The US Passes the Anti-TikTok Bill

Tech Are You? So I had been working on a totally different episode for today, but then yesterday the US Senate did what I originally said I thought they wouldn't do, which is that they passed a bill that mandates byte Dance the Chinese company must sell its subsidiary TikTok to some other entity that is not identified as a foreign adversary to the United States or face a ban across

the nation. That bill is now going to President Biden's desk for his signature, which seems to be pretty much forthcoming. I mean he said he was going to sign it into law. In fact, it may have already happened by the time I get this episode published, and then that means this bill will in fact become law. This is a huge moment in technology, in business, in politics, both domestic and international, and I figured it would make sense

to kind of go through and talk through this. So first up, let's talk about byte Edance and TikTok, because we've learned some things about byte dance in particular recently that really have shaped perspectives in very recent weeks. So let's start off with a guy named Jean E. Ming. He got his start working for a travel website in China called Kuksoon, and he spent a brief period working for Microsoft, but then ventured out into the entrepreneurial landscape himself.

So the traditional story is that he created various apps in an attempt to kind of find one that really stuck, and one of those was a real estate app, not too different from what you might see in an app like Zillow right, but this one was called ninety nine Fong Fang. That app was not a success. It ended up eventually going out of business in a couple of years, but it would end up being really important to the

TikTok story for multiple reasons. For one thing, engineers at ninety nine Fong developed tools that were meant to help for search as well as recommended real estate listings based upon user information, which you know a lot of that sounds fairly standard for a real estate app, but the story goes Jeong Yi Ming decided that maybe you could pair a recommendation algorithm that didn't work for real estate, but it would work for something like serving someone up

news that you know. You would learn about a user's behavior, their interests, the things that are important to them, and you could aggregate news for those users, and you could match people to content. Essentially, he was just thinking about how the best apply recommendation algorithms. How do you judge what someone likes? And then how do you keep them at your app by serving them the stuff that makes them stay there? How do you make that happen? So

to that end, again, the traditional story goes. Jiang Yiming launched a news aggregator app called Totyoo, and he and his former college roommate Leong Rubo decided to found a company that would sort of be the umbrella corporation for the various apps they were developing, and this would become Bite Dance. They sought seed money from investors, and then a company founded by an American politically conservative mega donor enters into the picture. So we're in around twenty twelve

at this point ninety nine. Fong really started around two thousand and nine. Byte Dance starts around twenty twelve. Now, the conservative mega donor is a fellow named Jeff Yas And you know, I get it. I know tons of y'all out there hate politics in your tech stories, but unfortunately this time we have to include politics because it

plays a huge part in what we're talking about. Me we're talking about a ban on TikTok, a legal ban, so we have to talk about politics, and Yes in particular has had a really huge impact on the TikTok story. So Yes co founded an investment company called Susquehanna International Group with some of his fellow students at the State University of New York at Binghampton back in the nineteen seventies.

And this company would actually become wildly profitable. It would become one of the massive investors in the stock market here in the United States, and it would turn Yass into a billionaire in the process. So here we are in twenty twelve and Susquehanna International Group invests in this fledgling Chinese company called Byte Dance, ultimately spending enough to

purchase a fifteen percent state in the company. And you know, that's a healthy chunk of ownership, and today it represents a truly massive investment considering the stratospheric altitude that Byte dances valuation would reach. So Yas is heavily invested in byte Dance, and some argue that the majority of Yas's estimated wealth is tied up with this investment. So he clearly has a huge incentive to protect Byte Dance. That's

where his billions of dollars are tied up. Now Moreover, the New York Times published a piece not too long ago about some court records that were accidentally made public. These records relate to a lawsuit in which some former ninety nine Fong engineers allege that their work has been repurposed to power byte Dances various apps, most notably TikTok, and that these engineers were not fairly compensated for the

use of their work. The court records show that Susquehanna had invested in ninety nine Fong, So Susquehanna's involvement and thus Jeff Yass's involvement with Xiang y Ning, TikTok and byte Dance has gone much further back than was first known. This goes back to two thousand and nine, so Susquehanna apparently invests in ninety nine Fong, but that app, like I said, went belly up. And then, according to these court documents, Susquehanna essentially created byte Dance and put Xiang

