Why does Bill Gates call Microsoft's acquisition of TikTok a "golden cup of poison"?

Although Microsoft has officially stated that there will be no further response to the TikTok acquisition before September 15, Microsoft founder Bill Gates answered TikTok-related questions in an interview with the US "Wired" magazine recently.

Regarding this acquisition, Bill Gates remains cautiously optimistic. Gates bluntly stated that Trump's desire to obtain a commission for the U.S. Treasury Department was "very strange", "but in any case, Microsoft has to deal with all this." He also said: "Who knows what will happen to this transaction."

Bill Gates has faded out of Microsoft's most core management, and is not a direct decision maker negotiating the TikTok acquisition, but as a technical consultant of Microsoft, he will still provide opinions on the company's major decisions.

How does Gates view TikTok? The most meaningful one in his answer may be this sentence, "poisoned chalice" (Poisoned Chalice).

The "Poisonous Holy Grail", or "Golden Cup of Poisonous Wine", comes from Shakespeare's famous drama "Macbeth" and usually refers to things that look tempting but may cause trouble.

Bill Gates used it as a metaphor to deal with TikTok. What exactly is it talking about?

Social media is not a simple game"

Obviously, this acquisition may bring benefits to Microsoft.

TikTok's main source of income is advertising. Microsoft has its own search product Bing, Xbox and other entertainment businesses, as well as corporate services, which can form synergy with TikTok in business and further expand the overall scale of Microsoft's digital advertising business.

More importantly, the social media track that TikTok belongs to, and the young generation Z user group backed by it, are things that Microsoft has always wanted to grasp but couldn't ask for. The Wall Street Journal once pointed out that once TikTok is owned, Microsoft may be regarded as the biggest competitor by YouTube and Facebook.

In terms of expanding business boundaries and broadening the user base, the acquisition of TikTok hides Microsoft's ambitions. It was precisely in the face of such a seemingly "perfect" transaction that Bill Gates issued a warning of "Golden Cup Poisoned Wine".

Because the other side of the matter is not that simple. For example, Gigi Thorne, a former senior adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, said bluntly, "Microsoft will find itself a big trouble." Because hate speech, false information, malicious attacks and other content always exist in social media.

Bill Gates knows this information. This year, he has focused his work on fighting the epidemic. He said, "We spent tens of billions of dollars on vaccines to save lives," but on some social media, some people commented that "we are making money and we are ending lives."

These remarks "subvert our values ​​and our historical records to some extent," Bill Gates said, "Internet rumors can be very deceptive, and you (the platform side) must be able to distinguish them and make them spread more slowly. It's also good."

It can be seen that Bill Gates has obvious different opinions on the information dissemination management mechanism on existing social platforms.

If Microsoft acquires TikTok, a company with an algorithm as its core and a large number of users, it may rely on "algorithmic values" to change this status quo.

When asked about Microsoft's attitude towards social media, Bill Gates said that it may be a good thing for Facebook to have more competitors. "Trump is killing the only competitor, which is incredible. "

However, operating a social media with a large number of users must face the social impact of free expression and the risks of content supervision.

Take Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as examples. Although these products have adopted artificial intelligence technology and have hired thousands of content managers to delete misleading content, risky information may still slip through the net, and they have to Continue to defend yourself. On the one hand, you must prove to the US government that you are innocent and did not manipulate public opinion. On the other hand, you must also face user dissatisfaction and doubts.

Bill Gates clearly saw these problems. He said, "Being big social media is not a simple game", "TikTok not only has dance moves, but also political content." He obviously knows that the acquisition of TikTok by Microsoft will bring more "friction" to the relationship between Microsoft and the US government, and it will also bring more new challenges to Microsoft.

This is probably the origin of the name "Golden Cup Poisoned Liquor".

What does TikTok mean?

Bill Gates is not the target user of TikTok. His knowledge of this app mainly comes from his eldest daughter. He was curious, why did his daughter spend so much time on TikTok.

Currently, TikTok has approximately 30 million monthly active users in the United States, of which 42% are between 18-24 years old. These are the mainstream users of Generation Z in the United States.

Young people share entertainment videos on TikTok, such as life, funny jokes, dance moves, etc., and also express their views on current affairs, economics and other social issues through this app. These contents are efficiently and accurately distributed to users through algorithms formed by machine learning, and then some of them form a continuous relationship of attention.

