Should We Ban TikTok?

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • The Pros and Cons of the TikTik Bill

  • The Proliferation of Conspiracy Theories on TikTok

  • Outside of Politics: Does It Hold Up?

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TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.  

Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

[00:00:29] Thank you so much for joining us today. We are going to talk today about a subject that is on everyone eye, nose, minds, and that is the bill the US House of Representatives passed regarding TikTok. It is not technically a ban, but it is stirring up controversy and conversation. And we want to discuss the wisdom of this bill today, the pros and cons, what they're trying to do, what we would hope they would do. And as part of that conversation, the Princess of Wales comes up. Like the rest of the world, Princess Katherine will be on our minds during this conversation. Just as the TikTok conversation holds a little generational tension, (meaning we feel old as we're talking about it. It's just the truth) Outside of Politics, we're going to talk about some entertainment that would now be considered classic, that we've been watching with our kids to talk about how well it holds up here in 2024. And you'll also probably pick up some TV recommendations in the course of this conversation.  

Sarah [00:01:25] If you enjoyed today's conversation, we hope you're a member of our premium community, which we have decided to officially name-- are you guys ready? We're calling our premium community the Spice Cabinet, because if you do not know, that's where we get spicy. We cuss, we do some hot takes. Not usually what we do here at Pantsuit Politics. We're a little freer over in the Spice Cabinet. This name came to us from Britney. Amazing, amazing idea. So much better than the pantys [sp], which is what some people suggested. You guys, no. No, we're not going to be the pantys. So we're the Spice Cabinet in our premium community, and we hope that you'll join us over there.  

Beth [00:02:05] Next up, we're going talk about TikTok. The House of Representatives did a thing on a shockingly bipartisan basis; 352 to 65 they voted to force TikTok's owner, ByteDance, to either sell the app to someone who is not a company headquartered in a U.S. adversary. So it can't be the Chinese Communist Party, can't be Russia, can't be Iran, can't be North Korea. And if it fails to do that in 180 day window, the president would be authorized to ban the app in the United States. They said their protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Control Applications Act. And Sarah, I wanted to do a little pre and post conversation survey with you if I could, because we haven't talked about the wisdom of this law at all. So before we start talking about it, I just want to know where you're sitting right now. Do you support or oppose this law and how strong is that support or opposition?  

Sarah [00:03:08] I don't know. That's my answer. I really don't have a firm stance either way. How's that?  

Beth [00:03:13]  I think I would have voted in favor of it, but my support is very weak. So I think it's a hard one, and I'm really anxious to hear what you have to say about it.  

Sarah [00:03:23] Well, I think the first thing is when people say it's banned in the U.S., I mean, it's not like they're going to go in your phones and delete it. They're going to ban it from the App Store, which would be troublesome. But in the same way that Montana has to deal with current users versus new users, it's a little bit of a gray area.  

Beth [00:03:46] Everything about this feels like a gray area to me. And in other countries where you cannot access US-based social media apps, there are lots of workarounds. And I would imagine here in the United States people would find many of those workarounds. So this vote in the House happened despite TikTok mobilizing users against the measure, despite Donald Trump opposing the measure. This is a flip flop for him. Trump was, during his presidency, taking executive actions to try to do this very thing. It has been reported that he has an important donor. All of his donors are important right now, but it's been reported that he has a very important donor who has a stake in ByteDance. It's also been reported that Kellyanne Conway, who was his campaign manager the first time he ran, is lobbying on behalf of TikTok. Plus, he doesn't like Meta. I don't know why Donald Trump really does anything that he does, but I do know that he was against this bill, and Republicans in Congress still voted for it. And that's really unusual. And it seems that the national security briefings that lawmakers are receiving here are really having an impact.  

Sarah [00:04:55] Yes. And the committee in the House, it came out 50 to zero after the White House briefed lawmakers on the national security risk. Interestingly, the Senate just had a security briefing and sent it to committee, which is a little bit of a slow roll. So it feels like in both places, the security briefing spooked people, because there's lots of statements from senators that are, like, everybody should hear what we just heard. But it's interesting to me that the House accelerated it and the Senate was like, okay, this is so important. We have to slow down a little bit, make sure we do it right. I don't know if there is a "right way to do this." I think that there are risks and benefits either way. And I think that depending on what side you are on, you are over- emphasizing the risk and benefits. I'm very suspicious of both sides. They're like, this is what's going to happen, and it's the end of the world because it's almost never the case that one thing is the predisposed consequence and that one consequence is the end of the world.  

Beth [00:05:56] I think that's right. And I think the risks and benefits are a good scope for this conversation. There's a whole separate discussion to be had about if it were sold, how would that work and who could buy it, and what would that process look like? There's a whole discussion about what would it mean for it to really be banned. But I think for us, we can add value in the conversation by talking through the risk and benefits. To me, the hardest thing about doing this now is the timing. If you would ask this question before TikTok blew up, I would have been an easy yes, that's bad. They need to sell it or we shouldn't have it here.  

Sarah [00:06:33] Well, we did ask that question under the Trump administration.  

Beth [00:06:36] But even before that. And, yeah, it is not new. They've been working on this for a long time. And we have a committee on foreign investment in the United States that routinely deals with foreign ownership of important pieces of communications and other industries, and they have been investigating and negotiating for years now. And that's where you may have heard about Project Texas. Project Texas is a plan where TikTok has spent about $1 billion to work with Oracle to house sensitive U.S. user data in the United States, and to purportedly wall that data off from the rest of the company's operations. And that Committee on Foreign Investment has been reviewing this plan for a couple of years. And members of Congress who've been most vocal in support of this proposed law have said, we wish that we could have gotten to it through that process, but that process has failed here. It has been too slow and it has been ineffective, and the risk continues to accelerate. And that's why we need to act now.  