Yi Ming in charge of it. So, in other words, the court records say the origin story for a byte Dance is not the same thing as what has been generally believed, and that Susquehanna wasn't just a passive investor in this Chinese company, but actually took a very prominent role in the creation of byte Dance itself. Anyway, those court records were never meant to be made public. They

should not have been made public. So the court subsequently removed those records from public access, but not before The New York Times was able to review them and publish an article about them. So now let's move on. So ByteDance begins to form in twenty twelve. It's based in China, and we're still quite a ways out from TikTok at

this point. TikTok's own history is very convoluted. For one thing, it's really the story of a few apps kind of merging together Voltron's style to create what we know of as TikTok today. One of those apps was called Musical dot l y or Musically and some of y'all might even remember that app. I remember it was really big with some of my actor friends back in you know,

twenty fifteen or so. This app was originally founded by Luyu Yong and Alex Hu in China, and the app started off originally that they wanted to create an app, a totally different app, not musically. They wanted to make an app that was an educational tool, something that could

deliver short informative lectures and such to users. But they found that folks didn't want to know learning, so they decided to change directions and they made an app designed for very short form video content that you could create and share short form videos or you could browse short form videos, and that these would be you know, less than a minute long, somewhere between fifteen seconds and sixty seconds, and they included the ability for users to post videos

with specific music clips. They had a library of music clips, so it was kind of like adding a soundtrack to your video content. And this led to people using Musical dot Le to post lip syncing videos. That's really where the app took off. It also coincided with a popular lip syncing program that was happening in the United States at the time. So again when I say it got really popular, the app really got popular in America. In China, it actually didn't move the needle very much at all.

So with the American market going banana for lip syncing videos, the founders decided to establish an office in the good old US of A. So they did so in Santa Monica, California. This is kind of where the heart of TikTok being an American company comes in. So they create this office in Santa Monica. The app continues to go incredibly popular. At one point, an estimated half of all US teens were using Musically and it became the number one app on the iOS app store, so it was a really

big deal. Meanwhile, back in China, ByteDance was working on kind of a similar app, not the exact same thing as Musically, but along the same lines, and they called it dou Yin, which, from what I understand, means shaking sound and a cursory description of dou Yen makes it sound an awful lot like TikTok. It's an app that lets users create and browse short form videos, often ones

that include popular music in the background. Do youan though, also allows people to live stream, which you can do on TikTok now too, or you know, watch a live stream,

not just to do one yourself. And dou Yan also has some kind of incredible advanced features that are not in TikTok, like being able to search videos based on the face of someone who's appearing in the video you're watching, or being able to purchase goods that are featured in one of those videos just through a couple of presses at the screen, or even like to book a stay in a resort or a hotel that is featured in

a video. And as you would imagine it also as a Chinese app, has incredibly tight restrictions on the type of content that you can post there. Essentially, anything that would bring into question the authority or legitimacy of China's government is strictly forbidden. As it would later turn out that kind of stuff would sort of be forbidden on TikTok as well. We're going to have to come back to that in a bit. So in September twenty seventeen, byte Dance launches TikTok, which is a sister app to

dou Yin. It's the international version of du Yan and as such, it doesn't have all the features and it doesn't have all the restrictions that Duyin has. But the company had also become aware of Musical Lee and there was this clear market in America that was just waiting for exploitation, and Music Lee had already tapped into it. Right, it makes way more sense if we can get musically and we can get access to that, then we get access to those users and we don't have to build

up our audience from scratch. So Byte Dance, through its subsidiary Totial, makes an offer to acquire Musical Lee in November twenty seventeen. Now, the price tag was not made public, but estimates put it somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred million dollars to one billion smack a Rouse, which is a princely sum indeed. Now. At the time, Musical Lee released a statement that said the company would continue

to operate independently in the United States. While, in the words of a tech Crunch article, quote taking advantage of the distribution in tech that its new parent offers end quote, in reality, things would get a bit murkier Byte Dance intended to leverage the recommendation algorithm that it had developed for Totyoo, possibly by taking it from ninety nine Fong, although the company would dispute this and then incorporate this recommendation algorithm into the app Musical Lee in order to