On June 22 this year, Trump held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This was originally an event full of online reservations. As a result, the audience attending was far from expected, and large seats were vacated in the venue. Trump was let go.

One of the most important reasons is that a large number of young American netizens participated in a spoof plan. A large number of users registered for the rally and then deliberately refused to participate.

Screenshot of Mary Jo Laupp's video content posted on TikTok | Network

The cause of the whole incident was that a netizen named Mary Jo Laupp posted a "venting anger" video on TikTok because she had witnessed Trump's ignorance of the severity of the epidemic and public protests and insisted on holding a general election party. In the video, she looked serious, "I suggest that everyone book tickets and leave Trump alone on stage."

Mary Jo Laupp is not a big V. Her Twitter account has only more than 4,000 followers. She is a local musician who calls herself "TikTokGrandma". But this video proposal quickly received a large number of TikTok young users' response.

In many media reports, this "empty seat incident" embodies the creativity of the younger generation in expressing attitudes and completely different behavioral methods, and it has also been identified as the formation of young users of Trump and TikTok.

After the news that the Trump administration was going to ban TikTok in early July of this year, young Americans in TikTok launched the "Save TikTok" (#SaveTiktok) operation on Twitter.

A TikTok user recorded a video saying that if Trump really implemented the "ban order," he would appear in the White House to confront Trump. Claudia Conway, the 15-year-old daughter of White House consultant Kellyanne Conway, also joined the "retaliatory" operation.

Juan Booker, the creator of TikTok with 750,000 fans, even posted a video to teach everyone how to give negative reviews to the Trump campaign app. This video has been clicked nearly 6 million times.

Juan Booker's instructional video and a one-star review of the Trump election App | Product screenshots

Fans responded to the call and poured into the app store to give Trump's App a star. This caused the download of the product to skyrocket. Sensor Tower data shows that its ranking in the Apple Store at the time rose from 486th to second.

The New York Times commented that TikTok has become an important platform for young people to express creatively and maintain interpersonal communication. Especially when the election is approaching, TikTok has become a channel for generation Z activists and young people with political thoughts to organize and distribute political views. .

In fact, although TikTok and Douyin are almost the same product form, they have completely become two different things in China and the United States. In China, it is a leisure and entertainment product for people to spend time, but in the United States it has a stronger community attribute, and it also has a role for young people to express their attitudes and opinions.

TikTok has always faced a dilemma in the management of content. On the one hand, the Trump administration was accused of restricting "freedom of speech" because of some political content, and on the other hand, it was accused by the same government of "influencing public opinion."

Platforms such as Facebook also have this dilemma, but Tiktok is actually more under pressure. Because he brought the younger generation in the United States, he got rid of the original influence models of Facebook and Twitter platforms, and constructed new models and new high-influence groups.

For American politicians, this is yet another new challenge that is extremely troublesome after they have just learned how to play with the influence of the Internet. Of course, this is also the point that makes Facebook seem "extremely sore".

At present, some officials urge Trump to take a tougher stance on TikTok. For example, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has publicly stated that he does not think that selling TikTok to an American company will solve national security issues. In fact, what he did not want to say in the second half was probably because he was worried that this new influence mechanism and new influence platform would further make it more difficult for American politicians to grasp the public opinion of the entire country.

The so-called worry about data security itself is unnecessarily suspicion. What the US government is really worried about is not China's control of US public opinion, but its own loss of control over public opinion management. Because the current model of social media influencing social perceptions and attitudes is completely different from traditional media, this makes the US government feel terrified.

Back then, the United States ignited the "color revolution" in the world. Now, in the death of black Freud, almost the same "back fire" has been encountered. In addition to transferring internal contradictions and creating China threat theory, this is also the secret mind of the White House hoping to kill Tiktok while deterring and restraining other social platforms.

When the Internet content media was transformed from images and texts to videos, TikTok created an expression method that was different from Facebook and Twitter, and this method completely matched the expression habits of the aborigines of the Z generation network. This makes it inadvertently a "throwing bird."

This is doomed to the transaction between Microsoft and Tiktok, and there are huge obstacles and uncertainties.