Disastrous start for US TikTok as users cry censorship

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Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Doha, where I’m moderating panels about AI and investing as part of the Web Summit Qatar.

I want to bring your attention to the impact of a Guardian story. In December, we published a story, “‘A black hole’: families and police say tech giants delay investigations in child abuse and drug cases”, about grieving families and law enforcement officers who say that Meta and Snapchat have slowed down criminal investigations. (The tech companies contend that they cooperate.) This month, Colorado lawmakers introduced a bill to compel social media platforms to respond to warrants in 72 hours.

How storms, Alex Pretti and Trump led TikTok to disaster

Nearly two weeks ago, TikTok stepped on to US shores as a naturalized citizen. Ever since, the video app has been fighting for its life. It endured a major outage that stifled users’ ability to upload videos, which fueled a fierce user backlash over perceived censorship. Now it’s facing an ascendant competitor and an inquiry by the California governor.

TikTok’s calamitous emigration began on 22 January when its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, finalized a deal to sell the app to a group of US investors, among them the business software giant Oracle. The day after the deal closed, its new owners altered its privacy policy to permit more extensive data collection.

During the weekend that followed, the US weathered a fearsome winter storm and the killing of an American citizen by federal immigration agents. Both knocked TikTok off its feet.

Winter Storm Fern crippled multiple Oracle datacenters that TikTok relies on. The app suffered severe outages as a result. Many users said they were unable to upload videos. Others said their videos received zero views despite significant followings. Many of those same users cried censorship as they tried to express their outrage over Alex Pretti’s death via TikTok and found they could not. Prominent personalities said they would leave the app.

After days of outcry, TikTok issued a statement ascribing the problems to the snow, ice and cold. That did not stop California governor Gavin Newsom from announcing the next day that his office would investigate the app’s alleged suppression of content critical of Donald Trump.

TikTok’s late attribution of blame did little to assuage public criticism. The exodus has propelled a new competitor, Upscrolled, which promises less censorship than TikTok, to the top spot in the US Apple App Store and the third spot in the Google Play Store. Upscrolled’s founder said in a conversation at the Web Summit Qatar that the app now boasts more than 2.5m users.

With more than a billion users worldwide, it seems unlikely that TikTok will altogether vanish as a result of these failures. TikTok’s first week in the US does not bode well, though.

This week in Elon Musk

Two new plays dramatize our anxieties about tech

Two dramas, both showing in New York, are highlighting how our collective anxieties about technology have shifted in the decade between their premieres.

Marjorie Prime, now revived on Broadway but first staged in 2014, follows Tess (Cynthia Nixon), as she deals with the aging, death, and robotic recreation of her mother (June Squibb). The world of the play features “Primes”, android lookalikes of real people that attempt to emulate them for the comfort of those left behind, which Tess and her mother both engage with. Picture an Alexa, but it’s your dead husband, grandmother, etc. The play brings to mind the early worries about Siri, which debuted three years prior to the play. Since then, we’ve seen our own real-life versions of Primes: millions of people have digitally copied their deceased loved ones to varying degrees of uncanniness and success. Though its predictions are no longer far-fetched, the play remains moving. I found it touching.

Data, which premiered off Broadway last week, follows the talented young programmer Maneesh (Karan Brar) after he joins Athena Technologies, a clear analogue for the very real company Palantir. Maneesh is inducted into the company’s most elite team, data analytics, where he learns about clandestine work with the US government. He struggles with the ethics of the project. He wrestles with whether to expose it to the world in hopes of tanking it or keeping his head down. The play’s themes are quite familiar. They were playing out in headlines two days before I attended, and the Guardian has published stories about them.

Data is paced and plotted like a political thriller, more like House of Cards than Her. Seeing the two plays within a week of each other, I was struck by how much our concerns with tech have moved from the realm of science fiction into that of realism. Marjorie Prime is less literally concerned with tech, more with its emotional consequences. Data is about what it means to literally work as a software engineer. It seems unlikely to me that a play about the ethics of software in US bureaucracy could have sustained any tension in an era before this one.

Marjorie Prime imagines a melancholy future; Data chronicles a version of the unpleasant present. The very real events of the previous year and Silicon Valley’s entanglement with the Trump administration loom over Data, for better and for worse. The play could not be more timely; it may feel dated by the end of year. Watching it felt like reading a yarn in the Wall Street Journal (or The Guardian, if I’m flattering myself).

I am curious to observe which play ages better. Data serves as a real-time, red-hot record of our current moment, which may cool quickly. During the play, I was intrigued by some of its villains’ seemingly nefarious arguments in favor of the company’s work. What if the main character exposes the evil in the press and nothing happens, as his boss says? I have been part of multiple news cycles where that has been the case. What will plucky 22-year-old Maneesh do then? The question presents a more interesting, nuanced response to reality than Maneesh’s black-and-white, do-or-die plan to blow things up. By contrast, Marjorie Prime’s sentient artificial intelligence acts as a vehicle to discuss the age-old grief of a parent’s death and its aftermath.

The central question that both plays ask is not, in the end, one explicitly about technology, but about how to keep living beneath crushing weight. In Marjorie Prime, Tess struggles with the repetitiveness of her days and the robotic, constant reminder of her mother. She eventually succumbs to her despair, replaced by a robot herself, which torments her grieving husband with its pale simulation. In Data’s final, devastating scene, the secondary hero, Riley (Sophia Lillis, who gives the play’s best performance), asks how she can just go back to work, plagued as she is by moral concerns but trapped by monetary need, after failing to stop the company’s work. She trembles as her phone beeps, reminding her she’s late for her next meeting.