Inside the World’s ‘Most Sophisticated’ Surveillance System, With BuzzFeed News’ Megha Rajagopalan
OneZero is partnering with Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast by Alex Kantrowitz, to bring readers exclusive access to interviews with notable figures in and around the tech industry.

This week, Kantrowitz sits down with BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.

China’s mass internment of Muslims in its Xinjiang region is one of the world’s most under-covered stories. The country has detained 1 million people there, putting them through a “reeducation” program meant to erase their language and culture, sometimes through forced labor and sterilization.

Though comprehensive, on-the-ground reporting from Xinjiang is sparse, BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan has been on the story from the beginning. She reported from Xinjiang itself. Then, after China did not renew her visa, she worked with BuzzFeed News contributors to track the internment camps using satellite imagery, finding that they are expanding.

To learn more about what’s happening in Xinjiang, how China treats the press, and the future of the global internet, I sat down with Rajagopalan on this week’s Big Technology podcast. The following discussion is filled with fascinating revelations from her reporting, an absolute clinic for anyone interested in these issues.

Kantrowitz: What is Xinjiang and what’s happening there?

Rajagopalan: Xinjiang is a really large region in Western China that sits on the border of a number of Central Asian countries. You have a population there of some 25 million people. About half are Uighur Muslims and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities and the other half are Han Chinese.

The government has had its issues with the minority populations there for a long time — since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. But what I’ve primarily written about is the government’s policies in Xinjiang in the Xi Jinping era. And it’s during that time period that things got significantly worse.

Starting in late 2016, early Sep 2017, the government started to implement this policy of high-tech and pervasive surveillance over Muslim minority populations, and mass internment and incarceration of a portion of that population.

So, they’re detaining millions of people.

Detaining and incarcerating. According to UN officials and some academic estimates, there are upwards of a million people who have been detained in that region since 2017. The numbers involve a lot of extrapolation and they’re sort of hard to get to, but that’s the ballpark figure that everyone takes seriously.

If China is going to incarcerate people like this, what does it say their crime is?

It’s important to distinguish between people who are in extrajudicial camp facilities versus people who are in the normal prison population. In some sense, it’s a distinction without a difference, because the government calls the camps vocational training centers or schools. They are not that, they are internment camps. But the thing that you do to get to camps versus the things that you do to get to prisons are different. For camps, people are being sent there for transgressions that are not even crimes under Chinese law.

I’ve met people who were told that they were sent for having banned apps like WhatsApp on their phones, people who were sent for sending money to family overseas for traveling and living abroad, particularly within the Muslim majority world. There’s all kinds of things like that that can get you sent to camps.

China isn’t really worried about the people downloading WhatsApp. So, what’s going on from a higher level? Are they just interested in making sure there are no Muslims in China?

Well, I think they are concerned about people downloading WhatsApp. You have to factor in that China has probably the most sophisticated internet censorship system in the world and surveillance system as well. So, of course, it’s quite important to them to first of all control the way ways in which people communicate and also to monitor those communications. That’s why they drive people outside of systems that they cannot monitor. WhatsApp of course is end-to-end encrypted. It also belongs to Facebook, which is a U.S. company. So, Chinese government is really limited in the ways that they can monitor it.

But what I’m getting at is — why is it that Muslims in this region are the ones that are taking the brunt of this?

From the government’s own statements, at the heart of this is a desire to sort of forcibly assimilate this group of people into Han Chinese culture. That necessarily involves eradication of their own cultures. So, the Chinese government’s perspective is that Uighurs in particular, who are the biggest by far Muslim ethnic minority group in Xinjiang, have separatist groups that are responsible for terrorism, are responsible for riots that broke out in the city of Ürümqi in 2009. That they’re sort of causing unrest because of an ideology that they perceive to be toxic.

It’s important to note that there have been terrorist incidents in Xinjiang. Although according to the government, there haven’t been any in the past few years. They have punished all of the people that they have found to be responsible in those incidents. You could see this particular campaign as a form of collective punishment for an entire ethnic group for the crimes of a handful of people who have sort of already been punished, but that’s sort of their perspective.

So, this has been going on since around 2016?

Late 2016, early 2017.

