Is Project Texas enough to save TikTok?

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Americans love TikTok – 100 million of them and counting. So why are politicians at the federal, state and local levels on both sides of the aisle calling for the China-owned social media app to be banned? We peer behind the rhetoric to see if there's anything to the labeling of TikTok as a national security threat. And we hear about the extraordinary plan the company has devised to stave off extinction in the U.S.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.0	Everybody has their favorite way of wasting time online.
0:15.6	As a tech reporter, I'm always curious.
0:17.1	Where do you waste the most time?
0:18.3	I actually, I like quit Facebook and Instagram like two years ago.
0:22.7	So I really don't have any social media that I regularly use.
0:26.3	What do you do like read books?
0:27.3	Are you an alien?
0:28.3	I understand.
0:29.3	I watch TV, I play some video games.
0:32.3	That by the way is a NPR's tech reporter, Bobby Allen.
0:35.5	And his favorite way of wasting time online is TikTok.
0:38.6	I was just on TikTok before this interview and I was fed a really hilarious, this cat
0:44.1	going up an escalator the wrong way.
0:46.5	I mean, it's just an endless feat of really, really entertaining hilarious content.
0:50.4	Yeah.
0:51.4	You know who else finds TikTok entertaining slash hilarious?
0:54.8	More than 100 million other people just in the US.
0:58.3	We're talking a third of Americans.
1:01.0	And so if all these people are really into TikTok, why is it that government officials
1:06.0	on both sides of the aisle are saying that TikTok should be banned?
1:09.9	This morning, Senator Bennett sent a letter to the CEOs of Apple and Elfabet requesting
	...

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