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.
The former Treasury Secretary said on CNBC Thursday that he’s “going to put together a group to buy TikTok.” Such a group would need to have massive buying power, since the app boasts 170 million US users, and has an estimated value in the tens of billions of dollars.
The House passed a bill Wednesday that could force TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to sell it, or be banned from the US.
Now that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act has passed in the House of Representatives, TikTok CEO Shou Chew made — what else — a short video appealing to the app’s users to speak up against a ban.
He doesn’t address the possibility of a sale, saying the bill will take away their app if it becomes a law, but that “We believe we can overcome this together.”
We’ve heard so much about the dangers of TikTok from both sides of the aisle, and even had Trump flip-flop his position ostensibly over the political calculations of banning an app 170 million Americans use. But what exactly did the House select committee see in its secure briefing that led them to vote 50-0 in favor of the bill that would ban the app? If this thing is going to move forward in the Senate it seems like we should at least know the basics.
The former House Speaker said passing a new bill that incentivizes China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok “is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It’s an attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-tac-toe. A winner.”
After the bill passed out of the House with 352 votes, it now must clear the Senate to reach the president’s desk.
“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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I can’t get enough of ad agency creative Dustin Ballard’s AI hijinks: he made The Red Hot Chili Peppers sing a grocery list, turned Lil Jon’s “Get Low” into a time-honored Christmas classic, and showed up a congressional hearing on AI. That’s just a taste.
Recently, he revealed the process — it starts with his own voice!
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.”
TheSpAndroid found code within the TikTok app that suggests it’s working on a photo-sharing platform called “TikTok Photos.” One line of code says, “TikTok Photos will be launched soon,” while others invite users to share their posts on the platform.
However, it’s still too early to tell whether TikTok is actually planning to launch a photo-sharing app or if this is all just an experiment.
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.
Reels and longer videos will be included in a new AI recommendation model that Facebook plans to build by 2026, Facebook head Tom Alison tells CNBC. Eventually, Facebook’s core feed may be included in the model as well.
“If you see something that you’re into in Reels, and then you go back to the Feed, we can kind of show you more similar content,” says Allison.
Jon Stewart’s presence on The Daily Show already feels very familiar (and very good), but the way people consume their video entertainment has shifted dramatically since he left the anchor’s chair in 2015.
Prior to his episode this past Monday, Stewart had a very interesting conversation with an audience member about how different “TV” has become.
Worth mentioning: Stewart’s return has already boosted TDS ratings in a real way. Turns out people can still be convinced to tune in.
I’ve mused before on the correct number of posters and influencers vs lurkers required on text-based social networks — but refrained from commentary on video. (I don’t watch much.) Anyway this survey data suggests my theory applies there too: most people don’t post. That means posters are weird outliers who should be studied in a lab.
About half of TikTok’s users have never uploaded a video; a normal user hasn’t so much as updated their bio. Why, then, is TikTok successful? Posters.
The Flip shopping app is a TikTok knockoff, filled with wannabe influencers making pennies per video view — myself included.
Users in more than 160 new countries will be able to add music they find on TikTok to their streaming platform of choice, TikTok announced today. The “add to music app” feature launched in the US in November, integrating platforms like Spotify and Apple Music with the video app.
Music discovery is huge on TikTok, but the relationship between labels and the tech company are tenuous: earlier this month UMG pulled its entire catalogue from TikTok, including Taylor Swift and Drake, due to disagreements on compensation.
In what Reuters says is the second formal proceedings under the Digital Services Act, EU regulators are looking into whether TikTok has broken rules about safeguarding children and advertising transparency. If found guilty, TikTok could be fined up to 6 percent of its global turnover.
It comes after the EU opened formal proceedings against X over its handling of illegal content surrounding the Israel-Hamas war.
[European Commission]
Here’s something you can do with that dozen or so obsolete Ubiquiti access points you’ve got shoved in your junk drawer.
Slide decks: good, useful, necessary in business! Also a scourge against humanity that may exist only for the purpose of bringing unending misery to those who are forced to make them all the time.
Available in english for both free and premium Adobe Express users, the AI-powered TikTok Creative Assistant add-on can write scripts and provide insights into what topics and hashtags are trending on the video-sharing platform, alongside design templates and editing features like the free TikTok video creator.
Once a video has been produced, users can schedule or publish content to TikTok without leaving the Express platform.
The longer the TikTok / UMG battle drags on, the more I think UMG’s leverage increases. Talked about it on Today, Explained with my pal Sean Rameswaram — and Cory Doctorow also joined this episode, so it’s a fun one.
That’s according to a new report in The Information, which says the company is opening the studios in “several locations in cities including LA,” which it may or may not charge creators to use for promoting products.
TikTok plunged into US e-commerce last year and plans to start taking a bigger cut of sellers’ profits soon.
[The Information]
The company has started hiding details on how popular hashtags are... after researchers and journalists kept using them as a measure of how widely controversial and harmful topics had spread on the platform.
[The Washington Post]
The next time you scroll through Shorts, you might spot a preview for a live video that you can tap into and watch. You can also continue scrolling to find other livestreams. The setup is similar to TikTok, which already lets you scroll through a feed of live, mobile-friendly videos.
