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Six days after the famous Access Hollywood tape showed then-candidate Donald Trump bragging that he could “grab 'em by the pussy” was revealed by the Washington Post on 7 October 2016, I wrote a post here that speculated on the coincidence of timing between that revelation, and the release only an hour later of the first of the hacked John Podesta emails by Wikileaks:
13 October 2016
By Clay Claiborne
I actually wrote the post below several days ago but I didn't publish it because the point it makes, that the first WikiLeaks release of Podesta-Clinton emails on Friday was about an hour after the Trump grope tape was published, was inconclusive. Although that timing can be used to support the claim that WikiLeaks released these emails as a Trump counter measure, it is also possible that it was indeed coincidental, given the rapid pace of developments in this campaign and Wikileak's earlier promise to make new Clinton email releases ahead of the second debate.
But I just heard Donald Trump make the argument at a rally today that turns this timing on its head. He is now claiming that the exposures of Trump as a sexual predator were started in response to the email dump. The timing I document below puts the lie to that. More...
I then went on to document the fact that the Wikileaks email dump happened an hour after the Washington Post released the lewd Trump tape. At the time, I couldn't definitively answer the question I had raised, but did note, “There's an old cop saying: Never believe in coincidence.”
Now, thanks to information revealed in the 1000 word “Final Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference” released today, that question can definitely be answered in the affirmative. What it reports show that this was a classic example of the collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services that Bob Mueller failed to prosecute, and the Republican Party, along with some members of the white Left, continue to deny.
(U) At approximately 4 p.m. on October 7, The Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape.1664 Witnesses involved in Trump's debate preparation recalled that the team first heard of the tape about an hour prior to its public release.1665 According to Jerome Corsi, however, news of the release also made its way to Roger Stone.1666 Corsi and Stone spoke twice that day at length: once at 1:42 p.m. for 18 minutes, and once at 2:18 p.m. for 21 minutes.1667 Corsi recalled learning from Stone that the Access Hollywood tape would be coming out, and that Stone “[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle” either “right then or at least coincident.[my emphasis]”1668 According to Corsi, Stone also told him to have WikiLeaks “drop the Podesta emails immediately.”1669
(U) When the tape later became public, Corsi claimed that he was not surprised by the graphic language because he had already heard it.1670 Corsi recalled previewing the Access Hollywood tape with conference call participants during one or two calls that day: a WorldNetDaily staff call at 1 :08 p.m., or a 2 p.m. call involving Total Banking Solutions that included Malloch. 1671 Corsi remembered telling conference participants that the tape was a problem and to contact Assange. 1672 Corsi then “watched all day to see what Assange would do,” and when the Podesta emails were released, he thought to himself that Malloch “had finally got to Assange.”1673
... 1664 (U) See David A. Farenthold, "Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005," The Washington Post, October 7, 2016 (linking to video). 1665 (U) Bannon Tr., p .. 206. 1666 (U) FBI, FD-302, Corsi 9/21/2018. 1667 (U) In an email to the SCO that he later produced to the Committee, Corsi also stated that he called and spoke to Stone at 11:47 a.m. about the "status of the Wikileaks publication of the Podesta emails and Roger's concern that Assange should start publishing immediately the Podesta emails." See Email, Corsi to Gray, October 2, 2018 (Corsi Production). Corsi's phone records reflect only one minute of call time, suggesting that a conversation, if one occurred, was short. See Corsi Phone Records, October 7, 2016 (Corsi Production). 1668 (U) FBI, FD-302, Corsi 11/1/2018. It is not clear how Stone received news of the tape. Stone's phone records did not reflect any calls that day with the Trump Campaign and only one 18-minute call with a Washington Post number-but, according to the SCO, the records do not, on their face, indicate that the call involved any of the· reporters who broke the Access Hollywood story. See AT&T toll records, Roger Stone/Drake Ventures; sea Report, Vol. I, p .. 59. 1669 (U) FBI, FD-302, Corsi 9/21/2018. 1670 (U) Ibid. 1671 (U) Ibid.; FBI, FD-302, Corsi 11/1/2018. 1672 (U) Ibid. 1673 (U) Ibid.
Ted Malloch is described in the report as “an American author who lived in London and was believed to have contacts with associates of Assange.” Malloch has also been an Infowars contributor. He also had close ties to the British white nationalist Nigel Farage, who is another Putin fanboy.
