Four unpersuasive arguments against TikTok

The TikTok ban, the de-professionalization of MrBeast, and what happens in the sequels to Dune

Akira Toriyama art for Chrono Trigger via Eric Williams

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Once again, this week’s newsletter features three shorter blurbs about recent articles or news events. Below you’ll find some thoughts on:

• The “TikTok ban,” and why one might (or might not) support it;

• predicting a future for MrBeast; and

• the Dune sequels. (This will be the last Duneposting I do for a while, I promise.)

If you like Read Max, I hope you’ll consider paying to subscribe. Each of these newsletters takes a lot of time to research, contemplate, write, delete, re-write, delete again, and re-write a third time with more jokes, and the only support I get is from paying subscribers.

Four arguments for banning TikTok that I do not find persuasive

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a bill mandating that TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance sell the app to an American company within six months, or face a national ban. The law may or may not ever reach President Biden--Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn’t yet committed to bringing this bill to a vote in the senate, where Rand Paul (among others) has vowed to fight it--but this is the closest a TikTok ban or forced sale has come to reality since President Trump first floated the idea in 2020. (Trump, for his part, now opposes a ban on TikTok, apparently at the behest of billionaire donor Jeff Yass, who owns seven percent of ByteDance.)

“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” Nancy Pelosi said. “Tic-Tac-Toe, a winner,” she elaborated.

I would describe myself as a person who is “persuadable” on the question of banning TikTok. I don’t have any particular affection for the company or the app, which seem as vacuous and evil as their advertising-platform competitors. I’m not convinced that the app represents an irreplaceable (or even, frankly, a particularly important) venue for outside-of-mainstream reporting or information (such as about, e.g., ethnic cleansing in Gaza). Nor am I particularly worried about “government over-reach” in this arena, for many reasons but especially because “the range of available apps” is already subject to the corporate over-reach of Tim Apple and his tyrannical reign over the App Store. Frankly, I have a suspicion that while the people who use TikTok have produced moments of surpassing beauty and grace, the app and platform itself are probably, on balance, bad for our souls.

However, I remain distinctly unpersuaded by this bill, and the reasoning being used to justify it. As far as I’ve been able to gather, there are something like four simultaneous but distinct arguments being made in favor of the House bill:

1. TikTok is being or could be manipulated by the Chinese government to produce misinformation;

2. TikTok is making or could make sensitive U.S. user data available to the Chinese government;

3. we’re in a trade war with China and this is retaliation; and

4. TikTok is uniquely bad for society/kids in ways that have nothing in particular to do with the Chinese government.

The fourth of these, “TikTok is uniquely bad for society/kids in ways that have nothing in particular to do with the Chinese government” is the one I’m most sympathetic towards, as you might guess, but “my unscientific assessment of vibes leads me to believe that a national-security ban on this particular app will probably have positive knock-on effects on general well-being” is a bad reason to support a law. I know that many people my age and older have recently come to the conclusion that there is something specially pernicious and addictive about TikTok as a platform, based on various stories they’ve read or heard and their own experience feeling alienated by the app’s constant production of glurge,¹ but there’s no real evidence that TikTok in particular is worse than its rivals, and even if that evidence existed, a law that simply mandates this deeply evil app’s sale to, like, Steve Mnuchin seems like a remarkably bad way to address the problem.

Of course, the fourth argument is one I see made only vaguely by liberals who have acquiesced to the passage of a somewhat stupid bill and are trying to make peace with it. Versions of the first three, which focus on paranoia about or aggression toward China, are what you hear from the more full-throated defenders of the bill. The third, “we’re in a trade war with China and this is retaliation,” at least has the virtue of being honest: China banned Facebook and Google, so we should ban TikTok in retribution. But I think honesty is the only virtue of this particular line; openness and internationalism are among the few wholly positive values of the first few generations of internet, and building national firewalls as a tactic in geopolitical power struggles should be seen as another step in dismantling whatever might have been good about the web.

From there, we get progressively less serious. “TikTok is making or could make sensitive U.S. user data available to the Chinese government” sort of sounds sensible and concerning, but it’s never been clear to me what that “sensitive data” might be, or how the C.C.P. would use it maliciously. The best I can come up with is that the Chinese government might use direct access to TikTok to target and monitor U.S. military and intelligence personnel as well as Chinese dissidents abroad, but (1) the Chinese government is already scraping data on spooks, soldiers, and anti-CCP activists (as well as other U.S. citizens) from Facebook and Twitter, and it’s not at all clear to me how more precise data from TikTok would add to those already probably wasteful² efforts, and (2) like … without wanting to be glib here, if you are a C.I.A. agent or Chinese dissident using TikTok for sensitive communications, you are doing it wrong.

