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FEROZA: TikTok was a new app.
I knew millions of people were downloading it by the day.
And I just thought, "I want to post on a platform
where younger generations are."
Once I got into junior year of high school,
I was like, "Okay, I'll give TikTok a try."
I remember when I started seeing views pile up
in the thousands, and hundred-thousands.
I didn't know I had this much power
just because I've been putting my voice on an app.
On TikTok, anything can happen.
♪ ♪
♪ Watermelon sugar high ♪
♪ Watermelon sugar ♪
♪ Dream, dream, uh ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ Listen to me now ♪
[beatboxing]
♪ ♪
I guess I'm on TikTok now.
TikTok has been downloaded
more than two billion times,
more than any app ever.
I think TikTok right now is probably
on the cutting edge of all social media...
and it is becoming a world onto itself
for a lot of people,
especially young people.
♪ ♪
NEWSCASTER: TikTok is the first Chinese app
to threaten the dominance of Silicon Valley.
It's a cyber security story.
It's an algorithm story.
It's a biased story.
It's a geopolitical story.
...TikTok. We may be banning TikTok.
It was bizarre why when suddenly this
kind of a fun little kids app,
become wrapped up
in this huge geopolitical storm
between the US and China
that was only getting hotter.
[sound of explosion]
[electricity crackles]
[car door closing]
BOY: Fix your mirrors. Can I drive?
FEROZA: Can you drive?
So my family's from Afghanistan.
They were just very grateful
because they could finally come here.
They were just amazed by the privileges
that were being brought to them.
You didn't--you didn't use your signal there.
I did. Oh, I thought I did.
My parents, their dreams of America
were flourishing before 9/11,
and then once those planes hit the towers,
their dreams were shattered too,
because it was as if they were responsible for that.
♪ ♪
Growing up as an Afghan-American,
it was really rough.
I'll just have a small amount.
Yesterday, he was teaching me how to drive.
Every five seconds, "Don't scratch my rims.
Don't scratch my rims." Oh, my God.
I'm not gonna scratch your rims. I know how to drive.
The only times where I feel like I belong
is with my family.
My cousins, my brother...
I--I feel like I have a place with them,
because they understand where I come from.
How'd you make it look pretty?
- Why? - Like, it looks like
a Instagram picture.
We had a phase,
growing up as children of refugees
in a country that doesn't like refugees...
And my school isn't diverse at all.
I don't feel like I'm one of them.
I don't think my classmates
even think that I'm one of them.
I got called a terrorist.
I got called Bin Laden.
I've been called a part of the Taliban,
since I'm Afghan.
I've been called all these things.
♪ ♪
And I always felt like an outsider.
♪ ♪
My mom made these two.
I wore this dress on my TikTok.
I have gone viral a few times.
It was my first time posting on TikTok.
It was like 40,000 views I've gotten on it.
And it was just me dancing with my Afghan clothes on.
The response was like amazing because through TikTok
I found so many other Afghans,
and so many other Afghan-Americans.
I never knew how big the Afghan-American community was
'til I joined TikTok
and I've seen more people accepting me for who I am.
[exotic music playing]
I got so excited. [giggles]
I really wanna be a part of my community more
through TikTok.
♪ ♪
♪ Wipe, wipe, wipe it down ♪
♪ Wipe, wipe ♪
TikTok is an app that's completely different
than any other type of social media
or entertainment platform that we've ever seen before.
TikTok was the first platform to really popularise
high quality vertical video content,
which just makes it so easy to consume.
♪ ♪
The "For You" page is completely,
individually tailored to you,
based on the data that they gather about you.
I mean, I cannot explain
how fantastic this algorithm is
at delivering you exactly what you didn't even know
that you wanted.
♪ ♪
What TikTok does so well is discovery,
it allows you to drill down on the whole internet,
and find these really specific groups of people
that resonate with you.
♪ ♪
It's just any kind of niche, subculture or community
where you can find creators that are in that niche.
People just get discovered much faster,
they blow up much faster,
and it's just... everything goes ten times
more viral than it would on any other social app.
It's remaking the food landscape,
the fashion landscape...
People learning on TikTok...
It's hard to find an industry that TikTok hasn't infiltrated
or disrupted.
ANNOUNCER: TikTok has captured the attention
of the world's most lucrative market,
young people.
And with it, the power to reshape the future.
[robotic vocalisation]
DJ Spencer in the home.
[humming] Mix.
[beatboxing]
My friend Scott comes up to me,
and he goes, "Hey, man, I wanna show you something
you've never heard before."
[beatboxing]
And I was like, "What did you just do right now?"
Like, "Is this a trick? Is this a game?" Like...
And he was like, "No, no, no, dude, it's called beatboxing.
You make music with your mouth."
And I'm like, "You are doing that with your face?"
[beatboxing]
I was 15. I was a sophomore in high school,
and I remember that moment just being magic to me.
Like it was love at first sound.
[beatboxing]
This is Spencer Polanco, and this is what I do.
[beatboxing]
And I decided that night I was gonna be a beatboxer.
But you can also imagine me busting out of my room
just, you know, wild Spencer...
full of excitement in my eyes.
"Dad! Mom! I know what I wanna do for the rest of my life.
I wanna be a beatboxer."
And then they looked at me like I was crazy.
[beatboxing]
♪ Spencer beatbox ♪
I grew up in New York City.
My father is from Ecuador, and he came here
and found my mom.
My mom is first generation, uh, Chinese family.
My father, uh...
He wanted me to be a tennis player,
and my mom wanted me to be a doctor.
And then when I expressed something
they didn't understand, which is beatboxing,
they were accepting, but confused,
and then unaccepting and even more confused.
[beatboxing]
I--I struggled with a little bit of anxiety
and depression when I was in college.
I had to make a decision,
and I said no to formal education.
And I said yes to beatboxing.
I mean, I was a struggling artist.
I was a... typical artist that was
I was performing in the streets
of New York City.
I was in the subways, busking...
Some days, you make $20 working all day.
When I started TikTok,
I had to look at myself in the mirror,
and say, "If this isn't gonna happen right now,
it's not gonna happen."
Okay, this is the first viral video.
[chugging]
[exhaling]
[beatboxing]
Look at my hair.
I didn't even, like, fix my hair for this video.
And that was a six-second video.
[beatboxing]
I woke up the next day
and it had, like, three million views.
And I was just genuinely confused.
I was like, "Oh, my God. They like me."
I look at it and I'm like, "There's something here."
So I decided to post more, and I decided to do
everything single idea I possibly could."
[beatboxing]
TikTok topping Facebook
to become the world's most downloaded app.
TikTok is absolutely massive.
TAYLOR: Last year, they reported they have
over two billion users,
with almost a billion monthly active users.
People spend more time on TikTok per day
than Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube.
Facebook is absolutely desperate right now
to regain any semblance of relevance,
which they've lost quite a while ago.
In many areas, we're behind our competitors.
The fastest growing app is TikTok.
The elephant in the room, of course,
is the fact that TikTok is owned by ByteDance,
a Chinese company.
And it's the first time we've seen a huge Chinese
consumer tech company come in and dominate
the American market.
♪ ♪
SHELLY: So there was this guy from China
named Zhang Yiming.
He worked for a number of startups
before starting up his own company,
a company called ByteDance.
♪ ♪
The thing that struck me the most about TikTok
was just how calculated their founders were
from the very beginning about their goal,
which was to become this kind of global force,
and really, like, penetrate the, you know, the zeitgeist
of the US.
