The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Evans: TikTok's Real Threat Is Algorithmic Control, Not Data Collection
“The real Policy problem with TikTok is not that it has personal data, it kind of doesn't really, it's that it's deciding what you see.”
Evans: Privacy concerns span all foreign apps, but algorithmic risks isolate TikTok
“If you're worried about a Chinese app that could have access to device on the phone, then you either just ban all Chinese apps, or you try for a systemic, scalable solution across, like, well, you have privacy laws, you have rules that all apps have to follow,…”
Evans: The Chinese government has absolute control over the ByteDance CEO
“ByteDance is a Chinese company. The government can go to the CEO of ByteDance and do this, and he does what he's told, and he doesn't have a choice. It, You know, who owns the shares is completely irrelevant. They tell him what to do and he does it or he goes,…”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram due to graph mechanics
“I would actually argue that Instagram is about people you choose to follow, and mostly people you know, whereas TikTok is about people you don't know. It's a completely different graph, and it's a recommendation-based graph, not a people you've met-based graph…”
Catton-Brown: Sports copying F1's Netflix boom ignore the pandemic's role
“All of these other sports are trying to recreate this magical Netflix strive to survive moment. But they seem to omit the fact that we had a pandemic. Everyone was stuck at home. Everyone was dying for content. The first season of Drive to Survive was actually…”
Brown: TikTok Gives Americans a Taste of Foreign Tech Dominance
“Saying that, like, basically Americans are experiencing what the rest of Europe has experienced over the last 10 years of, yeah, your citizens are loving a piece, a social media app that wasn't designed by Americans for Americans with Americans in mind.
yeah,…”
Evans: Engagement signal graphs matter more than raw content
“If you're trying to build a competitor to Instagram, I wouldn't want Tony Karen Brown's posts. What I want is who's liked Tony Karen's posts, Tony's posts, and what else did they like? And who liked their posts, and who else liked that? There's like these sort…”
Evans: Any company based in China is de facto controlled by Beijing.
“So in principle, any company that is based in China where sort of important decisions can be made here in China is de facto under control of the Chinese government.”
Evans: TikTok fundamentally competes with YouTube, not Instagram or Facebook.
“I think there's a sort of it's almost like an incorrect analysis, which was, I'm trying to think of the right word, which is like, we kind of went down the line of thinking that TikTok competed with Instagram and Facebook, as opposed to thinking that it compet…”
Cowan-Brown: Most creators view TikTok as an intermediate stepping stone to YouTube.
“Most people are creating short form content on TikTok, but that doesn't feel like the end goal. It feels like the end goal is then moving to YouTube or moving somewhere else. Whereas I can see more YouTubers being like Marques Brownlee or Mr. Beast was like, n…”
Evans: TikTok's algorithmic flow prevents creators from building a permanent owned audience.
“I don't get the impression that TikTok has that same mechanic of, like, I can build a permanent audience there, and that it's more that you are more dependent on the river, on being thrown up to the river, because, you know, TikTok, YouTube gives you all these…”
Evans: TikTok differs from YouTube in UX, not fundamental product capability
“TikTok is not Different to YouTube in any sort of fundamental product sense. It's different in UX.”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram
“Is TikTok competing with YouTube or Instagram? And it still puzzles me, like everyone always puts it on the chart with Instagram, and I'm like, no, no, no, I think this is YouTube.”
Evans: Meta struggled with Reels because it requires an interest graph
“Facebook has struggled a lot more to get reels working because that's actually a different graph. It's not just another thing you would share with your friends. It's a whole other graph of different people.”
Evans: Regulating foreign platforms like TikTok company-by-company is unworkable
“It's TikTok, it's Chinese, we should ban it, control it, take it over, something, but there's going to be 20 more of those. So you can't one at a time this, you can't do it company by company, you have to have a sort of systemic idea of, ok, we are in this sys…”
Evans: TikTok's innovation is its discovery mechanics, not the video format
“The new thing about TikTok is the swiping and the recommendation. So it's the, you could call that a network, but it's the mechanics that you build around how you show people what the video is. As opposed to YouTube, which is a basically a very desktop, very l…”
Evans: Google's UX is inherently bad; TikTok's UX is the innovation
“YouTube is a utility that distributes video. But the UX itself, A, it's a Google UX, so Ipso facto is shit, but B, like, the UX is like a utility UX, whereas for TikTok, the whole point is the UX. That's where the innovation is, and the UX is pop culture.”
Evans: The US company-by-company tech regulation approach will not work
“Whereas the US approach is we'll see Google and then we'll see Facebook and we'll see TikTok and we'll see like one by one which will be like, and that's just not going to work guys.”
Evans: US and EU Exhibit Radically Different Approaches to Tech Regulation
“And I thought there was just kind of an interesting symmetry there in these two sort of radically different approaches to regulation and to political control of technology companies.”
