Now structure, arguments, and personality aside, we finally get to rhetoric. They each only had one main perspective which was an interesting clashed. I only realized it in the third hour but it was existent the whole time. The Committee are running a Nationalist deck while Chew runs a Globalist deck.
The Committee cannot argue that they weren’t sinophobic, they were literally coming up with conspiracy theories against China. The Chair’s opening also mentioned how it was specifically a hearing for American users (150 million of them, that’s surprising) and everyone else kept that same consistent line. They mentioned Europe just once but to them, this was an America-China issue. Tik Tok is a Chinese company suspiciously starting Project Texas with a potential to feed China, American information. “Are you selling information of American children to China?” “The American public will not like this” blah blah America blah blah America. The American focus would ruin the logic of their united front though.
- First of all, there was one guy who asked why there is drug content like fentanyl on Tik Tok but not Douyin. Chew didn’t have much to say considering he doesn’t work at Douyin so he mostly just reassured him that drugs are illegal on both platforms. Here’s the nationalist issue though, China has a different culture around drug usage. Remember the Opium Wars? Why would they let their own people even find fentanyl? The Committee also recognizes China as some autocratic all-powerful state so any drug ring would be logically busted unless sponsored by the state. Drugs also never became cool in the East like it did in the West although I imagine there’s still some criminality in China. In America, doing drugs is thug shit. It’s really fucking cool, it’s a whole counterculture. Remember Hippies? Even the Prohibition? Every badass character in media smokes a cigar or every cool guy drinks alcohol. In most big cities, people can just recognize the smell of weed in the air because it’s so widespread and fairly accepted. There’s a super popular entire show that just featured a Chemistry teacher making drugs. We fucking love drugs in the country of freedom. Of course there’s more drug content on Tik Tok than Douyin, that’s our national culture. Dumbass question. And you know what’s more American than drugs? Racism!
- I think they were democrats, there were two of them who tried to represent the minorities of the United States which is fine. In the United States (more on that later). First there was this Hispanic lady who asked (in favor to Hispanic Estados rather than Latin America) about the safety of Spanish speaking kids of Tik Tok. Chew reassured her they would be treated the same as others. Another black lady asked if Chew’s algorithm discourages black content which he argued was untrue but will double check with his mods. Considering that black people always go viral, I think we’re doing pretty good but idk. But racializing the app doesn’t necessarily affect Chew considering his mindset of Globalism.
- Lastly, I again ask if we asked for this. You know, the American public. But this isn’t a direct democracy so eh…I guess our reps can do whatever they want. It’s funny cause there was a protest outside the building against a Tik Tok ban, the Committee knew a Tik Toker ‘threatened’ them and then we would spend the weekend making fun of their little hearing. There’s just a huge political dissonance between the commons and lords here. I don’t feel represented by a single person in the committee. Honestly, if boomers weren’t in charge, this conversation wouldn’t have even been had. China quite literally has done nothing to cause this, you know. Not anything I’m aware of.
As for Chew, he seems through and through to be a Globalist which is too new for these people that remember Jim Crow. You see Nationalism, is all about being proud around your specific country while Globalism is the idea that commerce turns the world and so business should be international to the best efforts of the business. The economy should also be interconnected, not only to level the playing field but to also make warfare non-profitable. War used to be super profitable. But now, as we can see in the oligarchic winterland, war can put a country indebt if it interrupts money flow. With the Russian-German oil line tarnished, every country embargoed that country to the bottom of the economic ranking. Globalism is much closer to world peace than Nationalism. For Chew, this means arguing for the big picture. Sure, the idea for Tik Tok started in China but it is specifically an international platform. Has foreign investors, available in a couple languages, and it tries to be welcoming to everyone. Chew really promotes this part so I don’t think it’s just company policy but his philosophy and why he became CEO just in 2021. He looooooves a world community and I support it although not as heavily as he. It would explain some of his arguments.
