(Source)

So my two cents that no one asked for is that a TikTok ban is actually Not A Good Thing. A lot of small businesses and artists (including my own band) rely on TikTok for marketing and growing an audience. TikTok is also a source of community for people from marginalized groups who might not feel safe expressing themselves in real life, especially younger folks. Not to mention the amount of real-time news we get that other sites suppress, such as the raw footage from Gaza or people organizing healthcare protests.

Does TikTok have issues specific to its platform? Undeniably. It's a digital meth house where I got flagged for the using the fuck word in a lyric. But when you find yourself dealing with a meth house, you don't take a wrecking ball to it and evict the residents. Banning Tiktok won't stop the widespread trends that other social media sites have now adopted. We still have short-form content. We still have algorithms tailoring our feed for the maximum dopamine rush while bombarding us with ads. Companies are still harvesting and selling our data. The worst people you can think of still have a Wi-Fi connection.

The TikTok ban was meant to pull the app and all other apps under the same parent company of ByteDance from major appstores. It was never meant to shut it down entirely, just stop further distribution of it. You cannot download TikTok or CapCut or Lemon8 or ANY of the apps made by ByteDance anymore, because the BAN IS STILL IN PLACE.

The shutdown [which started earlier than the initial ban was supposed to take place, iirc] was NOT supposed to happen. It was performative. And judging by those notifications crediting Trump for "lifting the ban" [aka ceasing a shutdown that was never supposed to happen in the first place], I'm betting money that it was nothing but propaganda to get us to stop hating on him and make us stop caring about the ban.

Low and behold, TikTok users may beat him to it as they start using the Chinese app RedNote, using online translators to interact (in Chinese) and are leaving video messages for their personal “Chinese spies.” This app is currently the 3rd most downloaded in the US iTunes Store.

If the US Congress can be circumvented by an army of 17 year olds playing on their phones…guessing they don’t have the power they thought they had. Maybe Congress should learn what the internet and apps actually are before trying to pass laws about them.

They can switch to another app, and another, and on and on.

Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

You’re forgiven for forgetting about TikTok for the last couple of days, what with the horrorshow avalanche of executive orders and gleeful deployment of Nazi salutes (plural!) from the world’s richest man. Nonetheless, TikTok is ostensibly banned in the United States as Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly voted only nine months ago to outlaw the app unless its parent company, ByteDance, agreed to sell it. The US Supreme Court even upheld the law just last week. However, TikTok lives, thanks to the whims of Donald Trump, the same person who, in August 2020, issued an executive order giving ByteDance 45 days to sell the app or see it banned. Trump has been extremely transparent that he flip-flopped on TikTok because the app helped him win the election last year, in part because it became a hotbed for criticism of Biden’s support for Israel. “We won young people and I think that's a big credit to TikTok,” Trump told Newsmax earlier this month (even though he in fact lost the youth vote). “So I'm not opposed to TikTok ... I had a very good experience with TikTok." Lost in the current discourse about TikTok is an important conversation about whether it violates the First Amendment to ban a social media app based on national security concerns about its Chinese-owned parent company. Also lost is a debate about whether it’s fair to single out TikTok over worries about user privacy, data harvesting, and manipulative algorithms when such issues are common to all social media platforms. There’s also a discussion to be had about whether singling out TikTok is racist — though there’s a good argument it is. Instead, what’s happening here is the creeping oligarchy of companies and capital aligning around an authoritarian president, with everyone fully aware that sucking up to Trump personally, ideally along with staggering sums of cash, is the only way to evade scrutiny.

[...]

The art of the deal

To be scrupulously fair to Trump, he isn’t the only person who reversed course on TikTok. Once it was clear that the public opposed the ban and that the Supreme Court might not step in to save legislators from themselves, the Biden administration spent last week trying to figure out how to keep TikTok alive. Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Markey introduced legislation to delay by 270 days the initial January 19 deadline for TikTok to be sold, despite having voted for the ban in the first place. The problem these efforts faced, however, is that TikTok wasn’t interested in working with the Biden administration or Senate Democrats to fix the problem. And why would they be, when Democrats are hobbled by a persistent inclination to actually follow laws rather than treat everything as an episode of The Apprentice, where flattering Trump as a master dealmaker is all that matters?

It’s exactly the latter approach that TikTok took. The ban required Google and Apple to remove it from their app stores or face steep fines for each user who downloaded the app. What it did not do, however, was penalize anyone who already had the app on their phone or accessed TikTok on the web. So the real financial peril would initially fall on Google and Apple if they kept the app available. After the Supreme Court decision last week, the Biden administration suggested it would not penalize those companies for continuing to host the app, a move TikTok said didn’t provide them enough “necessary clarity and assurance,” and they would therefore shut down in the United States on January 19. Thus began the public kayfabe of TikTok pretending that only Trump could fix it, knowing full well that he would happily go along. So the app went abruptly, ostentatiously dark on the evening of the January 18, only to pop back up some 12 hours later on January 19 with a gushing message to Trump: “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”

One might note, of course, that Trump was not president on January 19. One might also note that what Trump did promise — basically, that he would not enforce a law passed by Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court — is not functionally any different than what Biden or Markey were trying to offer, albeit without a demand the company show them personal fealty. But if TikTok had simply left the lights on for those 12 hours and waited for the incoming administration to decide how to enforce the ban, it would have missed the opportunity to let Trump be the savior who brought the app back from the dead. And the one thing social media companies have learned about Trump is that their success will rise and fall with his impulses.

When social media platforms let Trump and his hangers-on say and do whatever they like, he loves them. Once X was purchased by president-unelect Elon Musk, it became transformed into a MAGA megaphone and no longer faces scrutiny from Trump. That’s a change from January 2021, when Trump complained that then-Twitter was “not about FREE SPEECH” after it banned his account following the insurrection. Though Meta didn’t change hands, it still transformed — or more accurately, perhaps, deformed — to meet the new Trump era. CEO Mark Zuckerberg got rid of third-party fact-checking on Facebook, calling it “politically biased,” and revised its hateful speech policy to explicitly allow for attacks on trans people. Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the inauguration, went to church with Trump Monday morning, and hosted a reception Monday night. For the inauguration itself, Zuckerberg, along with Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Google head Sundar Pichai, was basically in the front row. Nothing says “incipient oligarchy” like an inauguration dominated by the richest men in the world, private citizens all.