In 2020, when then-US President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok due to alleged Chinese influence, Microsoft unsuccessfully attempted to buy the app’s US operation, a move that CEO Satya Nadella later called “the “Strangest thing” I have ever done.
Now events are getting even stranger. Last month President Joe Biden signed a bill demanding that ByteDance, the China-based owner of TikTok, sell its US operations by January 2025, or face a ban. ByteDance now he is fighting this through US courts. Meanwhile, Trump himself has apparently changed and appears to oppose a banprobably because Jeff Yass, one of the main US ByteDance InvestorsHe is also a big Trump supporter.
But even stranger is that some of Trump’s key allies, like Robert Lighthizer, hate China’s alleged influence over TikTok, while Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s former Treasury secretary, seems eager to buy it.
And this week Frank McCourt, the real estate magnate and fierce critic of Big Tech., threw a supposed “offer of the people”, through the Guggenheim investment bank. This is supported by Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web, and Jonathan Haidt, the influential social psychologist whose new book, The anxious generationdenounce social networks.
In reality, this public tactic seems quixotic, if not advertising. McCourt claims he has the advantage in any race, since he doesn’t want to buy into the recommendation algorithm. This is seen as the secret sauce of TikTok, which many in Washington allege is tightly controlled by Beijing and therefore key to US national security concerns. “We’ll probably be the only bidder who won’t be interested in the algorithm,” McCourt tells me, insisting that removing it is the only way to build a healthier platform.
But McCourt tells me he has not discussed his move with Beijing and does not yet have funding for the group. And ByteDance has no incentive to negotiate while he fights a ban in US courts, or if he believes Trump could win in November and overturn it.
Still, tech investors shouldn’t ignore McCourt: If nothing else, this offering raises questions that challenge our assumptions about what cyberspace might look like in the future.
The issue at stake partly revolves around control of the so-called “social graph,” or users’ online data and digital footprint. In recent years, prominent voices like McCourt and Haidt have railed against Big Tech’s control of the social graph, arguing that it is being used to manipulate us all in unhealthy ways, through opaque algorithms like TikTok’s. .
Therefore, the instinct of most policymakers – and parents – is to want to turn back the clock and put the brakes on social media. But this seems unrealistic given that the digitalization of our lives has not only changed our daily habits, but also our cognitive maps and innate cultural patterns in at least two important ways.
The first is a shift from so-called “vertical” trust relationships to “lateral” relationships: from obtaining advice from institutions and authority figures to a networked group of peers. The second has its roots in what I call rise of “Generation P” — “Pick’n’ Mix” or “Playlist” generation, whose members are becoming addicted to personalizing their cyber lives according to individual consumer choices, and doing so in a way that is amplified by the rise of intelligence tools artificial.
These two changes are leading Internet users to group together into like-minded online tribes, where they decide what is “true” by analyzing the feelings and experiences of their peers, with surprising results. TO Survey by the Center to Counter Digital HateFor example, it shows that teenagers are the most conspiratorial generation.
And surprising ethnographic research by Jigsaw, a branch of Alphabet, and others, suggests that young people now trust your colleagues to ask for advice in most spheres of life, valuing them more than doctors for medical information, let’s say. Indeed, AI robots People are increasingly trusted over human authority figures, due to the love of personalization and peer advice. Yes really.
This is terrifying, given that online tribalism and robots can be (and often are) manipulated. The White House, for example, fears that China is using the TikTok algorithm to manipulate consumer “choices.”
But it seems pointless to hope that these two changes can be reversed: Generation P is integrated. Therefore, the key question is whether there is any way to work. with these trends to clean up the Internet, rather than wishing they would go away?
McCourt insists the answer is “yes” and has invested $500 million in a “Freedom” Platform which uses open source protocols to give individuals personal control over their social graph, so they are less prone to manipulation. He hopes to use TikTok to amplify this. Berners-Lee has similar goals through the call Solid platform.
This, of course, sounds even more quixotic than his TikTok offering. Big Tech won’t give up ground without a fight, and there’s no guarantee that the people who control its social graph will use it wisely.
But before dismissing this, technology investors should remember that the Internet has already evolved extraordinarily quickly, in ways previously unimaginable, and could do so again. Or to put it another way, quixotic or not, this new twist in the TikTok story shows how “strange” seems increasingly normal, in a political, geopolitical and psychological sense. Don’t rule out anything.