Will Congress ban BookTok?
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Three days ago, Vox.com ran an interesting article on BookTok, the literary subculture of the video-driven social-media app TikTok (discussed at length in SHuSH #148). It reports that BookTok produces the only growth seen anywhere in publishing today.
In the first three months of 2023, book sales have declined 1 percent across the industry, except for authors beloved by BookTokkers. They’re up 43 percent over last year. That’s why you can’t walk into a Barnes & Noble or Chapters/Indigo these days without bumping into a groaning BookTok table.
BookTok is largely a young woman’s environment. It favors genre fiction, a lot of fantasy and romance and it has almost singlehandedly made Colleen Hoover the most popular author on the planet.
Vox is interested in the economics of the BookTok world. There are many thousands of wannabe influencers on the platform, some with a few hundred followers, some in the range of 50,000 to 100,000 or more. They post videos of themselves discussing or emoting about recent reading. The more popular ones might take fees from publishers or self-published writers to make videos about books. The fees range from about $100 to $2,000, or reach as high as $4,000 if made for a big publishing house that wants usage rights to the video.
The vast majority of the action on the platform is unpaid, however. And for every person hustling to make a buck, there are just as many wary of the influence of marketers and keen to see the “authenticity” of BookTok undisturbed by commerce.
The Vox piece is a good overview of influencer culture, which, for better or worse, is picking up some of the slack left in the publishing ecosystem by the decline of the book review.
It seems entirely coincidental that the Vox.com piece dropped the same week that Shou Zi Chew, chief executive of TikTok, was grilled by the House of Representatives energy and commerce committee.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the committee, has called for TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd., to be banned in the US. While Rodgers is a Republican, the hostility runs across the aisle. The Biden administration has prohibited TikTok on federal government devices and endorsed a bipartisan bill that would give the Commerce department authority to direct ByteDance to sell its stake in the app or face a US ban. This position was apparently taken on the advice of a multi-agency task force that assesses national security risks in US cross-border investments.
How can an app used mostly by teenaged girls be a cybersecurity risk? It’s not entirely implausible.
China has a civil-military fusion program that considers tech platforms national security assets. President XI personally oversees a cyber committee composed of the CEOs and owners of major Chinese tech firms. His government has passed legislation that permits national security data audits of Chinese tech firms. And as the Wall Street Journal explains: “A fund backed by China’s cybersecurity watchdog holds a 1% stake in the core subsidiary of TikTok’s Chinese parent, Bytedance Ltd., a so-called ‘golden share’ that gives the regulator a board seat at the subsidiary, voting power, and sway over its business decisions.”
Like most apps, TikTok collects a lot of user data, not only about viewing and posting habits but about general phone usage and location. That data is clearly within reach of China’s national security apparatus. The app’s 150 million American users present a wonderful opportunity for spying on individuals as well as for propaganda and misinformation campaigns. The platform could be useful in the development of mischievous new technologies in the realms of facial recognition and deep fakes, as well.
Chew spent his five hours before the House committee attempting to reassure its members that nothing of the sort would happen. He said his firm is building a new facility in Texas that will house American TikTok data. It will be owned and operated by Americans.
He didn’t get far with the committee. He was repeatedly asked if TikTok was spying on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government. Each time, he sidestepped the question: “ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government.” The New York Times reported that the hearing only escalated tensions over the app. Chew’s spokesman came away complaining of political grandstanding. None of the several bills to ban TikTok now under consideration in Congress were pulled after the CEO’s appearance.
I watched some of the proceedings. There were a lot of lobbyists in the room. I wondered if one might be from Paramount which is right now trying to sell its publishing subsidiary, Simon & Schuster, the primary American beneficiary of BookTok (S&S publishes Colleen Hoover). I scanned the crowd for someone holding a romance novel but came up empty, which seems to have been a missed opportunity for the publishing community given that its only source of growth is at stake.
Thirty TikTok stars gathered in DC the day before the hearing to rep the app. Some of them told reporters that its ban would deprive them of their livelihoods. Wired said the “enthusiasm emanating from the crowd of visitors was tangible” and that their stories were “deeply personal.” The magazine went on to detail how the supposedly spontaneous demonstration was arranged and paid for by TikTok, which flew the stars and guests of their choice into town and put them up at nice hotels. The app had hired LA’s Hotline, “a Black and queer-owned boutique creative communications agency,” to manage the whole affair.
The stars were said to have a combined following of 60 million. Among them were a taco influencer, a cake baker, a couple of artists and musicians, a model, and a guy who raises money to buy wheelchairs for veterans. There were no BookTokkers visible, which seems to have been another missed opportunity for the publishing community given that its only source of growth is at stake.
What’s the likelihood of a TikTok ban?
It depends. The Trump administration tried to ban WeChat outright but ran up against First Amendment protections of free speech in court.
Biden’s approach is designed not so much to ban the app as to force ByteDance to sell its stake. This has worked before. Grindr, the first big hookup app for gay men, was owned by the Beijing Kunlun Tech Company. Citing national security concerns over access to personal data, the same multi-agency task force now looking at TikTok forced Beijing Kunlun to unload its holding in Grindr in 2019. The app is now owned by a group in West Hollywood.
Since 2019, China has written protections for TikTok and other tech firms into law. The Chinese government must consent to a sale that would allow foreigners access to a platform’ proprietary algorithms. So TikTok may not go the way of Grindr.
Instead of a flat-out ban or forcing a sale, Team Biden might settle for heavy regulation of the app.
Timothy Edgar, a former national security official who lectures at Harvard Law School, says he’s not sure a regulatory approach is sufficient to meet the TikTok challenge but that it is more likely to survive the inevitable legal challenges. And maybe regulation amounts to the same thing as a ban if the approach is so restrictive that the company chooses not to submit and abandons the US market.
In any event, US concerns about TikTok aren’t going away. Democrats and Republicans largely agree that China is both a geopolitical threat and a serious cyber threat. The Republicans have been more hawkish in recent years but Biden, embarrassed by revelations about his family’s business dealings in China and those spy balloons floating over the US, is catching up. He can’t afford to let TikTok alone.
“The future of TikTok in the U.S. is definitely dimmer and more uncertain today,” said Lindsay Gorman, a former tech adviser to the Biden administration, yesterday.
Meanwhile in Canada, a full-blown national security crisis has been ignited by revelations of what appears to be Chinese interference in our electoral process and we can’t be arsed to launch a proper investigation. BookTok should be safe this side of the border.
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Ken, you should watch a very recent interview of James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, by Steven Sackur on the BBC-TV program Hard Talk. Daunt has a golden touch in bookselling, and would be an ideal owner of Indigo. Best, Peter White