- Whenever they asked about ties to China, he always argued how globally connected Tik Tok was. Like sure they have Chinese allies but they also have an American ally in Oracle among others. He would also argue that other platforms like Meta, Reddit, and Twitter also have ties to Chinese companies. With Project Texas, he would be on the same level as them for relation to China. There’s one guy who asks if ByteDance is a Chinese company in order to damn it for communism and Chew relents that is was founded by a Chinese man but it is a private company with ties across the world. Then they ask the same of Tik Tok way later and he answers that it’s basically international which they disagree with because… (no reason given). The consistency to remain Global is why Chew felt confused when the Espanol rep showed up. He almost sounded confused by the American racism when she asked her question of “are there as many mods for safety in the Spanish language as there are for English” because for him then answer would be obviously yes. To explain, the racialization comes from the fact that only in an American-centric conversation would someone have to consider Spanish a second language that would have less mods. But for a Globalist, Spanish is the second most spoken language, running behind Chinese which isn’t as widespread. It is ahead of English, Hindi (although Tik Tok has lost that audience), French, and Arabic. That’s why I called her an Estados Latina, cause that question only makes since when excluding the rest of the Spanish world. I get like one fully Spanish tik tok every once in a while, they’re probably doing fine on that side of the app. Same thing for the BLM question and the question about Uyghurs, Chew would repeatedly state that the platform is open to all walks of life and all opinions. There’s even a question about abortion to which he says “we allow both sides of the conversation on the app, as long as it doesn’t break other guidelines”. It seemed they were stumped by his open view to everything in this sense. Then there’s the other globe, the Internet.
- “Industry Baby” is a monster card that deals damage equal to its attack power to both players when it is destroyed, it can be summoned during the standby phase in defense mode on your next turn. In the third hour, the gang was starting to get upset at Chew’s excuse of “well this is an industry issue so we will try our best-” *cutoff*. The earlier people let him walk away with it before but some of the later people really started complaining about it. What were the issues? Privacy stuff, threat to hacking, inciting political violence, drug use, pornography (again, where was that Congressperson finding it on Tik Tok?), addiction, and child abuse plus other stuff I don’t remember. Chew would tell them that this stuff is against app guidelines but in general “we are not perfect but we are trying our best. It is an industry issue…” alluding to the fact that the other Big 4 (Reddit, Twitter, Meta, and YouTube) face the same problems. Which is true and Congress has had their hearings with Zuckerberg and other reps too. Stuff like ‘suicide’ videos are just rampant on the net no matter what algorithm you have. Porn too, is ubiquitous on the net buuuuut the stuff you’ll find on Chew’s app is just women in lingerie or there is that new trend of sneaking your nipple in the camera shot. So it was a good excuse. One woman responded, “we aren’t asking you to be perfect, we just need you to be safe enough for our American children” but no everyone was asking the app to be perfect. “Why did it take 41 days for this threat on the Chair to be taken down?” because shits not perfect dumb broad. One non self aware guy in the fourth hour ironically asked, “you sound just like Zuckerberg, dancing around our questions…you guys think you’re all smart with your sweet talk. You’re just biding your time to get more money on your app before we do the inevitable…why does your app x” and then Chew said something to the effect of industry issue- “there you go again, why? Why is it you all use the same excuse? Are you guys collaborating against the American people?” Bro maybe its because its an industry issue. Like an issue shared by everyone. But he and someone after him didn’t want to hear it at all, “no give a real answer, what are you going to do about this widespread problem?” goddamn, had they ever talked to anyone before? And I have nothing to excuse Chew and Zuckerberg for, there is no answer to bad content on the net. Or teens using the app longer than the app asks them to. Or people trying to incite violence. It’s just gonna fucking happen. Some silly guy is gonna tell everyone to do the ‘thug shake” some kid is going to die to some accidental misunderstanding and now thug shake is another lethal challenge for the next hearing as if anyone could singlehandedly control that situation. I did like Chew’s attitude toward his competitors. He would promote some stuff tik tok has that others don’t (like no dms for minors) with an underline, repeated that “from my understanding, we are the only ones that offer this and that and this level of transparency that we have”. But he isn’t actually trying to be competitive. One time he told a member, “it would be great actually we in the industry collaborated on how to root out all of our shared issues” basically hinting at a Big 5 coalition. I know the Shou Zi Chew, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Steve Huffman, and Neal Mohan alliance goes crazy in the manga’s Second Meme War arc. But even the member who heard this didn’t sound happy to hear it. Nothing pleases them.
tdwriter 