The Current - TikTok U.S. ban expected this weekend

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Tik Tok could be banned in the U.S. this weekend, sparking panic among influencers who make their living from the social media app. Journalist Emily Baker White explains why it’s drawn the ire of U.S. lawmakers. 

This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at Viking.com. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. For those that don't know you or don't know TikTok, can you explain what is TikTok? So TikTok is a very creative app where there's not one thing to put it in a category of. It's 15 to 60 second videos of really doing

whatever you want. Sometimes I vlog, I mostly dance. A lot of people do comedy, there's a lot of art. It's really all over the place and you can just post whatever you want or you enjoy making. That's Jimmy Fallon speaking with TikTok star Charli D'Amelio on The Tonight Show.

She has more than 155 million followers on TikTok, almost 12 billion likes. She makes a lot of money through TikTok. But now there is a chance that content creators like her could lose their livelihoods. TikTok is set to be banned in the United States this Sunday. And just this morning, the US Supreme Court upheld that ban.

I'm nervous. I'm nervous for myself. I'm nervous for my full-time creator community. I'm nervous for the audience. What's also scarier weighing on me is just the intensity of how they're describing it. They're essentially saying, if the ban goes through, it's going to just go dark on Sunday. And that just feels so final and extreme.

Emily Baker White is an investigative reporter and senior writer at Forbes. She's long been reporting on social media apps and is actually writing a book about TikTok right now. We spoke with her earlier this morning before the Supreme Court made its decision, here's our conversation. Can you just briefly remind us why TikTok could be banned in the United States as of Sunday? Yeah. So in April, the US Congress passed a law and President Biden signed that law that said TikTok was a national security risk under his current ownership. TikTok is owned by the Chinese tech giant, ByteDance. And Congress was worried about two different things.

They were worried, first of all, that ByteDance might be forced by the Chinese government to collect information about American users of TikTok and then use that information down the line for a national security purpose. They were also worried that the Chinese government could force bite dance to then use TikTok subtly, sort of changing the dials on what people see to warp civic discourse or sort of cultural discourse in the United States. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tom Cotton, who's a Republican senator said,

TikTok is a Chinese Communist spy app that addicts our kids, harvests their data, targets them with harmful and manipulative content, and spreads Communist propaganda.'" Is there any evidence of any of that? Well, mostly no, but in some places, yes. What we do know is that the Chinese government has legal and operational leverage

over the TikTok and ByteDance employees who live in China. In 2017, the Chinese government passed a law that said that at any moment it could conscript random Chinese citizens into service sort of as spies or as informants. And that created a problem because even if people who work at ByteDance in China, they don't want to be part of a tech Cold War, they don't want to be involved in this, right? The Chinese government could force them to either change how the app works or use it to collect data about people. Now what there isn't evidence of is that the Chinese government is actually using TikTok as some sort of propaganda tool in the United States today, or that

the Chinese government has ordered people to turn over information. But the US government is worried that if either of those things were happening at scale, it wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. And so that's why under this law, what the US government wants to happen is for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a company that doesn't have ties to the Chinese government. And TikTok and ByteDance have refused to do that. They've said it's impossible. And the Chinese government blocked ByteDance the last time ByteDance tried to sell TikTok

and changed its export rules at the last minute to say, actually, you can't sell a recommendation app like TikTok, certainly not without our permission. And so there's really sort of a tussle going on between the Chinese government and the US government right now where the Chinese government is telling ByteDance, you're not allowed to sell this thing, certainly not to a non-Chinese company. And the US government is saying you have to ban it

or you have to sell it or we'll ban you. Just, I mean, one of the things, you just said this a moment ago, just briefly, social media, one of the things that the algorithm does, no matter what site you're looking on, is warp a discussion. I mean, it changes how people, what people see and it changes perhaps the news that they get, how they might think about that news. Is the difference here compared to something like Meta, which just took away its fact checkers

that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company? Is that at its heart, what the difference is? Yeah, yeah, that is the difference. And I think you've zoomed right in on the problem, right? Which is that all of these massive social media companies have a huge amount of control over what people see and what different people see, right? Because your TikTok feed doesn't look like mine.

And what the US government is worried about is a foreign government being able to lean on the person with that ultimate power or the people with that ultimate power for TikTok and say, you're gonna do it this way. So if the Supreme Court upholds the ban, does the app just disappear on Sunday? That's what their lawyers said would happen, at least.

