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

🗓️ 2 May 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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	They enjoy the particular protections of Section 230 of the Communications DCC Act, in which
0:06.6	they literally are considered just this neutral platform.
0:09.6	They are not legally responsible for the things that we post or do on there.
0:14.0	There's a bunch of legal challenges to that coming up, but they enjoy a open road we
0:19.2	have rarely seen.
0:20.7	The gun industry is one of the only others I can think of that enjoys anything like the
0:24.8	special protections that this industry does.
0:31.0	Hello and welcome to Wise is Happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.
0:40.6	I spend too much time on my phone and on social media as I would hazard many people listening
0:47.1	as podcasts do.
0:48.9	And I have been using Twitter less, I think, for fairly obvious reasons, because it's
0:53.3	become more of a sort of insufferable cesspool.
0:56.9	But rather than cutting down my time on social media, I've replaced the time that I spend
1:02.6	on Twitter often with scrolling through an app called TikTok.
1:07.0	You've probably heard of TikTok.
1:08.2	I'd actually be curious.
1:09.7	You should write into us at withpod.gmail.com or tweet us to the hashtag with pod.
1:13.6	Curious how many listeners this program used TikTok?
1:16.1	I sort of was skeptical or felt like, oh, it's one of those things for young people,
1:19.9	and I'm not a young person, so it's not for me.
1:23.6	I'm writing this book, as I've mentioned before, about attention.
1:26.0	And so TikTok seems sort of an important thing to kind of learn my way around.
	...

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