With another TikTok deadline and extension, WTMJ’s Erik Bilstad spoke with Dietram Schuefele, Taylor-Bascom Chair and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about what he expects the future of TikTok and social media to look like in the coming days, months, and years.
Erik: Why is TikTok considered dangerous?
Dietram Schuefele: I think the main concern that we’re seeing out of Washington, D.C. and some state legislatures really has to do with the amount of data that’s being collected. Everything from how fast we move, where we are, what our health apps are doing, other apps on the phone, and of course, all of those data being collected by a company with very close ties, if not controlled by the Chinese government. And so having a foreign adversary have access to millions and millions of data sets about Americans that are really pretty personal is something that has raised a lot of concerns.
Erik: Is there one type of information or something that is more dire than others as far as what they’re able to see and use and hold?
Schuefele: Good question. I think very often we kind of miss the point when we’re saying, well, it’s all about videos and it’s, you know, every new medium, people were concerned about comic books and about videos and whatever else. This is not about the content that’s on TikTok. This is about the underbelly, the data that is being collected. And I’ll give you two examples: One is health data. So the data from our Apple watches and everything else that’s being collected that would technically, theoretically allow for an adversary, for example, to target weaponry at some point to particular vulnerabilities of a population. The second one is location data. And I think a really good illustration is what we saw in the last few days in Iran. With the very surgical strike by the Israelis on Iranian leaders. If I know exactly where a phone is sitting, just because they have TikTok installed and the Chinese government knows exactly where those particular users are, I can do exactly those strikes where a drone delivers a strike through a window of an apartment building, like what we saw in Iran. And so that gives you just an illustration of how powerful some of the uses of those data are and how deeply creepy they can be if you think them through in their full consequence.
Erik: That’s pretty scary to think about, because I had wondered about behavior modification, like the ability to potentially change someone’s behavior just by what they’re seeing and consuming on the site.
Schuefele: And that has always been a big question for a lot of social media sites. Right? There is no difference between an Instagram or Threads or a TikTok or whatever else. They all do the same thing and they play to our psychological vulnerabilities and even addictive tendencies to keep us tied to the platform. TikTok is not any different from any other app in a sense that it has its own little browser built in. So when you’re actually on your phone and you click on a link, it doesn’t take you to a, to a Safari or a Chrome. It takes you to an internal browser to keep you within the ecosystem and collects data. So that’s actually not a new part and that’s not unusual, except for, again, the data on TikTok is very different from an Instagram, or any other Meta app, that go to an American corporation. This one goes to a corporation with very close ties to the Chinese government.
Erik: So the deadline is supposed to be Thursday (6/19) for a decision on whether TikTok would ‘go dark,’ so to speak. If there was actually something purchased or sold or a deal is made, what would that mean if someone else gets that algorithm? That algorithm is pretty sexy, right? Would they just hand that over to another company?
Schuefele: That’s exactly it. That’s where the holdup has been, in terms of getting that right. Getting all the NDAs or the contracts in place that keeps the control of the algorithm and doesn’t turn over intellectual property, in a corporate sense to, to a new actor or to have those in a partnership where they cannot reveal what the algorithm does to other corporate players or to government or whatever else. It’s not necessarily unusual to have that. We’ve seen that for, for other types of, mergers and, collaboration or cooperation among corporations. but that has been the big piece of the of the holdout in getting this deal done.
Erik: So moving forward, will there always be another app? Will there always be another social media site that can do a similar thing? An app that can be considered dire?