Sarah [00:07:41] Yeah, I think the foreign ownership component of it is and has always been problematic. That's not something that's new. We don't want major U.S. media organizations owned by adversarial foreign governments. I hope that's not a controversial statement. I mean Matt Iglesias and his advocacy for this bill inside his Substack was like, what if in the 1960s the Russian government wanted to buy CBS, would have been like, no, you can't do that. And for better or for worse, I do think that's an apt analogy. I do think that massive amounts of the American populace get their media from TikTok, and having that company owned by foreign adversary is deeply, deeply problematic. I think the best case scenario is it's sold to an American company. But I do not think that the Chinese Communist Party is going to allow that to happen. I do think they'll call the bluff and kill it before they allow it to be sold.  

Beth [00:08:36] Well, because the Chinese government almost wins either way. To be able to message that the United States government has shut down a speech platform, and to do that with Americans making the case for them, that achieves some goals that are hostile to the United States. So TikTok itself is not profitable. It loses billions of dollars a year. Already, the user base is leveling off. The growth has slowed. The age of the people on the app is going up. These are the signs of the death of social media- usually. I don't think TikTok is going anywhere anytime soon, but I'm saying from the Chinese government's perspective, if you aren't interested in making a lot of cash anytime soon-- and I don't know why they would be-- you get what you're going for just through the controversy here.  

Sarah [00:09:25] That bugs me, though, because all this reporting that, well, then we're like China blocking US social media companies inside China. But that's not what we're doing. We don't control the internet. That's not what would happen here. The US government is not going to go into the network and block these websites if I try to pull it up on Safari. And so I bristle a little bit at that criticism of the law because that's not what's going to happen. I even bristle a little bit at the speech component because, yes, it's a speech platform in the way that any media platform is a speech platform. But the mechanisms of this law are not going to dramatically decrease people's speech. First of all, there are a million other options. Second of all, again, it's just going to ban it in the App Store. They're not going to like go in and block the website if you try to pull it up on Safari. So let's just not be hyperbolic about what this quote unquote ban would do. It is not equivalent to what happens when you are in China and trying to use the internet.  

Beth [00:10:26] I agree with you on both of those components. I just think the Chinese Communist Party doesn't particularly care about what the truth of it is. There's enough here that they'll take it and run with it.  

Sarah [00:10:34] They'll take it and run with it no matter what. It don't matter. This is not a good faith operator when it comes to propaganda about the West.  

Beth [00:10:41] Which, look, is why we should not have allowed this to get to this point. That is the problem here. And I want to go back to your CBS analogy from the 60s. It goes even further than that. The framers talked about how an open form of government is vulnerable to outside influence. Alexander Hamilton wrote foreign powers will not be idle spectators. They will interpose. The confusion will increase and a dissolution of the Union ensue if we are not careful. In 1912, we passed the Radio Act to limit foreign ownership of radio licenses. There's a 20% limit on foreign ownership of radio licenses and 25% on holding companies. This is why Rupert Murdoch relinquished his Australian citizenship so he could buy Fox. So we have a long history here, and I think people acting like this is the end of the world, or something brand new, or xenophobic, or coming from a place of just being upset about the TikTok perspective on Israel and Gaza. I think all that's really misguided. This concern has been around for a very long time, and work with respect to this specific app has been ongoing for years now.  

Sarah [00:11:53] And I think really where I start to sound scolding (and I think I'm okay with that) is here's what I hear underneath this. What I hear is, fine, the Chinese government is promoting and facilitating the radicalization of people around the conflict in Gaza, but completely hiding information about the treatment of the Uyghurs inside China. So we don't care. We see and accept the national security risk, because at the end of the day, we think that TikTok offers more to us than a free and fair election in the United States. Because what TikTok has taught us is that it doesn't really matter that the government really doesn't have that much to offer us. We don't get that much from it. These parties aren't that different. That this is all just a rigged game and so who cares? Because really where the real stuff is happening is on TikTok, not inside our government. And that bothers me because I think it's ignorant and wrong. And it's not even that I think this legislation will get at that. But I do want to be clear about what I'm hearing, because I do think there are issues here. There are issues with foreign ownership, there is issues with data privacy, and there are issues bigger than TikTok. And the most encouraging thing that I've read and heard from the reporting of senators who say, like, if we're going to do this, let's do it. And there's some other legislation that has passed through the House, and there is other tech bills passing. They're getting real busy on tech.  

Beth [00:13:36] And it's about time. Good for them.  

Sarah [00:13:39] The United States Congress. And that's encouraging because I think there are bigger, important conversations here. And just the cynicism to me that TikTok breeds and that is present and people's arguments about why this bill is bad from gradations of bad to stupid, that undercurrent really bothers me.  

Beth [00:13:56] I've talked a lot with my 13-year-old daughter about this. What I say to her about TikTok is that we don't know what is behind all the information there-- we don't want any social media. You have to be careful if you're talking about taking in especially news. But what even is news gets so blurry on social media platforms. It's like going to the grocery store and taking a can of soup off the shelf that doesn't have a label on it. You don't know who made it. You don't know what the ingredients are. You don't know what the calorie count is per serving. You don't know anything about it. It says soup and you go, "Okay, soup," and you open it and you eat it. We wouldn't do that, but we're doing it with our brains for hours a day on social media. And I feel some tension around saying that, because here we are as content creators where you have to do some work to find out who we are after every episode. But the work is there. We post the transcripts of our episodes, we post links to show you where we got our information. We post our bios publicly. I hope that we are meeting that ethical challenge that all content creators have. That's not the game with short form videos algorithmically delivered to you. The game is figure out your interest and keep feeding your interest with whatever version of chicken soup matches it.  