♪ ♪
The story is going to sound very similar
to many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Zhang Yiming came from a middle class family.
And he basically just had this dream
that he was going to make something important of himself.
♪ ♪
So, when the iPhone came out, in the late 2000s,
he was just really blown away by the fact
that you could have a full computing device,
small enough to fit in your pocket,
and he was just convinced mobile internet
was going to be the next once in a lifetime opportunity
that you'd read about in history books,
and he was determined to take advantage
of this big wave.
♪ ♪
They started in an apartment,
which is very common in Chinese...
sort of internet entrepreneurship lore.
About 2015 or so, ByteDance was doing
experiments with video,
and Yiming had this sort of strange idea
about recommendation engines which serves you content
that it thinks you'd be interested in.
So ByteDance bought Duoyin.
♪ ♪
Within six months after launch
it hit this inflection point.
Somehow it just became viral.
[singing in Chinese]
Yo, what's going on?
Dude, it is so hot.
Dude, why don't you just go get some
Ben & Jerry's ice cream?
People pay me to put their product in my videos.
It's--it's--it's crazy.
These are from this week.
They're so many. Look.
I get, like, clothes from, like, all different
major brands.
Look at that.
ANNOUNCER: After the success of Douyin in China,
ByteDance acquired Musical.ly,
a lip-synch app already popular
with kids and young teens in the US.
And merged them, rebranding the app
as TikTok.
One thing Zhang Yiming did was to create
two different products.
Duoyin was for the Chinese market,
and it was a Chinese app,
and TikTok was
for the global market.
And what that meant
was that he could keep the Chinese app
walled off in China, with Chinese rules,
and then keep TikTok for the rest of the globe.
TikTok was, all of the sudden,
this huge success from day one.
TikTok has done what no other Chinese-made app
has done before.
It's cracked the international market,
and become a global sensation.
ANNOUNCER: TikTok is now available
in 154 countries and 75 languages,
rivalling Silicon Valley's biggest apps.
TikTok and its owner ByteDance
were the first Chinese social media company
to really provide a wake-up call
to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others,
that it's not just about Silicone Valley
bringing technology to the world,
but, really, that China's a real force
to be reckoned with.
MATTHEW: There's sort of this perception
that there was too much
of a cultural difference
between China and the rest of the world
and that Chinese companies didn't know to build
globally successful social media.
I think TikTok's completely blown that out of water.
The world we all grew up in was one where America
dominated culturally,
where it dominated technologically,
and the world that we would end up retiring in
would probably be one where China dominates
in most of those areas.
Power's shifting to China rapidly.
And ByteDance and the story of TikTok is part of that.
- Hi. - Hi.
- How are you? - Good.
So what are you gonna do?
I wanna play with... adding just, like,
more dimension to my hair,
it's, like, a little flat...
Yes.
DEJA: I think that it's scary
to be the first generation,
to have our entire lives documented.
♪ ♪
Every action, you know, every haircut,
every look change... it's on people's radars.
You know, I work a job where so much of it
is, like, looking... being looked at, or...
- Yeah. - Looking at myself, honestly.
Big deal.
So, I'm influencer and content creation work,
so I went viral for the first time,
uh, when I was 16 years old for a confrontation
with my Senator.
Republican Senator Jeff Flake held a town hall
in Mesa, Arizona last night,
and got an earful from 16-year-old activist
Deja Foxx. Take a look.
So I'm a young woman, and you're a middle-aged man.
- I'm a person of colour... - Ouch.
...and you're white. Uhm, I come from a background
of poverty and I didn't always have parents
to guide me through life.
You come from privilege.
Why would you deny me the American Dream?
DEJA: I woke up the next morning,
and 18 million people had seen that video.
And I had a request to my email to go live on CNN.
I can't sit idly by while women like me
are countlessly and constantly being ignored
on Capitol Hill.
And I suddenly realised that all those things
I've been putting on social
that I thought were only going to the people
who knew me, overnight I could be visible
to people that I will never know.
♪ ♪
The internet connected me to the entire world.
TikTok is a blowup overnight kind of place.
On any platform where you can get extreme reach,
you open yourself up to benefits, right?
larger followings, more views,
more attention.
You must open yourself up to more hate,
to people who are going to tear you down,
tear you apart, pick at you...
I live in a pretty constant state of anxiety.
I don't know what it's like to live in a world
where I'm not being perceived always.
And it's this tug of war between...
that's kind of what I want,
and it's kind of the thing I fear the most.
I think there is a really interesting line
between what it means to be empowered
by your sexuality,
versus being exploited by it online.
I definitely think that women are seeing
larger followings, more attention,
from the ways that they're being sexualised online.
You can be a bad bitch in a bikini
and a boss bitch in a blazer.
Do both.
The posts where I'm showing more skin do better.
But I also question why that is.
If we think that these platforms really are just showing us
the most popular content, without really interrogating
why we're seeing what we're seeing.
That's dangerous.
There is so much mystery to the algorithm.
The algorithm. Like, what does that even mean?
When I call your name I shall place the sorting hat
on your head...
and you'll be sorted in your Houses.
EUGENE: I refer to TikTok as a sorting hat,
in reference to the sorting hat
from "Harry Potter."
When the kids show up at Hogwarts,
there's this magical sorting hat
that sorts them into one of the four schools.
TikTok's recommendation algorithm serves
as that type of sorting hat.
It sorts its users into different audiences,
then it sorts videos into different clusters
that appeal to different audiences.
Most apps, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
you actually have to follow a lot of accounts,
or other people, or people you know.
TikTok is very different, in that, even if you
didn't follow anybody, you would over time,
just by using the app,
get a very personalised entertainment experience
for yourself.
Is anyone else, like, a little weirded out
about how specific TikTok's algorithm gets
for the "For You" page.
EUGENE: The "For You" page on TikTok is the default
that the app opens into.
On the one hand, it has a bunch of attributes
about the video.
It has the song in it. It has a dog.
And the other, it has a bunch of attributes about you,
you're this age, you live here,
those are contextual clues to feed their algorithm
to determine what your tastes are.
My TikTok algorithm is just like,
"You have ADHD, you have BPD,
you're depressed."
EUGENE: When you're looking at each video
on the "For You" page, TikTok, the app,
is looking at how we react to that video.
The algorithm starts to become smarter
and just off of these long sessions
where you're addictively scrolling through videos.
And then adjust what videos it shows you in the future.
And over time, it builds almost a fingerprint
of your tastes.
I'm talking, like, I was just thinking about
making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,
and then, out of nowhere, someone is making
a peanut butter and jelly on my "For You" page.
But lately, I kid you not, it hasn't been things
that I Google or I talk about,
it's been thoughts.
Are any other girls, like, kind of aggravated
that it took more than 20 years to figure out
we were bisexual, but it took my TikTok algorithm
like 37 seconds?
EUGENE: TikTok is just the latest manifestation
of the power that comes from connecting
billions of people in the world with really powerful
machine learning recommendation algorithms.
The creator economy is the fastest growing type
of small business, with more than 50 million people
around the world who consider themselves
to be Content Creators.
♪ ♪
TAYLOR: All the biggest brands, they wanna do TikTok
campaigns, because it has the hype right now.
TikTok has just really resonated
with this Gen-Z audience,
which is where the most valuable users are.