supercharge it and to tap into that massive audience, and they decided that it made more sense to fold Musical Lee into the company's own efforts to launch TikTok. So byt Dance made the call to merge these apps together and to drop the Musical Lee name in the process and instead use the name TikTok. That was a pretty gutsy move in America, right because Musical Lee was young, but it was firmly established as a brand already, at least for its target audience, So making a change like

that was risky. And really you could say TikTok was kind of the product of three different apps. You had Musical Lie, you had Duyen, and you had the original

version of TikTok. The international variant of dou Yen by Dance would make great use of its recommendation algorithm on the new app, and this is the algorithm that the engineers who worked for ninety nine fond claims came from their work, which is a claim again that Bitedance continues to dispute as well as Susquehanna International Group they disputed as well, that again was found in those court records. So TikTok essentially becomes a thing officially in early twenty eighteen.

When we come back, we'll shift over to politics again for a bit, because unfortunately that's what this whole mess revolves around. But first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All Right, we're back. Let's plunge on into the political bit of this story, and that all

gets started in China itself. So back in the mid twenty tens, China started to pass laws that were meant to tighten up national security in various ways, and that included stuff like, you know, cybersecurity laws and cracking down on digital espionage, you know, that kind of stuff. And in twenty seventeen, China passed a law called the National

Intelligence Law of the People's Republic of China. At least that's the Western translation this law, and the law covers a lot of ground actually, but the bit that really sticks out, at least with regard to you know, the

TikTok mess would really be articles seven and ten. So Article seven states that all Chinese citizens and companies and organizations are to cooperate in intelligence gathering efforts, and that seems to mean that if the Chinese government wants information on something and a Chinese company has access to this information, that company is obligated to hand it over to the government. Article ten says that that goes for you too, two companies that are owned by Chinese interests but are actually

operating overseas. So essentially, the law says it doesn't matter if the business practices are outside of China or not. If the company that's conducting these matters ultimately is a Chinese company, then it is subject to this law, whether the business is happening inside China or someplace like the United States. Now, how and how frequently the Chinese government enforces this law isn't exactly clear, but the implication worries

a lot of folks internationally for good reason. You know, Chinese companies make a lot of stuff, and a lot of that stuff ends up in complex critical systems like

telecommunications infrastructure, for example. So for that reason, countries like the United States began to reconsider the wisdom of allowing telecommunications companies to use Chinese components in their various systems, out of fear that these companies could end up being complicit in spying on America on behalf of China, with or without that telecommunications companies, you know, knowledge or active cooperation, just by using these components that could be snooping on stuff.

So we in the States started to see calls for telecommunications companies to remove and replace these Chinese components with stuff from other companies, and that got underway. All right, So China passes a law that seems to say any Chinese company, et cetera, et cetera, has to comply with government requests to gather and share intelligence. Byte Dance is a Chinese company, and TikTok is a byte Dance subsidiary.

So our seed has been planted. Now let's pop on over to the old us of a. In twenty eighteen, the US government, led by President Donald Trump, got involved in a protracted trade war with China, and the issue at hand was really a trade deficit, and to go into the history of that would require a whole lot more time and expertise than I have, just do a bad job of describing it, but we can summarize it sloppily.

I might add by saying that for a few decades now, the United States imports from China drastically exceed its exports to China. We're bringing in more stuff from overseas than we are selling to overseas customers. So the worry is that ultimately this could have a huge negative impact on American economy and jobs, as well as national security. Whether that actually is the case is a lot more complicated, and I frankly would go dizzy trying to suss it

all out. So Trump's administration sought to reverse the trade deficit trends, and in order to do that, his administration

levied tariffs on Chinese imports. And again, going into whether or not this was actually a good idea or a bad idea would require a lot more time and knowledge than I possess, and I don't know ultimately if it was a good or bad idea, But I do know there were a lot of folks who are at least called experts in the field, who debated that topic amongst themselves, So I don't know that there's a clear answer anyway. As you can imagine, the Chinese government was not thrilled

about this move. The Chinese government responded by saying that Trump's actual goal wasn't to correct some sort of unbalanced trade playing field, but rather to directly attack China's economic growth. They're saying, oh, you're not trying to fix things. You just don't want us to succeed, so you're attacking us, which I'm pretty sure is not a really sincere argument, but that was the one that was put forth. Things got really complicated from an economic standpoint. But this provides