And that is what TikTok and ByteDance have done in response to bans in other countries. So this happened in India in 2020. The Indian government banned TikTok along with a whole bunch of other apps. And when that happened, the ban was fairly sudden. The people who worked at TikTok wrote up a little message. It was what, I don't know, two sentences long that explained, hey, we're no longer available in your market. That's a bummer.

And that's what people saw when they opened the app. I expect there to be something similar, maybe with some sort of call to action to tell your legislators that maybe they should undo this ban. I'm sort of expecting a message, something like that. Now, the Biden administration has said that it wouldn't enforce against the law in its last 24 hours of existing, that it's sort of on the Trump administration to figure out how to do that. And the Trump administration has suggested that maybe they would not enforce the law too. Still, given the uncertainty and given that right now the Trump administration doesn't exist and can't make any sort of legally

binding promises, my guess is that the app will go dark and then whether incoming President Trump will try to create a legal framework for them to come back. There's evidence that he might, but I think that'll take a minimum of a few days. The CEO of TikTok is going to be with Donald Trump at his inauguration in a prime seat. What does that tell you? It tells me that the CEO of TikTok and TikTok's senior top executives are trying as hard as they can

to ingratiate themselves to Trump in the hopes that he will bring their app back online. I mean, there's been a lot of lobbying, right? These ads that have popped up saying, talking about how people make money from TikTok, how it spreads information, brings people together, and what have you. There is a huge audience for this.

If the company is forced to sell to an American investor, who might want to buy TikTok? You know, there are a number of investors and investor conglomerates who have said that they are interested in buying TikTok. TikTok is a hard asset to value. And there's also a big question about what they would be buying and what would be for sale, right? For the moment, ByteDance is saying TikTok is not for sale, that they will just take

their ball and go home if they are banned. If a sale comes onto the table, if after a ban by Dan starts saying, okay, maybe we can sell, maybe we can divest, would they be selling all of English language TikTok? Would they be selling all of global TikTok? Would they just be selling the US part of TikTok? And if it was just the US part of TikTok, would that part of TikTok still be interoperable with TikTok in the UK and Canada and Australia, et cetera? I think there are a lot of questions about what would even be for sale that we'd have

to answer before we could talk about who has enough money to buy it because the scope of the sale is going gonna determine the price. But the rumors are, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, that it would be known entities, if I can put it that way, that might want to get their hands on this. I think it's known entities because no matter how it's scoped, it's gonna be really, really expensive. Those are the people who have the money.

Yeah, yeah. On both Zuckerberg and Musk, it's also worth raising that there could be antitrust concerns about someone who already owns a massive platform owning another one. It's not to say that that couldn't happen and in the incoming Trump administration, those priorities may change, but I would also be looking at massive companies that don't already own a social media platform, something like a Microsoft, something like an Oracle, I raise those two, of course, because they were interested last time around in 2020.

But other big investor conglomerates too that might not even be in tech, I think would also be on the table. Just finally, there are a lot of people who are on TikTok who are flocking to another Chinese social media app. There's a message on there that's saying, hello, TikTok refugees, welcoming them to this different app. There are millions of people in the United States who make a living from creating things that are posted on TikTok. What happens to them if the app disappears. Yeah, I think for a long time, creators have been trying to diversify

where they post the things that they make. And that's because all of these apps are fickle in some sense. If you look back at Facebook over the years, people would invest tons of money into making content that did well on Facebook, and then Facebook would change their algorithm. And all that work would be for nothing, right?

Look at Google search. People are trying to hack Google search all day long, all the time. And Google is constantly changing how it prioritizes things in search. And so SEO is just like one giant game of whack-a-mole. TikTok had all those same problems. And of course, just taking the thing offline is a much more dramatic impact than all those other changes. But creators have known for a long time that unless they own a website where they're posting,

that website might change, their distribution might change, et cetera. And so most creators I talk to and people who advise creators I talk to, they are scared, they are worried, but this just further emphasizes for them that the answer is posting on platforms they control. What a great time to be writing a book about this subject, not just because it's incredibly popular, but because it keeps changing second by second. Emily, thank you very much. We will be watching to see what happens. Thank you so much.

Emily Baker-White is a senior investigative reporter with Forbes, has been reporting on social media apps for a long time. And as I mentioned, is currently writing a book about TikTok.