President Joe Biden’s administration is considering ways to keep TikTok available in the United States if a ban that’s scheduled to go into effect Sunday proceeds, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
....Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump is ready to intervene to preserve access to the Chinese-owned video app in the American marketplace.... The moves represent parallel efforts by the rival presidents to execute an end-run around Congress and the Supreme Court, which is teed up to rule on the ban at any time.
An end run around Congress? One of these presidents signed the ban and the other one supported it. They're doing end runs around their previous selves.
In related news, Sen. Ed Markey, who voted to ban TikTok last April, has introduced a bill to extend the deadline for TikTok's divestiture to an American owner.
This is comical. Now everyone suddenly wants to keep TikTok? A year ago both presidents and 80% of Congress were gung ho to boot their commie asses out of the country. What's going on?
Tik Tok users started migrating to an honest-to-goodness Chinese owned, based in China substitute.
Talk about your unintended consequencess!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2475l7zpqyo
I suspect the numbers will ultimately be extremely small once Americans realize that a lot of the content they want to post on that platform won’t be allowed by the CCP. But nonetheless, unintended consequences indeed. Another potential unintended consequence is Elon Musk becoming the owner of TikTok.
I expect the numbers are already extremely small, notwithstanding the "flocking" headline the BBC used.
My two cents: Musk (along with Zuckerberg and to an extent, Bezos) is a greater threat to our democracy than China (who is not our friend, either).
The TikTok ban was a xenophobic move in a highly xenophobic era during an election year. What's truly needed (and is not likely to happen) is regulation of social media across the board. The rules need to be rewritten.
That was a large part of Biden's warning in his farewell address last night.
All of this.
Its because Trump says he wants to save TikTok and young people will be more inclined to like Trump just because of this.
Someone told me it was called Little Red Book after Mao's famous volume.
OT: you are a smart fellow, answer me this: Are we going to experience an ocean collapse in the next 5-7 years? Followed by an extinction event in 30-40 years?
We're already deep in a major extinction event. Extinction of humans? Unlikely. We're too much like rats and cockroaches. We find a way to live almost anywhere.
Not only that, we are willing to kill everything around us to do it. Including humans.
"Peanut butter"; that's the reason. Lots and lots of "peanut butter" spread around by the owners of the peanuts, factories and warehouses full of processed butter.
At last the answer. And it works for literally every important question of the day.
All Chinese apps in the US should be capped at a number of US users small enough that they cannot be a systemic threat. Maybe 1MM.
In addition Chinese mobile roaming in the US should be required to follow meet neutrality rules. Right now people using Chinese mobile plans but roaming in the US are still blocked from Google, etc. They should be forced to give access to all sites legal under US law or stop their service.
We are at war and it is ridiculous that we are pretending we are not.
The transition to oligarchy will be littered with these type of sudden twists and turns.
Especially since the media has signaled how eager they are to support the transition. They aren't here to inform, instead they are here to deliver messages to the public. Did NBC discover this information? Or was NBC chosen to deliver this message to the public? Probably the latter, right?
Information, believed to be objective and reliable, used to be a marketable product. No longer. The only thing media companies can sell now is something -- anything -- that entertains and glues eyeballs to screens. Entertainment has swallowed everything and now a slimy carnival barker and his crew of utter assclowns is about to assume power and the major media outlets are *thrilled* because they know the next four years are going to be *so* entertaining.
Transition? We're already there. The entire media establishment is controlled by them, their headlines and spin tell us that things are either wonderful or horrible depending on what they need to sell. The NAR is pumping out spin to convince people it's a great tome ro buy, they latest financial reports are spun to keep people from pulling their money out of the market or they're spun to keep bitcoin rising.
Every last bit of it is manipulation for someone's profit.
What’s going on is that a lot of low information voters who love TikTok but haven’t really followed the news have become aware that in a few days they’re no longer going to be able to use this highly popular platform.
But if they're tuned-out, low-information voters how likely are they to know how to even call their Congressman or whoever and complain? Kids these days can't even dial a phone.
This, exactly.
Also a lot of low-information politicians have discovered that the promises about "they'll just sell to a U.S. owner" are not going to happen the way they hoped.
They seem like morons
It's almost like politicians say one thing before an election and a different thing after an election.
Ya think???
