What Next TBD: Is TikTok Cooked This Time?

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You earn up to 3% daily cash on every purchase every day. Visit apple.co slash card calculator to see how much you can earn. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank ORG, USA, Salt Lake City GPE branch. Subject to credit approval, term supply. Last month, during the Super Bowl, the Biden campaign joined TikTok ORG,

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and it sure seemed like the president liked posting.

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Chiefs or Niners? Two great quarterbacks. Hard to decide. But if I didn't say I was for the Eagles

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and I'd be sleeping alone, my wife's the Philly girls. Deviously plotting to rig the season so

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the Chiefs ORG would make the Super Bowl or the Chiefs just being a good football team?

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You're getting trouble if I told you. Trump or Biden PERSON? Are you kidding? Biden. Trump or Biden PERSON?

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Are you kidding?

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Biden PERSON.

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The campaign has been using the platform to post memes and raise awareness for Biden PERSON's re-election bid.

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Makes sense.

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TikTok's popularity among Americans NORP has been growing faster than any other platform, according

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to Pew Research ORG.

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But there's a tension here.

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TikTok has long been targeted by lawmakers, dating back to 2019 when then-President Donald Trump tried to force a sale of the platform due to its connections to the Chinese NORP government. And since then, the threat of a TikTok ban in the U.S. GPE lingered. In fact, almost exactly a year ago, lawmakers were grilling TikTok CEO Xiaoz Qiu, about the app's ties to China GPE.

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ByteDance owns TikTok ORG. And the CCP owns ByteDance because the CCP owns everybody in China GPE.

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So by law, they can make them do whatever they want. And they say that by law, you can't tell anyone about it. So they can make you hand over that data.

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Is that correct? Data is stored here in American NORP soil soil, by an American company, overseen by American...

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We thought that, but leaked audio from 80 internal TikTok ORG meetings shows that U.S. user data has been repeatedly accessed from China GPE when you said it hasn't been.

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Then, after the hearing, nothing happened. TikTok ORG continued to operate in the country,

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and negotiations between the platform and the government appeared to stall out.

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It looked like the app was here to stay.

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But earlier this month, seemingly out of nowhere, lawmakers in the House ORG introduced a bill that would kill the app in the U.S. White House ORG aides even helped craft the legislation. The bill sailed out of committee unanimously. The House ORG rushed to bring it to a vote, and in a rare display of bipartisanship, they overwhelmingly voted to pass the bill on

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to the Senate. And why is it essential for Congress to do this? Because the PRC GPE controls bite dance. This is a common sense measure to protect our national security. This is not an attempt to ban TikTok ORG. It's an attempt

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to make TikTok ORG better. Tic-tac-toe. A winner. There's been attempts at banning TikTok before.

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What's different this time? I don't know if anything's different this time.

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That's Emily Baker White, a senior writer at Forbes. She's been covering the platform for years.

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The sort of fundamental reasons that the Trump PERSON administration gave for wanting to ban TikTok are the same reasons that the Biden administration is now supportive of a ban on TikTok ORG if divestment is impossible.

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According to a Wall Street Journal report, when the Biden campaign joined TikTok ORG, executives inside the social media company took it as a sign that things were going well for them in the U.S. But the fast pace that this bill moved blindsided the company and just about everyone else.

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Given the concern from the administration and given the concern from members of both parties on the Hill ORG, I can see how this came together, but it came together very quickly and very quietly. And so, did I know it was going to happen this way this week? No.

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So today on the show,

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almost a year since the last calls for a ban, TikTok ORG is under fire again. Is it about to go up in flames? I'm Emily Peck, filling in for Lizzie O'Leary PERSON, and you're listening to What Next TBD WORK_OF_ART, a show about tech, power,

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and how the future will be determined. Stick around. Apple Card PRODUCT is the perfect cashback rewards credit card.

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SAP Business AI ORG won't help you generate cubist versions of your family's holiday photos, but it will help you understand which supplier is best to help you roll out your plant-based packaging in Southeast Asia LOC, identify the training your junior project manager needs to rise up the ranks, and automate repetitive tasks while you focus on big innovations so you can be ready for the next opportunity. Revolutionary technology, real-world results.That's SAP ORG Business AI. The bill that passed in the House

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doesn't automatically call for a ban on TikTok ORG. What it requires is that ByteDance ORG, the Chinese NORP company that owns the platform, divest TikTok into American NORP hands within six months of the legislation passing or face a ban.The thing is, divestment is unlikely.