We have brands poised to spend over $15 billion
in the next year, on influencer marketing alone.
Eyeballs bring money and brands chase the eyeballs.
chase young users.
JIMMY: In less than a year,
you have almost 35 million followers on TikTok.
Over two billion likes... Billion. Wow.
[audience cheering]
TAYLOR: TikTokers, they've embraced that idea of being
the entrepreneur.
They're not just in it to get famous,
they're also in it to get rich and successful.
The social media influencer market
is a multi-billion dollar industry,
and some young people are cashing in big time.
TAYLOR: I mean, these TikTokers are making more
in their first year than a lot of huge YouTubers
have made throughout the entire past decade.
Late 2019 was my first brand deal
and it was for Nike.
When I first told my parents
that I was doing something for Nike, they were like,
"What? Nike? Like Nike?"
The fact that anyone wants to use beatboxing for anything
is the coolest thing on Earth to me.
This is a doll made for Little Caesar's.
Life-size. Even got the hair.
[beatboxing]
I'm a beatboxer, and I'm hanging out
at Jason Derulo's house, like, "How did this happen?"
Like this is dope.
[singing]
[beatboxing]
SPENCER: TikTok has made music more fun.
When we talk about revolutionising, you know,
an industry...
[beatboxing]
...that has existed for so long by itself...
[beatboxing]
TikTok's taking away that guardian, that little gate.
Now there's so many independent artists,
especially coming from TikTok, that have just, like,
cult following that'll have people that believe
in them, being outside of the industry.
[beatboxing]
It wasn't until I was on TV, when I presented
at the "Billboard Music Awards,"
that's when my parents, they were like,
"All right, Spencer's on TV now,
I don't know what to do with this information."
[beatboxing]
♪ ♪
TAYLOR: TikTok has also completely upended
the talent industry in Hollywood.
Hollywood people love TikTok, because they're like,
"Great, more famous people, more people to make us money."
These TikTokers are launching their own brands.
You have a beauty line coming out, right?
TAYLOR: Think of Addison Rae, right?
She's a hugely popular TikToker.
She launched Item Beauty.
So you see a lot of these young TikTokers
building already multi-million dollar empires.
Someone like Bella Poarch went viral for this, like,
lipsynching video, where she's making
these funny facial expressions.
♪ It's M to the B, it's M to the B ♪
♪ ♪
TAYLOR: She used that to launch a pop star career.
I mean, she's had several huge hit songs now.
Somebody like Lil Nas X is also a good example,
somebody that really leveraged the internet
to promote his own career.
♪ Oh, I'm gonna ride 'til I can't no more ♪
TAYLOR: TikTok defines "Top 40."
If you go to the Trending List
on Spotify, the most viral hits,
it's all TikTok songs, and it is a really crazy mix.
We saw Fleetwood Mac "Dreams", you know, resurged,
because of a viral video.
♪ It's only right ♪
♪ That you should play the way... ♪
TAYLOR: The whole media ecosystem has migrated
towards this personality-driven
form of entertainment, so often people think,
"Oh, I'm on Content Creators, right?
That's some teenager that's dancing".
No! Online influence is influence.
And if you can make an impact online,
you have the ability to reshape the world.
FEROZA: I started realising TikTok had power.
Even if it was for a comedy or makeup.
Whatever I was posting, people wanted to watch it.
And I was, like, "Okay,
so anything's possible on this app."
♪ ♪
Anyone can basically go viral on this app.
♪ ♪
After joining TikTok, I decided, like,
"Maybe I wanna make more political-savvy videos,
and I got more--more views on that.
Hi, if you, um, actually think all lives matter,
I want you to speak up about the kids in cages
at the border, I want you to speak up
about the kids dying in the Middle East.
I want you to speak out about the child...
I first read about the Uyghurs through social media
since I do follow Muslim pages,
and try to keep up with my community.
NEWSCASTER: Across the Northwestern
province of Xinjiang, an estimated one million
Chinese Muslims have vanished into a vast network
of detention centres that targets Uyghur Muslims.
I saw someone post a picture of these Uyghurs,
Uyghur prisoners,
and when I did more research, I found out
that this genocide is happening in front of us,
and no one is speaking about it.
♪ Okay, okay... ♪
It says, "News outlets when innocent Muslims
"are getting murdered every day
in the Middle East and in China."
The next day, after I posted that video,
I--I looked at my feed,
and I saw where the post used to be,
it was no longer the image of my face on there.
It was just a black little box.
When I clicked on it, it just would say,
"Video unavailable."
I was shocked at that time, but once I found out
that TikTok is a Beijing-owned app,
I was no longer shocked.
I found out how TikTok's basically using our data,
using our information,
and using it for their own benefit.
TikTok is a Beijing-owned app.
It has censored videos that are against the CCP.
I don't know about you, guys, but I wanna know
what TikTok's doing with our information.
AI is--is hungry for data,
so the more data you have,
the more accurate the AI becomes,
so in the age of AI, uh, data's the new oil,
and China is the new Saudi Arabia.
SCOTT: Your data is an asset to a lot of companies.
Google and Amazon and Facebook are so big,
and they have so much money because they have
all of your data.
And there's a whole secondary market for data,
called "Data Brokers."
And they're gathering all of this data,
and they're selling it to each other,
and it's really no different than the stock market.
If a company can start gathering that data,
thousands of points of data a day,
from the time someone's five until the time they're 18,
those companies, when they sell that data,
they have a profile that knows a child
way better than a parent would.
And that is extremely valuable to advertisers,
and to people who want to persuade you
to do something you might otherwise not want to do.
If social media is determining and tracking you
in different ways, and--and telling you
what your dreams are going to be,
based on the ads you're getting,
that impacts the kid's brain and it impacts their goals.
There's a lot of harms happening with these companies
that are--are based in Northern California.
What's different about TikTok is,
where is this data going?
NEWSCASTER: TikTok is reportedly
under federal investigation.
The US Government reportedly launching
a national security review of the company's
data collection, and censorship practices,
amid concerns that users personal data
could be accessible to foreign governments.
there's very little transparency,
just because a tech company says something...
and I'm not just talking about TikTok.
We don't have to take the tech company at its word.
And I think Facebook is somewhat scared
of the quick rise of TikTok, because all that data
that Facebook was getting is now going to TikTok.
The Chinese, one of the few markets where Facebook
is unavailable right now, because of government censors...
While Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg,
appears to be trying bit by bit to reenter the world's
largest internet population, China.
SHELLY: Facebook was probably
the most aggressive social media company
to try to get into China,
because social media in China had been blocked
for a number of years.
♪ ♪
Mark Zuckerberg is trying to find a way
that they could exist somehow in China.
And so he learned Mandarin.
He went to a number of conferences,
where he could put himself in front of Xi Jinping,
and speak to Xi Jinping directly.
And he really was aggressive in saying, you know,
"This is a huge market.
"How can we be this global connector
for the world and not have China be part of it?"
But it became clear to him in the last few years
that it's not going to work.
And so he completely changed, he completely had a 180
and he went, uh, on the offensive.
A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms
were American.
Today, six of the top ten are Chinese.
He realised that, "If I can't win over
"the Chinese market, then I'm gonna make it harder for them
to win over my market in the US."
NEWSCASTER: Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly called TikTok
"A threat to democracy."
What the Facebook CEO failed to mention
is that he tried to purchase TikTok's predecesor,
Musical.ly.
