This is Red Pilled America.

So, Adriana, do you ever use TikTok?

You know what, I didn't used to, but very recently I've actually started sharing my Adriana Jade influencer stuff on TikTok.

Well, are you worried that China's tracking you every move?

No, because everybody's already tracking my every move.

What they're called a big brother.

Well, this week we are talking about the company TikTok.

We go into a very interesting story behind the origin of TikTok.

This is on Red Pilled America.

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Now on with the show.

This series was originally broadcast in August twenty twenty four.

It's hard to deny that there's been a growth in conspiracy theories.

The media often dismisses them as fake news, pushed by tin hat wearing weirdos.

Doctor Anthony Fauci is shooting down theories that the coronavirus was man made.

But oddly, conspiracy theories, once thought to be fringe, often turn out to be not so fringy.

So how did we get here?

With America's most prominent public health expert saying that the lab leak theory, which was previously hawked by conspiracy theorists, might actually be credible.

And it's not always the outcasts promoting conspiracy theories.

Sometimes they come directly from the establishment.

With the spread of conspiracy theories seeming to come from all angles, it begs the question, what is a conspiracy theory?

I'm Patrick Carelci.

And I'm Adriana Cortes, and this.

Is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.

This is not.

Another talk show covering the day's news.

We're all about telling stories.

Stories.

Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.

The media mocks stories about everyday Americans at the Globalist Ignore.

You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries, and we promise only one thing, the truth.

Welcome to red Pilled America.

What is a conspiracy theory and why have they become so common?

To find the answer, we're going to tell the story of how TikTok was pushed to the brink of banishment in America.

There are many theories for the attacks on the social media behemoth.

Some are wild, others not so much.

But a deep dive into this topic goes a long way into understanding the true nature of a conspiracy theory and why they've spread like wildfire.

It was mid March twenty twenty four when the US House of Representatives took a monumental step.

It voted on a bill forcing a private social media company to break away from its parent company or face a US ban.

On this vote, the Ya's are three hundred and fifty two, the nays are sixty five one.

At present, two thirds being in the affirmative, the rules are suspended.

The bill has passed.

For over four years, US politicians have been debating whether to block the social media behemoths TikTok from the US market.

At one point, President Trump even signed an executive order calling for TikTok to divest from its parent company or be pushed out of the country.

It can't be controlled for security reasons by China two big two invasive, and it can't be I don't mind if whether it's Microsoft or so somebody else.

A big company, a secure company, very very American company.

By it.

We set a date.

I set a date of around September fifteenth, at which point it's going to be out of business in the United States.

But then, shortly after entering the White House in twenty twenty one, President Biden reversed his predecessor's order.

TikTok lived to fight another day.

By March twenty twenty four, it appeared every effort to take down TikTok had failed.

But now, with the House overwhelmingly voting in favor of a divest or band bill, the app it had become the favorite among America's youth based an existential crisis, and this time Biden wasn't coming to its rescue.

Do you built the thud Bannon Club?

If you sign that bill.

If I pass it, all fire?

The House vote unleashed a hot debate over the issue.

This is about national security.

This is not a ban.

We're just saying that by dance, the parent company of TikTok that is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.

They must avest themselves of this, and the bill specifically says adversarial countries.

I'm not saying that this law is going to be great, but you'd have to be extremely naive to assume that there is nothing bad going on here with this app It is inconceivable to me that our voice signatures aren't being mapped, and there isn't a massive sort of file and repository that is understanding what we're all saying.

The bill poses a significant risk of being Patriot Act two point zero.

With the Patriot Act, they ended up spying on Americans.

There's no way to argue that this language isn't vague and could invite abuse.

So it gives huge, i think, new powers to the executive branch to pursue political opponents and political enemies.

I could see it being forty to ten if it's ideological, I could be seeing it thirty five to fifteen, forty eight to two.

It was fifty to zero.

So what's the Patriot Act?

Look, there's old saying in Washington that the worst ideas are bipartisan.

I've already shown you how The language of the bill is overly brought.

It's not just a TikTok ban.

It says that any app or website.

Did you know that any app or website domestically that subject subject to the direction of a foreigner from one of these countries.

Four countries North Korea, Russia, China.

I said, a foreigner from one of those countries.

Yeah, I try to say it clear for the audience.

All you got to do is make that argument.

If you're an age who wants to go after one of our domestic platforms, that's all you got to do to bring them under your thumb.

Many TikTokers, like Kimberly Pew were outraged by the development and took to the social media app to vent their frustrations.

