Could Politics Poison TikTok's Magic?

Forbes

Some employees have argued political posts are good for business, and urged the company to loosen its political ads ban. Others worry politics could poison TikTok’s magic.  Forbes reporter Emily Baker-White discusses the battle of TikTok and politics with Forbes breaking news reporter Brittany Lewis on Election night. (Interview previously recorded on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024)  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2024/11/04/the-battle-over-how-much-politics-to-allow-on-tiktok/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  0:00 Introduction 1:32 The Latest With TikTok 8:15 TikTok's Past With Politics 12:33 Politically And Socially: How Does TikTok Compare To Instagram & Facebook?  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is my Forbes

00:07colleague Emily Baker White. Emily, thanks so much for coming on.

00:12Thanks so much for having me.

00:14On this election day, you have a very relevant story about the battle over how much politics

00:20to allow on TikTok. So talk to us about the internal battle, first of all, on the colleagues

00:27in TikTok talking about whether they should ban politics, what the political discourse

00:32on the apps would look like.

00:34Yeah, so TikTok has a long history of ambivalence and nervousness about politics. They used

00:43to call themselves the last sunny place on the Internet. They really wanted to sort of

00:48be a politics-free zone as best they could. And in part, that's because TikTok is owned

00:54by a Chinese parent company. And so if there's even a shred of doubt about whether TikTok

01:00might be putting its thumb on the scale in favor of one candidate or against another

01:04candidate, that would make people really uncomfortable.

01:07And so the company's stance from here on, from their founding, has sort of been to avoid

01:14politics as best they can. But as TikTok has gotten bigger, it is, as we all know, impossible

01:20to avoid politics these days. And it's especially impossible to avoid politics when you have

01:26170 million Americans on your platform. That is more people than voted for Trump and Biden

01:32in 2020. It is a huge number of people, and they are having this conversation on TikTok.

01:38And so some people at TikTok have said, let's lean into it. It gets clicks. It keeps people

01:44on the app. It makes money when we're talking about ads. And so some people internally have

01:51said we should lean into this and we should just do it, just like some of the other platforms

01:55do. Facebook and Google famously allow political ads and make a lot of money off of them.

02:01But there's also been pushback within TikTok. There are people who are really worried about

02:05its sort of geopolitical plight. Of course, TikTok is fighting a bill in the U.S. courts

02:11right now that became law in April and will ban TikTok in January unless it is found

02:19to be unconstitutional. And so we don't even know if TikTok is going to be around in years

02:26to come because of its sort of geopolitical complications. The last thing they want to

02:30do is add politics on top of that.

02:33So can you talk to us about when this staunch stance of we want this to be the sunny corner

02:38of the Internet, we don't want politics on here. When did that begin to soften? Because

02:42you mentioned a story at the beginning of your piece about a Donald Trump video that

02:47was circulating. What did that look like?

02:50Yeah, so the executive in charge of the monetization integrity team at TikTok, which is the team

02:57that sort of polices the political ad policies and political ads aren't allowed today on

03:02TikTok. But this person and others inside the company think they should be. And so you

03:10ask, when did the policy start to soften? I want to be clear that the policy is the

03:14same as it was before. But people internally aren't sure it should stay that way. And there's

03:20sort of been this debate inside TikTok. So it's not that the company has changed its

03:25public facing policies. They haven't. Those policies have been in place since 2019. But

03:31there is this debate raging inside TikTok about whether they should change their tune.

03:36Let's get into that debate a little bit further here. Let's dive a little deeper. Talk about

03:40Project Core, something inside of TikTok that's kind of spearheading these conversations.

03:47Yeah, so Project Core is a group of senior TikTok employees across departments. You've got,

03:54you know, your legal, your comms, your product, your engineering, what what have you. And

03:59this group of people, Project Core comes from the idea of sort of protecting and enshrining

04:06what is core to TikTok. And that is that sort of last sunny place on the internet idea,

04:11right? The company wants to make sure that it stays true to what made it so successful in

04:17the first place. And so Project Core has looked at a lot of research on toxicity, what

04:25creates like really awful online spaces. We've all been in sort of a doom loop online,

04:32whether it's on Twitter, which is now X or on Facebook or somewhere else where we just see