MAN: Zuckerberg's clearly very concerned about TikTok,
because it's the most genuine new competition
he's received for a long time.
I remember when Facebook was the number one place on Earth.
My grandmother doesn't even use Facebook.
She's too cool.
No, I'm kidding.
I posted a prank on my page,
and it has like three million views right now.
[imitates buzzing sound]
- Oh! - You know what?
Uh-huh.
Come here. Yeah, yeah. Mm...
- [screams] - [laughs]
SPENCER: I think it's all about how creative you are.
I mean, that's what TikTok has taught me.
Eh!
[beatboxing]
- That was good. - I like that one.
Content's easy with you, Merrick.
My name is Merrick Hanna. I am 16 years old.
[beatboxing]
When people think of influencers...
I think they think it's very leisurely. It's not.
[beatboxing]
- It's fast. - Is that how it goes?
- Yeah, it's that fast. - Why is it so fast?
- 'Cause it loops. - Ah.
Yeah, so it seems like it's longer when you watch it.
I don't think it needs to be quite as fast
as you're suggesting.
Try to make it longer, you're rushing so much.
To manage Merrick's career at this point,
is definitely a full time job, on top of my full time job.
Reading all the emails for him, reading the contracts,
reading offers, replying, the back and forth...
My dad helps a lot with finding ideas,
because that is a big part of it.
He'll find a trend that he thinks I can do,
he'll show it to me, and I'll be like,
"All right, I know how to do it."
Hit, hit, hit. Now push back.
Even though it may not seem like it,
he does a lot of the work.
I--I don't sleep quite as much as I used to.
[beatboxing]
SHAWN: It's like a gold rush.
Brands wisely are now seeing
that you can pinpoint an audience
better, probably, through social media,
and TikTok especially,
than a lot of traditional means of advertising,
and then, there's a lot of people who's trying
to take advantage of the gold rush,
who just shouldn't be, who are incompetent,
but a lot of the influencers are young and inexperienced,
- and don't know better. - Right.
I think that having a parent filter social media messages
is critical parent involvement,
if you wanna keep an eye
- on your child-- - It's very important.
Yeah.
♪ Inferno ♪
♪ Baby, I'm the reason why bad's so fun ♪
NEWSCASTER: "A third of TikTok's US users
may be 14 or under, raising safety questions."
An extremely popular video app that was called Musical.ly
is now called TikTok, has agreed to pay
millions of dollars in fines for illegally collecting
personal information from children.
♪ ♪
Hey, Carter.
These companies are preying on children.
SCOTT: TikTok is amassing a profile on them,
so that they can be targeted by advertisers.
They can push ideas to that child,
and that is dangerous.
♪ ♪
One of the unique features of TikTok
is that a child could post a video,
uh, dancing and having fun, uh, and there's a feature
on it called "Duets", where you have children
posting their own videos and then you just have
these older men staring at them.
♪ Good morning, beautiful ♪
♪ How was your night? ♪
SCOTT: While these older men doing... you know,
just part of "I wanna be in a duet with you."
We have one where the girl went to kiss her camera
at the same time one of these older men kisses his camera,
so it looks like you're having an older man making out
with-with a young girl.
These people are seeing your children.
And they could contact them through the TikTok app.
There were child predators before social media,
but they didn't have direct access
to your child's inbox.
♪ Walk up in dat bit' too clean, I' froze ♪
♪ They donвЂ™t fight you where I' from ♪
♪ Like the beat, I keep a drum ♪
♪ You ain't got dough, lil' boy ♪
I'm involved in working on litigation
against TikTok, and my son is up in his bedroom,
you know, doing livestream on TikTok, it turned out.
So, like, the work I do, is that--is that ever
on the back of your mind, like, "I'm using all these apps,
"and my dad has these lawsuits against these companies
for data and protecting people..."
Like, do you think about that?
No. I just think about it 'cause you come home
and tell me about all that stuff,
and then I'm like, technology is like someone
my age is, like, so essential to everything
I do that it's, like, I kind of have to live
with the fact that there's gonna be people that are profiting
off my data, and I have no real recourse for that.
What's more concerning is, like, the--the accuracy
of the algorithm, like, I could be talking
about a movie and then later that day,
that movie, like, shows up on my feed.
And you're just talking randomly to somebody
- about the movie? - That happens, like...
way more often than I'm comfortable with.
And that doesn't freak you out?
Oh, it does, to some degree, but, like, I guess
I'm used to it at this point,
like it happens so much.
♪ ♪
I am on the frontlines
of fighting privacy battles for children.
And my kids know that's what I do,
but they're on the app,
so it's a fight you fight, but it's a difficult fight
to win with your kids.
You can only do so much, and these companies know that.
If there's no regulation of it, you, as a parent,
you don't have any control
over what's being pushed to these kids.
♪ ♪
AVRIEL: Gen-Z is a unique generation.
To be a digital native is to be someone
who doesn't know a world without the internet.
Teenagers are in a really sensitive point
in their development,
both in terms of how their brains are rewiring,
and in terms of how they're making sense of themselves
and their place in the world.
What ends up happening is that the algorithms
themselves end up shaping the development
of teenagers on these apps,
in ways that we don't understand at all.
With any recommendation algorithm, you run the risk
of individuals who look similar to each other,
in terms of their activity, getting pushed closer
and closer and closer together in terms of content
that they're being recommended,
and whatever information is gonna confirm
your preexisting beliefs.
♪ ♪
By not allowing people from diverse perspectives
to come into contact with each other...
it lessens their ability for empathy.
The algorithms are reinforcing social disparities.
It's not just TikTok.
It is the technology that TikTok relies on,
but recommendation algorithms have infiltrated
all aspects of our society.
♪ ♪
Humans are relying on recommendation systems
to tell them what decisions to make.
And they are determining our futures moment by moment,
in ways that we have very little control.
If we fail to regulate social media
and the impact that it's having on this generation,
we're gonna see a lot of marginalised teenagers
experiencing harms that none of us
had the experience and that none of us
are prepared to help them navigate.
♪ ♪
DEJA: I've been in the spotlight
since I was 16.
And it is exhausting.
There's definitely this tension, uh, always
between produce, produce, produce,
stay relevant,
and produce things that you're going to be
proud of in ten years,
and they don't always go together.
They can't.
And... I think it leads me to question now,
"Am I doing the right thing?
Did I make the right choices?"
♪ ♪
I was raised by a single mom,
and I grew up in a household that, like many,
couldn't afford the basics.
Probably the hardest time was when my mom started
to decline into substance abuse.
♪ ♪
When I was 15, I walked out of my mom's house,
because I couldn't get what I needed there.
And so, for me, that looked
like living at a friend's house,
until I graduated and moved to college.
I was seeing a therapist at Columbia
for the first time ever, and I, like,
went into her office and I was shaking
and crying and she couldn't understand,
and then she was telling me, "You know,
why don't you just delete your social media?"
I was like, "What you don't understand
"is that I can't delete these accounts,
"because they are what keeps me financially stable.
"I pay all of my own bills,
and then, additionally, I pay my mom's bills."
And monetising on social media's given me
the opportunity to do that."
When I'm being abused or harassed online,
it's almost impossible for me to step away.
And it's kind of like an abusive relationship
in that regard.
I have to open myself up to this hate,
because this is what creates financial stability for me.
What starts out as just a place to be creative,
and express yourself,
becomes this rat race for attention.
And this need to constantly chase
a like count, follow accounts,
and view counts.