We’ve gotten bits and pieces of reports on this. China doesn’t have a free press in the same way that we do in the U.S. There have been a few journalists that have made it inside. But you actually took a pretty different approach, analyzing satellite imagery to examine what was happening on the ground, comparing uncensored maps with blacked-out areas on Baidu Maps. What did you find?

I don’t want to make it seem as if Xinjiang is a really difficult place to access. That’s just not true. There are a lot of journalists that have been to Xinjiang, including myself actually for a story for BuzzFeed in 2017 most recently. You can get on a plane and fly there. It’s not like it’s North Korea. The issues there are a little bit more subtle than that. When you go there, a lot of times you’re monitored by police. You can’t move about freely. Also, there are so many camps that it’s just like logistically not feasible to go to all of them or even a significant number of them, especially with the level of surveillance that exists there.

You also ended up getting kicked out of Beijing, but we’ll get to that in the second segment.

Yeah — so just about this particular project, I worked with Alison Killing, who is a licensed architect and also human rights investigator, and Christo Buschek, who is a developer. Essentially, we started talking all the way back in 2018. Alison and I met in a very strange fashion. We were working on this, like, citizen journalism handbook to help people become better investigators. While we were working on this together, I started kind of talking her ear off about some of these issues in Xinjiang. She got really interested. Then she started playing around with Baidu Maps. We were trying to kind of come up with a methodology for this.

She started to quickly notice that when she looked at places where we already knew that camps existed, when you zoomed in, these funny gray squares would appear. When you zoom further, they would disappear. We were like, “Well, what are these gray squares?” And then, it’s possible that it was because the imagery wasn’t loading or something like that. But we didn’t think that was the case because that’s actually like a different kind of gray tile or blanked-out tile that appears when the image just hasn’t loaded. So, we thought this might be a kind of censorship.

Xinjiang is a huge region. Satellite maps are made up of squares that are called tiles, and Xinjiang has millions of them. There’s no way we could have sifted through all of them. So we used this trail of clues from Baidu to narrow down the areas that we would have to search and that helped us. We didn’t use the fact that it was been blanked-out in Baidu evidence of it being a camp.

Right, you cross-referenced those with satellite imagery.

Yeah, we cross-referenced that mostly with tiles from Google Earth. Alison also had this idea to look near cities and near towns, basically where people had settled rather than these huge open deserts and grasslands that you have in other parts of Xinjiang and mountain ranges. So, that really narrowed the search.

What we ended up finding is that not only was the government accelerating its construction of these really scary facilities that have all the hallmarks of internment camps, they were building them really big. We found several structures, these are like compounds that can house more than 10,000 people. We found at least one that can house more than 30,000.

The comparison was to Central Park, which is enormous, when you’re talking about an internment facility.

Yeah, absolutely.

What happens in these internment facilities?

I interviewed a lot of ex-detainees. I’ve spoken to quite a few over the years and their stories have a lot in common. When people are inside, they’re subject to all kinds of kind of really degrading treatment. The kind of a sensible purpose of these facilities is education in some sense. That’s what the government says. There’s a kind of kernel of truth to that because people are taught Chinese language and then they’re taught like Communist Party dogma. But in practice, what that looks like is people go into these classrooms where there’s a kind of opaque, I think probably, transparent wall between the teachers and the students. There will be guards in the classrooms. The students… I shouldn’t call them students. I’m sorry.

The detainees, some people describe being hit with batons if they got a word wrong in Chinese, described being humiliated in terms of their treatment. Even beyond that, people describe really, really dreadful overcrowding, particularly in the first generation of camps, which were largely repurposed government buildings like old folks homes and high schools. Women talked about having their hair cut forcibly to chin length. Lots of people talked about being taken to solitary confinement, being interrogated routinely, being beaten with sticks. There are now lots of reports of women undergoing forced sterilization. So, really all kinds of abuses, really anything you can think of are happening in these camps.

Once again, I would stress that none of these people have been accused of anything. So, it’s an incredibly kind of Kafkaesque system in that way because you don’t really know necessarily what your transgression even is when you arrive to these places.

This is all just part of China’s attempt to essentially forced assimilate the Muslim community inside the country?