04:36people getting angrier and angrier and angrier at each other and more polarized, right? And

04:41there's been this big discourse over the past five, eight years now, about the extent to which

04:48social media may be increasing that polarization that we feel, you know, as a polity. And so

04:54really thinking about what role TikTok plays in that and what role TikTok think that should play

05:00in that was sort of the reason that Project Core was assembled. Now, one of the things that they

05:07talked about in the past year was how they should handle news content. This video, for example,

05:14right? They're interested in sort of any clips of what they call harder political news on the

05:22platform being put out by your Forbes, your Wall Street Journal, your Bloomberg, your New York

05:28Times, right? And on other platforms, there's long been a sort of question about whether those

05:35videos should receive more weight than videos from just a random user from more sort of fringe

05:44outlets that may not have the same fact checking and standards in place that major news outlets

05:49do. And so the whole prospect of sort of trying to figure out what are the authoritative sources of

05:54information here? And can we upbring those to people? Can we make sure that people are seeing

06:00good, accurate fact checked news? This is a really complicated question that Facebook famously tried

06:08to deal with and didn't really deal with to anyone's satisfaction. YouTube has had the same

06:13problem. And you know, TikTok's the new kid on the block, and they're going to confront the same set

06:18of questions too. And so Project Core considered a proposal this past year has been considering a

06:28proposal on whether to define a group of authoritative news sources and upbring those in

06:35people's feeds. And what's really interesting to me is that like, I heard about these

06:39conversations, I went to the company, and I said, Hey, guys, are you doing this? And they wouldn't

06:44tell me. So is TikTok currently defining and upbringing authoritative news? I don't know. Maybe we

06:53ask them again, their answer changes.

06:55So that's really interesting. So let's say this video went on TikTok, it would have the same weight as

07:01someone randomly maybe spreading misinformation, disinformation about a political idea.

07:08So not necessarily. And I say that only because there are 1000 different variables that go into how TikTok or

07:16Facebook or YouTube ranks of a video, a post a piece of content, right. And so it may be that they detect some

07:25harmful misinformation in another post, and they downrank it for that reason. It may be that they're trying to

07:31push videos over a minute long. And so somebody gets an upbringing just based on the length of their video,

07:36right. And I say this only to point out that there are like, a whole bunch of factors that go into how videos are

07:42ranked, many of them personalized, right? Many of them is like a gardening video is going to be high on my list,

07:46because I like to garden, whereas it's not going to be high on your list if you don't. Um, so it's really hard to

07:52say that this video will be ranked the same as some other video, because that might be true for one person and not

07:59another. But still, what what these discussions were about is whether all other things equal in a, you know,

08:06fantasy world, some videos should, based on their authoritativeness, get a bump.

08:15When you're thinking about the political history on TikTok, where does that begin? Because you talk about this, you

08:21know, checkered past when it comes to politics and TikTok, take us through it.

08:26Yeah, so TikTok started getting really big in 2019. And then fully exploded in the United States in 2020. Part of that

08:35was just how the platform happens to get big. A lot of it was the pandemic, people were stuck at home, they were

08:41looking for a new thing to do that didn't involve going near other people or touching anyone else. And there was this

08:48new app, and it was fun, and it was weird, and it was quirky. And it was just the break that a lot of people needed,

08:54right. And so TikTok gets really big in 2020. During the pandemic. Another thing that gets really big during the

09:00pandemic in mid 2020, is the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd protests. And so there was a huge upsurge

09:11in sort of political and civil rights, social activism content in TikTok around 2020. And that was sort of the first

09:19time that the platform really confronted that like, this was going to be a thing that was going to happen to them, whether

09:27they liked it or not. And of course, famously, there was a prank carried out by largely teenagers. When Donald Trump was

09:37running for president in 2020. This was carried out in part on TikTok, it was partially on Twitter, it was it wasn't

09:43necessarily specific to TikTok. But there was this prank that was carried out where a bunch of kids reserve tickets to a

09:52rally they weren't going to go to and embarrass the former president. And some people say that was why Trump actually

10:00decided he wanted to ban TikTok. And so this was a real find out moment for TikTok about what it could mean to engage in

10:08politics. It's like all of a sudden, some people engaged in political activism on our platform. And now we've got this guy

10:14who's trying to ban us, right. And so that was, I think, a wake up call for TikTok just about how complicated discourse and

10:23political discourse could be. Since then, we've seen the company for a few years really try to avoid politics. And then more

10:31recently, they've sort of leaned into the fact that they have all these users, and they're having all of these types of

10:37important conversations on the platform. Because as TikTok fights this potential ban in court, the fact that political

10:44discourse is happening on its platform, political discourse is one of the most protected types of speech under the First

10:50Amendment, and they want to try to use that.