Literally, so many people are so out of touch with what TikTok actually is, because this isn't a silly little app where we watch dances.

For small businesses that survive based off of this app.

There are people who are just your normal everyday hate people like myself who have been a stay at home mom who's finally able to do something where I post videos and make money off of that, or I promote products from TikTok shop where I can actually bring in a significant amount of money to help provide for my family, work my butt off doing it, but everyone sees it as just a silly little app You are so out of touch.

So is our Congress, so is all of our government.

They have one track mind, and that's to control everybody.

After a couple of weeks, the fervor cooled down, and, like often happens in Washington, d C.

It looked as if the bill was going to stall.

But then in late April twenty twenty four, with the bill attached to a foreign aid package to Ukraine and Israel, the TikTok divest or Be Banded Bill easily passed in the Senate.

On this vote, the Ya's are eighty, the knees are named team three fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted in the affirmative, the motion is agreed to.

It was an unprecedented move.

For the first time ever, the US government took a direct action that could lead to the takedown of a major social media platform with a massive user base in America, and if anything was clear, TikTok wasn't going to.

Just roll over that bill, basically just widening the President's of sent Now it's all but set and the scene now set for a legal battle.

It seems how long could that drag on for and what does it mean for a The bite around the First.

Amendment that's already promises that the company will file lawsuits trying to overturn this law on saying that it's unconstitutional and violating the First Amendment right to free speech.

But the lawmakers say that they're they're very confident they'll prevail.

There's no right to free speech for a Chinese company, and so the argument is that this is very similar to regulations, but the government has on who can own broadcast stations, for example, or radio stations.

After passage of the bill, President Biden gave a short speech.

I just signed in the law of the National Security Packages that was passed by the House representatives this weekend and by the Senate yesterday.

But in his prepared remarks Biden never mentioned TikTok, which seemed to surprise the media in the room.

I thank you all very much, and now I'm going off to make a speech at the hotel.

I'm laid for and plenty of time to answer questions on this another matter, and I have a quick one on TikTok.

Or how could Biden give an over ten minute speech about a bill that could lead to the ban of one of the most popular social media platforms in America and not include one mention of it in his remarks.

It was as if his decision was so unpopular he wanted to quietly slip that part of the legislation under the rug.

The entire dev development was shocking to most free speech advocates.

A social media platform with one hundred and seventy million US users now faced a full band from America if it did not break away from its parent company by dance.

The motives for this action were hard to decipher.

People wondered why and how this could be happening, and in the absence of good answers, some on both sides of the aisle began to fill the void with conspiracy theories.

The CCP is using TikTok as a spyware tool on Americans.

They're weaponizing our kids.

They have spread misinformation.

You know, if you want to talk about not giving into Jewish conspiracies.

John Green Black getting caught on the ADL and the hot mic talking about how he's going to we got to get rid of TikTok and.

Then tomorrow it gets passed through Congress.

Isn't good.

Why are we banning TikTok all the Chinese comedy Chinese commedy scom.

Government doesn't own it, Chinese citizens own it.

Do you think they it's because they really care about national security?

I don't believe it at all.

Here's what I believe, the social media players, including Facebook, giving them tons of money to ban TikTok.

The theories were elaborate, backed by passion and some facts, but they were all wrong, at least partially.

To understand what led TikTok to this crisis, we must first go back to the birth of its parent company and learn about the enemies it gained along the way.

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In twenty twelve, a software engineer named Jiong Yiming rented a four bedroom apartment in Beijing, China.

The short, shy Chinese citizen had been an entrepreneur for about three years, but he hadn't yet landed on the idea that would put him on the map.

But from this nondescript apartment in a technology hub of a fast growing nation, Yiming would launch one of the most disruptive technology companies in history.

The location would become the headquarters of an app company he called byte Dance and would eventually become the largest privately held social media organization in the world, and its success can be attributed to Yiming's unique mind.

Xiong Yiming was born in nineteen eighty three and grew up in the lung Yen Fujiya Province of China, a southwestern province about an hour and a half drive from Xiamen, a coastal city that overlooks Taiwan.

The only child of two civil servants, Yiming grew up in a middle class family.

He's been able to keep most of his early life private, an interesting fact given the company he'd eventually developed.

But what we do know for sure is that Yiming grew up at a time of profound cultural change in China.

A few years before he was born, in nineteen seventy eight, the country's leader, Dung Chiaopeng, initiated a policy that would come to be known as reform and opening up.

This was a pivotal period in the history of the Red Dragon.

It marked a shift from the strictly planned familiar to most communist governments of the time to the more market oriented version that we know today.

