TikTok, WeChat and Trump
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's been a wild few weeks with President Trump threatening to shut WeChat and TikTok out of the U.S. market and rip them out of the app stores. There have been lawsuits, a preliminary injunction—and a sudden deal to purchase TikTok and moot the issue out. To chew it all over, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare co-founder Bobby Chesney, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, and Jordan Schneider, the voice behind the podcast ChinaTalk. They talked about how we got here, whether the threat from these companies is real or whether this is more Trump nonsense, and whether the deal to save TikTok will actually work.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.4 | Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair no bull, |
| 0:27.3 | and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.5 | A quick word for listeners. |
| 0:32.5 | We taped this podcast on Friday afternoon, which means that the conversation took place |
| 0:36.8 | before the big TikTok news of Sunday night, September 27th. |
| 0:41.6 | On Sunday evening, Judge Carl Nichols in the US District Court for the District of |
| 0:45.5 | Columbia issued a preliminary injunction against the implementation of President Trump's |
| 0:50.6 | executive order to ban the app from US AppStores. |
| 0:53.9 | The ban was set to take effect midnight on Sunday night. |
| 0:57.6 | And this order puts a temporary halt on that ban. |
| 1:01.2 | Today's conversation is still more than worth a listen, but we did want to give listeners |
| 1:04.7 | a quick heads up before the main event. |
| 1:13.0 | It's been a game of chicken over the past couple of weeks, where the Trump administration |
| 1:17.1 | has sort of laid down the law, put the squeeze on TikTok and bite dance, and driven them |
| 1:23.1 | into this set of corporate transactions. |
| 1:27.2 | And China then says, all right, well, we can play that game too. |
| 1:30.1 | And they intervene in a way that impacts the algorithm in particular. |
| 1:34.3 | And the deal reflects an attempt to try to thread the needle between these seemingly incompatible |
| 1:39.6 | physicians. |
... |
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