A need to constantly perform
in a way that can really break people down.
Social media influencer was the fourth highest
aspiration among elementary school students.
On the outside, the life of influencers
looks really fun and glamorous.
On the inside, a lot of those influencers,
in addition to getting some external validation,
they're getting a lot of harassment and hate.
They have to perform happiness all of the time.
Many of them are struggling with depression,
anxiety, burnout,
and that is having very real-world consequences.
So that algorithm that's always trying to figure out
what the hottest trends are,
is constantly lifting something up
to the stratosphere, and then taking it
back down again.
To me, this is bigger than TikTok.
It's about who in our society gets heard,
and what you have to do in our society to get heard.
♪ ♪
FEROZA: After my first video about the Uyghurs
was taken down, I knew I had to disguise my video,
so I grabbed my pink eyelash curler,
and I started curling my lashes.
This is the one that started it all.
Hi, guys, I'm gonna teach you, guys,
how to get long lashes,
so the first thing you need to do
is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously,
then you're gonna put them down
and use your phone that you're using right now
to search up what's happening in China,
how they're getting concentration camps,
throwing innocent Muslims in there,
separating their families from each other,
kidnapping them, murdering them,
raping them, forcing them...
I spoke about that in just, like, 40 seconds,
and I continued on doing the eyelash tutorial.
...this is another Holocaust,
yet no one is talking about it.
Please, be aware. Please, spread awareness.
And... yeah, so you can grab your lash curler again...
It reached millions, it reached millions, and...
people were...
People were shocked in the comments.
You popped up in my "For You" page and I was like,
"Oh, my God, that's Feroza.
I was, like, "I sent this to her,"
and I was like, "Why are you on my 'For You' page?
And why do you have, like, so many likes?" It was like crazy.
I had to tell my mom right after that.
I was like, "Ugh, people are sending it now.
I should tell my mom I have TikTok."
My mom, like, we were watching the news,
and she's like, "Is that Feroza?"
I was like, "Oh, my Gosh.
Yes, it's my friend".
♪ ♪
A 40-second video going viral in just one day.
That's, like, the power that TikTok holds.
So I decided to post two more videos, uh,
the following two days, to just post more information
on how to help.
Hey, guys, you wanted a second part to the video
on how to get longer lashes, so here it is.
And, by the way, I say that so TikTok
doesn't take down my videos.
I don't think TikTok noticed what I posted at first,
and then the following day,
it was like a Monday, I wake up at 5:00 am
for school, and I go on TikTok to see how many views
the next two videos got,
and I see that I can't even go on TikTok.
My--my account's suspended.
"Your account is temporarily suspended
because it goes against community guidelines."
Nothing from my posts violates community guidelines.
I show nothing of hate speech, I show no profanity,
everything I spoke about was factual evidence.
My first thought after seeing this black screen
on my phone was, "I'm not letting them silence me."
I--I quickly made a Twitter account.
I quickly posted on Instagram that, "Hey, I was silenced
for speaking up",
and I'm not gonna let them get away with that.
And I asked people to continue sharing the video.
I'm so grateful that people heard me
saying that my voice was taken away.
17-year-old Feroza Aziz...
NEWSCASTER: Joining us now is Feroza Aziz...
FEROZA: In less than a few days, I was on Al-Jazeera,
BBC, CNN...
More than 1.5 million people watched it just on TikTok.
What kind of responses have you had?
Just from regular people...
Half of them is positive, and the other half
is, "Well, I don't know this is happening.
"Why am I hearing this on TikTok
and why not on the news?"
I did, uhm, feel a little bit upset, though,
because I thought, as if more attention was brought
to me being silenced than to what I was actually
speaking about.
I remember seeing headlines saying,
"Oh, Beijing-owned app takes down video."
And not, "Oh, like, there's a Uyghur genocide happening."
I felt very overwhelmed with the news coverage.
One of my idols-- I have, like, her picture
on my wall, mm, AOC retweeted an article of me.
♪ ♪
I didn't expect, uhm, politicians from China
to even comment on it.
China's Prime Ministry said it had no specifics
of this case.
You saying the content is still on the TikTok account?
I'm not aware of the situation.
How could I know what's happening
on the account of one individual?
I thought I had the freedom of speech,
but I guess... under TikTok that's not possible
for me to have that right.
♪ ♪
DAVID POLGAR: Content moderation is a process
of determining what's appropriate
and what's not appropriate online.
One of the natural tensions becomes if you have
a company but it's all throughout the globe,
do you adjust to the cultural norms of another country?
And a lot of people, when on Facebook or TikTok
or Instagram, they talk about it by using concepts
like freedom of speech,
because all throughout society, specifically American society,
we have debated.
What's appropriate? How you balance
individual autonomy and expression
with the societal impact?
That used to reside in governmental bodies.
♪ ♪
With social media, the power
of determining speech
has been far too consolidated.
Major tech companies... if they have the power
of deciding what's okay and what's not okay
with what I say, if they have the power
to deplatform.
That puts a tremendous level of power
in an unelected official.
That's antidemocratic.
♪ ♪
I mean, the think about TikTok is
it's, so it's--it's Chinese-owned,
or just that, owners, they don't control it.
In fact, TikTok takes a much, much stronger attitude
against the sort of content that...
well, that the Chinese government
wouldn't like to see on a social media app.
There's no orders coming down from up high,
it's just the understanding that you will do what Beijing
wants and you'll try and guess what they want
and do it without being asked.
♪ ♪
You know, I might--I might go livestream
on Duoyin a little bit.
That's what's high on Duoyin.
But...
There's one problem, 'cause all the restrictions
of my tattoos.
They might shut me down.
Here we go.
We're live!
Tattoos? No.
And so the piercing? No.
Ah! Sorry, sorry.
Did you see that?
Because I have tattoos, I can't--I can't go livestream.
That's--that's really messed up. You know?
Yeah, on Duoyin you have to watch
everything that you say.
Just one word... one frame
could set your whole video off.
For the first time in history, a person can write something
or say something and have it reach
a large segment of the world.
So this brings up the topic of censorship,
which is really tricky.
The internet allows for the fastest spread of ideas
in the history of the world.
China with the great firewall
and with government moderation has taken a very active hand
in controlling what topics are discussed,
what ideas are acceptable to discuss on the internet.
We've never had to grapple with questions around censorship
and in an era where so many people have
a global megaphone now in their hands.
♪ ♪
It was back in late December when Dr. Li Wenliang
first warned friends on WeChat
about a SARS-like disease going around.
Li sent a group message saying that a test result
from a patient quarantined at the hospital
where he worked showed a patient had a coronavirus,
but hours after being sent, Wuhan City health officials
tracked Li down,
questioning where he got the information.
Dr. Li sounded the alarm early in the COVID-19 outbreak.
He soon faced government intimidation,
and then contracted the virus.
When he passed away,
I was among many Chinese médecins
who expressed grief and outrage
at the events,
only to have my account deleted.
I felt guilt more than anger.
At the time, I was a tech worker at ByteDance,
where I helped develop tools and platforms
for content moderation.
In other words, I had helped build a system
that censored accounts like mine.
♪ ♪
The technologies we created supported the entire company's
content moderation, including Duoyin at home,
and its international equivalent, TikTok.
♪ ♪
There was a long, constantly updated list
of sensitive words, dates and names.
If a user mentioned a sensitive term,
they would shut down the ongoing livestream session
and even suspend or delete their account.