Maybe, but there is no evidence that this is the case here. Trump has been against the TikTok ban for awhile. Kevin mentions that a senator (Ed Markey) who was opposed to it in the past, is still opposed to it.
All we have are three unnamed people saying very vague things about something that Biden might be considering but the details are left to the readers imagination.
Can we be at least a little skeptical here, sniffing out the usual both sides do it and efforts to manipulate as always the mainstream media? NBC's article itself says, "Still, a White House official insisted that not enforcing the ban, if it is upheld, is not an option," and pivots right to Bondi. Hmm. Moreover, Biden's "end ruin," if any, would last all of how many days before he leaves office? Gee.
I see TikTok lobbyists or dissenters within the administration trying to force Biden's hand. And, lo and behold, the article ends by identifying and quoting one such. Whether the ban is good or bad I leave to others.
Agreed. Very weasely language being used to get the reader to make the same assumption Kevin did. Both sides! Biden too!
But the article didn't really say that and it's a lot of faith being put in 3 random 'people familiar with discussions'. This could be 3 people in the Trump PR team.
I love how people think they're giving the US government the middle finger by switching to RedNote, when in fact, they're fucking over themselves. We are at that point in Animal House:
Otter: "I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!"
Bluto: "We're just the guys to do it."
And you wonder why the convicted felon Trump was elected.
+1
otoh, our Betters have witnessed this for decades and stood blankly by and in fact aiding this information infiltration.
Dog caught the car.
Based on talking to my teen, the general teen view is that the other platforms are even worse. They seem more put out by Instagram's ability to target ads to you than by China's ability to steal data without them realizing it, or the threat of propaganda.
My own opinion on TikTok, or any other foreign platform, is that if we're going to allow them into the US, there should be complete and full reciprocity for American platforms in their own country. Otherwise screw you.
You know what app is banned in China? TikTok! Chinese people can't even use the massively popular app owned by a Chinese company. They have to use the alternate locked-down version.
Not obvious why reciprocity is relevant. The main question is what is good for US people.
TikTok is good because (some) people enjoy using it, and bad because it gives the Chinese government oppurtunities to mess up US security. The question is the balance between these two.
TikTok is good because people make money off it and it was a major income source for many during (and after) the lockdowns of the pandemic. How that failed to register BEFORE the legislation isn't clear - but maybe it finally broke thru to the users that this wasn't just another virtue signalling law and it was really happening. It was widely remarked (wistfully?) on the platform that SCOTUS would throw it on on 1A grounds. When it wasn't, and Musk was reported to be interested, the Great Migration occurred. (Extra irony points: people are being labelled "refugees" on Red Book.)
I think they didn't imagine that the company owning Tiktok would actually go through with a shut-down instead of a sale to a US owner, and now they're agitated because Multi-Billion Dollar Company Going Down freaks them out. We saw that a lot with the Obama folks as well, where causing a Big Company to actually risk bankruptcy was the most terrifying thing.
As for Trump, they want to stall for time so it can be sold to Musk or some other Trump-connected set of owners. Also Trump flipped on it because of what was probably a bribe.
In the wake of the collapse of Arthur Anderson, the accounting firm complicit in the Enron and WorldCom frauds, The Narrative in the business press, and subsequently in the mainstream media, became, not, ‘Huh, companies don’t want to have their books audited by crooks’, but ‘Big Government smashed this pillar of capitalism; such a thing should never happen again’.
This is what has always annoyed me about the shorthand, “TikTok ban“.
Everybody has always loved TikTok, but Congress/whitehouse did not love the Chinese ownership, so that is what they always targeted, not the app itself. That was just the consequence if the ownership did not change.
It is political malpractice, that They did not work harder to change the “marketing“ of this law.
Good point; a clever marketer would have pitched this as protecting beloved tiktok from anti-democracy Xi Jinping.
After all, that is basically how Elon(gated) Musk(rat) pitched his takeover of Twitter.
It was always likely to be a de facto ban because it was always likely Xi was going to prohibit Bytedance from selling. You think he welcomed the precedent of foreign governments forcing Chinese firms to break up?
Too late for Kevin to see this, but Markey didn't support the TT ban. As is the way of our dysfunctional Senate, the ban was in the same bill as Ukraine Aid. He spoke out against the ban in realtime.
Good catch.
Allow me to sell to you my newest collectible, Presidential Profiles in Butter.