Schuefele: I think for now TikTok is around to stay. I would be very surprised if it shuts down. Even if it does shut down, it will ‘dim.’ When you said earlier it ‘goes dark,’ it will dim for a little bit. It may be off the App Store for a little while. People will still be able to access it with a virtual private network, a vpn, and so on and so forth. So, my guess is it’ll be around for a while. But of course, TikTok is one in a long line of social media apps. Right? There used to be MySpace a long time ago, and then Facebook was the thing, or the facebook.com at the beginning. and then Insta came along and whatever else: Snapchat. TikTok is just one in a long line. I think the next frontier is really going to be generative AI, where we’re going to, and we’re already seeing that where what is now a human influencer who creates content, who travels, who takes pictures and builds thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers. That will be a synthetic person, that will be a completely generated person that’s tailored. Again, you spoke earlier about our psychological vulnerabilities, where we all get the influencers that speak to us personally. And I think that requires a whole new platform. Maybe TikTok will be a starting point for that. But I think we’re in the middle of a very rapid transformation of our information ecosystem and TikTok is just one small step in a long journey.
Erik: Wow. So, if you have AI influencers, someone’s still making money off that influencer, it’s being created by some entity that is still going to reap the benefits of all of their followers following it. Right?
Schuefele: It’ll go back to where it was before, because before we had corporations trying to speak directly to consumers. Influencers stepped in between. They said, “well, we’re closer to the consumer.” If you’re a nano influencer, you just have a small group of followers, but you’re highly trusted. And so corporations speak to these influencers, give them products, help them promote these products, and then influencers make money as the middleman or middle person. Now AI will allow corporations to take that power back and basically create their own influencers and use all the data that we produce in our phones, every single day to tailor what the influencer says, what he or she looks like, what they look like, what they wear, how they present them, even their voice, their intonation, their accent toward, our specific preferences. so we all going to have our own influencers, that are going to be, utterly virtual, and utterly imaginary, but unbelievably effective.
Erik: So none of us can ever sleep again.
Schuefele: (laughs) Basically, it depends on how comfortable are you with a brave new world that’s really going to be a world that’s largely going to be about ‘synthetic reality,’ where it’s going to be very, very different to find content that’s truly original. That’s not going to be any different for Hollywood movies than it is going to be for whatever the next version of TikTok is going to be. That’s just an inevitability at this point, given where the technology is. The question is how we as a society kind of govern that and put guardrails on, that the societal benefits are maximized, and the risks that are obviously there are minimized.
Erik: You mentioned Hollywood. At some point you’d almost think that there would be a way to create movies tailored right to one consumer. And you don’t need actors. You can almost create an actor and have it be exactly what that consumer wants without having to have the overhead of paying a bunch of actors or paying for a bunch of writers or anything.
Schuefele: Absolutely. And there’s already technology or studies that show that, for example, if I layer a little bit of your face, for example, or my face on top of, let’s say, a political actor, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, whoever else, and I still look at a video of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, but I see a little bit of myself in that. I will actually trust the message from Trump or Biden much more if I see a little bit of my own face layered on. For Hollywood, maybe there’s a Tom Cruise with a little bit of Dietram layered in it. And all of a sudden I like his movies a lot better than I normally do. But it’s also just the logical extension from what Hollywood has always done. They’ve always conducted focus group tested endings, for instance, to create movie endings that resonated most with audiences. They went with that one version, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be a tailored version that fits particular demographics better, than others. And we already do that when we look at, for example, news content, where news stories and headlines are routinely on the Washington Post or elsewhere are routinely tested, meaning different headlines run. The same story runs with five different headlines for about 15 minutes. They know how much social engagement there is, how much these stories get liked and forwarded, and then that one story that is most successful is the one they run with, both for whatever’s left of the print edition, and then also, for online. And so we do this all the time already, and it’s just a question of basically now having reached a computational stage where we can do this at scale for almost everything.
Erik: What happens with TikTok this week?
Schuefele: The reason why I think it’s so unlikely that we’re going to see a real exit of TikTok from the US is that there’s so much sunk cost already from politicians who are using this as a platform for campaigning, from corporations who are using still influencers, but also using TikTok for their own promotions, and of course, millions of Americans who are using it. And for many of them, their livelihoods, as well as small businesses or influencers, really depends on that platform at the moment. And yanking it, without any transition time would be pretty disruptive. So that’s, that’s one of the reasons, why I think it’s highly unlikely this is going to happen, and the self interest of politicians probably being prime among them.
