. They do, I guess, is what I would say. Sometimes they would say yes, sometimes they would say no. I agree, it puts them in a difficult position. But there's a lot of situations where the FBI has come to Apple and said, “Give us all this data,” and they don't have a warrant and Apple told them to pound sand. Every company, I think, also pushes back on requests that aren't grounded in some kind of warrant or legitimacy.
All those things exist in the United States and they just don't exist in the Chinese system.
Max: Gotcha. So what do you think about the right to access information? I guess this applies to RT, too. As an American, shouldn't I have the right to view whatever content I want to view? If I want to see foreign propaganda, maybe I'm not even looking at it for the purpose of joining them, but for the purpose of looking at what they're saying. Shouldn't that be available?
Adam: Yeah, and frankly, I think if you want to find propaganda, it's not gonna be too difficult to find anything. We have a pretty big, vast internet. I don't think it's going to be difficult to find that.
The real question, I think, in this case of CFIUS, is really this is the kind of case that this was set up for. Which is to say, we recognize that for our own national security, there are going to be certain services where the government might have a really smart, compelling interest.
Give you another example. Several years ago, the Federal Communications Commission, basically decreed that Huawei, the Chinese network provider company, was a national security threat. Because they had seen evidence that Huawei routers and network switches that were being installed in America were being used to, essentially, spy on Americans for the Chinese government. Over the course of the last couple of years, the FCC has essentially told telecom companies in this country, you can't do business with Huawei.
Is that a violation of the rights? I guess you could argue that, but I think the FCC and the national security agencies, also their job is to protect our national security and to say, “Well, no, don't use this Chinese telecom company because they're spying on Americans.” I'm personally okay with that.
Max: What do you think about these admittedly emerging and maybe not all ready for primetime, but uncensorable social networks. Whether it's Crypto, Bitcoin for payments that are uncensorable, or, in the case of Library who I spoke to. They were kind of beaten down by the SEC, but the service is still there on Odyssey where you can get any video you want within reason.
These services are available. Presumably, it would also be hard to censor them in authoritarian countries as well. Would you be concerned about it? Would you welcome that? How would you think about these technologies? Again, I know it's unclear how these things are going to develop over the next few years.
Adam: It's a great question. I think, for example, there's folks like Jack Dorsey who would say that decentralized protocols, and you see some of this with Mastodon, for example. Mastodon is based on individual instances, each with their own content policies, decentralized. I think this thing that's a little bit different in that each instance owner in Mastodon is responsible for having its own policies and enforcing them. There's not no one. I think there's probably going to be a market for that.
On the other hand, I think that what often happens with some of these things is that the first time somebody uses that for some kind of illicit, say, criminal activity, the government is going to come and say, “Who do I talk to? Where do I go? Where do I send my warrant?” I think to have completely warrant-free communications or communication in law. Like, there's always a robust debate about encryption, for example, and keeping encryption communications protected. But I think that there's gonna be a place for that.
Having said that, I think the vast, vast, vast majority of users of social networks want a set of centralized content moderation. There's an argument that when you go into a social network that content moderation is essentially their main product. Which is to say, no one wants the unfiltered, raw feed. You want to prioritize somehow. You want it made relevant for you. But you also want the gross garbage stuff filtered out as most people do.
There's a reason that Instagram is a much bigger, more successful business than Parler, which loves everything. Instagram has a very curated, moderated social network. Parler is intentionally not. Instagram is a much bigger, more successful business with a lot more users.
Max: I can see the argument for centralized content moderation when it's something we kind of all agree on. A good example is email. I don't know what percent of my email gets blocked by Google but I'm pretty sure all of that stuff is stuff everyone agrees that I don't really need in my feed.
But especially in recent years, there's a whole lot of stuff where people just don't agree. If that's the case, it seems like content moderation should not be centralized until three major players that all kind of collude with each other.
Adam: I think what you're describing is an argument that many people have made that social networking should move more towards a protocols-based approach. Again, Mastodon is sort of one of the interesting experiments there. Again, Jack Dorsey before he left Twitter talked a lot about this. They had a project called, I think it was Blue Sky that was trying to do that. I do think it's very interesting.
There's a number of experts talk about middle where maybe we have some kind of middle layer that says, “Okay, I want the Disney approach to content moderation.” Which is nothing but family-friendly, or, “I want the R-rated version where I don't want pornography and stuff like that, but I'm okay with like some a little edgier.” I think that is definitely very interesting.
In the meantime, I actually think if we effectively have that, to be perfectly honest. Because essentially, if you look at YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and then look at Parler, Truth Social, and then look at 4chan, you have a spectrum of moderation already. Which is from the highly moderated to the highly unmoderated and they're already attracting different audiences. So I think that we kind of have that in some ways.
Max: Yeah, you have it emerging. It's definitely a lot different than it was three years ago. But I don't see how someone can look at everything that's happened since COVID, for example, and just be like, yeah, there was no impropriety with how people were censored. I don't want to go through the whole list.
Adam: I guess the way I think about it is that I do think genuinely, most of the people working at the companies, particularly Twitter, historically, err on the side of allowing most speech. But I think you also have to understand that… Well, I think historically that was true.
Max: Yeah, I would agree in 2015 that was absolutely true.
Adam: I think the Trump era, to be perfectly honest, posed a lot of novel challenges for content moderation. When before you had a president who was saying stuff that… There was a concern, I think it’s legitimate that it could be making more people sick and die.
At a time, particularly, where there was a lot we didn't know about COVID, it was understandable to me that a lot of businesses were facing pressure to act responsibly. Did they go too far? Certainly, people thought they were, some people thought they were going too far.
