TikTok is the social media sensation that all of Silicon Valley — and a lot of Washington, DC — has their eyes on. The app, created by ByteDance, became famous for rocketing musicians and dancers to stardom. But as its popularity and influence have grown, so has scrutiny of its privacy policies, security, and influence, with legislators voicing concern about its ownership by a Chinese firm. Meanwhile, social media competitors are doing everything they can to knock off TikTok’s features and usurp its short-form video dominance.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with China’s Xi Jinping today to discuss everything from AI to the war in Ukraine. But “TikTok did not come up,” Blinken told reporters at a short press conference following his meetings today. Seriously, that’s all he said. Maybe next time.
[The New York Times]
Meanwhile, sources tell The Information that ByteDance is “internally exploring scenarios for selling.” It’s been literally one day since the divest-or-ban ultimatum became law, so I hope you’re ready for another nine to twelve months of spin.
Our latest episode of Decoder is about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.
This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next.
Chew said that the bill, which requires China-based owner ByteDance to divest TikTok within a year to keep operating in the US, is in fact a ban.
“Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere,” Chew says. “We are confident and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts.”
The EU Commission is taking notice after TikTok launched a “Lite” version of its app in Spain and France, which pays users for using and interacting with the platform.
Commissioner Thierry Breton says the agency believes the feature could be “toxic & addictive” to children. The Commission could suspend the reward program if TikTok doesn’t provide a risk assessment report in the next 24 hours.
Political strategists aren’t throwing away TikTok, even after their election candidates try to force its sale on national security grounds.
Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, but previously served as the CEO of 99Fang, a Chinese home finder startup with “very powerful” tech for search, image processing, and recommendations.
Now, The New York Times reports that former contractors suing Susquehanna, an investor in both companies, claim technology they developed for 99Fang was used to create TikTok without compensating them.
The proposal, reported by Axios, would give the president discretion to extend the initial six month period for TikTok to find a buyer and separate from its Chinese parent ByteDance. The Senate is already considering a longer timeframe for the forced sale, as many analysts doubt six months is sufficient.
It hopes to recruit more EU users through a new rewards app called TikTok Lite that offers cash incentives.
Le Monde gives us a first look at the app where users earn “coins” for their activities on TikTok. A daily target of 3,600 coins (or €0.36 or $0.38) is reportedly equal to an hour of consuming content. Liking three videos? 150 coins.
Just like its existing partnership with Ticketmaster, TikTok has now teamed up with AXS to allow users to search and purchase the ticket outlet’s offerings directly on the video-sharing platform.
The feature is currently live in the US, UK, Sweden, and Australia. Performers on TikTok can promote their shows by adding AXS event links to their videos.
And so I’m warning you. If you haven’t watched X-Men ‘97’s fifth episode, take extra care with TikTok’s search function, as today, one of the trending topics’ names might spoil a big development for you (as it just did me).
Instead of tapping TikTok’s search icon, I’d suggest reading Charles’ interview with the show’s sound designers.
TikTok could get more time to spin off from its Chinese parent company to avoid a ban if the Senate moves forward with updates to a bill that passed the House. The Verge confirmed a Politico report with committee spokespeople that Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is working with Senate Intelligence Committee leaders on updates, like extending the timeline for a sale from six to 12 months.
ByteDance can attribute some of that increase to how well TikTok Shop has been received in the US and Southeast Asia, according to Bloomberg. TikTok, which has 170 million users in the US, is aiming to increase its e-commerce business in the region tenfold this year... if it survives the US government.
Wired writes that Zen Goziker says he has met with Congressional staff members to share concerns about TikTok’s data practices and claims to be the source for multiple articles about the company and “Project Texas” based on his experiences working there for six months.
The article also says:
He asserts that he was put under 24-hour surveillance by TikTok and the FBI while working remotely in Mexico. He claims that US attorney general Merrick Garland, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, and other top officials “wickedly instigated” his firing. And he states that the FBI helped the CIA share his private information with foreign governments. The suits do not appear to include evidence for any of these claims.
Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who’s apparently assembling an investor supergroup to buy the beleaguered app, wants to cut a deal to buy it sans algorithm and rebuild it, according to The Washington Post yesterday.
Now I may be a simple country tech reporter, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Matt Perault, former Facebook public policy director, points out why in this quote from the Post:
“All the biggest companies have thrown a lot of money and engineering talent at that issue and have struggled to do it,” Perault said. “If Steve Mnuchin thinks he can do that and succeed where a lot of successful companies have struggled, good luck.”
[The Washington Post]
LinkedIn confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing a short-form video feed housed within a new “video” tab on the app, which one user shows off here.
It’s not just TikTok — other apps like Shein, Temu, and WeChat are popular in the US, too. The TikTok ban focuses on ByteDance-owned subsidiaries including CapCut and Lemon8, but includes a carve out for popular shopping apps, The Washington Post reports. On the other hand, “everything app” WeChat could be in a gray area.
[Washington Post]
In an interview with ABC News, the vice president said the goal of the bill recently passed by the House is to force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell:
We need to deal with the owner, and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok... It’s an income generator for many people, what it does in terms of allowing people to share information in a free way, in a way that allows people to have discourse, it’s very important.
Set to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” a TikTok user cut together idyllic, quaint clips of their hometown — followed by a bunch of sterile data centers being built.
On TikTok, the medium is the message. Not everyone seems to know what a data center even is (the recommended search query below the video is “data center explained”) but the video works. This trend, as they say, has potential.