Sarah [00:15:18] Well, I would like to offer up a definition of the news that I have given my 14-year-old. If they are not paying journalist, it's not a news source. We are not a news source, we do not pay journalists and we are not paid journalists. And that's why it says a different approach to the news, not a different approach to journalism, because we are not journalists. And that is a key component to news, is people who are paid professionals to go gather the information. So if you're watching anything and they don't pay journalists to go to where the story is, it's not news, it's opinion and commentary. And I think that is a very important distinction that is getting lost. So I told Griffin once-- he sent me this sort of Daily Show equivalent YouTube channel, and I was like, Griffin, look at what they're citing over and over and over again, The New York Times, The Washington Post, because those are actual news sources. They're not journalists, they're opinion commentators. They are giving you a take on the news, which is what we do here, because we are not journalists. And I think that distinction is so important and is completely lost in an algorithms like TikTok's or an algorithm like Facebook or an algorithm like Instagram. It just gets shrunk. And, look, cable news is a part of this problem too, because they put opinion and news next to each other and don't do a great job of distinguishing. And even within the pages of the New York Times, they have what they call opinion journalism. What the hell is that? They'll have reported stories in the opinion section. Now, it's easier for [inaudible] because I'm reading the print newspaper, but it's much harder to do that on the website and that's on them, and they should work harder on that. And that is a critique that they're getting from people who are leaving The New York Times, because that shrinking, that overlap, that entangledness between commentary and opinion and actually journalistically reported news, is something that we have to educate ourselves about and be very, very careful about. TikTok and, I believe, the Chinese Communist Party are exploiting that situation.  

[00:17:07] Music Interlude.  

Beth [00:17:17] So I do want to unpack the national security side of this best we can. We are not getting the briefings, obviously, and there is clearly so much more going on than what's apparent to people who do not get classified information about this. But from what has been reported, there are a couple of issues with respect to ByteDance's ownership. Number one, the Chinese government is unique in its legal and extralegal ability to compel companies headquartered in China to share information with them. You must, under the law in China, allow the Chinese government access to user data. So that is unusual and it is specific to this company. I always get worried when the legislature is making a law, or taking any action as to one specific company, instead of doing something more generally. But that is why we have this Committee on Foreign investment because sometimes there is something unique to a company, and that's going on here. There is a transparency concern. No one in the United States knows enough about TikTok's algorithm. No one knows what data is actually being collected. No one understands content moderation decisions. There is an enormous asymmetry between what Chinese officials and American officials know about this app that 170 million plus Americans, many of them children, are spending hours a day on. There is that data privacy component.  

[00:18:46] TikTok's collection of data, best we can tell, is on the high end compared to other social media platforms. To be honest though and fair, would we take what we know about TikTok's data collection, it is not as much data as the Chinese government is already getting about us through hacking efforts, by buying our data from brokers in the United States that collect it from other social media platforms and from credit cards, and from customer loyalty programs from our appliances. Congress is way behind the ball on regulating in this privacy area, as you said earlier, Sarah. I think when people hear the data privacy concern, they instinctively know that. And they also do what I tend to do, which is say, "I don't have anything to hide." But we're not really talking about personal surveillance. There was a great piece in foreign policy about this saying, well, personal surveillance is the most creepy. It is the least directly risky for the majority of everyday users. We're talking about collective risks. What can be learned when you get so much information about what entertains and motivates and upsets 170 million Americans? That has huge implications for how we compete in a free market and global economy. It has huge implications for political campaigns. China just gained so much access to this enormous sample size, and personal surveillance is the least problematic for most people, but it is not true for everyone. If you are a weaker, personal surveillance is a huge issue. And journalists have been targeted. That's not theoretical. There are people who report on China who have been targeted through surveillance done via TikTok. We know this.  

Sarah [00:20:30] We started this conversation being clear that TikTok is a media company. And I think that people's reaction to the data privacy and the security risk is reflective of people's lack of media education. This is something that I've encountered in my whole life. Back in the day when I was arguing about McDonald's and fast food companies and soda taxes, people would just roll their eyes, "It doesn't affect me." It does affect you. That's why they spend billions of dollars on it. It absolutely affects you. And the Chinese Communist Party knows that and has known it for a long time, as all our foreign adversaries have known it, and as we know it about other countries. Media environments and information campaigns matter. They matter. And at the same breath that people will say, I have nothing to hide. They will bemoan the partisan rancor in our country, even though so much of this is a reflection of the manipulation that happens on these media platforms. Absolutely some of it orchestrated and mobilized by these foreign actors. I think it's maybe too scary to take in. Man, people love a conspiracy theory and they miss some of the orchestrated actions right in front of their faces that China and Russia know what to put up there and what to sort of show to us to make us fight each other about. I just wrote this piece about Mr. Beast and Vox-- talk about someone who understands the algorithm, and he's probably the most successful I would say internet personality as far as being able to exploit the algorithm. Which I think it's right to say the algorithm, not just TikToks algorithm, not just YouTube, Instagram, whatever. This algorithm-- I thought this quote was so good. It says, "These algorithms are poisonous to humanity. They prioritize addictive, isolated experiences over ethical social design, all just for ads." It's not Mr. Beast I have a problem with, its platforms which encourage someone like me to study a retention graph so I can make the next video more addicting. At least I did that on steroids. This was a guy that worked for Mr. Beast.  

