Are we about to lose TikTok? Like actually tho?

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

TikTok could begin shutting down in the U.S. as soon as January 19 of next year. But the app is not going down without a fight. The company is asking a panel of federal judges to block the law in a high-profile case that pits free speech versus national security. Today on the show, how TikTok got to this point and what we can expect from the app's last ditch effort to stay alive in the U.S.

Related episodes:
Tick tock for TikTok? (Apple / Spotify)
Is Project Texas enough to save TikTok? (Apple / Spotify)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR. If the federal government has its way, the social video app Tic-Toc could be banned in the US as early as January 19th.
0:20.0	And if that happened, it would disrupt what's become a favorite time killer for millions of Americans.
0:26.0	Swiping on video, after video, after video, after video, after video. But Tik-Tok is not about to just let this happen. It's suing
0:39.6	to block this law saying it violates its First Amendment rights.
0:45.0	This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma.
0:48.0	Today in the show, how did Tik-Tok get to this point?
0:50.0	And what can we expect from the company's last ditch effort at survival.
0:55.0	To learn more, we speak to NPR's a tech reporter here at NPR covering technology in Silicon Valley.
1:15.2	I spend a couple hours of my life every day on Tik-Toc so I'm happy to talk about it for this
1:22.3	podcast episode or for like 10 hours.
1:24.8	So just to start us off, Tik-Tok is this app that we've established a lot of people love and on a surface level at least you could say
1:35.2	like it seems relatively innocent how do we get to the point where the government
1:39.4	wants to ban it well it all started in in the Hellseon days of the Trump administration and the
1:47.4	White House under Trump saw Tik-Tok as a national security threat because it's
1:52.4	corporate par of company
1:53.8	Bight Dance is based in China and because of the laws in China it was
1:58.7	theoretically possible then and remains so now that China could try to exert influence vis-à-vis bite dance
2:05.6	to change the opinions of Americans by fiddling with Tik-toc's algorithms, right?
2:12.0	The second bucket of concerns has to do with data security.
2:15.5	We're worried, well 170 million Americans, that's more than half of the country, do we
2:19.2	really want that being vulnerable potentially for China to data mine.
2:23.2	Trump tried to put it out of business
	...

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