a pretty good backdrop for what would come next. So we get up to the summer of twenty twenty. This trade dispute has been going on for two years. President Trump says he wants to ban TikTok. He claimed he would do this by executive order, and in fact, he did issue an executive order to force byte Dance to either sell TikTok off or face a ban. In fact, for a while he was just saying he was going to ban it. That was it, and what no sale

was just going to be a ban. Byteedance approached Microsoft to potentially buy the US portion of the TikTok business to kind of spin that off and Microsoft could take control of it. But Trump initially rejected that move, but Microsoft would remain part of the conversation about a potential buyout for about another month. Like this was happening in August of twenty twenty, things would move really fast. By

September twenty twenty, things got real messy. So again Trump says he's going to ban the existence of TikTok in the United States. And the first time he said that was really toward the end of July twenty twenty, but then literally just a few days later, Trump reverses his stance and he says, you know what, I would allow

for the sale of TikTok to an American company. Maybe we don't ban the app, maybe we do allow it to get sold as long as it's to an American company, And he establishes a deadline of September fifteenth, twenty twenty, and that if a suitable buyer did not emerge by that point, he would shut TikTok down with this ban by executive order. Now why he wanted to ban TikTok, that's a lot harder to say, because it's hard to parse what he was trying to convey. He's difficult to

understand at points. So generally speaking, it seemed that Trump believed that although TikTok belonged to a Chinese company, it was operating in the United States and that was the issue, not from a national security point of view. In fact, at one point he said, quote, it's a great asset, but it's not a great asset in the United States unless they have approval in the United States end quote.

I don't know what that means. I do not know what he was trying to communicate at this point, but he did seem to feel that the United States was owed some money for the success of TikTok, right like, based on what I've read and what I've watched that was right around that time period. His argument largely boiled down to, hey, Americans are what pushed TikTok to incredible success, so America deserves some of that cheddar Now, I don't

really think that argument holds much water. You know. That's like saying to someone that because they were so successful in the company, the company deserves all the credit. I don't think that really makes sense, but that is what I gathered from the material. I mean, that's based upon what Trump himself was saying. So again, this was not being conveyed in the context of national security. It was being conveyed and they got big, So I want the money.

Microsoft and Oracle were both in talks to acquire the US based operations of TikTok from Byteedance, and for a while it really did look like something along those lines was going to happen. But then TikTok filed some legal challenges to this executive orders. Arguments included an accusation that Trump's administration failed to produce any evidence that TikTok is

actually a threat to national security. They're saying like, yeah, you're saying that the conditions exist for this to be a threat to national security, but you failed to point at any actual evidence that it's happening. So just because

something could happen doesn't mean that you have to ban it. Right, Like, any one of you out there could get in your car and purposefully drive into crowds of people, but that doesn't mean the government has the right to come in and say, you know what, we revoked your driver's license because you could do this. Even though you haven't done it. That's the same sort of thing. Tytuk was saying, Hey, you can't ban us on the basis of a threat to national security if you can't prove that we're a

threat to national security. And TikTok would also bring up other arguments, saying that this was an unconstitutional move in the first place, that it violated First and Fifth Amendment rights, and the ban would get moved moved back, like the deadline would be moved back a couple of times throughout this, and TikTok successfully petitioned a court for an injunction against the order to prevent the ban in late September twenty twenty,

so everything was on hold. Then we get to early November twenty twenty, where the US held its previous election and President Trump lost that election, a matter of which there was some debate. Anyway, this obviously redirected political momentum at this point. Right the president who would issued this executive order is no longer going to be president after January twenty, twenty twenty one, so a lot of the

pressure that had been on TikTok was alleviated. Was now the guy who had made the order wasn't going to be in charge anymore. Biden would ultimately revoke that executive order with an executive order of his own that happened in the summer of twenty twenty one, but he did call for an investigation into TikTok to actually determine if, in fact there were any threats to national security present.