♪ ♪
Many of my colleagues felt uneasy
about what we were doing,
but we all felt that there was nothing we can do.
♪ ♪
Dr. Li warned his colleagues and friends
about an unknown virus.
He was punished for that.
Just imagine, had any social media platform
been able to reject the government's
censorship directives, perhaps millions of lives
would have been saved today.
♪ ♪
NEWSCASTER: TikTok faces government investigation
in over seven countries,
all citing concerns over national security
and content moderation.
♪ ♪
CHRIS: In 2019, we had someone contact us,
claiming to have internal information and access
to internal TikTok moderation guidelines.
And I don't think we realised, at the time,
how big the story would get.
[cell phone buzzing]
What we saw was that TikTok was very explicit
about what it wanted to have on the platform,
and what it didn't want to show on the platform.
♪ ♪
TikTok rarely deletes content.
They don't have to.
They can just hide it.
♪ ♪
The guidelines were explicitly instructing moderators
to deal with people who are LGBTQ or had disabilities
or for whatever reason TikTok felt
were vulnerable to bullying by hiding their content.
So it was in Mandarin,
and underneath a fairly awkward
English translation,
so it says subjects who is susceptible to bullying
or harassment, based on their physical or mental condition.
Example, facial disfigurement,
autism, Down syndrome,
disabled people or people
with some facial problems, etc.
Content of subjects likely to incite cyberbullying
will be allowed, but marked with risk tag 4.
Basically, and like... different levels
of what we call "algorithmic punishment"
or "algorithmic visibility,"
so they were put in a category called "Risk 4,"
which means that as soon as their videos
would reach a certain threshold of views,
they would automatically also be taken from the "For You" feed.
♪ ♪
Later on, other leaks surfaced.
I actually have the ugly content policy
right in front of me,
So... crazy to read this.
"Abnormal body shape, chubby,
"ugly facial looks,
"not limited to 'disformatted' face,
"fangs, lack of front teeth,
senior people with too many wrinkles..."
And it just goes on and on, right?
In a statement, TikTok said,
"Earlier, we took a blunt approach
"to minimising conflict on the platform...
"Today we use local content moderation policies.
"We want TikTok to be a space where everyone can safely
and freely express themselves."
It's just a lot of the "move fast and break things"
attitude that we've seen
from other Silicon Valley companies.
It's not like only TikTok was doing these things.
Obviously, the representation that we see in media
is not an accurate picture of society,
but I think there is a difference
that, you know, no TV station, nor does Hollywood
pretends to be open access to everybody,
whereas this is a promise
that social media platforms make.
♪ ♪
Am I the only one that has noticed
that black creators get least favorite body algorithm?
How is it that my followers are not seeing my video?
What's up with that algorithm?
I've had some of my TikTok videos get zero views,
and I've been shadowbanned.
EMILY: Shadowbanning on TikTok is just when
something in the algorithm
that just kind of shuts you out completely.
They just like find a way to make it
so nobody sees any of your content.
I am an apprenticing ocularist,
an artist who works in the medical field, uh,
making prosthetic eyes.
TikTok's algorithm is very good.
You know, you can create an account
and within a couple of hours or a couple of days
that algorithm knows who you are.
You know?
So for that same algorithm to kind of just...
rip the rug out from thousands of Black creators,
it kind of pulls you back for a second.
We know the history
that this nation has with Black people.
We know the savagery that they had to endure
because of colonisers,
and the savagery that they still have to endure...
I got on, and I had made a video talking
about how my "For You" page was only of white creators
and by that point, I would say I had...
150 to 200,000 followers.
And so I had a video sitting, that I've published
for three hours, and it said zero views.
That was the first time where I was, like,
this is blatant shadowbanning.
Nobody's seeing us 'cause they're ensuring
that nobody can.
NEWSCASTER: Tech troubles.
TikTok says a technical glitch is making it appear
as if posts with the hashtag "#blacklives matter"
and "#georgefloyd" received no views.
The video platform says
it's dealing with a display issue
adding that videos featuring those tags
have amassed more than two billion views.
The moment you go to use a tag on TikTok,
it'll tell you how many views, have been on that tag.
And you go to write "black lives matter",
and it says zero or, you know, "#blm,"
"georgefloyd," "ahmaudarbery," anything.
It would tell you zero.
NEWSCASTER: TikTok said in a statement,
which reads in part, "First, to our Black community:
We want to..."
"Last week, a technical glitch made it
"temporarily appear as if posts uploaded using #blacklivesmatter
"and #georgefloyd had received zero views.
"We understand that many assumed
"it's bugged to be an intentional act
"to suppress experiences and invalidate the emotions
"felt by the Black community,
and we know we have work to do
to regain and repair that trust."
Kind of like the normal check points
that people go through.
"We're growing, we're learning,
we're trying to do better."
I would love to believe that it was a technical glitch.
'Cause you're like, "That's absolutely possible.
100%," but it's so oddly specific
that I can't attribute that to just being a glitch.
SHELLY: TikTok has said that their content moderation
has changed.
Some of what you see on there backs that up.
The sense that you see a lot of activism there.
You saw Black Lives Matter content,
eventually be up on there.
But it's constantly changing, it's a constant black box.
We have no idea what's going into any of these algorithms.
And there's zero transparency.
NEWSCASTER: ByteDance, the Beijing-based
owner of TikTok, apologised for the suspension,
blaming a human moderation error.
And TikTok says it doesn't apply Chinese moderation
principles to its product outside of mainland China.
FEROZA: After a few days, TikTok gave my account back.
People don't seem to understand
what it feels like to have someone try to take away
your voice, and then they give it back to you.
It's my voice, and them deciding
to give me back my account
after taking it away. It was as if...
they could control what I could say
and what I could do,
and it's just disgusting to see an app do that.
'Til this day, my classmates will post
on my social media accounts,
leaving hate comments.
I can delete the comments, but I'm gonna go to class
the next day, and I'm gonna sit next to the person
who hates my guts, for just speaking on issues
I believe must be spoken about.
When you're so invested on apps like TikTok,
when something bad happens on social media,
your life is torn apart.
♪ ♪
Story time. We all worked on the Kamala Harris campaign,
in the presidential primary.
And this is your sign to get a tattoo with your work besties.
For the people.
DEJA: I was 19 years old
when I started on the Kamala Harris campaign.
I withdrew my sophomore year at Columbia.
And it was a huge move.
I think that our perspective as young people
is what led us to think TikTok is important.
There's a lot of young people there.
We were the first campaign that was putting content
on TikTok directly.
I feel like we have to take a moment for this... this.
Oh, thank you.
Oh. Yes.
All of Yessica's iconic shots.
So good.
I mean, you pioneered vertical video.
I--I love that shot in the rain.
She was booging it down.
That one was everywhere. I love that.
I just remember, like, all those airplane videos
really making the rounds on TikTok.
Absolutely.
They were showing up everywhere.
And it was interesting to see the progression.
Like, when different candidates started to have, like,
their official TikToks and what kind of content
did they make on TikTok.
I think we felt like we were kind of starting
to hit our stride on TikTok,
and then we, like, had to stop.
That email, that dreadful, dreadful email we got.
The dark day when we were told
that we couldn't be on TikTok anymore.
DEJA: When I get this email that,
because of security reasons, we were all being asked
to delete TikTok on government and military phones...
That was a sad email. That was a tough one.