I think that there then situations like how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story where I think within a matter of hours or the next day, they acknowledged they had gone too far and allowed it. Then decided to change paths.
I think the reason why they blocked it initially was a little bit of PTSD from the previous Russian government elections, stolen hack materials thing, and they thought that's what it was. Turned out, that's not what it was. I think that even Jack Dorsey was pretty honest that they made a mistake.
The thing about content moderation is that they do make mistakes. They go back and say they changed their view.
Max: I think it was with the CIA, with like 50 people from the CIA saying that, “Oh, this is a fake story.” I think even I would have a hard time arguing against it at the time. That's an example of government actors getting involved there.
I was thinking more along the lines of, a good example would be the the lab leak. It's hard to forget you couldn't say that on Twitter. Of course, at the time, I wasn't involved in that. I don't know. But it seems like in an open, democratic society, you should be able to ask those questions.
Adam: It's always worth reminding, Twitter can allow or disallow whatever the heck it wants to on service. It's not a government service. It's a private company. It has its own First Amendment right to allow or disallow.
Now, we can argue, and people do argue, pretty much continuously about whether they should allow more or disallow more. I tend to agree with you that I think there are many things with hindsight, I think many platforms look back and say, we might have gone too far in terms of disallowing too much.
Max: Let's come back to TikTok again because I don't know if we really closed that out. Where do you see this actually going? You hope that it becomes controlled by a US company. But where do you think this is going to end up? How long do you think it's going to take?
This market, the social media market moves so fast. Wouldn't you be concerned, this is something that we think of outside of New York, outside of DC a lot, which is this market moves so fast. By the time the government reacts, where's the market gonna be in two or three years? TikTok might not even be popular.
Adam: That's a good question. That's why I said at the front, I think this is really an unprecedented situation where you have such a popular service that is Chinese-owned. I think that people may not realize or may forget that this is something that President Trump tried to do. And his order, essentially banning Tiktok was-
Max: I didn't want to trigger you but I did want to say that this sounds like some of the things that Trump also said.
Adam: I think he essentially attempted to force TikTok to be sold to Oracle, which was a favorite kind of crony company of his. I'm not surprised any of that got thrown out of court. That's why I think the divestiture path is the established path and that CFIUS has clear control over… As I said, with the case of Grindr, it was done quietly. I do think all the parties would have an interest in it being done quietly rather than a big splashy press conference. Because I do think that there's an interest in not upsetting all of US-China relations.
I'll be honest. It's very hard for me to imagine TikTok having a sustainable business in the United States in the long term and continue to be owned by the Chinese. I think it would be so much better. All of the American employees of TikTok, though, some of them have to spend time defending the current ownership structure and saying no, they would be much better off.
Max: Where's their office, by the way?
Adam: I think, in California and in other places. But my point is that if they were sold to an American owner, they could potentially go public at some point and their stock could be worth something. They also wouldn't have to spend all of their time answering these questions about what the Chinese have access to. They could just focus on building a great business. I think it would be a huge relief, and frankly, unleash TikTok to have more success in this country.
Max: Maybe if there's more of a push by consumers to care about their privacy in general, then we wouldn't have to… We'd still have to worry about it but maybe there would be less problems in terms of foreign companies taking our data or any companies for that matter using it.
Adam: Say more about that.
Max: I think that for many, many years, consumers just did not care about their privacy and their data online. I didn't care about it. I don't know if we could ever change human nature where we just want convenience over carefulness in terms of privacy.
Maybe you have to get burned a few times before you care about that. Maybe the American people have gotten burned a few times. I don't know, if we felt it enough, where the consumers were actually going to change their opinion. It could change. There have been social changes way bigger than that where consumers just change their behavior.
Adam: I think most people are generally fine with the trade-off they make when using apps and services. Which is, essentially, I'm going to provide some of my data in exchange for some value I'm getting back.
Max: So long as you understand what that data is.
Adam: Though I don't believe most people generally read the privacy policies. I do think people, their heart, understand they're making a trade-off. That the benefit they're getting is worth it. I'm not one who believes… There's some kind of arguments where consumers are just sheep, and they're being kind of preyed upon. No. I think actually, mostly they know what they're getting into at the basic heart of it.
But I will say that I think there is a separate question, which is I don't think the average consumer is spending any time thinking about what a government, either our government or foreign government, might have access to. That's what makes this situation, I think, somewhat unique.
That's not a question that… I don't think most consumers are really afraid of what a service knows about them. I think most consumers are not used to thinking about, worrying about, what a government might know about them because of the use of that service.
Max: Gotcha. We're coming short on time. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show today, having this discussion. I really appreciate it. This is a unique discussion to the Local Maximum. What are some of your last thoughts on the topics that we've talked about today? Where can people go to learn more about you and what you're what you're doing?
Adam: Sure! I love this sort of area of technology policy because it's kind of where the future meets the present. There's all these cool things that people are building and the present is really signified by debates about law and policy and concern about whether something should be allowed or disallowed. That's kind of why I love working in this space.
You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at adamkovac and our organization, again, it's called Chamber of Progress. We're on the web at progress.chamber.org.
Max: All right. Adam, thank you so much for being on the show.
Adam: Thank you.
Max: All right. This is a great opportunity for you in the audience to weigh in at the end of the episode. Let us know what you think at localmaxradio@gmail.com or join our Locals, which has had quite a bit of a lot of extra interest recently on our Local’s message board at maximum.locals.com. So go to local max radio.com/ 264. That's our show notes page for today's episode and get all of Adam's links. Have a great week everyone.
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