2024-12-10
26 分钟TikTok took down Esma Memtimin’s posts for allegedly violating the platform’s community rules, even though her videos were about little more than stickers and some current events. Just days after TikTok’s Chinese parent company asked a federal court to put a temporary hold on a law that would require ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in this country, we go back to an episode we did this fall about a mysterious dearth of TikTok posts about subjects Beijing doesn’t like.
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here.
Hey, it's Dina.
The Click Here team is taking a break from producing brand new episodes this month so we can get ahead on some stories we want to bring you in 2025.
So we started going through the archives and we thought there was one story we should return to.
It's about what worries some people about TikTok.
Congress passed a law earlier this year that said TikTok was a national security threat.
And the law demands that ByteDance, TikTok's mainland Chinese parent company, either has to sell the app or face a ban in the U.S.
tikTok, for its part, maintains that the ban violates the First Amendment rights of its 170 million American users.
The story we did back in September took a look at what might have lawmakers so worried.
It's about how the Chinese Communist Party could use the app's algorithm to influence American audiences.
And we decided to bring it to you again now because ByteDance has just asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to temporarily freeze the ban in hopes that the Supreme Court might agree to hear the case.
The ban takes effect on January 19th.
Take a listen.
Looking back on it, Esma Memtimin had a feeling that her TikTok video might be taken down, though at first blush, it didn't seem particularly sinister.
There was no violence, no swear words.
There wasn't even dialogue.
Just this music that you're hearing right now in a series of jump cuts of young women putting these small square stickers in public places in Munich.
One on a lamppost, another on a payphone or a snack machine.
These were stickers Esma and her friends had made themselves to send a message.
We've decided to go through Munich, and everywhere we go, we stick like a sticker of that and then film it.