NEWSCASTER: TikTok ownership by a Chinese parent company
subject to Chinese surveillance law
has made the app's popularity problematic,
causing concerns from the US Army,
the Navy, the TSA, the DNC, the RNC,
and the Biden campaign,
all banning TikTok from their phones.
SHELLY: For many young soldiers in the military
who were using TikTok, they were in all sorts
of US military bases around the world,
and said they would go
and they would do pushup contests.
They would, you know, do tours of the bases, then...
You know, they were really showing some pretty...
top secret assets to anyone in the world
wanting to see them,
and this was at a moment where...
people were not taking TikTok seriously.
But what they realised was this silly little kids app
was collecting a ton of information
on GPS, on location, of all these soldiers,
and all of that, in the end,
was heading back into a Chinese company.
♪ It took too long, it took too long ♪
♪ It took too long for you to call back ♪
♪ And normally I would just forget that... ♪
From a nation state's perspective,
well, data is the new oil.
If I can understand the connections between people,
I can start to target my misinformation,
so that one person is likely to take actions
in the real world, like vote.
So the data that TikTok collects
is on par with what other social media companies
are collecting.
So, the question really becomes, "Why is TikTok being picked on?"
Xenophobia should certainly be considered a part,
as part of this, we've seen a rise in hate crimes
against Asian-Americans, and so I think,
being very clear about the differences,
uh, of the practices of a government
versus the people that happen to reside
inside of that nation state.
After all, I don't agree with 100% of the things
our nation does.
♪ I'm singing Trump 2020 ♪
♪ Trump 2020 ♪
♪ Trump 2020, Trump 2020 ♪
♪ ♪
ALEYSHA: When I first found Gen-Z comedians online,
it was so inspiring to me as a comedian,
in seeing how easy it is to build traction
on apps like TikTok.
One of my friends had posted
that Donald Trump's Tulsa rally
had free tickets, and my first thought
was just how easy is it to get a ticket.
Guys, Donald Trump is having a rally.
All you had to do is give your phone number
and so I got two tickets, but I totally forgot
that I had to pick every individual piece
of lint off of my floor,
and then sort them by size, so I can't...
make it for Friday.
I had realised the potential of this.
You should be really careful going to do this, you know.
You don't want a bunch of empty seats.
And when I posted it, I didn't think much of it...
♪ ♪
...but in two days it just blew up.
Oh, my God! I just registered for Trump's rally,
and I'm so excited to not go.
Mm-hmm.
We've never had an empty seat.
And we certainly won't in Oklahoma.
TikTok users may well be
President Trump's latest adversary,
after thousands of people who've gotten tickets online
didn't show up,
thanks to a secret campaign on TikTok.
We've gotten over a million tickets sold
and only 6,000 people showed up.
President Trump was frustrated and angry.
TikTok is definitely giving teenagers new power.
I think it's unbelievable that I was able to prank
an American President.
NEWSCASTER: Trump nemesis, New York Congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, gloated.
As soon as that rally happened,
that's when the rhetoric on TikTok rose to a level
that we hadn't seen before.
The real China hawks in his Administration
were ready to go after this company, and then were kind
of waiting for the moment, and this rally
and the pandemic came together
to give them that moment that they needed.
The Pentagon, the Department of State,
the Department of Homeland Security,
and the TSA have all banned their employees
and service members
from using TikTok on government devices,
and we know that it's a national security risk.
People really pounced on this moment,
not only the China hawks and the US government,
but also the tech companies, particularly Facebook.
Do you believe that the Chinese government
steals technology from US companies?
Uh, Congressman, I think it's well documented
that the Chinese government steals technology
from American companies.
And so Mark Zuckerberg saw this as a moment
and Facebook pounced on this moment,
where TikTok was getting under pressure,
and he said, "I'm gonna turn this up even more."
And so they started making their case
to the different people in Congress
who were really going after Facebook,
and they were saying, "You know what?
"You're looking at us as the Boogeyman,
"but we're just a distraction,
"from the real problem,
"which are the Chinese tech companies,
"and those are the companies
that you should be looking at."
Now the "Wall Street Journal" is reporting that...
Not only did Mark Zuckerberg publicly
go against TikTok,
he lobbied behind the scenes against the company,
in a private dinner with the President.
There was a moment during the pandemic
where cases were going up,
we didn't have a vaccine,
Donald Trump's campaign wasn't doing so well,
and so Donald Trump started really hammering this idea home
that we need to blame China for the Coronavirus,
and this pandemic.
"Kung-flu."
The Chinese virus.
REPORTER: Why do you keep using this?
- Because it comes from China. - Sounds racist.
It's not racist at all. No.
Not at all. It comes from China.
SHELLY: Trump loved that. He wanted to play to that,
because it became this kind of rallying cry in the US
to go after China,
and TikTok kind of became, um, this symbol of China
at that moment.
NEWSCASTER: There have been more than 2,500 incidents
of anti-Asian hate crimes.
NEWSCASTER: It's not just in the US,
Asians around the world have reported discrimination
linked to Coronavirus.
Asian hate, it didn't just started now.
It was always there.
Suddenly, because of the pandemic,
TikTok became this symbol of this fight
between the US and China, and a way for Donald Trump
to kind of deflect blame.
NEWSCASTER: It all started last Friday,
when President Trump send shockwaves
through social media after making this comment.
We're looking at TikTok.
We may be banning TikTok.
NEWSCASTER: The President threatened to block
the popular video app,
citing national security concerns.
No. We're--we're not a national security threat.
And we've said that time and again,
we have very strict data access and controls.
NEWSCASTER: TikTok has said,
"American user data is stored in the US,
"and backed up in Singapore,
not in China."
We are at a time when we're seeing a very much...
a geopolitical tension, as you know,
between the US and China,
and we are in the middle of that.
In China, there is this cyber security law
that states, "If we ask you for information,
then you have to give it to us."
NEWSCASTER: The 2017 law mandates
that Chinese-owned companies have to cooperate
with the Communist Party.
And so that's kind of the heart of the problem.
TikTok can swear up and down that they've never been asked
to give information,
but that doesn't stop the Chinese government
from taking information in the future.
I remember this moment, where we had the pandemic,
we had Black Lives Matter protests,
we have wildfires in California,
like the world feels like it's falling apart
and the only thing people on the news are talking about
is this ban of TikTok.
Just the threat alone has already had a huge impact.
Advertisers have been hitting pause on campaigns,
worth millions of dollars...
It caused absolute chaos in the tech industry,
like Apple and Google,
and everyone was sort of struggling
to get a handle on it, and thinking,
"Can a president even do this?"
Yo, what's up, guys?
I'm sure all you guys heard the news.
TikTok's getting banned.
I'm... going across TikTok, and all my friends
are saying bye to TikTok
"It's so sad I have to leave you, guys."
There's another one saying, "Please follow me
on all my other social media."
And I was fearing for my career.
♪ But it's done now ♪
I have five million followers. How can this get banned?
This is my living, it's what I do.
And I'm starting a video petition with #savetiktok.
You all mean the world to me.
[sighs]
Thank you for everything.
Thank you for a career.
Thank you for... making all my beatbox dreams come true.
That was tough. I...
I thought of a million different possibilities in my...
Maybe I gotta perform or maybe I gotta go busk
or something, like, "What am I gonna do?"
Like, it was definitely tough for me to see,
because I didn't want that to happen.
