Rumours began circulating by media companies that TikTok is selling, but TikTok has said that those rumours are not true.
Last week, we reported on US president, Joe Biden, signing a bill that, in part, makes the TikTok ban bill law. TikTok, in response, said that it is going to litigate on, among other things, free speech grounds. Those vows match up with earlier comments from TikTok when they said that the bill banning TikTok tramples free speech.
Mainstream media outlets, throughout this process, have been pushing the conspiracy theory that TikTok is a national security threat and that TikTok is a Chinese spy machine. Those theories ran into a brick wall when US intelligence was asked to provide evidence that TikTok is engaging in either activity. Those intelligence officials, in turn, came up empty-handed, meaning that all of these fears are, at best, based on pure speculation.
What isn’t purely hypothetical, however, is the fact that many of those pushing the TikTok ban have a financial conflict of interest. As noted by TechDirt, some 44 US House of Representative lawmakers who voted to move a TikTok ban forward own shares in TikTok’s rivals – companies that stand to benefit greatly from a TikTok ban. The value of those stocks range between $29 million and $129 million worth of stock. Yeah, no wonder some people are pushing to ban TikTok despite not having evidence that supports the need.
In the flurry of developments that have been happening, apparently, some outlets were publishing rumours that TikTok was exploring options to sell. One of those sources was The Information which suggests that TikTok was looking at selling TikTok without the algorithm that drives it. It’s possible other sources might have picked up on it.
TikTok, apparently, denied those reports and said that they have no interest in selling. From the BBC:
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance says it has no intention of selling the business after the US passed a law to force it to sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in America.
“ByteDance doesn’t have any plans to sell TikTok,” the company posted on its official account on Toutiao, a social media platform it owns.
“Foreign media reports of ByteDance selling TikTok are not true,” the company said in the post, which included a screen shot of the article with the Chinese characters meaning “false rumour” stamped on it.
This is probably not surprising. There is obvious legal avenues to pursue in challenging this law in court. Even if the activist Republican judges on the US Supreme Court decide that the US constitution isn’t a valid legal argument in the end, that still leaves many years of litigation. Why explore options now when you’re going to be sticking around for years while this whole drama plays out in court?
At any rate, we are definitely moving on to the next phase of this story which is going to likely be a long drawn out legal battle. This with content creators no doubt freaking out about the possibility of their productive careers being potentially cut short in the process.
If there was clear evidence that Tik Tok was helping the Chinese government spy on dissidents would a ban be appropriate or would you still argue a ban was a free speech violation?
The debate would be a heck of a lot different at the very least. I mean, if there was Chinese interference and general surveillance happening exclusively on TikTok with all other avenues either extremely limited or completely shut off, then I would say that national security concerns would have merit because we have raised the safety of others ahead of those free speech concerns in terms of importance. As of yet, I haven’t seen anything saying that we are anywhere near this scenario, though. If anything, I see US lawmakers hoping to make bank off of distorting the social media landscape by eliminating one of the rivals of the corporation they have invested in.
Protonvpn has a blog post on Tik Tok that has links to articles. It says Tik Tok has admitted it spied on journalists to try and find a leak, a former Bytedance executive says it helped the Chinese government spy on Hong Kong dissidents, and an ex-Google employee says he found keylogging code in the app.