But “TikTok might hand over secret C.I.A. TikTok accounts to the C.C.P.” is still more intellectually serious than the first, and in my experience most common, argument for the bill: “TikTok is being or could be manipulated by the Chinese government to produce misinformation.” It won’t surprise anyone who is familiar with my feelings about “misinformation” to learn that I find arguments around “platform manipulation” generally unpersuasive, and also stupid. It’s not so much that I don’t think the Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party would ever try to leverage TikTok to advance geopolitical goals, were they given some kind of privileged access--of course they would! So too would the U.S. government!--it’s that I reject the premise that such attempts would be a significant problem, which rely on the stubborn belief that “platform manipulation” is (1) possible, (2) coherent, or (3) effective.

Look, I think it’s important to understand that TikTok itself has no real idea “how it works”--what levers will change what kinds of user behavior, what videos might do well and why if you tweak those levers, what people are looking for and how they might respond. I don’t mean to mystify TikTok, just to make a simple statement of fact about huge dynamic systems. More than a decade of reporting on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and the unintended consequences and ripple effects of small and well-intended design and incentive tweaks, should have taught us all that platforms are barely able to be monitored, let alone controlled, by the multi-billion dollar companies who own the platforms and employ thousands of people specifically for the purpose of monitoring and controlling them. The idea that direct access to TikTok’s video-ranking and recommendation algorithms would give you similarly direct access to the brains of American voters is patently absurd.

It’s true that some kinds of attempted platform manipulation are more subtle than mere propagandizing. The infamous Russian influence operation of the 2016 election--the effectiveness of which is still not entirely clear!--was apparently aimed at merely sowing discord and conflict among American voters, not necessarily at promoting a particular viewpoint. But to whatever extent that operation was successful, it was undertaken from the outside. As any successful influencer will tell you, you don’t need back-end access to succeed on a platform. (To underline the point: MrBeast says that YouTube engineers routinely contact him with questions about the recommendation engine, which suggests that ownership of the algorithm doesn’t necessarily give you much of an advantage when it comes to understanding it.)

The truth is that maybe the most significant effect of that Russian op was to give American elites what Kevin Baker calls “psy-op brain”--the belief that any online political expression with which they are uncomfortable must be the product of a foreign psychological operation. A telling Wall Street Journal story reports that this bill “gained new momentum in part because of anger over TikTok videos about the Israel-Hamas conflict… People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos.” Israel, portrayed badly? Gotta be a psy-op!

This is stupid, but it’s also concerning. There are many reasons to think that TikTok and its peers are bad for us--reasons that we may eventually find compelling enough to justify a ban or other severe limitation. But a ban motivated by concerns over political speech is worse than pointless. It’s actively malevolent.

MrBeast and the future of media

Last year I wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine about the YouTube sensation Jimmy Donaldson, d/b/a MrBeast--an attempt to come to grips with the remarkable success of a seemingly unremarkable 20something from Greenville, N.C. One aspect of Donaldson’s popularity touched on in the piece, though perhaps not at the length it deserves, is his transparency: Donaldson is remarkably open about the business of YouTube in a way that to older generations might read as gauche or cynical but that to his younger fans only adds to his credibility:

Thanks to the amount of money up for grabs in the YouTube economy, there’s a large cottage industry on YouTube itself devoted to giving advice on becoming a YouTuber, and clips of Donaldson interviews in which he discusses his observations of the algorithm and successful strategies for working within it are treated by the mass of would-be YouTube stars the same way Warren Buffett remarks at Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings are treated by armchair investors. […] On YouTube, the size of your audience is directly connected to your revenue, and Donaldson pitches subscribing to his channel as an act of charity, sometimes literally: “From now until the end of the year, every single time someone subscribes, I will give away 10 cents,” he says in a video from February 2021. “By literally hitting that subscribe button, you are taking 10 cents out of my pocket and giving it to people like we had in the video.” […]

For Miller, what makes Donaldson remarkable is that he essentially asks his audience to see themselves as a commodity, and to therefore see their views and likes and shares as a force for good: “MrBeast is actually telling people that they’re entering a marketplace, by saying, ‘If you watch this, this is worth so much money, I can raise this much money and I can spend it on good causes.’” […] For older viewers, maybe less accustomed to seeing themselves so bluntly as numbers on other people’s spreadsheets, the strategy of wedding philanthropy so closely with audience growth can seem, well, icky. But Donaldson’s young fans have mostly grown up on YouTube; some, like Jeremiah Howard, have been watching his videos since they were preadolescents. They’re intimately familiar with the platform’s business and revenue structures, both because so much content on YouTube is concerned with these topics but also because many of them are striving amateur YouTubers themselves. (When I asked Howard what he was going to do with the $50,000 check Donaldson gave him, he told me he was thinking about using it to kick-start his family’s YouTube channel, FLBOYRHINO.)