[00:22:44] So he's done it so successfully, he just signed a $100 million streaming content contract with Amazon. And he's miserable. He sounds miserable. He makes $100 million; although, interestingly, most of it comes from the candy he sells. He makes all this money millions and millions of dollars and everything that people report from working on him or that you can even see in his video where he'll say, "The more I suffer, the more you watch," is just so problematic. It's does not surprise me that our happiness Index for the United States dropped, driven mainly by young people who spend a majority of their media consumption inside algorithms that feed conflict and social isolation and do not reward connection and, like he said, ethical social design. And it does not surprise me that that's easily exploitable by foreign adversaries. But that's what I want to get at. And I'm not really sure this bill does. And I think it gets to the biggest manifestation of that problem. But I think that the senators who say this is just the beginning, like, we really have a problem here. We have a problem with young people that spend a majority of their time inside these algorithmic driven media companies. I've talked about this in our premium content that I've just described it as watching TV. Like, Griffin, would you watch TV right now? Would you pull a TV out in the car and put it in your lap and watch TV? Because that's what you're doing. That's what they become. Whatever tiny social component existed in the beginning, now it's just watch, watch, watch, watch, watch. And, look, I don't think TV's that great force either, but Lord, it seems like the good old days compared to this.  

Beth [00:24:29] And that is how I would respond to concerns from people who make their livelihood on TikTok, and people who say that there is a speech problem here. I think both of those are fair concerns. If you make your living on TikTok, I do think the government has been too far behind this. And it sucks to have invested so much in any platform and then the game change. At the same time, when you work on the internet, that is always the risk. Almost every business-- and we have had pains from this ourselves. When you are beholden to a tech platform, a tweak to that platform can take your business under. And that's true in the real world too. There are always external factors on businesses that are risks. And it's very painful. I do not mean to diminish it at all. I just don't think that that is, if we have a national security risk, a strong enough argument to defeat what that risk looks like. On the speech front, I think about the Second Amendment and how I do believe we have a right to keep and bear arms in our country, but I don't believe that right is unlimited. And I don't believe that right means that as technology allows us to build machines that are capable of killing with even greater speed and efficiency all the time, it means we have a right to have those machines. I don't believe a right to keep and bear arms means that individual citizens have a right to keep and bear nuclear weapons, as an extreme example. So when I think about our right to speech (which I think is sacrosanct and probably the most important one we have in a democracy, and the one that I think is most effective) I do believe the pen is mightier than the sword.  

[00:26:14] That's why other countries spend so much money to speak here, because when you capture a pure public opinion, you have done more than you can ever do with guns. And I believe that meeting the bad speech with good speech is almost always the answer. But I do not believe that free speech means that as technology builds machines that give us the ability to speak with increasing unlimited volume and scope and efficiency at a scale that is unfathomable, and as those machines enable us to not even be using our own voices anymore, but to be building an army of bots to speak for us, to push and push and push an issue, I think we're beyond the First Amendment there. I think that's something other than speech. I don't know what to call it, but I think a lot of what's happening on the internet right now is something other than speech, and we need to figure that out. That's hard work. It's hard work that should not be left to the Supreme Court. And we've got a bunch of cases pending right now that could help define some of the contours of how we regulate the internet. But I'm happy to see Congress beginning to have a conversation about what this is, because figuring out what this is and then how that intersects with our rights, to me, is one of the most important issues confronting us right now.  

Sarah [00:27:34] Yeah. And I think to your point about the business owners, it's just that there's this great piece I think we talked about here on the premium channel called 'Enshitiffication' where you see what happens. It's for the users, then it's for the advertisers, then it's the business clawing back its profits. Well, TikTok's trying to be for the advertisers. There was a big piece recently, an opinion piece in the New York Times, that was like, is TikTok ruined? Because it's full of shop stuff now? It's full of ads, just like what happened with Facebook, just like happened with Instagram. My most hopeful vision is that they just become so shitty, nobody wants to use them and we have to go back to the real world. But I think it's very interesting to me that this is happening right now as Reddit goes public, because Reddit was a chaotic platform that nobody wanted a piece of. And through content moderation and privacy policies, they clean their act up over at Reddit- for the most part. They're still not making any money, 19 years later. I think that's another question here. Like, is this a sustainable business? I know there's lots of users, but does that mean there's business? Have we through the course of this media environment, starting with TV all the way to TikTok, just destroyed everyone's attention that we have to rethink media and advertising all together? There's a part of me that wonders that if we flooded people with so many advertising that we've made advertising worthless. I think there's definitely a component of that on websites. I mean, we saw the collapse of website ads, even though they still exist. But does anybody click them? Do they work? There's like a bubble there I think that maybe has happened or is happening with regards to media advertising, our attention spans, and particularly with these platforms. And I think how you know that to be true, particularly in the context of the security, is that Congress finally acted. It takes a lot and they move slowly. And so for them to move fast on something like this, there is some there-there I think with regards to the security concerns, and it's up to them to educate people about that. And maybe they're up for the challenge, maybe they're not. But I think that if there are real security concerns-- I don't remember which Senator said, like, well, then we need to share these briefings with the public. Maybe that's what it will take.  

Beth [00:29:44] Honestly, I think it would be better if all of these platforms were just online malls. I don't mind at all to shop on Instagram. I kind of like it. I get connected with some small brands that I would never run into otherwise, but now that I know that that's what it is, when I go to my Instagram feed, it is basically an online mall. There's nothing social about it and that's fine. That's great. I know what I'm getting into. I understand what the deal is here. It is the lack of transparency around that that really bothers me. And I love that people who are super creative about their marketing can have a small business with reach because of these platforms, and I hope we find a way to keep that. I think in terms of speech, I don't know that that ever becomes a sustainable model, because the truth is you don't want to talk to everybody. Even a public square has to have some kind of container around it. This is a conversation that we should have within our community. This is a conversation that I want to have with people who also read the book, or listened to the podcast, or live here and have to live with the consequences of whatever decision that we make. I don't think this endless scale of speech is a lasting recipe. That's why all of these platforms eventually start to lose users and engagement, because we're kind of like, oh, I don't actually want to talk to the whole world always about everything, all the time.  