I made an educated guess in 2016, and I was right. The evidence in this final report shows that there was far more collusion between the Trump campaign and Putin's intelligence services than even that uncovered by the Mueller Report, and that Wikileaks was acting in concert with both to interfere with the US 2016 election. Just saying...
1.) It is a violation of the First Amendment rights of TikTok users.
In just a few years, TikTok has built up a lively community of more than 100 million US users. As a foreign owned business, Bytedance may not have many rights in the US, but those US users, most of whom are citizens, do. In the Internet age, the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, enshrined in the constitution, must necessarily be expanded to freedom to access a wide variety of Internet methods and resources. These rights must not be tampered with lightly, yet President Trump has given TikTok 45 days to either be sold to an approved US company, or cease to function in the US. The fact that Trump seems to weight each solution equally, and nothing he has so far said in his war against TikTok, indicates that he has given even the slightest thought to the “civilian causalities” of this war, the TikTok users, and any rights they may have. Many have spent years building collections and followers on the platform that Trump proposes to do away with for reasons that have nothing to do with them.
Unless, of course, they do.
Many suspect that Trump's real problem isn't with TikTok at all, its with TikTok users. Whether it's high profile creators like Sarah Cooper that have gone after Trump on TikTok, or K-Pop fans using TikTok to prank the Trump campaign and other white supremacists, TikTok users have emerged as a significant anti-Trump force, and this is an election year. If you read my first post on TikTok, you already know I think Trump is all about silencing the TikTok users. If that is the actual goal, rather than an unfortunate side effect, then it's definitely a violation of the First Amendment.
2.) It violates US campaign laws.
I'll leave it to the lawyers to work the details, but if this move really is about using the power and authority of the federal government to silence anti-Trump voices ahead of an election, then either it's a violation of campaign law, or we need a new law. At a minimum, it would seem to run afoul of the General Prohibition Against Using Official Resources for Campaign or Political Purposes.
3.) It represents the brazen thief of Chinese technology by the United States.
TikTok has achieved what every web startup hopes to achieve. It has created a unique web product and at the same time created a new web niche, which it dominates. As President Trump said at his White House Press Briefing on 4 August, “TikTok is very successful; it does tremendous business in the United States.” Its short-form video creation and distribution model has won it more than 500 million users in over 150 markets, and 39 languages, in less than four years. “People are riveted by it,” Trump says. Now he is forcing the Chinese owners of that technology to sell it to a US company. This sounds a lot like the thief of intellectual property, or forced transfer of technology, that the US often accuses China and other countries of practicing. According to Lee Branstetter, Carnegie Mellon University and Peterson Institute for International Economics:
Forced technology transfer occurs when foreign multinational companies have to provide strategically significant technology to an indigenous entity they do not control in order to gain access to the massive Chinese market.
So, how is not forcing Bytedance to sell the TikTok app (and backend) to Microsoft, not the same sort of forced technology transfer the US has been complaining about? As good as it may feel for Trump and his friends to force the Chinese to hand over this very popular app to Americans in the short run, it doesn't change the fact that as the hands-down biggest owner of technology and intellectual property, behavior that would appear to justify or encourage the thief of technology or intellectual property, is likely to hurt US interests more than help them. Just saying.
4.) It is a US takeover of a foreign asset as practiced by authoritarian regimes.
Before Trump proposed the US takeover of TikTok, only authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, and Iran were known for forcing tech companies into selling out to investors with close ties to the government. For example, Uber had to sell their Russian and Chinese branches to local players. These authoritarian regimes are already reducing the usefulness of the Internet as a truly global network. The US takeover of TikTok is setting a dangerous precedent. It will be used by other authoritarians around the world to further decimate the Internet as the worldwide resource it was intended to be. This is already starting to seriously limited the usefulness of the Internet as a tool to access information, and advance international dialogue, in an age in which that is becoming increasingly necessary. On the business side, as the home and originator of the vast majority of Internet resources, and reaper of the biggest part of the profits, US companies have the most to lose from this balkanization of the Internet.
5.) Trump is demanding a “cut,” to be paid for allowing a private transaction.
Trump is making the unprecedented demand that the US Treasury has to get a “very big proportion” of the sales price in any Microsoft-TikTok deal, saying since “We're really making it possible because we're letting you operate here so the United States Treasury would have to benefit also, not just the not just the sellers.” Trump has declined to say what laws would make this legal. The New York Timessurmised:
In essence, the president is promising to orchestrate the kind of pay-to-play bounty that the United States prohibits companies from making to governments of other countries under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Again, this is a common practice among authoritarian rulers. There is no US law that would allow the Treasury to demand “a piece of the action” to consummate a merger or an acquisition.