To be clear, this kind of transparency isn’t at all uncharacteristic of YouTube, some enormous portion of which is devoted to instruction and analysis videos about the YouTube economy itself, but Donaldson’s continued success means that his predictions about the platform and opinions about growth strategies have a particular credibility and weight. Which adds some interesting context to Patricia Hernandez’s excellent Polygon essay on the future of MrBeast (and YouTube):

…the new YouTube will be more like TikTok. That manifests in literal ways, with the company putting much of its energy into “shorts,” but also figuratively, beyond structural elements. TikTok’s strength lies in its ability to surface videos from everyday users to an enormous audience, and it’s so good at doing this that people talk about its algorithm in mystical terms. The internet, in other words, is hungry for authenticity — or at least a person they can detect as human to deliver their content. It’s the very thing YouTube once did best, once the internet moved past the supremacy of blogs. “We are seeing many creators blow up right now because they’re creating good content while maintaining their relatability,” Smigel says. […] On some level, Donaldson must feel the ground shifting underneath his feet. On X (formerly Twitter), MrBeast’s updates say that he’s been trying new things with his videos — things that, a year ago, might’ve sounded sacrilegious in a MrBeast video. He’s screaming less, and messing around with his friends way more. The videos are slower, and by extension, feature a longer run time than his older videos. He’s including sillier material, even if it doesn’t seem pertinent to the video. To Donaldson, these changes are all a part of his newfound focus on producing material with better stories. His theory, which he’s been talking about for over a year now on podcasts, is that good storytelling will take his videos to the next level.

YouTube is now on its second or third generation of fully professional YouTube stars, of which MrBeast is the shining light. As I observe in the Times Magazine piece, MrBeast’s videos are increasingly reminiscent of old-fashioned network and basic-cable TV in both their game-show premises and their high-budget productions. But YouTube may not want its platform to keep solving for MrBeast, and it’s hard not to read the shift that Hernandez is observing and predicting--toward “authenticity,” casualness, intimacy, “relatability”--as an attempt to de-professionalize YouTube again. One that MrBeast is, characteristically, already way ahead of.

What happens next in Dune?

For inquisitive Dune-the-movie fans who haven’t read the books and want to know what happens next, I’ve got a piece at GQ outlining the plots of the five sequels written by Frank Herbert himself, highlighting all the important stuff--the invincible human-worm hybrid, the psychotic dominatrix nuns, and of course the hidden colony of space Jews. Spoilers, obviously:

How big is this human-worm hybrid, exactly? Leto say he's "about seven meters long and somewhat more than two meters in diameter, ribbed for most of its length, with my Atreides face positioned man-height at one end, the arms and hands (still quite recognizable as human) just below."

Proportion of this book that can successfully make it to the big screen without a studio executive having a heart attack: 40 percent, at best. Even if you can get over the fact that the main character is a five-ton human-worm hybrid, you have to deal with the fact that huge stretches of this book consist of the five-ton human-worm hybrid discussing his personal political philosophy at great length.

For whatever it’s worth, as strange as they get, the immediate three sequels to Dune--Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God-Emperor of Dune--are all very much worth reading, even if they’re more patchy than the original. (I find Messiah kind of terminally boring, especially compared to Dune, but Children of Dune picks the pace back up and God-Emperor is just such a trip you can’t help but admire it.) I could never really really get into Herbert’s final two books, though they have their fans; part of the problem is that while the first four are telling essentially one single, 3,500-year story, Heretics and Chapterhouse kick off a new and frankly less interesting story. I’ve never been able to finish the sequels written by Frank’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, the plot summaries of which are dire.

1. Perhaps not coincidentally, millennials are more likely than zoomers to post videos to TikTok, and are joining the platform at higher rates than zoomers.

2. In general, if you are a China hawk, you should be cheered by this quote from the linked Post piece:

In the article, Liao points to Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the 2016 U.S. election as evidence of social media’s ability to mold public opinion.

“The West uses big data to analyze, research and judge public opinion to influence political activities. ... As long as there is a correct grasp on the situation, public opinion can also be guided and interfered with,” he wrote.

Very few of the claims Cambridge Analytica was making about itself have any kind of empirical support! These guys have no more clue what they’re doing than Americans do.