10:52That's a really important piece of this puzzle here, especially when we think about TikTok potentially being banned. I just

10:59checked, but both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have accounts on TikTok. So is there any indication of the future, let's say

11:08either of them gets elected president, if they would ban the app or not?

11:14Yeah, it's not clear that the president at this point has that much control over what's going to happen. Congress passed a law

11:21and President Biden signed that law. The new president can't just undo a law that's been signed that requires an act of

11:27Congress too. And so Donald Trump has said that if he becomes president, he will not ban TikTok. Again, it's not totally

11:37clear. It's up to him. The way that the law is written, fines will start to accrue if Apple and Google do not remove TikTok from

11:44their app stores. This is, of course, assuming that the Supreme Court or a lower court does not stop the law from going into

11:51effect. If the law goes into effect, those fines start accruing, those fines can be enforced, would be enforced by the Attorney

11:59General, right? And Trump could, of course, say, hey, Attorney General, don't do this. Don't enforce this law. But Trump's not gonna be

12:07president forever. Nobody's gonna be president forever. And Trump couldn't stop a subsequent president from then coming and

12:14saying, hey, Apple and Google, those fines have been accruing for years, you want to pay up now. And so Trump may say that he

12:20wouldn't ban TikTok and he would do what he could to try to stop it. But the truth is, Congress has taken an act. The president

12:27signed that act into law. That's that's not something that Trump can just unilaterally undo.

12:33When you're thinking about politics on different social media platforms like Facebook, like Instagram, does TikTok have a tougher

12:41stance when it comes to politics and political ads than these other platforms? What does that look like amongst the competition?

12:48TikTok very clearly has a stronger stance on political ads. They don't allow them and Meta and Google do. And so you will see

12:57political ads, you will see campaigns paying money to Google to Meta to run political ads, and Google and Meta are taking that money

13:05and running with it, right? TikTok doesn't do that. But people do post political ads on TikTok, right? They just do so as organic

13:16content rather than as an ad. And so you if you open up your TikTok feed, you are likely to see if you have any interest in politics

13:25at all, if you're based in the United States, you are likely to see political ads, ads that have been created for the purpose of

13:31politics. But they are not ads that are running on TikTok, right? And they are just videos that people have posted that are running

13:41elsewhere as ads.

13:43So that seems to be a bit of a workaround. Would TikTok ever ban those? What does the future of this conversation look like?

13:52Yeah, it would be really hard for TikTok to ban those because you're banning a person from posting a video that is engaged in

14:03political expression. Now, now, the company could say this is just this is not a place for that. We don't want any political

14:09discourse on the platform. That would be a really, really aggressive thing to try to define. And if, if you ban politics, and

14:18this is true, even of TikTok and political ads, that means you have to define politics. And all of a sudden, maybe this is a

14:24woman posting an ad talking about an abortion that she had because she was going to die otherwise. Is that a political ad now?

14:32Right? If you say we can't talk about politics, is that politics? And so drawing the lines about what is political and what is not

14:40quickly becomes really, really murky. What about, you know, someone making a video about facing discrimination at work for being a

14:47person of color, right? Is that political? What about someone making a video raising awareness about gun violence? Is that

14:53political? All of a sudden, you've got like, all of these really tough questions that like, TikTok, just just like Facebook, just

15:00like, you know, Google, these are like tech companies. And do we really want tech companies having to draw lines about whether

15:09someone's first person testimony about their abortion is political or not? That's so messy. And they are not the best position people to

15:17do that.

15:19And it sounds like a slippery slope for certain. But as the conversation definitely persists, as election season wraps up a new

15:27administration comes in. I hope you come back on and continue these really important conversations. Emily Baker White, thank you so

15:34much for joining me.

15:36Thanks so much for having me.

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