He maybe taking this illegal stance to discourage Microsoft from making the deal because the would prefer it go to a company that has “friended” him, like Facebook, where he can exercise a level of content control, or be banned altogether, which brings us to six.
6.) Trump has implied that the US government would be asserting some control over the user content of an Americanized TikTok.
In a White House Press Briefing on 4 August 2020, Kayleigh McEnany was asked a question by the corespondent from the right-wing OAN, now Trump's favorite news outlet because it's to the right of Fox News. After leading with accusations that the platform encourages the “sexual exploitation of young people,” she asked would the White House be taking steps to control the content of a post-transferred TikTok. The Press Secretary answered in the affirmative. Any government censorship of user content on the platform that goes beyond existing laws would also be a violation of the First Amendment, but entirely consistent with his authoritarian desires to mute the anti-Trump activism on the platform.
7.) There is an implied bias against US companies that don't work with the Department of Defense.
In suggesting Microsoft as a possible buyer, Trump said “They're approved in that respect at many levels including working with the Department of Defense.” This was a clear message to Google, and Apple, that they may not be in the running to takeover TikTok because they have refused some touchy government, and DoD contracts, often responding to employee pressure to decline business likely to make authoritarian rule, or military conquest, easier. They remember when IBM collaborated with the Nazis to catalog Jews, and are determined not to see a repeat on their watch.
Beyond Bytedance, and the TikTok user community, this TikTok story may feel like back-page stuff, but once you examine what is really going on here, you find a major Trump power grab that should concern everyone interested in maintaining even the current levels of freedom and democracy in the United States.
President Donald Trump held his first public rally since the coronavirus outbreak in Tulsa, OK on 20 June 2020. It was suppose to kick-off his re-election campaign. Instead, it was a big embarrassment for him.
His then campaign manger, Brad Parscale, bragged that they had a million requests for tickets. In addition to the main venue, which seated 19,000, they set up a second location with a capacity of 80,000 for the anticipated overflow crowd. In the end, only about 6,200 Trump supporters showed up. Had they made use of that sparse attendance to practice social distancing, perhaps Herman Cain would be alive today. He, and countless others likely caught COVID-19 at that “pathetic” Trump rally, where face masks were rare in the crowded lower seating.
Precisely one month after he sent out this tweet, Parscale was replaced by Bill Stephen. Before he became Trump's newest campaign manager, Stephen gained notoriety when New Jersey governor Chris Christie fired, and scapegoated, him as the aid responsible for "Bridgegate," a scheme to shutdown lanes approaching the George Washington Bridge to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ for declining to support Christie's election bid. Clearly, he's a campaign manager of proven ability. He's willing to carry out the bosses illegal schemes, and take the fall if they are exposed.
One likely reason for the disappointing turnout is a prank played by K-pop fans that relied heavily on TikTok, a popular short-form video sharing app. After Trump tweeted that tickets would be available for free online, they organized a campaign, mainly on TikTok, that resulted in hundreds of thousands of tickets being ordered by people who had no plans of attending the rally. The New York Timesreported:
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
This followed similar campaigns on TikTok and Twitter, that flooded the right-wing hashtags #WhiteLivesMatter, and #ExposeAntifa, with contrary or comical tweets that were successful in drowning out the original messages of those campaigns. Varietyreported:
K-Pop Fans Take Over #WhiteLivesMatter Hashtag to Drown Out Racist Posts
By Jem Aswad
3 June 2020
In an anti-racist move that demonstrates their formidable social-media power, K-Pop fans took over the hashtag #whitelivesmatter, drowning out white-supremacist messages with nonsensical or anti-racist posts. The move was met with wide approval online early Wednesday morning.
“#WhiteLivesMatter LMAO I WAS READY TO INSULT THE SH– OUT OF EVERYONE,” one poster wrote. “THEN I SAW THAT K-POP STANS ARE DESTROYING THE [hashtag], DAMN NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE THAT HAPPY SEEING K-POP FANCAM”
“Imagine trying to trend #WhiteLivesMatter like a typical racist and Kpop fans said “Not on my watch bitch,’” another wrote. More...
Then the right-wing dirty-tricks Project Veritas released their #ExposeANTIFA video series, but their message proved hard to find.😈
While the Chinese-owned TikTok video sharing service may not have any political bias, the young people, that are the biggest part of its hundred million strong user base, most certainly do. They oppose Trump, and he has good reason to think they will continue to dog his re-election chances in the months remaining before the 2020 election.