Sarah [00:31:10] Well, my concern is that the only time people seemingly want to do that, the only social component is now around conspiracy theories. And, yes, we're going to talk about Kate Middleton. I feel like that's the only time the social component takes off. It's like conspiracy theories or Taylor Swift or conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift. And, to me, that is weird and deeply problematic and easily exploitable. I was just sitting here thinking like, well, it's probably not an accident that we're talking about the exploitation of these algorithms to divide America while we're all fighting about Kate Middleton and trad wives. Do we really think this trad wife thing just burst forth, fully formed? I doubt it, guys. I really doubt it.  

Beth [00:31:50] While we're debating reproductive freedom here in the United States.  

Sarah [00:31:53] Yes. While we're debating reproductive freedom here in the United States. I don't think these women are like Chinese spies, but I think some of that content is getting promoted and finding a place in the algorithm because it feeds this need for conflict. And the Kate Middleton part of it, it just feels like so many people described it as it's just fun, which I found so deeply weird. Look, I have been very interested in the royal family for decades. It is a thing that I have always found fascinating, but it's not because it's fun. I never would have described it as fun. Because I think the system and what it does to the human beings within it is deeply problematic. And I have a curiosity about that, but not because I think it's fun. And this pursuit of conspiracy theories and describing it as fun is just-- I don't know. I find it really concerning. And not just because it's so easy to lose sight of the fact that it's a real person. She's a real human being. Taylor Swift is also a real person. And to me, though, the way the algorithm just shrinks it all-- and I don't know if it's because we're watching it like it's TV and then they become a character and we think it's a plot and a character. All of this just feeds our need for not just conflict, but interaction in these spaces where we spend so much time as consumers. And so then we're consuming in a way the conflict in search of the connection. Even though it's a connection that's making no one happy, as evidenced by our precipitous drop in the Happiness Index. I don't know. I just don't know.  

Beth [00:33:52] I think there are a bunch of things going on surrounding Kate Middleton that are really interesting. I don't care about the royal family at all, and I'm opposed to monarchy in general. The fun around it to me is a little bit of a nostalgia for big things that interest everybody, and for the early days of the internet when the internet was hilarious. And that's mostly what it was. I guess it was mostly porn, but for those of us who weren't in the porn space, the hilarity of it was a draw. And I think that when something big happens that that brings out the creativity and humor that a lot of people on the internet have, it is fun. And it isn't about Kate or where she is as much as it's about that nostalgia for a different internet. And this is complicated to split, but I think there is a distinction. I think Kate Middleton is fine and have from the beginning of these stories. I am not worried about Kate Middleton. I do think the Royal family as a brand is interesting, and it doesn't bother me at all for people to take shots at the brand of the firm that supports the royal family. Those distinctions get lost fast. People go way down rabbit holes. But a few days of memes about something that everyone's talking about, I find that engaging, and I get it. And I think it's because my peak internet use was in that window when that's mostly what the internet was.  

Sarah [00:35:33] See, I don't think the fun is the jokes for people. I think the fun is the rabbit hole. I think it's the puzzle of it all. It's why people like true crime. They want to feel like they're putting the information in a way that makes sense to people. I had a big conversation with my son last night about conspiracy theories because he is convinced that the government killed Martin Luther King. I don't know if I have Bo Burnham to thank for this or not, but I tell them all the time, you don't have to make one up. The government killed Fred Hampton. If you want a story about the government killing a civil rights leader, use that one. Don't make one up. And it's he's like, well, his family thinks they did. And he stood on a bathtub and the caliber-- all this stuff. And I said, "I need you to listen to me carefully. Something can seem fantastical, and still be true. And something can seem like such common sense and still be false because our sense of things, which is what fuels this algorithm and what fuels so much of this content, is not a dependable foundation for conclusions." It's sort of the entire pursuit since the enlightenment and the basis for the scientific theory. Like, that's not it. It's just not how we feel about things. That's not enough. Our feelings are relevant, but they are not reality. And I feel like-- which is a hilarious thing to say, ironically, after saying feelings are not relevant. But it's the pursuit of what I feel to be true because our media environment has shrunk in a way we can't go to, well, this is what's going to tell me is true. So I have to take it all in and do my own research and be my own expert and decide what's true. And it's freaking dangerous. And if I had a solid guess, I'd say that's what freaked out all those members of Congress when they walked into the security briefing, because they said they're using this sense that everybody's their own researcher and nobody can trust any experts anywhere. And they're feeding this shit to the American populace. And it's really dangerous. And, yeah, Kate Middleton is fine. But this sense of, like, I have to find that truth for myself, it's in a lot of places and it's not just her.  

