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.
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.
As the fervor among Democrats surrounding her still-new presidential campaign continues, Vice President Kamala Harris has now joined TikTok.
“I’ve heard that recently I’ve been on the For You page, so I thought I would get on here myself,” she says in the clip.
Harris has previously expressed national security concerns about TikTok parent company ByteDance, but also said the Biden administration has “no intention to ban TikTok.”
Bullying works: after TikTok users complained about Chipotle’s inconsistent portion sizes, the company announced this week it is “doubling down” on training to ensure customers get “correct and generous portions.” It will cost the company $50 million, executives told analysts.
The EU’s General Court has ruled that TikTok parent company ByteDance meets the required user threshold to be a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act.
TikTok has claimed it wasn’t valuable enough, and failed to obtain interim measures to avoid having to comply with DMA rules while it appealed the designation. The decision can still be appealed to the European Court of Justice.
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.
Casey Newton shines a light on the increasingly common social media scam that primarily targets teen boys in his most recent Platformer newsletter:
But when a terrifying scam comes along that has led to at least 20 confirmed deaths in the past two years, a whole stack of investigations can’t seem to get a conversation going. [...] Perhaps the surgeon general, instead of his new ham-fisted campaign against every risk that social media presents, could warn parents about this one.
[Platformer]
TikTok, like other social platforms, has become part of the political fabric: politicians campaign on TikTok and groups attempt to spread propaganda via influence campaigns.
In the lead up to the UK general election, TikTok is surfacing videos from journalists and fact checkers. It’s also sharing tips for spotting fake news and definitions for things like disinformation.
This time from the Department of Justice, after the Federal Trade Commission said it was referring a complaint to the agency based on an investigation involving a children’s privacy law. The FTC said it doesn’t usually make this kind of referral public, but believed it in the public interest. TikTok said it “strongly disagree[s]” with the allegations and said many of them are outdated.
[Federal Trade Commission]
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.
The former President, who once attempted to ban the platform, posted his first video to it yesterday under his usual handle of @realdonaldtrump.
As Politico notes, Trump reversed his stance earlier this year after momentum behind the ban abruptly rekindled and President Biden signed it into law.
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]
Creators can edit and manage content, access post analytics, and view their monetization in the TikTok Studio app, the company announced today. A web version of the platform is already live.
According to current employees who spoke to The Information after being told of the cuts:
“The layoff will affect a large percentage of the roughly 1,000 people working in TikTok’s global user operations, content and marketing.”
TikTok cut about 60 workers from its sales and advertising teams back in January.
[The Information]
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.