China's plan for Musk Tiktok purchase leaves further security concerns
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Toby Gillis, joined today by Tom Noonan. Now, on the face of it, the potential sale of a social media platform might not appear to be a story for a podcast about global security. But it's a story for a podcast about global security.

But when it's about to be banned in the States, currently the subject of a Supreme Court appeal, being moved from China to the US, Donald Trump has completed a total 180 on its future and Elon Musk is the potential buyer, well, you start to look a little deeper. The social network is TikTok, specifically its American operation. It's due to be banned there the day before Trump is inaugurated over concerns it's a threat to national security.

But any potential sale could delay that. So is this merely a stalling tactic or is the world's richest man and one of Trump's closest allies, of course, really keen to add TikTok to X in his portfolio? Our guest today is our China correspondent, Richard Spencer. Richard, why is TikTok an enemy for Joe Biden's administration?

Yeah, I mean, there are so many questions around this story and so many questions around TikTok and what will happen to it and why. And it's kind of hard to know where to start. I mean, this wasn't Joe Biden's idea. I mean, that's one thing to start off with. This was President Trump's idea. It's this whole idea of

forcing a sale of TikTok or closing it down dates all the way back to 2020 when President Trump, in the face of, well, whatever reason you want to attribute, suddenly became very anti-China, possibly in the wake of coronavirus and the controversy around that, or possibly in the wake of other things. He started becoming very anti-China, threatening tariffs on Chinese imports,

And one of his targets was TikTok. He said he wanted to ban TikTok because it was an agent of Chinese influence, which other people have said, to be fair, you know, that was an issue. Its Chinese ownership was had been raised as an issue.

Then there was an injunction. TikTok took out an injunction against this ban. That was going through the courts when Trump left office at the beginning of 2021. And the whole idea was dropped because that ban was as an executive order. Then it was resuscitated by Congress and on both sides of Congress.

decided that it was a bad idea to have TikTok owned by the Chinese. And that was supported by the Biden administration, who signed it all into law. But in the meantime, President Trump had changed his mind and a complete vol fat said he thought it was a free speech issue and that TikTok shouldn't be banned. So that's where we are. I mean, the issues are twofold. The two main issues that have been raised is one is that

ownership of a social media company gives you access to whole loads of data. And that is, they believe, is an inherent national security threat. And the second one is that being owned by China in some way, even though it's not subject to Chinese censorship, in some way, it can be used by China to influence public opinion. And that's also inherently dangerous.

And is the data issue really that serious? I mean, many of the TikTok users who might be listening to this will be thinking, well, all TikTok sees of me is, you know, the ice bucket challenge or a silly dance.

That's a very good question. One of the questions about this that people have asked is, you know, why is the data I give to TikTok so much more sensitive than the data I give to an app like Temu, you know, an online purchasing company, or indeed all the other data that the Chinese can hoover up, or we can all hoover up. I mean, it's not just China, of course, you know, could America access data from Apple if it really needs to in the case of issues of national security? These are all questions that

can legitimately ask, what about all those computer chips in Chinese electric cars? What can they do? Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court judge, one of the judges hearing this case, he raised an interesting point. He said, what if your online habits, you know, as a teenage TikTok viewer,

Whatever you're downloading as a teenager on TikTok, I mean, who knows, it might not be very savoury. Could that be used to blackmail you in 20 years' time, by which time you may be working for the CIA or the State Department or the FBI or something? So there's that, you know, it's just this idea that we're all slightly uncomfortable, I think, with how much data

There is out there, you know, we all know about we go online and buy a pair of shoes. We're bombarded with ads for shoes for the next months afterwards. And people are thinking, well, you know, on a state level, you know, what could a state be doing with apparently trivial information once it's aggregated, you know, you know, used to psychologically profile you, work out who you are, what you're thinking, you know, who your friends are, who you're dealing with. You know, what if that's used by a malign power against you?

Richard, would a sale of the US arm of TikTok separate it completely from China and put an American owner in total control of both data and content?

The relationship with TikTok and China is quite straightforward. There's a Chinese company, which as far as we know, is a private company. It was founded by a Chinese entrepreneur, built up from like any other of these new tech social media companies, built up from scratch. And it owns a number of different social media brands. I mean, its two most famous brands are TikTok and

which is a Western brand and it's not operated in China. But there's a Chinese equivalent called Douyin, D-O-U-Y-I-N, which basically does the same thing for Chinese people. And it's all in Chinese, basically. I mean, but I could go on and download Douyin and upload your English language videos onto that if you wanted to. But basically, like a lot of the world, a lot of social media is now locked into these two halves, one inside the Chinese firewall, and then there are the non-Chinese versions of the apps.

most of which are not Chinese owned, like Twitter or X. But in this case, TikTok is owned by the same Chinese company. So what hasn't really been addressed by this very precisely by this new American law is what exactly a sale of TikTok would mean. Now, obviously, if they don't sell it and US closes it down, then that's fairly simple. That would just effectively mean that

you couldn't download the app in America. There would be a block on it. It would be a bit like China where you'd have to get a VPN to tell the authorities that you were in Germany to download the app.

If you sell it, then what are you selling? Do you just sell, do you hive off a TikTok arm of the wider TikTok company and then you effectively have two TikToks? You have one in Europe, which is still owned by the Chinese company and one in America. And how do those two companies operate together? Do you...

simply get around it by having a licensing agreement between the American version and the non-American version so that, you know, you're still seeing the same TikTok when you're on one or the other. But it's just that the American company holds the data. That, of course, wouldn't get around the influence aspect because you could obviously upload American targeted influence ads, if that's what you're doing, or influence videos from outside.

And that's, I guess, what people in TikTok are working out at the moment, you know, how that would actually operate. And just finally, Richard, the one element we haven't really discussed here is Elon Musk. Why would he want to buy it?

Right. So one issue is the algorithm. Algorithms, as we all know now, at least I think we're all familiar with the term, are what makes these social media channels work, how they operate. And they're like the master code. That's the real intellectual property there.

Now, it's also what makes these things incredibly sensitive and important because it's very that's how you influence. That's how you influence people. And China is a control freak nation. It wants control of things. So it wants to keep people.

that algorithm as Chinese. The interesting story to me, one of the interesting stories about this idea that's been floated and apparently it's been floated by the Chinese government, it's not been floated by Musk himself, is that maybe you could sell it to him. Now, why would you do that? Well, if they're not going to sell the algorithm, if the deal is we sell the company,

that operates the algorithm in the US, which is, you know, if we sell TikTok US, well, then you look at Musk, of course, and Musk, you know, is currently famous for being close to President Trump and the Trump administration and playing a role in Trump's new administration. But before that, he was also very close to the Chinese Communist Party and still is.

His relationship with China is commercially incredibly important to him, more important than anything else. And he goes and meets the Chinese leadership. He meets the prime minister regularly. So they may be thinking, well, who will do us a favor and agree to this deal whereby they'll get...

the US off the backs of ByteDance, off the backs of this successful Chinese company, do this deal just to get the regulators off you

take over TikTok, run it as a extension of ByteDance, which is what it would effectively become, you know, pay huge amounts of money for it, you know, under those terms. And they're thinking, well, maybe someone who already is a friend of China already. I think that's probably how they came up with the name Musk. Richard Spencer, thank you for joining us on The World in 10. And that's it for today. Thank you for spending 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.

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