BONUS: TikTok’s Uncertain Future with Jacob Ward

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve seen that this week the House passed a bill designed to force the sale of TikTok from its Chinese parent company. If you’re confused about the ins and outs of this issue, we did an extensive exploration of it with NBC News technology correspondent Jacob Ward last year. So, we thought it would be good to re-share this TikTok 101. This conversation was originally recorded in April 2023.    From the original description:  TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world, and now has over a billion users worldwide. But its future in the United States remains in limbo. The Biden administration, citing national security concerns, has demanded that the Chinese-owned company be sold, or face a federal ban. Montana lawmakers have already passed legislation banning the platform on personal devices, sending the bill to the governor. A lot of questions remain about the feasibility of statewide and federal bans, and why, exactly, do U.S. policymakers view this platform, that started as a lip syncing app, as such a threat? Jacob Ward is the NBC News technology correspondent and is author of “In The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back.” He joins WITHpod to discuss what’s driven the app’s exponential growth, the company’s lack of transparency in the past, the case for and against it, what could be ahead on the regulatory front and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there with pod listeners. If you've been following the news you've seen this week
0:10.9	the House of Representative passed a bill designed to force the sale of
0:15.1	Tik-Tok from its Chinese parent company, Bite Dance. And if you're confused about the ins and outs of this
0:21.5	issue, it turns out that we did an extensive explanation of it with
0:25.5	NBC News technology correspondent Jacob Ward last year so we just thought it would be a good idea
0:30.4	to re-share this kind of Tik-Tok 101 conversation to those of you who are reading the news this
0:36.1	week and kind of asking a lot of questions.
0:38.1	I thought it was really helpful for understanding what's going on now.
0:42.2	Here's our With-Pod episode about Tic TOC's uncertain future.
0:45.0	They enjoy the particular protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
0:51.0	in which they literally are considered just this neutral platform.
0:54.6	They are not legally responsible for the things that we post or do on there.
0:58.9	There's a bunch of legal challenges to that
1:05.0	coming up, but they enjoy a open road we have rarely seen. The gun industry is one of the only others I can think of that enjoys anything like
1:09.0	the special protections of this industry does.
1:18.0	Hello and welcome to Wises happening with me, your host Chris Hayes. I spend too much time on my phone and on social media as I would hazard many people
1:31.9	listening as podcast do.
1:33.6	And I have been using Twitter less,
1:36.6	I think, for fairly obvious reasons
1:38.1	because it's become more of a sort of insufferable cesspool.
1:41.8	But rather than cutting down my time on social media, I've replaced the time that I spent on
1:47.8	Twitter often with scrolling through an app called Tik-Toc. You've probably heard of TikTok. I'd actually be curious, you should write into us at with pod at gmail.com or tweet us to the hashtag with pod. Curious how many listeners this program use TikTok. I sort of was skeptical or felt like, oh, it's one of those things for young people and I'm not a young person so it's not for me and I'm writing this book as I've mentioned before about attention and so tick talk seems sort of an important thing to kind of
	...

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