Assimilate them and then also control and confine them.

What do you mean control?

Well, if you are afraid of being sent to a camp for writing a tweet or using VPN, if the cost for doing those behaviors is that high, if you’re afraid that having a prayer rug in your house is going to get you sent to a camp, then you’re probably not going to pray or tweet, right? So, I think, if control is one of the goals, that probably has been accomplished.

Wow. China. Is there something that the international community can do about this? Also, do you think that this has gotten enough attention?

Yeah, I mean, “Can anything be done?” question is hard because it’s almost like we’re coming at this as two Americans. We’re thinking about a problem that’s happening on the other side of the world. The implicit thing is “Can the international community do something about this?” when actually the most straightforward answer is that the Chinese government could just stop doing this, right? But that’s not really something that is even sort of within the realm of possibility as a consequence of pressure that would come from the media or something like that.

Even now that it’s a big international story, I still think it hasn’t gotten all the attention that it’s due. Simply because we don’t know a lot about the kind of whole scope of what’s happening there from a lot of different perspectives ranging from forced labor to forced birth control and other practices like that, all kinds of things. But having said that, I’ve been covering this issue for a long time. I do think that there has been a steady uptick and understanding of this issue.

I would also say the Trump administration has actually taken a few concrete steps. It seems like it fits into their agenda for China. They talk about it frequently. More than other international governments by a lot. They have put sanctions on officials with direct responsibility for the abuses, including Chen Quanguo who’s the top Communist Party official in the region. They’re putting curbs on imports from the region. So, there have definitely been some steps that have been taken already. In terms of what those steps are going to accomplish, I think it’s probably too early to say, but I’m interested to see if it will prove to be any kind of deterrent either for China or for companies with ties there or other actors.

One of the obvious questions I haven’t asked yet is… Do we know why China is doing this? China’s a country of 1.5 billion people. I don’t understand what they’re looking to do, to try to take such a small population and essentially erase their history, erase their culture. What’s the possible benefit?

You shouldn’t underestimate the government’s obsession with what they would call social stability. I think there is an element here of the government just genuinely believing that Islam is the thing that is the problem. The cultures that exist there are the problem. When you listen to what they talk about, they talk about ideology in the terms that people would talk about like a virus. They’ll call it like a virus, this idea of extremism being a virus.

So, if you think about extremism and then you broaden the definition of extremism to include anything like fasting on Ramadan or praying or having really religious texts, if you think that all of those things are extreme actions… The government clearly does, because they have banned things like wearing the hijab, like wearing a beard for men, very, very normal actions that followers of Islam would take up.

If that’s what you believe, then it makes sense to say, “Okay, this whole group of people needs to be brainwashed in these reeducation centers or what have you.” I think that’s sort of where they’re coming from. It takes of course a certain kind of racism to really believe that about a group of people that’s that big, but it’s happened many, many times in history. So, it’s not surprising to me that it would happen again.

And here it is happening again. Let’s talk a little bit about the people. One of the things that I found remarkable about your story is you did speak with a lot of people who have been through the system. How risky is it for them to speak with a reporter?

Yeah. So, when I first started reporting on this, it was really hard to get anyone to talk, because even if you’ve left China, you probably still have a family there. The government does go after people’s families. This is a known thing. They even do it in state media reports for ex-detainees who have spoken out. They’ll go and interview their family and the family will be like, “No, this never happened, and it’s all lies,” stuff like that.

Wow.

Or they’ll say like, “Stop talking or we’ll detain your family member.” I did a piece about a man who is in Scandinavia. He was worried about his teenage son being sent to a camp for this exact reason. So, what happened after that is that people figured out that… they kind of just gave up. They were hoping for lenience by staying quiet. And then they found out that they weren’t going to get any lenience in many cases. So, people started speaking up a lot more. That’s why if you look at Xinjiang news coverage now, you’ll see a lot of named sources in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily have done before.

What calculation do you make as a reporter? Because you realize that by putting these people’s names, there’s a chance there might be retribution.