And things kind of quieted down for at least a couple of months, right like, there was this investigation that was going to go on, but otherwise things kind of calmed down. But then we get to the end of twenty twenty one. That's when we got the Facebook whistleblower event, where documents from within Facebook now Meta indicated that a lot of shady stuff was going on at a corporate level, and it generally raised concerns about social platforms across the spectrum,

which included TikTok. So leaders were starting to raise some pretty tough questions about how these companies collect, use, and protect or failed to protect user information, and the specter of potential Chinese surveillance resurfaced. Now Over at TikTok, efforts were underway to distance the company from byteedance, at least on surface appearances. So those efforts got the nickname Project Texas.

The whole idea was that TikTok's US operations would flow through servers that were owned and operated by Oracle, and Oracle's an American company that's based in Texas, thus the nickname Project Texas. This project had its roots in the days when Oracle was in consideration to acquire TikTok's US operations from byte Dance. Now that never happened, but the move to silo TikTok's US data from the rest of international operations did continue, and the effort really ramped up

in twenty twenty two. However, subsequent reporting by Fortune revealed that several former TikTok employees claimed the efforts were quote unquote largely cosmetic. One former data scientist at TikTok named Evan Turner said that TikTok regularly received direction from byte Dance while outwardly posing as being largely independent of their

parent company. So to outward appearances, they were saying, no, we're completely distinct, we are US based and US operated, but then behind the scenes, Bite Dance was very much pulling the strings. Now. Turner claimed that while he he regularly had to send reports to byte Dance, and that these reports included these spreadsheets that had tons of American user data on them, primarily at least apparently in an effort to refine the recommendation algorithm to drive better engagement. So,

you know, that's not great. It's not great to hear that, but it's not quite a national security threat, right if that's in fact, all that was going on was that this was an effort for engineers back at byte Dance to make even more addictive recommendation algorithms. That's not the same thing as collecting information for the purposes of surveillance. But you know, we don't know if that's all that was going on. Actually, we don't even know if that

was going on. That's been under dispute as well. TikTok's CEO a man named Shaozi Chu who originates from Singapore, which is not, despite what some American politicians appeared to believe, part of China. He has appeared before Congress and claimed that TikTok is as American as apple Pie, which I think is more Canadian than American, but whatever, And he has maintained that the company TikTok does not work closely with byte Dance, so there's definitely conflicting information going on here.

He previously served as chief financial officer for a byte Dance, so that also raises concerns, right, like, yeah, he's from Singapore, he's not a Chinese citizen, but he was also the CFO for byte Dance, a Chinese company that does reserve a seat on its board for a member of the Chinese Communist Party. That in itself is not unusual for big companies in China. So the fear is that perhaps he's hiding the real relationship between the parent company and

the subsidiary. In fact, you know, I mentioned earlier that law about intelligence in China, and I mentioned that it has sections that say, part of the responsibility is that China these organizations have to gather intelligence, whether they are domestic or foreign in operation, but they also are supposed to do so in secret. They're not supposed to admit

or reveal that that's in fact happening. So you could make the argument that, well, of course, he says TikTok doesn't gather information on behalf of byte Edance because he can't because of the nature of the Chinese company, and that there's this law that says he cannot say that even though he himself is not a Chinese citizen, he's the CEO of a company that is owned by a Chinese company. So it gets very complicated. But that's not

exactly hard evidence of wrongdoing, right. You can't say for sure that because this is you know, potentially possible, that it's really you know, plausible, or that really is happening.

And TikTok representatives have said that the various allegations that were made by former employees that were reported on in Fortune all related to times that itsed before Project Texas was fully operational, and that those complaints are no longer relevant, that none of that actually applies to the TikTok of today. So you've got that too. All right, We're gonna have

to take another quick break when we come back. I've got a lot more to say about the things that escalated and eventually led to this legislation that could potentially ban TikTok, But first let's take another quick break. Okay, we're back. So in late twenty twenty two, we had

another scandal involving TikTok and Byte Dance. Forbes published a piece that said that Byte Dance had used TikTok to spy on Forbes' journalists, and that Byte Dance essentially had this list of journalists who were covering byte Dance, and they decided to use TikTok to figure out where these

