From Congress' TikTok hearing to the new J.K. Rowling podcast, who's really on a witch hunt?

26:20In TikTok we trust...or do we?

Audiences around the world learned this week that the old saying still holds true: never meet your heroes, whether the "hero" in question is the CEO of your favourite social media app, or the author of your favourite book series as a kid.

The United States Congress is currently conducting a hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on the app's data handling and privacy procedures. The legislature is even considering banning the app nationwide. But, as culture writers Syrus Marcus Ware, Rad Simonpillai and Sarah-Tai Black explain to Commotion's host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, this event has had mixed success in swaying public opinion.

Meanwhile, our commentators also unpack the new podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, the forces behind it, and the way in which it does a disservice to trans people — while purporting to do the opposite.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Is TikTok's dominance in the U.S. winding down?

Elamin: This week, the U.S. is looking into banning the app TikTok. We're going to start there. Rad, why is the U.S. looking to ban TikTok?

Rad: The U.S. government is very, very nervous that the Chinese government will use TikTok to spy on American citizens by tapping into your data because TikTok, of course, has a lot of Chinese shareholders. It is owned by a Chinese company. And so, that is the fear. So then, U.S. President Biden gave an ultimatum, saying that TikTok's Chinese owners better divest of their TikTok shares, to which the Chinese government is fighting back about any kind of sale. And so, you have these TikTok hearings where all these congresspeople are grilling the TikTok CEO about whether he can control our Wi-Fi networks, what can you get away with … And bear in mind, I caught up with the TikTok hearings on TikTok, so maybe the information I'm giving you was already manipulated by the Chinese government.

Elamin: Sarah-Tai, you're a big TikTok person. What do you get out of TikTok?

Sarah-Tai: It just brings me joy. It took me a long time to acknowledge that all these silly little videos of regular people talking about their equally-horrible days, but still being so funny, was a crucial part of my life. I watched the hearings on TikTok; it's actually become — I won't say a news source, but it's so easy to find news. Even if you Google the hearings, it's hard to find full clips — and then I go on TikTok and it's all there.

Elamin: So here's the thing, Cyrus. All major social media platforms engage in some form of data collection from their users. Some of them, that's how they sustain their platforms. What makes Tiktok's data collection so uniquely concerning, do you think? 

Syrus: To be honest, I actually don't think that Tiktok's data collection is uniquely concerning. They collect about the same amount of data as Facebook and Twitter, and in 2020, the Washington Post did a deep dive, working with a private agency, to see how much data they collected and it turns out that they actually don't collect more data than your typical mainstream social network. Now, should all of these social networks be collecting any data on us? That's a bigger question for us to have. I don't think that there's anything particularly concerning about TikTok, other than the fact that there is this kind of deep seated tension between the U.S. and China.

Elamin: Rad, you were in the U.S. recently. You talked to people about TikTok and the data it's collecting from you. What did you hear? 

Rad: I was actually just talking to them like, "Hey, I'm using TikTok," and they're like, "Why?" It was in Northern California, and just average people in their thirties on social media — and they were kind of regurgitating the fear-mongering talking points about the Chinese government spying on you. That took me by surprise, that these young people would just kind of regurgitate those facts without any kind of real critical introspection. It's like, you mean the Chinese government is going to spy on you through the social media app in the same way that the FBI spied on Black Lives Matter activists using social media? You're all of a sudden now worried about what a certain government can do with their powers, not considering how U.S. governments with these U.S. social media apps kind of take part in digital colonialism in a way? They have their fingers all across the globe, but now all of a sudden, this one company is the big threat. 

Elamin: So you're not necessarily concerned about TikTok being very different from the other data collection that other social media companies do.

Rad: I'm not particularly concerned about whether the Chinese government is interested in my brunch, you know?

Elamin: Was it a good brunch?

Rad: I mean, it was fantastic.

Elamin: Given all this concern Sarah-Tai, how do you think a potential ban on TikTok in the U.S. would affect you and other users here in Canada?

Sarah-Tai: I think in terms of the ban generally, if it does happen — and I wouldn't be surprised if it did given the dystopic tone of state-made decisions thus far — I've already seen a bunch of TikToks showing folks how to bypass the ban, if it came into effect, using VPNs, things like that. And really I don't think Congress was or ever will be ready for how fast things move on that app. Like, within an hour of the hearing, we have thirsty fan cams of Shou Chew, people calling him TikTok's daddy, dragging congresspeople … 90 percent of the people in that room who made up Congress would not be able to convert a word document to PDF, and TikTok users were on that immediately.