A new capitalism without freedom was born as a result of this policy.

Jiung Yiming grew up in a wholly new era, one where innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit were encouraged throughout the country.

Economic opportunities were expanding, especially in the coastal and urban areas of China, and Yiming would eventually want in on the action.

By the two thousands, China had fully embraced the digital revolution happening all over the world.

The government encouraged the development of a technology sector, building tech hubs in places like Beijing.

Yiming wanted to be part of this digital revolution, so he enrolled at Nankai University, a public college in north China on the eastern shore of the Bohai Sea.

Yiming was a bit awkward socially.

One colleague would later describe his awkwardness.

Una I remember once during a chat, I couldn't help but say no Jiming, you're really bad at talking.

Compensate for his lack of in person social skills, he turned online.

That's what will be off, wah say.

I was quite active on several BBS technical forms at the time, like the web design section, et cetera.

That's Jong Yiming in twenty sixteen, speaking on a Chinese television show.

My tech skills were good.

I was good at fixing computers that others couldn't fix.

He'd help classmates make repairs and assemble their computers.

As a result, he'd often find himself helping females with their computers, including one for a girl that would become his wife.

Yiming also began to develop a reputation about his character, as a colleague would later highlight.

A dice h but I think Yi Ming is really someone who when he says something, it's exactly what it is.

Everything he says is exactly as he says it.

People saw him as direct, with no fluff to his words.

In addition to being the university's de facto computer repair man, Yiming also became a voracious reader.

While other college students were playing video games, he'd devour not only books on computer programming, but also the biographies of tech icons, and he became fascinated by the tech titans of America.

It was these biographies that planted a seed in his mind.

He learned that some of the most successful entrepreneurs started off as ordinary people living simple lives.

Their initial actions looked small, even insignificant, but each incremental step would ultimately build into one major success.

Yeeming started to believe that his simple life could also amount to something much more profound.

He reflected on this time in a twenty seventeen interview with Bloomberg.

But I read quite a lot of story about bier Gay while I was young, and Steve Jobs and What's Nick.

While I graduated graduate from a university, I paid quite a lot of attention to Amazon and Facebook.

He graduated with a degree in software engineering in two thousand and five and began bouncing around to different tech firms.

He worked at a travel search engine and quickly became the technical director.

He spent a short at a microblogging site, then at Microsoft.

But through these experiences he learned something about himself.

Iming found the corporate work environment too boring and bureaucratic.

By two thousand and nine, Yming wanted to go out on his own, and an idea began to brew.

A long time ago.

I was thinking that when we watch TV, the programs that are shown to me are often not the ones I'm directly interested in.

I wish there was a channel where I could see content that interests me every time I turn it on.

For example, in the morning, I'd like to hear about.

Startup company news and what new Internet products have been launched internationally.

During dinner, I'd like to hear about Internet business models, and when I turn it on during the day, I want to hear about the latest Internet technologies.

But there was no such Internet platform.

If you rely on people to choose the content, it's impossible to give everyone different content unless you have one on one service where everyone has their own editor.

So to achieve this goal, it could only be done by machines.

Idea of a recommendation engine driven by artificial intelligence began to consume his mind, but he hadn't yet landed on an application.

In two thousand and nine, he collaborated with a friend to co found a real estate search engine, but three years later he dumped that business to apply the idea that had been percolating in his head as early as two thousand and six.

Yi Ming began closely monitoring his American doppelganger, Mark Zuckerberg and the rise of his social media network Facebook.

Like Zuckerberg, Yiming was socially awkward but ambitious, and also like the Facebook founder, Yiming found personal social success in the virtual world of online forums.

By twenty twelve, a once in a lifetime opportunity presented itself to the budding entrepreneur.

That was a pivotal year for China's technology industry.

For the first time ever, mobile Internet users outnumbered personal computer Internet users as the largest group online.

China's Internet users had swelled to five hundred and thirty eight million, but of those, mobile Internet users amounted to roughly three hundred eighty eight million.

The smartphone war and the arrival of the four G era kicked off a mobile start up boom, and to top it off, the Chinese Internet was shifting away from the infrastructure used globally and instead began developing mobile internet products designed specifically for Chinese users.

It was in this mobile epoch that Jiung Yiming, along with a friend, launched byte Dance from that four bedroom apartment in Beijing, and the timing couldn't have been better.

Yiming saw a glitch in the approach of the major Chinese tech firms of the time, a glitch that he knew his brewing idea could exploit.

