The sequence of events as far as I can recall:
- Trump promised to ban TikTok
- TikTok was slated to be “banned” in the twilight of Biden’s term
- Trump says he’d give it 90 days to make a decision
- Biden decides not to ban it, handing it off to Trump
- TikTok goes dark
- It returns, but if you search for something anti-Trump in the United States, you can’t find it
- Using a VPN will give you that content
- Various news outlets are now calling it Trump’s “Propaganda Arm”
What the fuck is going on? From a political or technological standpoint.
i can understand your confusion: actions speak louder than words; so break it down based on what they did (not what they said) to make it make sense:
Except it went dark before the law had a chance to be enforced, and was back up before trump was ever in office and able to use executive orders. So points 3 and 4 have nothing to do with the actual law and are decisions completely from within tiktok
Biden also announced he wasn’t enforcing the law. The TikTok operators saw the writing on the wall and realized they need to bend the knee to Trump.
Don’t get too hung up on specific dates. Laws are not some physical law like gravity that are present and universal. They exist within a fuzzy context of enforcement and interpretation.
Biden made clear he wasn’t going to enforce the law. Trump made clear he was going to make a decision based on how well Tiktok flattered and bribed him. So that’s exactly what they’ve done.
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It went dark after the judicial review process found that the law was constitutional.
The important thing to recognize is that the site stopped operating in the us (which it said it would do in reaction to this decision) after it was clear that it would definitely be violating a law with explicit consequences if it continued.
One unremarked-upon aspect of the events between Saturday and Sunday was the arson of a representative’s office in retribution for the ban.
Combined with the crappy algorithm after the shutdown (indicates they gotta actually rebuild all the recommendations), it’s likely that the company shut the site down to be in compliance, intending to go back up if possible once the law was reversed or the new administration was in power, and was offered assurances against legal action and protection against the law after the representatives office was set on fire.
The constitution stopped mattering to these people a long time ago.
I’m not sure you’re correct.
The law only mandated that ByteDance remove TikTok from app stores in the U.S. if it failed to meet the sale deadline. Company executives made the decision to shutdown the app entirely.
Apple and Google removed it from their app stores in accordance with the law, and it is still removed from those app stores.
Quite possible that TikTok just went dark to make an infrastructure change to implement new code - while they display a message praising Trump.
So that we’re 100% clear, the site and app only stopped working in the us.
If you were in the us on a browser and used a fresh cache and a vpn in another country it worked fine, famously Canadian users used the time to shit talk American users while they “couldn’t” hear.
While there’s an argument to be made that the law only explicitly prohibits new downloads (distribution) it also makes reference to maintaining the service. A company that wanted to continue running the company without any ability to gain American users could attempt to skirt that, but eagle eyed readers of law will recognize that sec2.a.1.B pretty much squashes that. Not only does it make datacenters in the us and elsewhere culpable, but the generally held legal definition of words like “internet hosting services”, “distribution”, “maintenance”, “updating” and “application” are not the narrow often colloquial meanings we’re used to, but broad definitions intended to give the maximum applicability to laws regardless of specific technology involved.
So I think unless bytedances strategy was to explicitly skirt the law and try to keep the servers up for the American users then the “correct” decision was to follow the letter of the law until the new regime that had promised to offer a stay was in power and made that offer officially and in writing.
From a business perspective, for a company caught between two regimes, giving the “win” to the one you’ll definitely be working with longer is a no brainer.
I haven’t seen significant right wing or pro trump content on TikTok after it came back on. I have seen plenty of users saying thank you president trump with a whole spectrum of intonation and doing thinking emoji at the message when it came back on. I also haven’t seen decent analysis of its algorithms behavior since then, which makes sense because making a decent analysis of such a black box would take time.
Changes to a persons recommendations take time. The way that 小红书 surfaces this by changing the “reels” offered to the users explore page when they’ve accumulated enough information to make a change and finished processing it.
Part of what made TikTok’s algorithm and recommendations seem so magical is that it had a really good way of spicing things up and not getting stuck in a rut and because there was only one scrolling feed, changes to recommendations were just suddenly there.
Just having said that and having experienced the rinky-dink recommendations after the downtime I don’t think it was a shut down specifically for changes (although they definitely did, why would t you take the opportunity to update everything if you’re doing mandated spin down?) but because it was the smart legal choice.
This is key. Trump’s executive order can’t override the law. Executive orders can only interpret the law. With the courts saying the law is valid, TikTok and US hosting companies are understandably hesitant to resume operations just on Trump’s word (which is worthless anyway) that the ban won’t be enforced.
and only one of the app stores brought back tiktok despite trump’s executive order saying that it’s okay now.
when it comes to profits & finance, they’re very easily spooked and will go out of their way to ensure that they don’t lose $$$; points 3 & 4 are in service to $$$ based on how they interpet the law, just like the app stores.