Inside TikTok's extraordinary almost-deal with the U.S.
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
TikTok offered the Biden administration a kill switch. Today on “Post Reports,” why the U.S. government declined.
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In 2022, TikTok offered the U.S. government an extraordinary deal.
The social media app – owned by a Chinese company – said it would let federal officials pick its U.S. board of directors, would give the government veto power over each new hire and would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department to monitor its source code.
The Biden administration, however, went its own way.
Today on “Post Reports,” tech reporter Drew Harwell takes host Elahe Izadi behind the scenes of the U.S. government’s decision to pass on TikTok’s proposal.
Today’s show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and mixed by Sean Carter.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Martin. So by now you have heard about the great subscription deal that we've been offering. |
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| 0:36.4 | supporter of the work that we do here at the post and we're so grateful. Okay here's |
| 0:41.3 | the show. Tic-Toc thought it had made a deal that was too good for the U.S. government to pass up. |
| 0:48.0 | Tic-Toc would allow the American government to pick who it wanted to sit on its U.S. Board of Directors. |
| 0:55.3 | It would allow U.S. officials to veto new hires. |
| 0:58.5 | An American company could monitor its source code. |
| 1:01.7 | There was even talk about giving the US a kill switch, meaning if American |
| 1:05.6 | officials felt that Tik-Tok was a threat, they could shut it all down. This extraordinary |
| 1:11.4 | proposal was made by Tik-Toc two years ago, but the Biden administration |
| 1:17.2 | didn't like the deal. They turned it down. And instead, this past April, President Biden signed a law targeting Tik-Tok, which we've discussed on the show before. |
| 1:27.0 | That law will force the app's Chinese parent company to either sell Tik-Tok or face a ban in the US. |
| 1:35.0 | And so new details are coming out all the time about the long negotiation process that predated |
| 1:40.5 | this law and what Tik-Tok was promising the government in hopes of staying alive |
| 1:46.3 | in the US. |
| 1:47.8 | The fate of Tik-Tok has been up in the air for months. |
| 2:01.2 | So Tik-Tok sued the Department of Justice and is fighting that law on First Amendment grounds saying it's totally unconstitutional for the government to suppress a speech platform. Drew Harwell is a tech reporter at the post and he has had a lot of questions about the case filed last month by Tik-Toc and its parent company, |
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