journalists had been going. They wanted to identify their IP addresses and then track these journalists, and this was supposedly in order to figure out who the journalists were meeting with within Byte Dance to find the source of internal leaks from within the company, and they were using TikTok as the data gathering tool to do this, which is kind of like the nightmare scenario. Right here we have the smoking gun of byte Dance using access of TikTok

to track people, including American citizens. So Forbes publishes these claims and Byte Dance responds by firing or forcing to resign the people who were connected to the tracking efforts within the company. So, like the guy who supposedly oversaw

the efforts and his direct boss, they left the company. Now, whether this was an indication that the decision to track journalists was actually localized to a lower spot on the corporate higher and thus like executive level you know, c suite level leaders had no knowledge of this project, or if this was like a cover up where you know, the people were fired in order to preserve plausible deniability, I don't know, but Byte Dance's leadership was essentially saying

this was unacceptable. We didn't approve this. You know, the executive leadership did not approve this. This was done by lower level management. We're dealing with it internally to make sure it never happens again. But whether that was sincere or not, it certainly did not win byte Dance or TikTok any confidence points in the United States. Now, we started to see movement in the US as various government agencies and college campuses and some other organizations began to

ban TikTok to some extent. So with government agencies, the usual move was to forbid staff from installing TikTok on government owned devices, but employees could still have TikTok on their personal devices. Personally, I think this is entirely reasonable. I think it's the same as if you get a company issued laptop and they say, hey, don't go installing Stardu Valley on this thing, because that's not what this is for. And I'm like, I think that's totally reasonable.

It's not your computer. It belongs to the corporation or, in the case I'm talking about here, to the state or federal government, and therefore they do have some authority over what should and should not be installed on that over at college campuses, the general approach to banning TikTok was to block TikTok traffic across college servers. So you could still access TikTok through cellular data or through some other Wi Fi network, You just couldn't do it through

college operated Wi Fi. So there were, you know, limits to these bans. In May twenty twenty three, the state of Montana became the first in the United States to

ban TikTok. The state government argued that TikTok represented a threat to the private data and security of Montana's citizens, and that the Chinese government in general was a huge threat to national security, and the law stated that app stores that would continue to offer TikTok to Montana citizens could face a fine of up to ten thousand dollars per day of violations. The law was due to take

effect on January one, twenty twenty four. However, in November twenty twenty three, a federal judge blocked the law, citing concerns that Montana could be violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and the judge argued that it was not the state of Montana's responsibility to determine matters of national security. That is a federal concern, not a state level concern, and that further, the move in Montana appeared to have a greater connection to xenophobia than a legitimate threat.

There was no evidence, again shown that TikTok actually did represent a threat, just this kind of overall vague glegation. The First Amendment argument is one that is likely to come up again, you know, assuming that Biden actually does sign this into law, which I believe he will. I mean, he said he would as soon as it was announced that it had passed the Senate. He said he would sign it into law today. So again, by the time

you hear this, that might already be the case. The American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, maintains that a ban on TikTok amounts to a violation of the First Amendment. So I just can't imagine a world in which TikTok, you know, kind of rolls over and says, oh, well, we had a good run. That's not going to happen. I mean, obviously there's going to be a fight on this to force further decisions among the judicial branch about

whether or not this law is constitutional. Anyway, the political move to ban TikTok grew in momentum in the back half of twenty twenty three and into twenty twenty four.

The House of Representatives passed a bill back in March that was to force byte Dance to divest itself of TikTok the US operations of TikTok within six months or face a national ban, which would essentially amount to the United States government for seeing app stores and communications networks from allowing TikTok traffic in the US kind of a grander scale of what we're seeing on college campuses, just

going across the entire nation. That would not only stop new downloads of the app, but also all TikTok transmissions in general in the US. Though I suppose you could use a VPN and connect to another country, like a server in another country to get around some of that, but it's a bit of a hassle, and I don't know what that would do to your recommendation algorithm. Honestly, I don't know if it varies from country to country.

