2024-10-03
9 分钟NPR.
If the federal government has its way, the social video app TikTok could be banned in the US as early as January 19.
And if that happened, it would disrupt whats become a favorite time killer for millions of Americans, swiping on video after video after video after video after video.
But TikTok is not about to just let this happen.
It's suing to block this law, saying it violates its First Amendment rights.
This is the indicator from planet money.
I'm Adrian Ma.
Today on the show, how did TikTok get to this point?
And what can we expect from the company's last ditch effort at survival?
To learn more, we speak to NPR's own tech reporter, Bobby Allen, after the break.
To discuss TikTok's complicated future with us, we're joined by Bobby Allen.
He's a tech reporter here at NPR, covering technology in Silicon Valley.
I spend a couple hours of my life every day on TikTok, so I'm happy to talk about it for this podcast episode or for like 10 hours.
You could just go on and on and on and on.
So just to start us off, TikTok is this app that we've established a lot of people love.
And on a surface level, at least you could say, like, it seems relatively innocent.
How do we get to the point where the government wants to ban it?
Well, it all started in the halcyon days of the Trump administration.
And the White House, under Trump, saw TikTok as a national security threat because its corporate paracompany, ByteDance, is based in China.
And because of the laws in China, it was theoretically possible then and remains so now, that China could try to exert influence vis a vis bytedance to change the opinions of Americans by fiddling with TikTok's algorithms.