A few weeks after these TikTok users helped make a fiasco of his Tulsa rally, Trump started a campaign to ban TikTok from the United States. Secretary of State Mike PompeotoldFox News' Laura Ingraham on 6 July that they were considering a ban on Chinese social media apps, “especially TikTok.” The app has been around for almost 4 years. Pompeo didn't say what prompted the sudden interest in banning it, but the response of app's users was immediate. Timereported on 10 July:
Thousands of users of the popular video app flocked to the Apple App Store in the last few days to flood U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign app with negative reviews. On Wednesday alone 700 negative reviews were left on the Official Trump 2020 app and 26 positive ones, according to tracking firm Sensor Tower.
The Trump administration has claimed that the TikTok app represents a security threat because it contains backdoors that would allow the Chinese Communist Party to illegally access personal data on smart phones. No proof of this has been found, and those IT specialists that have investigated the app report they are confident that it contains no backdoors or exploits. Cybersecurity expert Zak Doffmanaddressed this on Forbes:
In recent weeks, we have seen reports emerge suggesting that TikTok is “Chinese spyware,” alleging that the app steals data from users’ devices and sends it to China. This is certainly not proven and almost certainly not true on any level, at least not in the way it is presented.
He then goes on to say, “as with all platforms of its kind, TikTok occasionally releases software with security vulnerabilities that need to be urgently fixed.” This is a universal problem, and not what the Trump administration is talking about.
Nevertheless, Trump is continuing his campaign against the app, and its parent company, Bytedance Ltd. He announced on Monday that TikTok would have to be sold to an American company by 15 September, a Tuesday, or be banned from the US. Coincidentally, this date assures that TikTok will either be shut down, or under new management, in the crucial seven week run up to the 3 November presidential election. Microsoft has shown some interest in buying the service, but Trump has poop pooped the offer. He told Microsoft’s Nadella that U.S. should get a cut “because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen,” without explaining what this cut would be, or what laws it would be based on, and suggested that “somebody else, a big company, a secure company, a very American company can buy it.” Trump is saying his government should get a big cut of the sale's price, while China is accusing the US of “smash & grab” and “officially sanctioned theft,” in this forced sale of a very successful Chinese property.
Trump @ White House Briefing, attempting to forced the sale of TikTok | 4 August 2020
While Trump never mentions the embarrassment he has suffered at the hands of TikTok users, or their fight against his re-election, the fact that it is owned by a Chinese company gives him an excuse for attacking it that fits right into his racist anti-China campaign. Still, there are many Chinese companies doing business in the US that he could go after, and he could have gone after TikTok more than two years ago, so the timing and the target aren't explained by the front page reasons.
This brings us to another way Trump is using this pressure on TikTok to his political benefit. Trump friendly Facebook, not being satisfied with the dominance its ownership of Facebook and Instagram has given it, has already tried twice to launch its own clone of TikTok, and failed. The first was a Facebook service, named Lasso, that died a quick death. The second is an Instagram app named Reels, which is expected to launch this month. If TikTok is banned from the US, Facebook's attempts to launch a similar service (Which sounds a lot like a US company stealing Chinese technology.) will likely be easier, or perhaps Facebook itself may emerge as the “other company” Trump has in mind. Either way, it could be payback for the multi-faceted pro-Trump policies of this social media giant.
Consider:
While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells Dana Perino on Fox News“I don't think it's appropriate for Facebook to do fact-checking,” Donald Trump is spending millions of dollars on ads featuring claims that have been debunked by Facebook's own fact-checkers, and that saying something, considering it has recruited The Daily Caller, a website founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, to become an official Facebook fact-checker, in spite of its long history of publishing misinformation.
Hundreds of Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout over the company's decision to leave up 'inflammatory' Trump posts. When Twitter flagged this Trump tweet as 'glorifying violence':
[...] Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
@realDonaldTrump
May 29, 2020
Zuckerberg said Facebook would allow that statement. He told Fox News, “At Facebook, we've tried to distinguish ourselves as being really strong in favor of giving people a voice and free expression.” When Dana Perino asked “I wondered if you thought that Twitter may have made the wrong decision here?” Zucherberg replied “Yeah, that's right, Dana. We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this. I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.”
But, like I said, please try to post this blog to Facebook and report if the results are:
Your message couldn't be sent because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive.