Yeah, definitely. That’s something I think about a lot. I think I’ve thought about it more a couple years ago than I do now. Just because I think the consequences of putting your name out there, a lot better known now in these communities. I always try to ask people about their family’s situation early in the interview. I really do make clear to people, if you have second thoughts, if you get cold feet, if you get some new piece of information about your family that makes you think that if we publish this, they could be detained, then please tell me and we won’t do the story. That’s happened to me twice that I can think of where we had a long conversation and that the person got cold feet and backed out.

As a reporter, I’m always like, “My door’s open even if you just want to talk. I’m here for that.” But I would never want to put pressure on someone to publish. I think there have been other cases where I feel like people have been quoted in the press and I don’t know if consent was given. It really bothers me to see that, especially on video and stuff like that, because people are taking huge risks. The other side of that is that you don’t want to in the name of protecting a source actually stifle someone who really does want to speak out. You want to give them the opportunity to do that, if they have a story that’s true and that’s newsworthy.

There are a lot of people who are very direct who will say like, “I know this could have consequences for my family, but I feel like if I don’t speak out, I’m betraying myself. I’m betraying my conscience,” and all that sort of stuff. So, I try to take that seriously when that does come out. And then the other thing is often, we’ll use first names. Sometimes we won’t put the person’s hometown. We’ll just put their kind of adopted hometown, stuff like that. So, I think there are sort of some ways around it.

I’d like to just speculate a little bit. I know you can’t really say for certain where this goes, but if you had to guess, what do you think happens from here in Xinjiang?

Oh, man, I really hate this question. I don’t know. The thing is you’re asking where do we go from here, but I don’t even know if we have documented what here is. There’s so much that we don’t know about the crisis still. We don’t know about how prevalent forced labor is because of the opacity of supply chains there. We don’t know what’s happening to children of people who are detained in full. There’s evidence that children are being sent to state-run orphanages, but we don’t know long term what happens to these children.

We don’t know for what purpose, ultimately, these super high-security facilities that we documented were built on. We don’t know about the possibility of state-controlled violence or rape on a wide scale and other crimes, specifically targeting women. There’s just a lot to find out. I think knowing more about that stuff will tell us more about what’s to come. I don’t want to sound like I’m dodging the question.

No, this is great.

There’s been some international pressure but not like a lot. But I think these campaigns take a lot of time. I don’t think we’ll know if the international pressure that is there has worked probably for a couple of years at least.

Getting kicked out of China

Megha, you had an experience that might have been somewhat rare when it happened to you, which is that you got kicked out of Beijing. But now it seems to be happening much more frequently with international news organizations. From your perspective, what happened when you got kicked out of the country?

You’re right. It’s getting to be a pretty big club. When I lost my visa, it wasn’t that common.

When did it happen?

This was in 2018 in March. I had written my first big piece on the camps in Xinjiang and the surveillance environment there in the fall of 2017. I had gone to the region. I was the first journalist to actually find one of these internment camps because I had GPS coordinates, or I had directions I think from a source who just knew where it was. So, I went. I took some pictures and we did a piece on it. Because it’s BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed doesn’t have a paywall. Of course, a lot of people read it. I didn’t really have much of an inkling that anything was wrong, but I did get a call for a meeting with state security officials in the kind of, I think, fall or early winter of 2017. That was kind of unusual. It wasn’t the most common—

What did you think when you got called into that meeting?

I didn’t know they—

Were you like, “This is the end of my time here?”

No, I wasn’t like that. I mean, I didn’t know who they were. They said they were government officials by phone. With the Beijing city government, they asked if I would meet. And then once I showed up, they showed me their badges and they were state security officials. They identified themselves as such. So, we had the meeting. It was cordial.

What do they say to you?

They wanted to know about who I was talking to, about my work, and stuff like that. They wanted me to sort of cooperate with them in giving information. Of course, I had no intention of doing that, but I just didn’t give them much of any answers. I think I wrote a little memo about the experience, just so I would have it for my records in case anyone ever asked. Yeah, and that was it. And then I didn’t hear from them after that. So, I had no reason to think anything had gone wrong.

