Hello from the Goods Newsletter twice a week! On Tuesday, reporter on internet culture Rebecca Jennings use this space to update you all about what’s happened in the world of TikTok. Is there anything you want to see more of? Less of? Different from? Email [email protected], en subscribe here for the goods newsletter.
If you or someone you love has recently been forced to know or care about what TikTok is, first, I’m sorry, this app will take over your life.
Second of all, when was the last time normal people got this rumor about a possible sale of a foreign tech company? I can not remember for sure, but under all the news – Trump bans the app? Is Microsoft buying it? Do the faceless, omnipotent gods steal data from TikTok? – are fears about China and specifically fears that the US may not be the one setting the ground rules of the internet.
On August 6, President Trump gave executive orders that would ban two apps, TikTok and WeChat, from operating in the U.S. if they were not sold by September 15 by their respective Chinese member companies. (In response, TikTok is now setting up the Trump administration.) National security concerns about how the Chinese government could force TikTok to hand over US user data or censored content to the Communist Party of China have been going on for more than a year brewer.
Both Microsoft and Twitter have apparently been in talks to get TikTok, although a sale would be inexorably messy: Microsoft is not trying to buy TikTok, it is trying to buy TikTok in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and as my colleague Russell Brandom explained at The Verge, no one has ever split a social network along regional lines; it is unclear whether this is even possible. “That central problem is much harder than anyone is willing to admit,” he writes.
Meanwhile, the vultures growl. Last week, Instagram launched its long-in-the-works copycat product, Reels, in the US. (Snapchat also has a competitor feature.) Although Reels is functionally identical to TikTok, it has so far failed to recreate the particular joys and origins of its predecessor, and most of the content seems like a sad facsimile of most boring moms from TikTok.
But back to why this is important for people who do not otherwise care for viral dances than technology companies. The best and clearest approach to all of this, in my opinion, comes from Sarah Jeong, who also writes for The Verge. She treats the central strategy in the game here “information nationalism”, as the idea that to point out a country’s failures and human rights abuses it is too weak (for example, to pinpoint the history of slavery in the US to describe America is blasphemous).
The US, she claims, is afraid of TikTok because the country has made it an avatar of the Chinese approach to tech. The irony here, however, is that there are many reasons to actively fear about how American tech companies and their own government use the same data, in particular the information that Edward Snowden revealed in 2013; if American politicians run out of Silicon Valley virtues while spreading fears over China, it is rather hypocritical.
“Just as China tried to use Google to spy on its activists, the National Security Agency had secretly collected data from almost every American company you could think of,” she writes. “The federal government has made it harder to see numbers on coronavirus infections. The president has even said on the plate that increased testing will make him look bad. The logic behind this is the same logic that drove the Chinese Communist Party to hide the pandemic in Wuhan all day long, a lot for everyone. The similarities in their behavior will not stop the president from accusing China of a cover-up – that’s exactly how information nationalism works. ”
Even if Instagram Reels launches, or even if TikTok is turned to dust with the stroke of a pen, it will not matter, because although TikTok may be the first Chinese social media company to succeed on a truly global level, it probably won it be the last. If the US thinks this is a problem, information nationalism is not the answer.
Meme watch
On TikTok, some moms are funny, many are lame, and some are incredibly disgusting (do not click on this link unless you want to watch videos of people eating cereal with milk from each other’s mouths). But among the least and most deceptive is the prevalence of digital blackface, in which white makers synchronize lips to the voices of Black peoples or trace their influence. Digital blackface has always been a problem on the internet, and on TikTok, where mimicry is the lingua franca, new fertile ground has been found.
In this month’s Wired cover story, Jason Parham explores how TikTok has shaped this evolution, where memes like “Hot Cheeto Girl” and audio like Nene Leakes’ “whew chile, the ghetto” have become fair game for white makers. One woman said for the story, “When you call them out, it’s, ‘Every race can be a Hot Cheeto Girl.’ “No dear, we know what you’re doing. We know that the Hot Cheeto Girl is just a derivative of the ghetto girl, the Caprot, the Shanaynay that people once called Black and Latin women.”
The piece also includes a series of disturbing statements by TikTok makers about the racism they have experienced on the app, whether from fellow users or from the technology itself – videos are being taken because sign language is read as a “band symbol,” censorship of comments on racist videos but no action taken on the racist video itself. It is now common for Black makers to keep a backup account for when their main account will eventually be discontinued for some nefarious violation.
Most luminous in Parham’s piece, however, is when he details the importance of seeing images of Black people online, and TikTok, despite the apparent problems, has been a home for many Black creators. Here he talks about what the early days of social media were like as a Black person:
‘It wasn’t until college, where I clicked through Facebook for hours a day, that I felt connected to a world and the people who made it to what it felt like for the first time, that I finally began to articulate what part of it I have known since childhood: that images make us true. From my laptop screen, I was looking forward to some sort of Black Universe. Here Black people did what we do: play spades at a barbecue; hanging out with family members at home, caught mid-laughing. We posed for the camera every chance we got, because we understood, even though we never spoke, that we would exist here – somewhere – forever. There was air in our lungs, fire in our bones. When whites try to tackle that Blackness for TikTok, they erase it.
One Last Thing
This was a rather depressing newsletter, so please enjoy this incredibly calming video of a self-proclaimed Cottagecore lesbian preparing a picnic for her girlfriend. The sandwich looks so good!
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you and our audiences around the world with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more important than it is at the moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work reaches more people than ever before, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources – especially during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to provide free articles, videos and podcasts by providing the quality and volume that this moment requires. Consider making a contribution to Vox today.
