Here is the state of play on the Joe Biden’s TikTok legislation:
Last year a bill requiring the Chinese company ByteDance to sell the platform TikTok passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan majorities.¹
The law said that ByteDance had to sell TikTok to some entity that would not present a national security risk to the United States. If it failed to execute a sale by January 19, 2025, then TikTok could no longer be downloaded by users in the United States.
Meaning that existing users who had the TikTok app would be unaffected, but the app’s U.S. user base could not grow.
ByteDance launched a series of legal challenges, which have basically failed.
The Chinese government decided it would rather kill TikTok than either sell the platform or let it continue in legacy mode.
So that’s where we are. Three days from now TikTok will go away. The causality is crystal clear:
TikTok is best understood as an intelligence operation that managed to (a) run in broad daylight and (b) make money. In just a few years it became the go-to news source for an entire generation of Americans under 30. It’s one of the greatest ops in the history of intel.² Respect. 👊
The U.S. government recognized this reality and called China’s bluff. The TikTok legislation basically said, “Hey, we know that this is an op and not a business. But if you want to pretend TikTok is just a business, fine. We’re going to make you sell it. This is a thing that a legitimate business would be happy to do, because legitimate businesses are motivated entirely by money and when ByteDance sells TikTok it’s going to get paid absolute bank.”
In response, ByteDance/ChiComs said, “Actually, no. We don’t want to let anyone see under the hood of our tradecraft. We’ll just shut the op down. We don’t care about the money.”
I cannot be clear enough about this:
If TikTok were a business and not an intelligence operation—and if ByteDance were an independent company and not a wholly-owned government subsidiary ultimately answering to Xi Jinping—then ByteDance would have sold it and pocketed hundreds of billions of dollars.