Beth [00:37:42] Yeah. And I would love to know the numbers-- which we can't know because there's no transparency. I would love to know the numbers of people who are really in it for that puzzle and that true crime investigation versus people who just enjoy the funny memes, the jokes, that sense of like, oh, everybody knows about a thing. And we cope with a lot of things through humor and that's nice. That's a nice feature of being a human. I don't know what the breakdown is. I was thinking about how a lot of what I hear myself saying about social media when I consider my age and how my daughter might be hearing me as we talk about these things, how much of it is relying on sort of slippery slope fallacy. Which is a fallacy. It is not the case that if you watch a couple of reels about Kate Middleton, you will necessarily begin devoting your life to investigating lies about the royal family. It's not the case. Judgment usually intervenes. So I've been trying to kind of slow my roll there. I also struggle with the idea of gateway drugs for this reason. It is true that sometimes if you have a particular vulnerability and you have a glass of wine, it is going to lead you down that path. And that's true and that's real. It is also not usually the case. And so I can't find the numbers with the internet. What I know is that the internet has the unique incentive structure to create the slippery slope. To make it true that if you watch a couple of videos about this thing, suddenly you are deep in it because that's how they keep you there on the platform. They are interested in your judgment intervening. An app wants to keep you inside the app, and the way to do that is to pull you down the slippery slope. And there's no transparency about it. And even TikTok occasionally going, "Hey, you sure you still want to be here? It's been a while," is not enough to disrupt the deep psychological pull of a sense that I am in community right now, enjoying things with other people, really solving something, figuring out whatever. And that's where as a parent, I try to figure out what my role is. I don't want the government to make a decision about one company based on a concern that is, for me, a parental concern. I don't think that's the right balance, but where that gets layered in with all that I cannot see as a parent and all of these other risks, some of which I don't have the security clearance to know about, I do want the government to act. And I do feel as a parent right now that we are individually shouldering too much decision making responsibility around this whole apparatus.  

Sarah [00:40:22] Look, this week I read two articles about Discord where my 14-year-old spends an enormous amount of time. One article was about a highly organized group of predators. They have a name. They prey on children. They exploit them and blackmail them to do terrible, heinous things. They got this girl to cut the head off her own hamster. And I've had to read that and live with it, so now you guys can keep that in your head too. At least I'm not alone. And I read that, made Griffin read it and we talked about it. Then today I read an article about how people are forming actual, long lasting romantic relationships and marrying each other across thousands of miles based on people they meet on Discord. I read both of those inside a week. One were people getting married on Discord, one where people are cutting off the head off their hamsters. What am I supposed to do with that? My problem and the reason I think the concern is not a slippery slope. I think what I see, even as I read both of those articles with these platforms, is that the things that would have disrupted the slope, the barriers within the slide that would have gone, "Oh no, this is your judgment. This is not right," they are crumbling. The institutions we trusted that would have disrupted that slide that the algorithm makes so slick: the press, the government, civic organizations, organized religion, even familial structure, they're not as strong as they used to be. And so that's my concern. Public education, all these places where in theory they would have pulled us off the slope and said, "Hey, it's not just X and Y, we have a bunch of different options here." That's the logical fallacy of a slippery slope is then you're just assuming one thing's going to happen.  

[00:42:19] That's how I started the show that I think most people who are assuming one thing will happen from this bill is not true, that there are lots of possible outcomes. But it's just hard not to look at these platforms and see that all the different speed bumps barriers, in particular, because all of this happens on a foundation of basic human psychology, that's not going to change. That when you get on the internet and you encounter a funny meme, your brain processes that as a reward. And so your brain says go back again and again to try to find that funny reward. And it doesn't matter if you have to swim through a river of shit to get to one meme, our brain processes that as a reward. And so I just think when you put all that together and I look at how it plays out in my own life and my kids life, I think that we maybe are inevitably going to be in a more reactive pose because we are a democratic country and it is a game of influence, and we're not an autocrat that's going to go in and shut things down because there's a risk. And for better or for worse, I don't have another idea. So maybe that we will be constantly in a reactive pose with these platforms and their effects on ourselves, our kids, our families, our communities, and in our democracy. Maybe that's just where we are, but we got to start trying. And so I respect the try. I respect the effort within this legislation, if nothing else.  

Beth [00:43:44] Yeah. Because those institutions that would be speed bumps on the slippery slope will not be stronger through inaction. You don't become a greater, more trusted leader by not leading. So I do think the try is important.  

Sarah [00:44:01] Well, and you know what else we talk about all the time here, is the transparency those institutions were forced under. And that's where a lot of that trust was lost. We had transparency within abuse in the religion. C-Span just celebrated it's 45th anniversary of filming Congress. And then we just spent a lot of time talking about these platforms are so powerful because there's no transparency.  

Beth [00:44:23]  I really want to resist having a moral panic about this. So I was kind of questioning myself last night because I learned through the course of preparing for this show that CapCut is owned by ByteDance as well, and that some of the most concerning privacy risks surround CapCut-- not TikTok, but the app that a lot of people use to create content for TikTok. And my daughter loves cap cut. She loves to make videos with her friends that they just share in text messages. And I said, "I think you need to take this off your phone." And we had a conversation about it and all day I was kind of going, "Beth, are you treating this like Ouija boards?" When you were a kid, there was a sense that all the kids are interested in satanic stuff, and that Ouija boards were going to be the undoing of society, right? And I do not want to do that. I understand that there have to be spaces for my kids and for people younger than me in general, and just for other people to really enjoy and pursue and investigate things that I think are unwise. There has to be space for that. It is the lack of the speed bumps-- and not just the lack, but like you said, the slickness that technology creates down the slippery slope here that I keep getting hung up on. And where I think in combination with a hostile foreign government, this is bad. And we do need to do more than just this law. But I think that we do need to do this law.  