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The actual likelihood of ByteDance being able to divest from TikTok ORG is uncertain at best. There are a number of things that could stop ByteDance from doing that. First of all, they could decide they don't want to, and instead they want to fight the potential ban in court. But it's also not clear that they would find a buyer. TikTok ORG is an extremely expensive asset, much more expensive likely than it was a few years ago when President Trump PERSON tried to force a sale with the threat of a ban after it. So whether they could get a suitable buyer isone question. But perhaps a bigger question is that the Chinese government has control over whether a sale happens too. Last time there was an attempt at a sale, the Chinese government at the last minute changed their export regulations and they changed them so that recommendations algorithms, if you wanted to sell them, you would have to get certain licenses and permits to do so. And that was sort of the Chinese NORP government saying, hey, we get a vote here too,potentially a veto vote. And so whether the Chinese NORP government would even allow ByteDance to sell TikTok, even if ByteDance ORG wanted to, is not something we have a lot of clarity on.

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This legislation just seemed to happen so fast. Even TikTok, according to the Wall Street Journal, was blindsided by this. When they saw Biden PERSON join the platform, they were like, oh, things are going great for us. And then all of a sudden,

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wham, this happened. My understanding is that there were pretty intense negotiations, intense and quiet negotiations on the Hill for weeks and maybe even months before the introduction of this bill. But it surprised everybody. And even hearing those rumblings, I didn't realize the force that the bill would have when it was introduced.

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Around this time last year, TikTok was deep in negotiations with CFIUS ORG. That's the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States ORG. These discussions were supposed to help TikTok remain operational in the U.S. by distancing itself from ByteDance ORG. They'd been negotiating since 2019, but talks hadn't gone anywhere. Largely because TikTok ORG had become so large that it's difficult to untangle all the interconnected parts that make it work.

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TikTok was built as one of many apps that ByteDance ORG has made. And ByteDance's apps, generally speaking, have been interconnected. They all use the same internal data analytics tools and style tools. I worked in big tech years before I became a reporter. And like, if you've worked in one of these companies, you know that there are like 50 internal tools that you have to use. All of those internal tools, there's nothing nefarious about that. It's just the way that these enormous apps run. All those internal tools were interconnected with a bunch of other ByteDance tools. I was talking a few years back to Brian Stelter at CNN ORG, and he said,it sounds like it's like untangling a bowl of spaghetti. And I love that analogy. That's exactly what it's like. They had to untangle a giant bowl of angel hair spaghetti in order to separate TikTok ORG from the rest of

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ByteDance. ByteDance did make an effort to appease the U.S. government. It was called Project Texas PRODUCT. The company said it would essentially give the U.S. government. It was called Project Texas PRODUCT. The company said it would essentially give the U.S. government an unprecedented amount of control over TikTok ORG. The platform wouldn't be able to make content policy changes without U.S. GPE approval, and the government could come in and

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view TikTok's records at any time. Still, it wasn't enough. The government decided that they could not come to an agreement to let tiktok and

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bite dance do project texas so long as bite dance owned tiktok at the end of the day what they were

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trying to do is separate the idea of ownership from the idea of control and in like corporate law ownership and control for the most part are something that we talk about together

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um and tiktok and biteance ORG wanted to divorce those concepts.

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Yes, ByteDance would own TikTok ORG. It would have certain control over certain things, but TikTok ORG would also be separate. TikTok's US GPE officers would have owed a fiduciary duty to the interests of the United States GPE as defined by whom? Well, the executive branch,which imagine another Trump PERSON presidency, that gets really messy really fast, right? But like all of that kind of conversation was happening in the CFIUS ORG negotiation. And again, would have been really legally complex. But at the end of the day, even even all that wasn't enough.

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there's no precedent for this, but there kind of is a precedent for this. And that's Grindr ORG. Grindr's Chinese NORP owner was forced to sell the company because of a CFIUS review, I believe they said. We don't want a Chinese company having control over this really personal private information. It sounds like a familiar thing. That is probably the best precedent that we

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have for this. I think the big difference here is TikTok ORG's size and TikTok's sort of unique role in the distribution of information, which I think may change the speech calculations a little bit here. There are so many people using TikTok ORG to express so much political, civic, sort of core cultural commentary that banning it would really change the information landscape in a way that really, I can like name on one hand, maybe two hands, count on one or two hands, the number of other companies that have that much of a role in our

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information distribution system. And of course, the people who want to ban TikTok ORG say that is a big part of the problem, right?

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They say the bigger it is, the more dangerous it is. The people who don't want to ban TikTok ORG will say it is so disruptive of our speech ecosystem that without an absolute smoking gun of, you know, a grand conspiracy, you simply could not do this. It would be totally unreasonable. And so, again, it all comes back to TikTok ORG's size and just the power the platform has over our culture and discourse and commerce.