And then at the kind of end of the year, I had my annual meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is the kind of main government ministry that foreign journalists interact with in China. It was a routine meeting. I got to this meeting, which was in a Korean coffee shop across the street from the Foreign Ministry, best known for waffles. We were sitting there, drinking our lattes. They were like, “Listen, we don’t like your reporting on human rights.” I was like, “Why?” They’re like, “Well, we think it’s wrong.” I said, “Well if there are any errors in the story, we can discuss. We can talk about running a correction if there’s something really wrong with the story.” He said, “Well, there are no errors that we could point to specifically per se, but it was wrong nonetheless.” I was like, “Alright.”

Interesting, yeah.

Yeah, great. So, then we talked. Again, it was a polite conversation, touched on a range of subjects after they were done criticizing my work. And then at the end of the conversation, I asked, “My visa’s coming up too. Do you expect any problems with it?” They’re like, “No, no, no, just submit it and it’ll be fine.” So, I was like, “Okay,” but they asked me to wait until after the Chinese New Year holiday, which is a weeklong holiday in China. The country kind of shuts down. It’s a bit like Christmas in terms of its significance. So, I waited until the first working day after the holiday. I submitted all my paperwork, got a read receipt, like an email back, like got it from the Chinese Consulate in New York. And then I just waited. I had to leave a country for a different story.

So, then I ended up abroad because I just had planned to just be away. That might be so it’d be renewed, and then I thought I would go back. But unfortunately, it wasn’t renewed. I called to check in on it. They said that they’d lost the application, which couldn’t have been true because I got that receipt. So, at that point, I knew something had really gone wrong. And then finally, I think around June of 2018, I received an email from the Chinese Consulate in New York saying, “We do not approve this visa.”

So, how did you feel when you saw that you weren’t going to get your visa approved? Because you've invested a lot at that point into reporting on China.

Yeah, I mean, it was devastating. It was absolutely devastating. I had built my career there for the most part. It’s the country that I spent the most time in since graduating college. I spoke Chinese. My whole life was in China. I’d never really lived anywhere else much as an adult. All my friends were there. I had a lease on an apartment there, all of my furniture was there. I was overseas and stuff like that. I just thought, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my career now.” Also, I just didn’t want to leave in that way. I’m not an anti-China person, at all. I wouldn’t have spent so many years in China if I hated China. I mean, there are so many things that I love very, very, very much about that country. The idea that I wouldn’t be able to go back because of this decision that felt very arbitrary was quite painful.

Can you go back as a tourist, or are you just fully banned?

I don’t know. I’ve never asked. I always assumed that I could go back as a tourist. However, because of some recent developments, the jailing of the two Canadians that have been held there in retaliation for the Huawei case, as well as all of the recent measures that have been taken targeting American journalists and Australian journalists, it’s a little bit scary to think about going back, especially now that I’ve published a new batch of work that’s quite critical of the government.

Right. Okay. So, after you got kicked out, now let’s get to the part that everyone seems to be getting kicked out. I mean, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Voice of America, TIME magazine have all had either been fully kicked out or have had restrictions put on them. Why is China kicking out all these journalists? It’s sort of interesting to me that they even allowed them in, in the first place if they’re so sensitive about this coverage? So, what do you think is behind this recent wave of expulsions?

Yeah, okay. So, two things. So, why do they let them in in the first place? A lot of people ask this, so I want to address this. So, China is an authoritarian country, but it is not a tin-pot dictatorship. This is a big economy that really, really cares about its international image including the whole world, not just the U.S. and Europe, right? Part of being a big economy is that investors have to trust that you have like a functioning system based on rule of law in terms of the stock market, in terms of property, in terms of monetary policy, all of these things. You can’t really get there if you don’t have international media in your country, right?

If you think that sounds crazy now, because now we’re talking about human rights and diplomacy and stuff like that, but it wasn’t long ago that the only story really that was making big headlines about China was the economic story. When they were at 10% GDP growth a year, that was the story about China. It was about poverty alleviation and economic development, joining the WTO, and stuff like that. So, it was during that era that a lot of journalists started to come to China, and China started to become a big presence in the international media. So, I guess like, what’s happened since then?