It's always “other people,” reporting some “content,” but nothing like a clue.
Facebook has a policy that prohibits misinformation on voting methods. When Zuckerberg announced the policy, he was clear that it applied to politicians, including Trump. Now that Trump is violating that policy, and posting misinformation about voting to Facebook, they refuse to enforce it. Instead, Zuckerberg appeared on Fox News and defended Trump's right to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election, “I don't think that Facebook, or Internet platforms in general, should be arbiters of truth.” Facebook changed its policies to allow Trump and other politicians to lie in ads. Again and again, Facebook has taken action to empower Trump and the right wing in violation of its own policies.
For several years, Zuckerberg has oriented Facebook's entire public policy apparatus around placating Trump and his “base.” Facebook hired former Senator Jon Kyl to produce a report about whether Facebook was biased. It didn't make the slightest effort to look for bias against liberals or the left. (hello!)
Zuckerberg recently invited a bunch of right-wing pundits to his home to discuss partnerships and free speech. The guests included Tucker Carlson, who recently said that immigrants were making America dirtier, which is a cruel irony, because here in L.A., they seem to be the one's doing all the cleaning, and Brent Bozell, who said Obama looked like “a skinny, ghetto crackhead.”
Zuckerberg announced the launch of Facebook News on a stage with a top executive in Rupert Murdoch's right-wing media empire. The head of Facebook News, Campbell Brown, continues to be involved in her own website, The 74, which she founded with the support of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Brown used the site to write a column lavishing praise on DeVos. Brown and Zuckerberg hired a former producer for “Fox & Friends,” Trump's favorite show, to head video strategy for Facebook News. She'll be a member of Facebook News' curation team, which means she'll select what content appears in Facebook's news tab. Also, Facebook News selected Breitbart, a noxious right-wing website that was caught laundering white nationalist talking points, to be among 200 trusted news sites to include in its launch. In addition, Facebook allows The Daily Wire, another right-wing website, to operate a network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote Daily Wire content. This is in clear violation of Facebook's rules. [I want to thank Judd Legum, popular.info, and the makers of this illuminating video, from which this summary of Facebook fun facts was largely plagiarized.]
Last November, there was a secret meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump. The New York Times reported it:
Last Nov. 20, NBC News broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and a Facebook board member, Peter Thiel, had dined together at the White House the previous month. “It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed,” the report said.
That was it. Nothing else has emerged since. Not the date, not who arranged the menu, the venue, the seating, not the full guest list. And not whether some kind of deal got done between two of the most powerful men in the world. The news cycle moved on, and the dinner became one of the unsolved mysteries of American power.
NBC Newsreported that it was the second meeting between Zuckerberg and Trump in a month. As Trump has said, “I'm very big on Facebook.” Don't be surprised if Facebook emerges as a contender for TikTok.
In today's White House Press Briefing the corespondent from OAN, a news outlet favored by Trump because it is to the right of Fox News, raised a question about TikTok. After making accusations that the platform encourages the “sexual exploitation of young people,” she asked would the White House be taking steps to control the content of a post-transferred TikTok. Kayleigh McEnany answered in the affirmative. Trump has used OAN to raise questions before. This one was raised to plant the idea that the White House would be restricting TikTok's content after 15 September, if it isn't banned altogether. This whole exercise is about the content that TikTok's users post, but knowing something about Trump's history, it's hard to believe it's prompted by concerns about the sexual exploitation of young people.
At the present time Trump is entirely consumed by the his re-election prospects. Beyond golf, he is currently only interested in things that will help him get re-elected. At a cost of tens of thousands of American lives, he has manipulated the federal government's coronavirus response to further his re-election. He first stopped his daily coronavirus briefings when he was convinced they were hurting his poll ratings. Then he restarted them in a vain attempt to push those ratings back up. It has nothing to do with the lives being lost in the country he was elected to lead, and everything to do with getting him re-elected. He had Bill Barr violently clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park for a photo op he thought would help him get re-elected. He has sent federal agents to Portland and other cities, not because he wants to bring peace to those cities, or even to bring “law and order,” but to help him get re-elected. He is slowing down the postal service, and railing against mail-in voting (except Florida 😉) because he thinks that will help him get re-elected. Why, with all of this, is he now trying to take down a company that has been operating in the US more than two years? It can only be because he thinks it is important to his re-election prospects, and his efforts reveal motives that go far beyond its use as another handy China target. That is largely a handy cover story, and a rather innovative way of using racism.