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When this legislation started moving, TikTok ORG quickly went on the offensive, you know, sent users this message asking them to call Congress ORG and tell them not to ban the app. And the message, I mean, it was like you could press a button and call your congressperson. That's pretty intense. It seems like a demonstration of exactly what lawmakers are worried about, in a sense. TikTok ORG will tell you, and they defended this

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campaign passionately, they said, why are you so worried about hearing from your constituents, right? Your constituents care a lot about this. What it did was show the political power of the

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app. And we often don't think about our Instagram, our YouTube, our TikTok ORG, whatever, as an engine of

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politics. But at least when it came to whether TikTok ORG should be banned or not, TikTok came out and showed that it could be an engine of politics. And any of these mega platforms can be engines of

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politics in that way. Is TikTok ORG really a security threat? I remember a story about Uber years ago and the same thing happened. And Uber is an American NORP company. What do we know here?

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Any company of TikTok size, TikTok meta, YouTube ORG, et cetera, these companies have so much power and control over what we see that governments are going to try to manipulate people through them. We've seen this on, obviously, on Facebook in the 2016 election, the, you know, Russian election interference attempts. We've seen similar things on Twitter ORG, too. Saudi NORP agents actually got inside Twitter and turned over information to the Saudi government that, you know, actually led to dissidents being imprisoned and killed. And so there is a very real threat that governments will try to infiltrate these platforms anduse them for bad purposes. That is the fear with TikTok and ByteDance ORG. And I do think there's a difference between that threat when applied to TikTok ORG and ByteDance than there is with that threat applied to the U.S. companies because of the extent to which the Chinese NORP government has control over or has tried

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to assert control over private companies in China GPE. That's a real difference. But there isn't any

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indication that there's a grand plot inside the C-suite at TikTok or ByteDance ORG to try to manipulate the U.S. GPE population. That just hasn't been shown. And so I think the threat can be really real. And by the way, there doesn't have to be a plot in the C-suite. There can be, like there were at Twitter ORG, a few people who gain access to things and that can still cause harm. And so I think like some people think it's all a grand conspiracy and they're all in cahoots to serve the interests of the CCP ORG. I don't think there's any evidence toshow that. But I do think the simple scale and power of these mega platforms, of these tech giants, is big enough that the threat is real, that they will be used in ways that will harm us. When we come back, what's the political fallout of a TikTok ORG ban?

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So speaking of people that don't want to ban TikTok ORG, we have to mention former President Trump PERSON. He supported the ban back in 2020, and now he's out there. He's done this 180. He says, you know, if you get rid of TikTok ORG, you're only goingto strengthen meta Facebook ORG. And he calls Facebook, quote, the enemy of the people. Okay.

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But why the sudden 180? I certainly think the 180 does raise questions about how sincere he was about what he thought were national security risks in 2020. Certainly a fair question to ask why you thought this was so pressing then and not now. It's an election year and President Biden PERSON has come out in support of this bill, which will probably alienate some young voters. It seems very plausible to me that former President Trump PERSON thinks he might gain some of those voters if he comes out and opposes this. Former President Trump also met with a prominent Republican NORP donor named Jeff Yassrecently. Yass is an early TikTok ORG investor. He is one of the most important TikTok investors in the United States. Trump PERSON could be trying to curry favor with him by taking this position and maybe hopefully getting some donations from him. So those are both things that folks have talked about. Trump PERSON is a really chaotic figure. He does things that people find hard to understand. I think he's playing a little electoral politics here, but the sincerity of his position is harder to understand when you

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look at the law. If this bill gets through the Senate ORG, big question mark, we don't know. But if it does and Biden PERSON signs it, he would be essentially killing a platform that he himself is using in an election year, particularly important to younger people, younger voters. particularly important to younger people, younger voters. Some people are calling this like political suicide, basically. I mean, is this a big deal for younger voters? Could it really have

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any kind of impact on the election? Polling shows that it is a big deal for younger voters. I hesitate to put younger voters in a single category. I think some of them would care a lot

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and some of them wouldn't care at all. And some of them probably support a ban on TikTok ORG. But I think, I do think it's a major electoral

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issue. I also think the president and Congress ORG, they don't take these positions in an election year if they haven't thought about the electoral politics of it. So somebody somewhere has convinced the people who voted yes and the president that this is not political suicide. And there's polling that show that, you know, a lot of people also support a ban on TikTok ORG. And so I'm skeptical that any lawmaker running for re-election is going to take a vote at this time in the cycle that they think is political suicide.