What he noticed was that the Chinese tech giants had become a victim of their own success.

They'd gotten big and bloated, often delivering irrelevant content and advertising to their users.

Yiming recognized that it was the perfect time to hit the industry by bringing his disruptive idea for a recommendation engine to China.

He described this moment in a twenty sixteen interview.

If we look back when the Internet first appeared, there was very little information.

Sites like Yahoo and so who were directory sites listing websites.

As more information became available, site directories weren't enough, so content directories emerged.

Then, as information increased even more, browsing directories became insufficient and search engines appeared.

After search engines, we found that information needed to be spread among acquaintances, leading to social networks.

After that, we found that, besides social connections and geographic location, information also needed to be more personalized.

Considering not just circles, but also interests.

It was a perfect time to launch his recommendations engine.

The first app he created focused on sharing jokes, memes, and humorous content.

It was with this app that Yiming began to develop his idea for a recommendation algorithm.

He learned what the users liked, how they swiped, what made them click, what didn't grab their attention.

The app did well and quickly acquired downloads, but it was his next app that would get the attention of China's massive technology cartel.

After testing his recommendation engine on the humor app, Yiming thought it was time to bring his idea for a customized news channel to life in the form of an app.

He called it to Tiao, meaning headline.

It was similar to today's Google News or Facebook's newsfeed, and he used the recommendation algorithm he was developing to deliver niche news that would have historically never made it into a newspaper.

Throughout history, newspapers have typically had to focus on headline news it appealed to a broad audience.

Newspapers couldn't individually tailor each copy of the news newspaper to the likes and dislikes to be treader, so nich stories, if they got printed at all, often got left to the gaps of newspaper or areas buried deep within the paper.

Yimen's idea could shift those niche stories to a headline by finding the exact readers that would consider that story important, no matter how small the group.

Yuman would later explain his disruptive idea on a twenty sixteen Chinese TV show What Jiga.

Let me give an example of a very small category of information, the kind that could only be printed in the gaps of newspapers in the past.

It couldn't make the headlines.

Let's take a gap filling piece of information, the kind called missing persons notices TA.

Often, when someone goes missing, they contact the newspaper and the paper prints it in the gap the next day.

Why can't it be.

The headline because there are many important news items in the headline section, and this isn't a paid advertisement, so it can only be placed in the gap.

But when it's printed in a gap the next day, the chances of finding the person are very very low.

Right, So we had the idea of pushing the missing person's.

Information immediately to users within the geographical range where the person might have gone missing, then you'd have a much better chance of finding the person.

We applied this personalized, precise recommendation to the small category of missing persons notices and found that it.

Was particularly effective.

To date, we've helped find over five hundred people through our information.

The Totiao app was delivering niche information to disregarded or overlooked groups.

The major newspapers were focused on the top tier cities.

Their content focused on the issues white collar elites cared about.

That rule, users interested in pig farming or beekeeping couldn't find a news source that would give them the latest information on their fields of interest.

That's where Totiao came in to fill the gap.

Totiao was not a traditional news app.

It didn't produce content, It had no editors.

Over one third of the staff were engineers.

It had no stance on the issues of the day.

At its core, it was an algorithm that focused on finding the individual in of each of its users by following each action users took on Totiao, calculating their preferences, then delivering them news they'd most likely find interesting.

Yimin was building an extraordinarily powerful recommendation engine that was getting smarter and smarter as people used as app, and did the Chinese people love it.

By twenty fourteen, Totiau had more than ninety million users.

By twenty sixteen, the user base swelled to five hundred and fifty million, And it was this success that led to his first major crisis.

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So just as Totio exploded in popularity, its founder, Jean Yi Mien, faced his first major crisis.

Traditional media companies and Internet portals began suing Totiau for copyright infringement.

You see, many of these companies hadn't yet made the shift to mobile.

When Totiao combed the Internet to find relevant news for its users, it would often convert these media companies information into a mobile friendly format.

For this act, some of the media companies accused Totiau of theft, so Yiming had to make a shift and fast.

He worked with the media companies to create a revenue sharing model, and the crisis led to an unexpected innovation.

As Totiao was growing, Yemen began to see a trend developing.

A new creator economy was forming.

In twenty fifteen, He explained how he began to see this new movement taking shape when one of his best workers gave note.

One day he told me Yieming, I'm quitting content management to start my.

Own new media business.

He realized that telling ordinary people's stories in new media was underdeveloped, even though there are many readers, so he started a Tucao account called Tank.

He was willing to give up a high salary in stock options to create his own new media company.