But anyway, at the time when the House first passed this bill, I thought that the US Senate would be unlikely to follow suit. The deadline meant that a rapidly approaching ban would be really big news at the same time as the election cycle, and a TikTok ban is really an unpopular move among a significant population of US citizens. You know, folks who could potentially vote, assuming that they're eighteen or older, or not vote, like just choose not

to vote because they're ticked off. And I think a lot of senators worried that supporting a bill that would be you know, coming into effect right around that time, would be political suicide with elections coming up this coming November. But then US Senator Maria Cantwell proposed that the House amend its approach and extend the deadline to one year

instead of six months. Now. The reason given was that one year is a more reasonable timeline for byte Dance to secure a buyer for the company, which is true. I mean, six months is not much time, but some senics were suggesting that another reason for this change would be it pushes the effects of the bill out beyond the election cycle. Whatever the justification, the US House voted to extend that deadline, and then the House lumped the TikTok bill in with a bunch of other measures that

were meant to provide aid to Ukraine and Israel. The bundle of bills then passed to the Senate. The Senate voted in favor of them, seventy nine in favor, eighteen opposed, and by said he would sign the bill into law today and the clock started ticking. So some other things we do need to consider before we wrap up here.

While much of the rhetoric around TikTok has centered on this threat to national security from an intelligence gathering perspective, you know, the idea that TikTok could be used to spy on America, there's another component that also deserves consideration,

and that's the foreign control over domestic broadcast operations. So if you go all the way back to nineteen thirty four, the United States has maintained that it's just not a good idea to allow a foreign government or a foreign government's representative, like a foreign owned company to have ownership of broadcast businesses within the United States. Now, this all

started with radio licenses. The Communications Act of nineteen thirty four, Section three ten A prohibits such a thing with foreign governments or its agents and radio licenses. Now, the concern is that a foreign controlled communications entity could spread propaganda to the US public, potentially threatening national security in the process.

And so another aspect of this ban on TikTok resides in the company's potential role as a means to spread messages that benefit China's goals, whether that's to downplay China's own involvement in international affairs or to promote certain narratives

that align with China's own strategies. It can include disrupting US elections by attempting to either push people to support specific people whom China has deemed as being of greater benefit to China itself, or just discouraging people from participating in the democratic process at all. It could include shaping public opinion on matters ranging from trade to international conflicts, including stuff that's going on right now, like between Israel

and Palestine. And you know, I'm sure a lot of y'all out there are aware that China is very much using social platforms to do this kind of thing, like that's not under dispute. It is happening. But here's the deal. China's doing this on platform that include ones that China

does not have any control over. Agents working on behalf of China, either with or without the nation's direct support, have used platforms like x formerly known as Twitter, as well as Facebook and YouTube and others to spread this kind of messaging. And China does not have ownership in these companies, but they're still leveraging them to achieve that goal.

So one could argue that whether China has a stake in TikTok or not ultimately is immaterial because the problem exists either way, and that problem is much larger than who ultimately owns TikTok, which brings us to the whole issue of the US's overall terrible lack of data protection and privacy laws. But that's a matter for another episode. However, we do have to acknowledge that there has been evidence of China interfering with how TikTok promotes and shares videos

relating to sensitive topics in China. Late last year, the Network Contagion Research Institute published to report that claimed that they analyzed hashtag ratios on TikTok quote across topics sensitive to the Chinese government end quote and compare them with ones from other social platforms, and they said that they found anomalies that could mean quote TikTok systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned

with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese government end quote. So according to this research, it is possible that TikTok is a more active tool for China to spread messaging internationally or to suppress messages that it deems sensitive. And while China can leverage other platforms to try and spread messages, it doesn't have that level of control on other platforms beyond TikTok. So you could say that in that regard specifically, this is a very China centered problem.

Now we have to go back to jeff yas So back in twenty twenty, Donald's Trump calls for a ban on TikTok, and his reasons for doing so are at best muddled, But he's really firm on the fact that he is gosh darn it gunna ban TikTok. But the band gets postponed due to legal challenges, and Trump gets voted out and the matter kind of fizzles. Now, as we have this new ban that's one backed by Congress and two supported by Joe Biden, Trump has spoken out against the ban. So why does he oppose a ban

now when he was calling for one four years ago. Well, his reasons for opposing the ban are I would argue, equally as muddled as his reasons calling for one in the first place. Generally, he seems to say we shouldn't ban TikTok because a lot of people happen to like it. And I mean that's true, there are a lot of people who like TikTok, But I don't know that that's the argument you make to oppose a ban, but it's the one that he offered. Now he has associated this