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The bill sailed through the House with overwhelming support, but it still has an uphill battle in the Senate ORG. Already, senators are expressing concerns.

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My understanding is that Chuck Schumer PERSON has not yet committed to bringing this bill to the floor. And so there's a question of whether the Senate ORG will even vote on it. I know that Marco Rubio and Mark Warner PERSON, who are prominent leaders, a little bipartisan pairing there, do want to try to move this thing forward. But I've heard a lot of senators say they're unsure, they need to look at the details. I'm not super confident that we're getting through the Senate here. I think there's a lot to be determined. I know that there are also some senators who favor a different approach and hope that they can materially change and pass a different piece of legislation than what the House ORG passed and try to work toward reconciliation there.

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And even if it does make it through the Senate ORG, the bill will almost surely be challenged in court. And there's some precedent here. the bill will almost surely be challenged in court. And there's some precedent here. A federal judge in Montana struck down a TikTok ORG ban in the state, citing free speech concerns.

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A national ban is a different calculus, though. A federal ban would probably fare somewhat better than state bans because when states start doing things in the name of national security by themselves, there's a separate and additional set of issues there. But there are a lot of potential landmines here. And you see big civil rights groups. The first amendment institute came out against the bill. The ACLU has come out against the bill. There are serious groups saying this billwould not pass constitutional muster. And the sort of biggest and most core reason why is the restriction that it would place on a lot of people and a lot, a lot, a lot of people's speech. There are a number of legal issues here and certainly the speech issues, but some of the others too would likely be included in TikTok and ByteDance ORG's challenge to this law.

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What's TikTok ORG's response been? I mean, obviously they didn't want the bill to pass. I've seen the argument that if it did pass, it'd be great for tech companies in the U.S. I've seen other tech companies saying, like, this is bad for tech companies in the U.S. because it's giving the government just too much control over a social media company. What are they saying? Well, obviously they don't

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want the bill to pass and they really have embraced the First Amendment LAW issue here. They're also saying we make a ton of money in the United States GPE. We're a really important part of the United States GPE economy. And if you shut us down, you'll hurt your own economy. What of the influencers?

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Some people say they would move to YouTube and they would move to Instagram ORG and they would get on with their lives. And so there are other platforms that they would go to, but this would certainly be disruptive to that ecosystem.

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those Florida and Texas GPE laws where they're trying to keep social media companies from moderating political content. Is there something bigger happening here where policymakers are, you know,

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just trying to simply find any ways possible to control social media platforms these days? Or is this really confined to, you know, a national security thing?

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There's definitely an effort to regulate social media more in the U.S. GPE, but it's coming from a lot of different places. So far, for the most part, at least at the federal level, lawmakers have not reconciled their very different objectives in a law that would have a lot of teeth. So we're watching them flail around and try, and they may get somewhere. But laws that restrict social media have strange unintended effects. The other big thing that is going on, though, is that, for Americans NORP anyway, the internet has mostly been a borderless place. And we have seen in the last five, 10 years that start to change, right? Even in Europe with the passage of GDPR, there are now restrictions on where European NORP data can be stored. Clearly inChina GPE, there's been a giant ratchet. Chinese nationals' data can't leave China the same way anymore. China GPE is much more restrictive over that. And of course, they have a great firewall, right? We've also seen other less democratic countries further restricting what their citizens and nationals can access on the internet. We've never banned a website before, let alone like one of the most popular websites in the country. And if our government bans a website, what other websites can it ban?And what road does that start us down? And how do we think about the sea change that that would represent?

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Emily PERSON, thank you so much for coming on. Of course. I'm so glad to be here. Emily Baker-White is a technology reporter and senior writer at Forbes ORG. And that's it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Anna Phillips, and Patrick Fort PERSON. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne PERSON.Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate. TBD is part of the larger What Next ORG family. TBD is also part of Future Tense ORG, a partnership of Slate, Arizona State University ORG, and New America ORG. And if you're a fan of the show,I have a request for you. Become a Slate Plus ORG member. Just head on over to slate.com slash whatnextplus to sign up. We'll be back Sunday with another episode. I'm Emily Peck filling in for Lizzie O'Leary, and you can catch me over on Slate Money every Saturday.

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I'm Dahlia Lithwick and I'm host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the law and the U.S. Supreme Court. And I'm host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the law and the U.S. Supreme Court ORG. We are shifting into high gear, coming at you weekly with the context you need to understand the rapidly changing legal landscape. The many trials of Donald J. Trump, judicial ethics, arguments and opinions at SCOTUS. We are tackling the big legal news with clarity and insight every single week. New Amicus episodes every Saturday, wherever you listen.