So, you asked, “Why are they throwing people out now?” I think part of it is the very obvious, they don’t like critical coverage. I think that’s part of it, but of course, as you pointed out, there was critical coverage before, and all these people kept their pieces. So, I think what’s happening now is that a lot of these journalists have essentially become pawns in this kind of grand strategy thing that’s happening between the U.S. and China, where both parties are continually sort of upping the ante. I used to cover diplomacy in China.

One thing that’s a really core part of Chinese diplomatic culture is just reciprocity. It’s like a very, very tit-for-tat kind of driven diplomatic culture. So, for instance, I used to cover state visits a lot. Whenever any U.S. official would visit China, there would be a discussion about how many journalists are allowed in the room from each country, right? As it was told to me by American officials, the Americans would always say, “Well, we want like six journalists,” or however many it was that they want. The Chinese would be like, “No, what for?” Just out of principle, they would want less. And then these discussions would go on all night long. It was so insane.

Fascinating.

Yeah, but this is what it is. So, for them, it’s like you force our state media outlets to register as foreign agents in D.C., we’re going to retaliate against your media outlets. It doesn’t matter that U.S. media generally isn’t state-controlled, right? They see it as more or less analogous.

So, is it the recent forcing of these publications from China to register that’s caused some of the stuff?

I think it was the trigger, but I kind of felt like this was always going to happen at some point. But yeah, I think if you’re looking for a—

Why was that?

Well, because of the direction things were going. I mean, I think China has sort of become less important to multinational companies than it previously was because their priorities building up their national champions in many industries. So, that was one of the core lobbies for greater engagement with China. That lobby kind of lost a lot of power, a lot of interest in doing that after the Chinese market became less hospitable to them. So, I think it was always moving in a direction where there was going to be a little bit less engagement, a little bit more hostility, but then I think that kind of sped up a lot in the past couple of years with the Trump administration.

So, I mean, having said that, I don’t want to imply that it’s the Trump administration’s fault that journalists are being thrown out of China. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is like they did it in response to an immediate event. I think they—

It was…

Yeah, the notion that throwing out journalists as a way to punish them for negative coverage has been a lot around for a long, long time, far predating Trump.

Yeah. I guess one obvious question to end this segment is how much has the coronavirus situation, where the U.S. has blamed China, China has blamed the U.S. for originating the virus. How much has that played into the tensions and then also the ability of reporters to do their job inside China?

I don’t know if I can answer that to be honest, because I just haven’t covered it.

The TikTok “sale”

The U.S. has been flirting with the idea of banning TikTok. Many U.S. tech companies are banned in China. Facebook isn’t in there. Google isn’t in there. What do you make up the whole fight between these two countries over control of the internet? How do you think TikTok plays into that?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I never thought that we would get to a point where there were serious discussions in the U.S. about banning a particular app because it was made in a country that was hostile to the U.S., but I guess we are there now. It’s interesting. I guess, to me, it’s shown that this vision of the internet that China and countries like China have established for a long time that was mocked I think by the U.S. and other countries that had the least restrictions on the internet is now being adopted by the U.S. kind of in a matter of speaking.

What is that vision?

So, for instance, we used to talk about the balkanization of the internet, right? Meaning that we would move from this kind of state of history that we’re sort of currently in, where there’s sort of free movement of information on the internet between countries to a version of the internet that is much more kind of regulated by country or censored by country, what have you. So, China was obviously the pioneer of this with the Golden Shield Project, also known as the Great Firewall, where they have, as you said, cut-out lots of internet services that other countries use. Bill Clinton referred to that model of censoring the internet as nailing Jell-O to a wall. Meaning, you can’t nail Jell-O to the wall, right? It’ll slide off.

But then now we’re in this situation where the U.S. is actually now saying, “We’re going to do exactly what you did. We’re going to cut out one of your apps from our market.” So, I think that’s really interesting because that’s sort of the vision of what the internet should be kind of at a high level. The U.S. reasons for banning TikTok are very different from China’s reasons for banning Facebook. To my understanding, the U.S. is not banning TikTok, because of free expression issue. They’re not trying to cut off speech. They’re thinking about things like basically privacy and national security concerns. So, it’s a little bit different, but the outcome is more or less kind of comparable.

