More from TikTok ban: all the news on the app’s shutdown and return in the US
Well, four people close to Trump say he’s going to try and stop it from happening, reports the Washington Post. It’s unclear what, exactly, that means. TikTok faces a ban unless its parent company, ByteDance, sells it by January 19th — the day before Trump’s inauguration.
Maybe Trump, who was courted by tech leaders in the months leading up to the election, will convince one of his new friends to buy it.
[The Washington Post]
Industry minister François-Philippe Champagne says the government is acting “to address the specific national security risks related to ByteDance Ltd.’s operations in Canada.”
However, Canada is not attempting to ban or control the TikTok app:
The government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content. The decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice.
TikTok has responded, saying it would challenge the order in court.
The Information reports that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance grew its overall revenue to $73 billion in the first half of 2024 — just shy of Meta’s $75.5 billion. The share of ByteDance’s revenue that comes from TikTok grew to 23 percent, meaning its operations outside of China are increasingly important for the company’s bottom line.
Judge Sri Srinivasan brought up the Supreme Court’s decisions in NetChoice and another case, Murthy v. Missouri, while questioning DOJ attorney Daniel Tenny.
“Under Netchoice, if we were talking about a US company, that’s heartland First Amendment-protected curation,” Srinivasan said. “So everything on under the government’s perspective turns on the fact that ByteDance is subject to Chinese control.”
Attorney Daniel Tenny frames the government’s objection to TikTok. “It gathers a lot of information” and “it uses that information to try to assess what sorts of videos and other content is going to be of interest,” Tenny says. “That same data is extremely valuable to a foreign adversary.”
TikTok’s lawyer is off the stage, and Judge Noemi Rao is questioning Jeffrey Fisher, who represents a lawsuit from users of TikTok. Fisher’s argument so far centers on the claim that American media creators have a right to work with publishers of their choosing. Rao is questioning how far that right should stretch — emphasizing the judges’ focus on TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
Andrew Pincus, the attorney representing TikTok and ByteDance in an appeals court hearing today, didn’t outright mention the DOJ’s attempt to introduce classified evidence. But he did suggest there’s no public rationale for the potential ban.
“We don’t really know what was determined here, because this was Congress enacting statute that has no findings, that doesn’t say why Congress did what it did.”
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals has just started its morning session, where TikTok and the US Government will be fighting over the divest-or-ban law passed earlier this year. There’s one brief argument in another case before it starts.
In a new filing, DOJ says it’s “not trying to litigate in secret,” but that the court should be able to review classified information that led Congress to determine the divest-or-ban bill was necessary. In its own filing, TikTok says the government’s arguments for the bill are riddled with errors and omissions.
A month after TikTok made its First Amendment case against a potential ban, lawyers for the government responded Friday. The partially redacted filings (available in full here) include their arguments that the Chinese government could use data collected by the app or manipulate its algorithm to influence US elections.
One example pointed to search tools for the company’s internal Lark messaging tool, shown below.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, the former president once again expressed support for the Chinese-owned juggernaut facing a ban in the US:
“Now [that] I’m thinking about it, I’m for TikTok, because you need competition. If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram — and that’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg.”
Bloomberg says he’s still stung by Facebook’s ban after the events on January 6th, 2021. “All of a sudden, I went from number 1 to having nobody,” said Trump, without feeling it necessary to challenge Zuck to a cage fight.
According to Forbes, TikTok accounts for Paris Hilton and CNN have been hijacked recently by a “zero-day” attack in the app’s DMs that could be activated simply by opening the message.
TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek sent us this statement:
Our security team is aware of a potential exploit targeting a number of brand and celebrity accounts. We have taken measures to stop this attack and prevent it from happening in the future. We’re working directly with affected account owners to restore access, if needed.
Oral arguments in its case against the federal divest-or-ban bill will be scheduled for this September, according to an order from the DC Circuit Court. That’s just months before the initial January 19th deadline its Chinese owner ByteDance has to sell the app or face a ban. The clock keeps running unless the court says otherwise.
[DocumentCloud]
On today’s episode of Decoder, Verge editors Alex Heath and Sarah Jeong join me to discuss the lawsuit TikTok filed last week against the US government in response to the divest-or-ban bill.
One reason I wanted to have both Alex and Sarah on here is that there’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law; some of TikTok’s arguments are contradicted by the simple facts of what the company has already promised to do around the world, and some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of attempts to regulate speech and the internet.
TikTok averted a ban once before under the Trump administration. But this time around, the bill is on far more solid footing, and TikTok is arguing that divesting its US business is not possible “commercially, technologically, or legally.” So we walked through each of those arguments one by one.
Having lost its fight in Congress, TikTok faces a tough battle in US courts and with China’s own export controls.
The creator subscription platform markets itself as basically the opposite of the algorithm-driven TikTok — but that doesn’t mean Patreon is celebrating the forced divestment from ByteDance.
Banning TikTok just serves to further entrench YouTube and Instagram as the dominant platforms in this industry. But more competition is good for creators–it gives them more leverage and ultimately more control over their businesses.
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]