Yieming noticed that people were writing niche stories and would try to monetize them.

Stay at home moms wrote about breastfeeding and turned the ads on that page to extra grocery money.

Other product enthusiasts turned their love for brands into extra cash via advertising.

While traditional media companies were faltering, Yiming was seeing creators innovate to create niche audiences.

Given all these circumstances, it's clear that we are in an era of massive change.

It is indeed the worst of times, but it's also the best of times, and it's just beginning.

I truly believe that the era of creators has begun, or rather, we are on the eve of a content explosion.

Yiming saw a unique opportunity to take advantage of this growing creator economy, and he began to change his business model to financially incentivize news content creators to produce content for to Tiao Wells wants.

In the next twelve months, Tutiao aims to ensure that at least ten thousand creators earn a substantial incode.

Why are we doing this?

This brings us to Tutiao's dream.

Tutio's dream is to become the world's largest Chinese content creation platform, and if possible, we would like to remove the word Chinese.

What Yieming was describing was a bold goal, unheard of at the time.

He didn't just have ambitious goals within China.

He wanted his company to become the world's largest content creation platform.

And in many ways, his goal wasn't just an offensive move, it was a defensive one as well.

You see the growth of Yiming's recommendation algorithm was so explosively disruptive in China that it actually became dangerous to business.

At the time, the China technology industry was cutthroat and was dominated by three major firms known as Bat or by Deu, Ali Baba, and Tencent.

By Deu was the Google of China, Ali Baba was the equivalent of Amazon, and Tencent was similar to Facebook or Meta.

These three media companies would either buy or crush tech startups that crept into their territories.

The explosive growth of Yiming's Totiao started to creep into the Bat firm's realm, and he knew that they'd soon come knocking.

But as he'd already learned in the years after college, he didn't like the big, bureaucratic nature of the major tech firms.

Yiming didn't want to work for someone else, so he had to come up with a way to bypass these behemoths to grow and survive.

This was an obstacle almost every Chinese tech entrepreneur could see on Yiming's horizon, and in one instance, during the broadcast of a Chinese entrepreneurial TV show called Dialogue, the man behind to TiO, an e commerce entrepreneur, offered Yiming some advice.

Who was It's signed.

If I were young Yieming, I'd be more aggressive in pursuing globalization.

Compared to the previous generation of Internet entrepreneurs, we have a broader global perspective and greater opportunities for globalization.

From a value creation standpoint, leading Chinese information and products abroad also creates value for both bat and the entire country.

When your company is globally positioned and you bring global resources back to China, you'll likely be in a more relaxed position.

Yes, the world is so big, I want everyone to see.

Tutiao Yeming no doubt saw the building storm.

So to survive an attack by the Big Three, Yiming needed a business model that reached into a larger pool.

He knew very early on that he needed to go global, and as expected, by twenty sixteen, one of the Big three, ten Cent the Facebook of China, began to apply the pressure.

They sent word to Yiming that they wanted to buy his company, Byte Dance.

When I heard about this news, a colleague asked me about it.

He told me I didn't join tucow to become a ten cent employee.

I responded that I didn't start tou Chow to become a ten cent employee either, But that doesn't mean we have any.

Issues with ten cents cooperation or competition.

I just want to express that we hope to become a platform company that brings significant value and meaning to society on our own.

The host of the TV show saw trouble in the entrepreneur's position and pressed, ye mean on the issue?

Are you worried that your attitude or statements might upset any of the bat companies.

I think they're all smart enough not to get angry over this.

That ye mean could see the writing on the wall.

A rejection of the ten cent offer meant he was now going to become a target.

So in twenty sixteen announced a new venture.

He was going to invest roughly one hundred and fifty million dollars to develop a short video platform he'd call the app dough in.

The logo was a lowercase letter D made into a musical note, and it would quickly grow to become the global social media behemoth that would eventually be targeted for banishment by the US government.

Coming up on red pilled America.

It was Donald Trump's first rally in four months as the US president campaigns for reelection.

Hundreds of thousands registered for tickets online, bout the nineteen thousand seat capacity stadium in Oklahoma was less than half fulls and its TikTok users who oppose Donald Trump who are claiming credit for the low turnout.

Would you recommend that people download that up on their phones tonight, tomorrow, anytime, currently.

Only if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

So it's almost like they recognized that technologies influencing kids development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they've shipped the opium version to the rest of the world.

And this TikTok fear that's somehow what videos we like is like precious data that's being shared with the CCP.

Look, I'm willing to believe it's possible, but they never proved that.

Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast.

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