And yet TikTok has no political agenda. I was surprise, when I signed up to TikTok, and was asked to choose a topic of interest, that politics, or anything like it, was not one of the choices. So, I chose comedy. I learned later that TikTok goes out of its way to be non-political. For example, while you can post videos that are decidedly political to your homepage, they can't be circulated. Being a Chinese owned service, probably it was trying to avoid precisely the vise it has found itself in. It was to no avail, because no matter how hard TikTok tries to be apolitical, the young people who are its “base” are decidedly not. They are anti-Trump. They have made Trump, and his white supremacist allies, look like fools, and while, admittedly, that's not hard to do, they have done it with style and flair unmatched by Brad Parscale, Bill Stephen, on even Roger Stone, and if you can't beat'em, have your friends buy'em, or ban'em.
Trump isn't after TikTok because it is Chinese owned. Plenty of iconic American companies are owned by Chinese investors, including the Chicago Stock Exchange, AMC, Smithfield Foods, Legendary Entertainment Group, GE Appliances, The Waldorf Astoria, Ingram Micro, and Motorola Mobility. He's not after TikTok because its a national security risk. It's no more or less secure than any other social media company, including Facebook. TikTok isn't being punished for its sins at all. It is being punished for the sins of its users.
Clay Claiborne
UPDATES 5 August 2020:
Sarah Cooper is one particularly high profile TikTok user that Trump would like to silence, but where this story, and similar ones about Sarah Cooper get it wrong is she's not the only TikTok user Trump wants to silence. There are thousands, maybe millions! From the Huffington Post:
People Are Convinced Trump Wants TikTok Banned Because A Comedian Is Mocking Him On It
Trump told reporters on Friday that he plans to ban the Chinese-owned short-form video-sharing app from operating in the US “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he declared aboard Air Force One. The president claimed he could use emergency economic powers to ban the app — possibly as early as Saturday. More...
Also, today Instagram launched its TikTok clone. I said sometime this month yesterday. Billboard is reporting:
Instagram Launches TikTok Competitor Reels
by Natalie Jarvey
5 August 2020
Instagram has launched a new video feature called Reels as it looks to take on fast-growing upstart TikTok.
The feature, which Instagram tested for months in countries including Brazil and India, allows users to shoot, edit and post 15-second video clips set to snippets of music or audio. The videos can be viewed via a new portal on Instagram's Explore page, which curates and personalizes posts based on a user's preferences. More...
Pavel Durov, founder and CEO at Telegram has posted an important warning about the danger Trump's TikTok grab might have on freedom on the Internet:
[T]he US move against TikTok is setting a dangerous precedent that may eventually kill the internet as a truly global network (or what is left of it). Before the US-TikTok saga, only autocratic countries like Iran, China or Russia were known for bullying tech companies into selling parts of their businesses to investors with close ties to their governments.
...
The problem with the US-TikTok case is that it legitimises an extortion tactic previously employed only by authoritarian regimes. For decades, the US has been perceived as the defender of free trade and free speech. But now that China has started to replace them as the main beneficiary of global trade, the US (or at least the Trump administration) seems to have become less enthusiastic about those values. This is regrettable, because billions of people on this planet still like the idea of an open and interconnected world.
...
Last week, Turkey introduced a bunch of laws limiting social media companies. A few years ago, the US would have had the moral right to criticise such efforts, citing freedom of speech and free trade as ideological foundations for their concerns. Today it’s less clear whether the US still has that right. Authoritarian leaders all over the world are already using the TikTok case as justification in their attempts to carve out a piece of the global internet for themselves. Soon, every big country is likely to use “national security” as a pretext to fracture international tech companies. And ironically, it’s the US companies like Facebook or Google that are likely to lose the most from the fallout.
This is a very important side of the question that I entirely neglected in my original piece.
UPDATE 6 August 2020
Trump signs executive order to ban US transactions with owners of TikTok and WeChat in 45 days
President Donald Trump issued an executive order which will ban any US companies or citizens from making transactions with ByteDance, the parent company of the video-sharing social networking service TikTok, in 45 days. Trump also issued an order taking similar action against Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat. The move comes after the president told reporters on Monday that TikTok would close down unless sold to a US company.
BREAKING: President Trump just issued an executive order "on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok." It takes effect in 45 days, prohibits "any transaction" with ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, and will almost certainly face legal challenges. pic.twitter.com/Ma9XOfYgOB