Rad: Sarah-Tai going in for the kill.

Who is really doing the witch hunting?

Elamin: The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling is a new podcast inspired by what you might call the public backlash to a series of tweets J.K. Rowling wrote that many people took as transphobic. Rowling has vehemently denied those allegations. Let's talk about this podcast. The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling seems pretty self-explanatory as a title. What else should we know about the focus of this podcast?

Rad: It's supposed to be setting up who J.K. Rowling is, what she has achieved, what she fights for and then her perspective on what has been going down when she made these anti-trans comments and how she feels like she's under attack. The thing that you need to understand with this podcast is, it's hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, who is the granddaughter of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church — a very homophobic, hateful organization. She's been on the front lines protesting with them. She describes herself as a "reformed" Westboro Baptist Church member, and maybe that's to win over people's trust, but it's something to take note of, especially because she's producing this podcast for The Free Press, which is Bari Weiss' organization — Bari Weiss being a very conservative columnist who left The New York Times because she felt that The New York Times was giving into the politics of the moment. So that context, I think, really shapes the way this show is edited, the way it's structured, the way certain voices are amplified and some are condescended to.

Elamin: The Westboro Baptist Church was, I think at a certain point, deemed a hate group. Syrus, how would you describe your relationship with the Harry Potter books before J.K. Rowling's tweets?

Syrus: Before the transphobic tweets, I was stanning hard, as they say, for Harry Potter. I love the story. I love the idea that we were telling a story where witches were good, where wizards and witches were doing magical things where they were trying to make the world a better place. There was a really captivating element to the story because it told the story of a diverse group of people — there were Black people, there were East Asian people; it seemed like it was a story about widespread acceptance, about this community of people who have often been vilified…. So I loved the books prior to the comments.

Elamin: We should note that J.K. Rowling has consistently throughout the years denied the allegations that she's anti-trans, and people have pushed back on those denials through pointing out her own comments. 

Syrus: I mean, the reality is that her words have been used to vilify trans people. We're facing a reality where we've seen something like 450 anti-trans bills introduced across the United States. We've seen anti-trans legislation pass in places like Tennessee and Florida, and drag bans and all of this transphobia. But you want to talk about a witch hunt — a transphobic witch hunt, against trans people, and J.K. Rowling is largely the mouthpiece that is driving a lot of the discourse. 

It's really surprising to me that she can say things like she doesn't think that trans people should exist, that she thinks that the only people who give birth and have uteruses are women — that she says these really transphobic things and then comes back to us in this weird gaslighting way and says, "I'm not transphobic. I'm not sure why you're getting that impression from my comments." So I'm really interested in the fact that this podcast focused in on the experiences of trans people who at one point would have loved to have had a chance to sit down with J.K. Rowling, but now are saying, "hold on a minute, her words are actually creating the conditions where life is less livable for trans people." This is a dangerous mouthpiece, and we have to actually respond in a different way.

Elamin: Sarah-Tai, this episode clearly seems to be built to make space in the podcast for the critiques that trans folk have of J.K. Rowling. How did you feel they did in terms of that aspect? 

Sarah-Tai: First of all, absolutely J.K. Rowling is gaslighting us at this point. To open a women's-only rape center because you don't like that the other one that is city run allows for trans women to use those services? The proof is in the pudding. But in terms of how trans people are being utilized in this podcast as a whole, I do believe in being open to knowledge, to experiences outside of ourselves and to conversations around accountability and harm, especially within our own communities. But to use J.K. Rowling as a starting point for these conversations, and further to weaponize a teenager who has transitioned relatively recently in a country where the health care that he depends on for bodily autonomy, for gender freedom, is being banned in state after state, in order to tie up these kind of very liberal thematics in a neat bow, is extremely not neutral. I find it incredibly ugly.

Content Warning, I'm about to pop off. I found this whole podcast to be in bad faith. As a trans person, I don't care to hear both sides, especially if one of those sides is refusing the fullness of my humanity and the humanity of my trans kin. I think that's the privilege that little Miss Megan has on this, and I think there's something really insidious about the way that she's benefiting socially and materially from this podcast. Some of us didn't need to learn that picketing the funerals of Sandy Hook victims is wrong. You know? So to apply this thematic of, "maybe we should consider everyone's point of view at the expense of our own humanity. Maybe the urgency of our truth is not to be trusted," is so gross to me.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.