ban with Joe Biden. Like he's not so much saying why he thinks the band's a bad idea, he's more we are concentrating on saying Biden is the one banning TikTok. So really it seems to be a political maneuver. You know, TikTok is popular with a lot of people. Biden supports the legislation calling for the ban. So Trump wants to win the election in November, so you make sure your opponent is associated with a really unpopular bill. Never mind if you yourself initially called for the very same thing

four years ago and did so by executive order. But another potential reason for Trump's change of heart goes back to Jeff Yas. So Jeff Yas is a mega donor to conservative campaigns. In fact, he's like the biggest donor to GOP campaigns in the United States, and he met with Trump back in March of this year. So the two people meet, the biggest donor to conservative campaigns in the United States and the presidential nominee for the GOP.

At this point, Trump's tune regarding TikTok changes. Now. I'm not saying Trump changed his approach simply cause a guy with exceedingly deep pockets, a guy whose wealth is heavily dependent upon byte dance, and by extension, TikTok told Trump that Trump needs to oppose the ban if he wants access to some of that sweet, sweet money. I'm not saying that happened. I'm just saying I wouldn't be at

all surprised if this is a big part of it. Trump, as you might know, definitely needs the cash because it is way easier to spend other people's money when you owe courts hundreds of millions of dollars than it is to spend your own money. But yeah, it seems that a conservative billionaire who has most of his wealth tied up with a Chinese company is spending a lot of time, effort, and yes, money to fight off a threat to his fortune, and that the beneficiaries of his donations are eager to

play a part in that. So it all comes down to money, and that's kind of where we're at now. You might wonder what's my opinion on the whole thing, in case it's not obvious, Well, I don't like TikTok, but I also so don't necessarily think TikTok represents the really huge problem that other people do or rather to clarify, I think TikTok is a problem, but it's a subset. It's a smaller problem in a much much larger bubble that so far has gone largely unaddressed in the United States.

That unless leaders take a look at the bigger picture of data privacy and security and they make some real changes. TikTok's ownership or even TikTok's existence is kind of not important, at least not from a national security level, because I don't really think there's much that TikTok could do that other platforms aren't already doing as well, like American platforms, and I mean even like American platforms doing things that

benefit China. So whether that's gathering bookoos of information on every single user, as well as people those users interact with, whether they're on the platform or not, to the spread of propaganda and misinformation, into designing ways to ca attention and to hold it potentially to the detriment of users and society in general. All that is happening whether you snuff out TikTok or you allow it to continue. So killing TikTok doesn't fix the problem. It's like putting a

little band aid on a big, old, gaping wound. Now. I'm also not a big fan of the politics around this. That might surprise you considering how much time I spent on it, but I'm not. I find the whole politics thing incredibly distracting because to me, it feels like theater. It feels like it's a show that's being put on

and it's focusing on an easy target. Also, a lot of the rhetoric around this starts to feel really xenophobic, Like, you know, there are legitimate reasons to worry about China's influence. There's no denying that there are good reasons to worry

about that. However, a lot of the messaging, a lot of the speeches, a lot of the conversations that we've seen, like the interrogations in Congress when you've got TikTok's CEO up there, they come across less about legitimate concerns about China and more, you know, kind of racist, and you know there's there's obviously fuzzy ground here. Like again, there are legitimate concerns, but the way they're being communicated doesn't

come across as sincere. And then you start to worry that this is like watching a pro wrestling show where the face is getting the crowd to chant usa usa usa against a foreign character. Heel. It's not a good look. So again, the whole thing is a mess, and it's not ending here. We've got the legal challenges to look forward to, so to speak, and the outcome from that is far from certain, so I'm sure we will revisit

this to find out. You know, will the US ban TikTok, will TikTok be forced to be spun off and sold to American company, or will the whole thing get dismissed on constitutional grounds, or will something else entirely happen. I don't know. I'm not going to make any predictions at this point because the last one I made was that the Senate was not to support this, and I was totals wrong about that. So we're dropping it off here.

But I wanted to give the update and give the context and the understanding of all the things that are going on, because it is a complicated subject. I hope all of you out there are well. I hope you are staying sane in this crazy world of ours, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.