Sarah [00:46:00] Well, and the previous panics weren't wrong. When an older generation says the standard is slipping, they're right. And when they say this will lead to further slips, right. That's also true. As my father in law very wisely told me, I've never forgotten it, you do not put Pandora back in the box. That's not how it works. I was reading Brideshead Revisited (it's a book almost 100 years old) and they were talking about you just can't depend on modern education anymore. You could depend that kids learned a certain amount of things, and you knew what the basis for the foundation was, and you can't depend on that anymore. Sounds alarmist compared to where we are now. But it's also true that if you were complaining about the education of 100 years and then 10 years and then you stack those up, the education is vastly different. We're in a very different place, which is what the people a hundred years ago were warning about. I don't know if that's just the inevitable march of human history because some things get better. Some technology has made our lives infinitely better. And I don't know if we just have to take the good with the bad, because I don't think you do Pandora back in the box. I don't care what the ultimate mechanics of this law are, we're not going to put TikTok back in the box. And that's true for the mechanics of the platform anyway. The ‘Enshittification’. It's not stasis. It's going to change. It's going to degrade. Some people will leave. And so I just I don't know. I just want us to try something because I think we have all-- as indicated by these votes and at Congress that can't get much done, shows that like we do all have concerns. Is this the best way to solve it? Who the hell knows? But at least we can agree there's a problem.  

Beth [00:47:39] And it is unusual for us to agree on a bipartisan basis that there is a problem in 2024, and that is part of what compels me to say, ultimately, I think if I were a senator, I would vote for this bill, but I would also want to be involved in a working group that continued to look at data privacy, what we expect in terms of transparency from these algorithms, what consumers rights are as they meet the increasingly powerful force of artificial intelligence. It's just a lot of work left to do here. And so I know that I'm really looking forward to continuing to having my opinion shaped by the thoughtful comments that we always receive from this community. So we hope that you will weigh in this week and continue the conversation with us.  

[00:48:27] Music Interlude. 

[00:48:38] Well, Sarah, we have just done the let's sound like old people segment of the show, so let's continue it.  

Sarah [00:48:44] Lean all the way in.  

Beth [00:48:46] Let's lean all the way in. We have been rewatching some of the favorites from our past with our families. So we're here for a little game called Does It Hold Up? What is your first contender and does it hold up?  

Sarah [00:49:00] Well, we watched several John Hughes films as a family. We watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off. We watched Curly Sue. We watched Uncle Buck. We're not done, we're going to watch some more. But that's the three we've watched so far. And the answer is Ferris Bueller's Day Off holds up beautifully. It's still so brilliant. The teenagers loved it, which I think is the ultimate indication. Curly Sue, not great. Wasn't really great at the time. Doesn't hold up well. It's a weird movie. The tonal shifts are dramatic. Uncle Buck is still really good. I think it holds up pretty well-- not as well as Ferris Bueller because I don't think it's as tightly written. But John Candy was such a genius. He sort of carries it along. So those were our first three. And then I have a whole other TV section, but those are my movies we've watched recently.  

Beth [00:49:54] We do this periodically with the girls, and I don't think about it so much. I hadn't thought about it until you brought this topic idea up. So they loved Independence Day. We are watching the X-Men movies with them and they like them. Those are a little more recent, but they like them. Most important to me, I've been watching musicals with Ellen. We watched Mary Poppins for the first time. She had seen a stage version, but hadn't seen the old film. So we watched it. She loved it. She was just totally enchanted by it. And we watched the Alice in Wonderland. They called it a mini series. I think it's more fairly a two part movie. That was on television in 1984 when I was a kid, and we recorded it on a VHS tape, and I watched it over and over and over again. And they loved it. It was just as charming as I remembered.  

Sarah [00:50:45] But does it hold up does not mean that they like it or did they not like it. Sometimes I think it means do you watch it and go, oh no. We watch a lot of 80s movies where I'm like, "Holy crap, I can't believe they just said that." It was entertaining for the time, but the performances are not that great, or the jokes are not that funny or the tonal shifts are weird. There's a lot of weird tonal shifts, not just in John Hughes films, but in 80s films overall. We watched Back to the Future and I'm like, this movie is weird. And I just want to say I said the same thing about Field of Dreams, and I feel very confirmed by John Mulaney's hilarious speech at the Oscars that I hope you saw, because Field of Dreams is a weird ass movie. When the kids are looking at you and they're like, "Why did that just happen?" And you're like, "I don't know. We thought it was great at the time."  

Beth [00:51:30] I did watch John Mulaney. I thought it was very funny. I'm not contending that it's not a weird movie. I'm just saying we make a lot of weird movies that we still like. No, I did not have any cringe moments in the movies that I just listed. I didn't have any moments where I thought they definitely wouldn't have said that today. We don't have to speculate about Mary Poppins because we have a remake. So I understand that they would do some things differently, but there were moments in the old movies that I specifically preferred to some of the newer takes. So I think overall I can say that these held up.  

Sarah [00:52:07] Well, sometimes I just don't commit to the redo. Sometimes it's like half and half. We saw a Peter Pan musical where it's like half of it was modernized and half of it wasn't. We're like, guys, you got to commit here. Either go all in and modernize it or don't. But don't do half and half. The other thing we've been watching is The Sopranos with Griffin. Obviously, I'm not watching The Sopranos with my 12-year-old or nine-year-old, but I am watching it with my 14-year-old and it's been really funny. The other day he asked me, he goes, "Was this the first TV show that like really serialized?" And I was like, "No. What are you talking about? No, it was not the first TV show." And he's like, but really was taking you somewhere. I'm like, well, yes. Was it the first prestige television that had a showrunner that was going in a very clear direction? It was one of the first. Yes. It was something that we had not seen in TV before. It was like ER. Just perpetual drama until the end of time. But it's been so funny because part of this, the holding up is difficult because-- And honestly, this is related to the royal family conversation. When a performance or a person was very much alive to you, but has always been dead to your children or to a new generation, it's very different. So my perspective on Kate and William is very much colored by the fact that I remember them as little boys, I remember Diana as alive, I remember her dying. It very much affected me. And so as we're watching The Sopranos, it very much mattered to me and colors my perception that James Gandolfini is no longer here. And so 'm wrapped up in him because he is Tony Soprano. Tony Soprano is James Gandolfini. James Gandolfini was not a murderous monster, but he was an amazing performer. And so it's all tied up to me. So when he's like, "Is he going to get better?" Like, he's terrible. I'm like, it's really complicated. You just have to believe me that he's a complicated character, but also capable of maybe being a murderous monster. Get it. Totally true. We just watched College, which is one of the most important episodes in TV, but definitely Soprano's history. Because he sees it like, why are we-- he's post anti-hero. This is not revolutionary to him. So he was like, why do we like this guy? I'm like, we do like him though. We're with him. We're in it with Tony. And you just have to believe that to be true to continue this journey with me.  