The most convincing argument I’ve heard for banning TikTok is that this is an app that shows you content based off of an algorithm not really based off of a follow model. It’s possible that because there are many tech companies in China that have serious connections to the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, the ByteDance CEO has already apologized to the Party for not censoring enough. That it’s possible that maybe one day TikTok will rearrange its algorithm to show people content based off of the Chinese government’s wants and sort of do some cultural control that way without anyone ever knowing. Is that a serious concern from your perspective?

I’ve heard people say that. Yeah, I have heard people say that. It’s interesting. I don’t think it’s outlandish. However, it is a hypothetical, I think. I think the problem with this argument is that to make this argument, you have to accept that manipulating algorithms is fundamentally a problem. You have to accept that even if it’s not the Chinese government doing it, if it’s some other bad actor that’s doing it. It’s really hard then to say, “Actually, TikTok is the only one that’s vulnerable to this,” right? Because that’s what you’re really saying.

You’re saying TikTok is more vulnerable to this than other social platforms. I’m not completely sold on that argument, because I mean, we all know that Facebook very famously had its algorithm manipulated, right? So, they’re now kind of conscious of that and taking some steps to try to ensure that doesn’t happen again. But I mean, we both know that it’s been touch and go at Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms in the U.S., right?

So, the question to me is when you’re talking about tech governance, you don’t necessarily want to apply rules based on the place that the company is based, right? I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best way to approach tech governance. It seems to me that it would make more sense to have one set of standards and then apply to all these companies, right? So, when you’re talking about algorithms, what we really want is transparency, right? Because we’re talking about social media companies as a vehicle for speech and these algorithms that are essentially regulating speech, right, in a public square.

The larger issue here is that nobody sees these algorithms because the companies consider them proprietary. There’s no kind of independent governing structure that determines which algorithms are just and which are free from influence and all of that sort of stuff. So, all of the tech companies have this problem, right? So, I don’t really see necessarily a strong reason to apply it to TikTok in a way that is different from all of the other tech companies.

The reason would be that TikTok seems more easily influenced by a state power than the others. I mean, that would be the straightforward argument to do it to TikTok. Do you buy that?

Well, I’m more convinced by the argument that it’s a platform that shows you stuff kind of not based on follows, but just based on the algorithm. I think that’s more convincing. But when you’re talking about is it easy for nation-state actors to influence the platform, that was already done at Facebook, right?

That’s true.

Yeah, how can you really make that argument, right? It’s hard.

Yeah, but we found out about Facebook. I guess, people would say, “We might never find out about TikTok,” because like you mentioned, it’s not a follow-based model. So, it could just be some subtle shifting of the algorithm to point to one thing, but who knows? Okay, so let’s just wrap up with another question that I’m sure you will hate. Let’s say you’re in President Trump’s position.

Oh, no.

What would you to TikTok?

Alex, I’m a journalist. Why would you ask me this?

I don’t know, I have a podcast and I feel like it’s fun to ask questions like this that people hate, so…

What would I do with TikTok? Gosh, I mean, I’m an old-fashioned girl who believes in the free and open internet. I think it’s a bad path to… I mean, I’m not saying any regulation of TikTok is out. I’m not saying that at all. But I think blocking an app based on a decision that is made about its home country is opening the door. Even if it’s legitimate, it’s still opening the door to other actions that are like this that will be taken on by future administrations that we cannot predict, right?

It will set a precedent for internet censorship in the U.S. in a way that has never been done before. I don’t necessarily know if that’s a good thing. I don’t know if we want to set a precedent where everybody in the world is living in their own little app ecosystem and not communicating with each other. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a better world.

Having said that, I think that if the Trump administration were going to say or if anybody was going to say, “Let’s not ban TikTok for the entire U.S. populace, but if you’re in the military, if you’re in a government role, don’t use it,” or certain kinds of people, don’t use it in certain occupations and stuff. That makes sense to me from this national security perspective. It’s also this argument that the Chinese government could use it to create an influence operation, I mean, yes, it’s definitely possible to do, but, like I said, it’s kind of a hypothetical, right? So, it feels like we’re punishing the app for something that hasn’t even happened.
['Alex Kantrowitz']
['Technology', 'BuzzFeed', 'Politics', 'Big Technology', 'China']