TikTok.
A few days after the executive order,
we hear that Microsoft is in deal talks to buy TikTok.
Then we started hearing, "Okay, well, maybe Oracle
"wants to buy TikTok,
"maybe all these other companies, you know,
"because if they bought TikTok then it would no longer
be owned by a Chinese company,"
and suddenly that would be okay
for Donald Trump, and, oh, by the way,
Donald Trump also wanted to take a finder's fee
to get some money to the Treasury,
which is probably the most bizarre plot
of the entire storyline.
♪ ♪
TikTok kept saying,
"We're trying to find a deal,
we're trying to find a deal,"
but, in the meantime, nothing was actually happening,
and then the Chinese government stepped in.
Tonight, state media have been lashing out, once again,
saying that Beijing would, quote, undoubtedly prepare
proportional countermeasures
for what it says could become piracy and looting
by United States.
All of a sudden, came this law that banned the export
or sale of any artificial intelligence
from China.
ByteDance and TikTok at its core
is an AI company.
And that was really what stopped the discussion.
And could prevent the sale of TikTok.
TikTok is one of the opening salvos in an emerging battle
of technology between the world's two largest
and most dynamic economies.
A new tech cold war.
SHELLY: And then, the November US Presidential Elections
started heating up, and the story of TikTok
became the biggest deal of the century
that never actually ended up happening,
because Donald Trump lost the Presidency,
Biden took over
and we never revisited it.
Well, it turns out the clock won't stop for TikTok.
President Biden has signed a new executive order,
voiding the Trump-era decision seeking to ban
the social media app.
Everybody, calm down. Calm down.
TikTok is not getting banned.
I just love how Trump tried to ban TikTok.
And now TikTok has banned Trump.
TikTok is just one app in what is going to be
a long line of applications
and new ways of communicating.
And so acknowledging our own humanity in this.
On the internet, we treat others like they're disposable,
but, and you know, nobody is disposable.
Okay, mama, what do you think of my haircut?
- I love it. - You love it?
My mom's now been sober
for a little more than four years.
And now we have a really great relationship.
I've actively worked... to remind myself
that she's someone who's capable of change.
♪ ♪
As a digital native,
it's exhausting to grow up and make mistakes
in front of everyone.
And not just the people who are looking at me right now,
but inevitably, the people who are looking at me in five years,
ten years...
The things you put on the internet are forever.
But... Hey! How's it going?
I founded GenZ Girl Gang
because social media can be used
as a community building tool.
As my generation gets older,
and we live more life documented,
I hope that--that we learn to live
with this technology,
and really live with it, right?
Live full lives with it.
Live our mistakes through it.
That we can all create the space for one another
to--to change.
[beatboxing]
SPENCER: The way that old Hollywood was
is very different than how new Hollywood is.
TikTok's so, so young that everything that's happening
is so fresh right now.
We're really gonna see who shines.
[beatboxing]
I have a lot of followers.
Like, right now, I have 54 million,
as of yesterday.
We follow you! Can you take a picture with my kids?
Oh, my God!
[all speak at once]
Don't cry.
I'm happy.
- I know. I'm happy too. - Aw.
No...
You're gonna make me cry.
[indistinct chatter]
[beatboxing]
My boy!
You guys have a great day, all right?
Thank you! That was awesome.
To me, I think, fame is that support you give people
that didn't really have it before you existed.
- I follow you. - Aw.
I will follow you guys back.
I follow you on TikTok.
I just put out a music video, like--
- Uh-huh, I found it. - You did? Aw, thank you.
♪ ♪
I want kids to be like, "I know I can do that too.
I know there's a chance out there."
I would've never dreamed, in a million years,
it would happen like this.
TikTok has really changed my entire life.
And I--I think if I wanna speak
to anyone out there that ever has a dream
and think that it's too crazy...
too crazy to accomplish, uh, you can do it.
You can--you can do anything that you want.
Sorry.
♪ ♪
It's--it's so, it's so weird for me, 'cause, like, being
a beatboxer... it was so hard for me to be accepted.
And... [sniffles]
[exhales]
I'm just really, really glad I never gave up.
FAREZA: It's graduation day.
I'm definitely nervous,
I'm trying to wear my Afghan sash
to graduation.
I was told that I can't wear the sash
because it goes against dress code.
But I'm sure that no matter what people say about me,
at the end of the day I'm proud I'm Afghan
and there's no other human being like me.
Take a lot. Just tap a lot.
And if it glitches, use your phone.
♪ ♪
It feels a little embarrassing to see, like, my mom
and the whole family, like, celebrating me graduating,
'cause I'm like, "Ugh, it's not that big of a deal."
But then I look back at them, and I'm like...
Honestly, it is, 'cause I'm the first female
in my family to graduate high school.
My mother, she went to elementary school,
but then, once the violence in Kabul, Afghanistan,
got too much, she had to be taken out at third grade.
I'm the first anyone in my family
to even go to college now.
[cheering and applause]
MAN: Welcome to graduation.
We're the class of 2021.
♪ ♪
I didn't expect myself to go viral
and be this activist.
What inspired me to speak up was seeing those around me
staying silent.
♪ ♪
SPEAKER: Feroza Aziz.
[cheering and applause]
I wanna do more in the future on human rights issues,
and I wanna do more than just speaking on social media.
I actually wanna physically help.
♪ ♪
SPEAKER: Congratulations.
[cheering and whistling]
♪ ♪
[speaks in foreign language]
Thank you.
TAYLOR: TikTok has infiltrated American culture,
the Hollywood and entertainment system,
and--and politics, and all of these different facets
of American life in--in such a deep way.
There's very legitimate reasons to think critically
about the impact that this massive tech conglomerate
is having on America and it's really important
to think about issues around data privacy
with all of these tech platforms.
It's called the Log Off movement,
and it's a nonprofit organisation.
It's really been started by kids,
for ways to promote healthy ways to exist
on social media.
I'm really inspired by the Log Off movement,
they're a group of high school students
from all over the planet.
They're not just telling people
to spend less time on the apps.
They're pushing back by talking to members of Congress,
by talking to people at the platforms themselves,
to try to change how these systems are built.
Companies like TikTok need to be watched,
they need to be held accountable
the same way that we hold
other institutions of power accountable.
NEWSCASTER: TikTok has tightened
the privacy measures.
Anybody under 15 will automatically have
a private account.
Federal regulators have already ordered the app
to disclose how its practices do effect young people.
SHELLY: Personally, I don't think it's fair to single out
an individual company just because it's popular.
Personally, I think it makes more sense to pass
cohesive laws against all companies,
so that not only can TikTok not do some of this,
so neither can Facebook or Google, or Amazon
or any other companies, regardless of nationality.
[beatboxing]
If the story ended today, I would say, hands down,
TikTok won.
All the Trump ban did was make TikTok even bigger,
because it caused people to download the app,
it caused people to talk about it,
and so all it did was create more growth
and more revenue for this Chinese company
that is even bigger in the US than it was
when Trump first started going after it.
Now, the story's not over.
[beatboxing]
♪ Everybody wants to be somebody ♪
♪ Everybody... wants to be somebody ♪
[beatboxing]
♪ Everybody ♪
♪ To be somebody ♪
♪ Everybody wants to be somebody ♪
[beatboxing]
...generations before us to have the same power
as we do now, and that's technology.
You have power.
You can create change.
[beatboxing]
[pop song playing]
♪ ♪