Brown: TikTok Has Stricter Political Ad Rules Than Meta
“And they also have the strictest policy when it comes to political advertising, much more stricter than Meta”
Brown: Biden Administration Enlisted 70 Creators For the State of the Union
“Just ahead of the State of the Union, they went out and found 70 creators, I think about half of them, TikTokers, to sort of spread awareness about the State of the Union and spread the message of Biden”
Evans: TikTok Displayed In-App Prompts Urging Americans to Call Congress
“TikTok put up a banner every time when any American opened the app this week that said call your congressman.”
Evans: US TikTok Bill Structures Ban Around Foreign Adversary Powers
“And so this, the kind of the rule, this, you know, the latest piece of proposed legislation is that the, you know, the president would be able to designate specific
Social media apps as national security risks
and require them not to be controlled by a foreign…”
Evans: The tech industry largely ignores TikTok compared to Twitter or YouTube.
“Everyone uses YouTube, and everyone sort of knows that TikTok is this big thing, but the sort of tech conversation in general doesn't talk about what's happening on TikTok. I don't think in the way that it talks about Instagram or YouTube or Twitter. And that'…”
Cowan-Brown: Users passively consume long TikTok sessions rather than quickly checking for updates.
“I don't, Check TikTok, I consume it, and I watch it. I don't check TikTok the way you would check Instagram or Twitter, where you open up the app, you have a look, you check if anything's changed, and then you leave. Whereas I think what's happening on TikTok …”
Evans: Apple's iOS sandboxing makes it impossible for TikTok to read emails.
“TikTok can't read your email. Like on iOS, it cannot. It just can't. A third party app cannot see your email. It's sitting in a sandbox.”
Evans: TikTok ad monetization and e-commerce underperform relative to user time
“TikTok advertising is doing okay, not, not doing, not where it could be relative to the time it has. TikTok selling, TikTok e-commerce, you know, one here is pretty kind of ambivalent things about it. You know, they create, they, I don't think they got to wher…”
Evans: UX and platform shifts create discontinuities that produce breakout companies
“Just shifting the UX and the platform is often kind of a discontinuity that creates new companies. And so you have that when you go to cloud, you get Salesforce. When you go to mobile, you get not just Instagram, but also Snapchat, and then TikTok”
Evans: TikTok, Shein, and Instagram users act as a giant Mechanical Turk
“And what you have in TikTok and what you have in Shein is you've got enough people looking at it that you've actually got that feedback loop. So basically the Shein user base or the TikTok user base is almost like a giant mechanical turk. Telling the system wh…”
Evans: Shein and TikTok differ from Zara and Netflix via rapid feedback loops
“But it's also the feedback loop, and I think that's the change from ASOS, and certainly from Zara and H&M, and in some ways the change from Netflix, but it's what you have on TikTok, and what you have on on Shein is, is you have that very quick feedback cycle.”
Caron-Brown: TikTok's 10-Minute Format Will Spawn New Video Editing Tools
“And you can almost guarantee that with the 10 minute format that you can now do, there's going to be a bunch of editing tools.”
Evans: TikTok Is a YouTube-Style Recommendation Engine, Not a Follower Graph
“TikTok is a different kind of format, but it's also a different network. And it's actually much more of a YouTube sort of network where it really isn't people that you know. Obviously it's all about the recommendation because it's partly because it's all about…”
Evans: Shein only exists because of TikTok and Instagram
“It's also, of course, Shein only exists because TikTok and Instagram came first.”
Evans: Stories revolutionized the content unit, unlike TikTok's wrapper model
“Whereas a story is like a new type of content that you can create that could then be presented inside Snapchat, or then of course copied and presented inside Instagram. And then of course inside every fucking thing. So I think LinkedIn does have stories. There…”
Cowan-Brown: TikTok executives openly describe the app as entertainment, not social media.
“What I found really interesting is listening to some TikTok executives actually openly describe TikTok, not as a social media platform, but as an entertainment.”
Evans: In March 2023, four of the top five iOS apps were Chinese.
“Somebody pointed out a couple of, a week or two ago that like four of the top five free apps on the iOS app store were Chinese, and so it's TikTok, but it's also Shein and Temu and CapCut from memory”
Cameron: TikTok Generated Roughly $11 Billion in Ad Revenue in 2022
“And it looks like, I think it was last year that TikTok TikTok's ad revenue was eleven billion, I think, which is pretty high.”
Evans: 'Shein Haul' hashtag has 5.3 billion views on TikTok
“So if it goes into TikTok hashtags, Sheehan Hall has 5.3 billion views, which it sounds like a lot to me.”
Cowan-Brown: Tech reporters missed Shein for months by ignoring TikTok
“Because the tech reporters writing about technology in Shein weren't actually on TikTok, and so they weren't experiencing this. And so it took five or six months for that to go from TikTok users talking about it to the tech reporters going, ah, there's a huge …”