Beth [00:54:42] I don't even know what to say about that, Sarah. I don't know what to say about that.  

Sarah [00:54:48] That's because you're not a Prestige TV person.  

Beth [00:54:50] I don't like Prestige TV.  

Sarah [00:54:51] Except for Succession.  

Beth [00:54:53] I loved Succession. I love Nurse Jackie. There are some good shows that people admire that have won awards that I have enjoyed. I just don't need to watch whatever people say is the prestige show right now, and I don't find them all enjoyable. And I have a real violence limit. We started watching Shogun, and it's beautifully shot and very well-written and thoughtful, and I can't do it. It's too violent for me. I just cannot. If I can't watch it before I go to bed, I'm probably not going to watch it. That's the only time I watch television, and it really bothers me. Chad just this morning was like, "So, are you out on Shogun? Can I keep going?" And I said, "I'm totally out. Feel free. Live your best life." But I enjoy well-made shows. I just find that a lot of them happen to be more violent than I can stand. I certainly felt that about The Sopranos. I just couldn't do it.  

Sarah [00:55:45] I love it so much. To me, it's kind of what I wish-- again, to tie this back to Kate Middleton. The Prestige television appeal to me is not like I need to watch it because everyone's watching it. It's because if you want the challenge, if you want a challenge of putting the pieces together and seeing the patterns and watching something just done and performed and created at the highest level, you don't have to go do a conspiracy theory. These shows do it. Nicholas just found this piece about the finale. Look, I'm not spoil anything. The show's been out for 20 years, but the ending is it goes black and a lot of the analysis is that he was killed. Well, there's this YouTube video Nicholas found that's like the theory is they all put all four family members sitting at the table, put the onion rings on their tongues like a communion wafer, and they all do it very deliberately. And the theory is this is the message that David Chase is like they all got killed, not just Tony, they're all dead. And just stuff like that. I remember the level of costume design to where you could watch Joan's marriage fall apart because the roses on her dresses died. They went from bright red buds to brown patterns. That level of like-- I know we love that. And I love it too. But can we do it in fiction not ever in real life? Because it's all there and it's all beautifully composed and put together in this way. And I just think the violence part for me is all the way back to Shakespeare. You create drama through violence. Human beings are violent creatures. And so I think it's just kind of part and parcel of the whole for me. But there were parts of definitely some shows like Game of Thrones where I'm like, Imma I need a minute. I remember the finale of Game of Thrones, I would shake and I'm like, why am I so cold? And then I realized it was adrenaline from the stupid TV show that I was watching. I was so invested in.  

Beth [00:57:44] Yeah, I have no judgment about the violence. I just personally find it overwhelming and I cannot sleep. And if I do sleep, I will have terrible dreams. And sleep is very important to me. So I prioritize my sleep over the Prestige TV. I'll tell you this show that I'm really enjoying right now is The Diplomat on Netflix. So it is not that level of Prestige TV care and patterns. I don't think. So far we're just a few episodes in, but it is so smart and so entertaining. And what I love about it is that you really have to know your current events to follow the plot lines.  

Sarah [00:58:16] Oh, fun. It's Keri Russell, right?  

Beth [00:58:18] Yes, they do not slow down and explain to you who Hezbollah is, but it is a big part of what's happening in the show.  

Sarah [00:58:26] I like that. I could have been into that. 

Beth [00:58:28] It's a really fun watch. It has multiple storylines that capture your attention. The characters are rich even this early in it. So I'm a big fan.  

Sarah [00:58:39] Well, she's also brilliant. 

Beth [00:58:41] She's so good in this. So fun to watch.  

Sarah [00:58:43] You should really watch The Americans. You would love it.  

Beth [00:58:46] Yeah.  

Sarah [00:58:47] She's a Russian spy. It's good.  

Beth [00:58:48] I probably would. Well, we've gone beyond Does it Hold Up? But that's what we do, and that's okay.  

Sarah [00:58:54] But I do want to hear what people watch that holds up because I, for the most part, love family movie night but do not want to watch anything made in the last 20 years with my children. So I want people's list of does it hold up something, especially the obscure one. We've hit the big dogs, guys. We've gone through most of the John Hughes movies. We've done Indiana Jones. I need them more like Short Circuit. That's what I'm looking for. I need to build my list out. So I'm here for that feedback.  

Beth [00:59:19] The absolutely it does not hold up is very helpful to eliminating things. It's a gift. So we appreciate all of your feedback on that. We appreciate everything. We're so glad that you're here. We hope that you found something in this episode, especially in our conversation about TikTok, that you would find helpful to share with people in your lives as you continue to discuss this. We will be back with you on Tuesday for a very special episode. The Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, will be with us. Until then, we hope you have the best weekend available to you.  

[00:59:47] Music Interlude.  

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. 

Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement. 

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima. 

Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. Christina Quartararo. Shannon Frawley. Jessica Whitehead. Samantha Chalmers. Crystal Kemp. The Lebo Family. The Adair Family. 

Sarah: Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller. 

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