Where the TikTok ban goes from here

📱 ByteDance, TikTok’s owners, generated around $120 billion in revenue last year, 89% of the revenue Meta generated in the same year.
Also today: the truth about virality, pushing Medium to its limits, and how to be the type of person everyone wants to know
By

Harris Sockel

Last week, nearly four years after it began winding its way through Congress, President Biden signed a bill to ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its owner, the Chinese tech company ByteDance, sells the app. (Ironically, the Biden campaign joined TikTok in February.)

ByteDance has nine months to sell or be banned.

Reasons behind the ban, according to Congress, include:

1. The possibility of China using TikTok to spy on Americans and seed misinformation in advance of the presidential election. Publicly available evidence of this is thin, but some ByteDance employees have admitted to spying on users.
2. Kids getting addicted to the app. TikTok built parental controls… but apparently kids can easily get around them.

There’s also an element here of fearing the unknown, and of the type of black-and-white thinking that’s easy to fall into when you’re making decisions about technology you don’t actually use. I appreciated this perspective from a TikTok creator who uses the app to build awareness and community around topics like Type 1 diabetes and AI ethics: “As I watched [the Congressional hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew], I kept coming back to a simple truth about our lives online: Social media is bad for us. Social media is also good for us — both of these things can be true at the same time.”

ByteDance has said they have no plans to sell; instead, they’ll probably challenge the law in court. As one lawyer on Medium explains, it’s now up to the U.S. government to prove their concerns are based in reality. Congress will need to show that a ban is the only way to avert the dangers they foresee, and that less drastic measures won’t be effective.

“Perhaps there are classified docs that justify such a ban?” he asks. “It’s hard to imagine this bill flying through the House without some briefing from the CIA or NSA.”

What else we’re reading

• When absolutely no one showed up to
  Tom Mitchell
  ’s book signing for his new young adult novel — and I mean no one; the photo at the top of his Medium post says it all — he posted a Hail Mary self-deprecating joke. Almost 20 million people saw it (!) resulting in around 100 extra book sales (underwhelming, but not nothing). Mitchell debriefs the whole experience, reminding us that going viral feels great in the moment but is usually inconsequential, as far as building a career goes. (Still: Congrats Tom! Go check out his series of very delightful young adult novels.)
• Palestinian-American filmmaker Mo Husseini thinks aloud about solutions to the war in Gaza. This post is raw and unpolished (beginning with the title) but, to me, it’s valuable precisely because of that. You may not agree with everything here, but I appreciated Husseini’s dedication to empathy, self-reflection, and facing complexity with courage and humility.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about mindset)

How you treat yourself comes through in how you treat others. If you want to be someone everyone hanging out with… you’ve got to enjoy hanging out with yourself, writes therapist

Hazel Gale

.

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Edited and produced by

Scott Lamb

,

Jon Gluck

, &

Carly Rose Gillis

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