More from TikTok ban: all the news on the app’s shutdown and return in the US
“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It’s an attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-tac-toe. A winner. A winner.”
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Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump explained, again, why he no longer supports the push to ban TikTok. “...without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”
And as for his own unsuccessful push to ban the ByteDance-owned app, he now claims “I had it banned just about, I could have gotten it done. But I said, ‘You know what, but I’ll leave it up to you.”
The former executive expressed interest in buying the app to the founder of TikTok’s parent company, according to The Wall Street Journal. China-based ByteDance could be forced to sell TikTok or else lose access to the US market should Congress pass a new bipartisan bill.
Kotick is looking for allies, tossing out the idea to a group including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, per the Journal.
The President said so while addressing reporters in this video from The Associated Press.
The push to ban TikTok was revived this week as House congressional lawmakers introduced a bill to make it illegal to distribute ByteDance apps. TikTok has been prompting users to protest the ban, which House Republicans will vote on despite Trump’s objections.
The Republican-controlled House is planning a speedy vote on a new bill that could ban TikTok unless it separates from its Chinese parent company. House leaders plan to bring the bill to a vote on Wednesday in an accelerated process that requires a two-thirds vote to pass, according to Semafor.
That says a lot about how much House Republicans care about this bill, considering that former President Donald Trump posted this on Truth Social after the committee vote to advance it:
If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!
After months of little serious discussion about TikTok on Capitol Hill, the House Energy and Commerce committee just unanimously passed a bill that could effectively ban the app unless it separates from its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) pointed to TikTok’s plea to users to contact their representatives about voting against the bill as “a small taste” of how the Chinese Communist Party can weaponize apps. After the vote, TikTok wrote on X that the “government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.”
[House Committee on Energy and Commerce]
Apparently TikTok’s push notification warning is working, because congressional staffers say they’re flooded with calls protesting a new play to make Chinese owner ByteDance sell the app:
“It’s so so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing. They’re teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can’t take it away,” one House GOP staffer told POLITICO, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
The Democratic representative from California, whose district includes Apple and Nvidia, discusses the future of tech regulation and the 2024 election.
The ban was challenged by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in July, arguing that it’s “preventing or seriously impeding faculty” from undertaking research related to the app. College students and staff across the state have nevertheless found ways to sneak around the ban.
US District Judge Robert Pitman rejected the suit on Monday, calling the ban a “reasonable restriction” in light of Texas’ concerns about data privacy.
This happened last week, but I saw it today because of Techdirt’s great post about the dismissal. Indiana’s attorney general actually filed two lawsuits against TikTok in December 2022, but they were consolidated, the Associated Press reports.
US District Judge Donald W. Molloy issued a preliminary injunction (pdf) blocking the ban on Thursday, as reported by Reuters. The ban had been set to take effect on January 1st. TikTok sued Montana shortly after Governor Greg Gianforte signed SB 419 in May.
The money will go towards Project Clover, TikTok’s initiative to house European user data on local servers to address concerns from regulators.
TikTok’s data center in Ireland is already up and running, but it’s already working on another in Norway, where it expects data migration to begin in late 2024. Once complete, TikTok says its Norway facility will be the “largest data centre in Europe.”
In 2020, the share of Americans age 18-29 who could say the same was just 9 percent, according to a new poll from Pew Research. Additionally, 43 percent of TikTok users report consuming news on the platform, up from 22 percent in 2020.
