TikTok Gets 9 Months

Senate approves massive spending: Last night, the $95 billion aid package meant for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan passed the Senate. “The vote reflected resounding bipartisan support for the measure, which passed the House on Saturday by lopsided margins after a tortured journey on Capitol Hill, where it was nearly derailed by right-wing resistance,” reports The New York Times. “The Senate’s action, on a vote of 79 to 18, provided a victory for the president, who had urged lawmakers to move quickly so he could sign it into law.”

“When it matters most, will America summon the strength to come together, overcome the centrifugal pull of partisanship and meet the magnitude of the moment?” asked Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) in an address announcing the bill’s passage. “Tonight, under the watchful eye of history, the Senate answers this question with a thunderous and resounding ‘yes.’” (If only the “centrifugal pull” were strong enough to force legislators to actually consider whether the federal government actually has that kind of money to spend, the answer to which would probably be a “thunderous and resounding” NO.)

TikTok’s death knell: The House had divided the bill into four pieces, which were then combined for voting in the Senate. The last part of the package—and possibly the most controversial—forces the social media app TikTok to be either sold to an American buyer or, if it retains Chinese ownership, banned in the United States. Expect the ban to be challenged in court, and for the government to have to flesh out its national security-related justifications for this to pass muster.

“There’s a speed to how TikTok facilitates conversations and trends, and its algorithm is unnervingly good at picking up on a user’s interests and showing them what they want to see,” writes The Atlantic‘s Kate Lindsay. “You could use the app for just five minutes and come away with a new song to listen to, a new recipe to try for dinner, and a new piece of kitchenware already being packed up and shipped to you.”

But the app definitely isn’t a universal good, and it’s shifting in concept, turning into what feels like a shopping platform, akin to Instagram’s pivot to e-commerce. “It went from a plaything for regular people—the dancing tweens, the animal antics—to a stage for brands and creators, and continues to make moves that push itself further from its original premise,” argues Lindsay. That shift aside, there are plenty of indicators that the app may have already been on track to lose popularity even if the government had never intervened: new user growth is plateauing, and the old people—those in their 30s and 40s, compared to the app’s Zoomer mainstays—are crashing the party.

Still, what happens in the long run remains to be seen. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has been given nine months to broker a deal with an American buyer—a deadline that may be extended by the president by 90 days if need be.

Masks and keffiyehs: Whenever you look at videos of the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel activists on college campuses, something conspicuous sticks out almost every time: it’s 2024, and these 20-year-olds are nearly universally masked.

My hunch, shared by many others, is just that it’s a performative way to signal belonging to the left. Maybe there’s some amount of gatekeeping on the left by long-COVID cuckoos who remain insistent that masking is what morally pure and righteous people do. But also, masks are surely being worn as a means of protecting one’s identity from being found out, to both literally hide from surveillance and also to ham up the danger element, as if their plight is akin to Hongkongers protesting the Chinese Communist Party or some other authoritarian regime that might disappear the disfavored.

“The semiotics that used to be associated with anarchists, whose masks stood out at rallies, are now popular with activists participating in non-violent civil disobedience,” writes David Weigel at Semafor in a deep-dive into how masks have endured.

Scenes from New York: Do all “New Yorkers of color” feel the same way? I highly doubt it!

New Yorkers of color are not trying to return to the Giuliani era https://t.co/3FRxvqTO0I

— Tiffany Cabán (@tiffany_caban) April 23, 2024

• Last week, in “Google Fires 28,” I covered the beautifully unceremonious axing of Google employees who felt as though Israel-related sit-ins were appropriate at work. Now, Pirate Wires’ Mike Solana follows up, covering Google’s new mission-first clarity, and a little on how we got here: “There was no CEO, at a private dinner, or in hushed whispers over drinks, who didn’t understand they had inadvertently overseen the dawn of a wildly hostile workplace environment, or worry their Red Guard HR team’s obsession with open discrimination against white and asian men was possibly illegal.”
• How did Google Search get so horrible?
• Related: The possible future of large language model optimization, and what we might lose when it takes hold.
• Some Columbia protest movement history, from Geoffrey Miller, on the anti-apartheid protests of the ’80s compared with the anti-Israel protests today.
• Speaking of: “Columbia University was emerging from a night of tense standoff early Wednesday…A midnight deadline set by the university late on Tuesday for protesters to disband passed without signs of police moving onto the campus to quell the demonstrations that have upended the final weeks of the spring semester and challenged the school’s leadership,” reports The New York Times. But the university’s deadline was fake, and at “around 3 a.m., a statement from the university said student protesters had agreed to remove a significant number of the tents erected on the lawn, ensure non-students would leave, and bar discriminatory or harassing language among the protesters.”
• This:

There is a disgust reflex when something that used to get rationed through time and luck gets rationed with money instead, but c’mon. Everyone takes the money option when they can afford it—it’s easier! https://t.co/vxtV7l2r8l

— Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart) April 23, 2024

• RIP Reddit?

New from 404 Media: we found a service called ‘ReplyGuy’, an AI that automatically plugs your product on Reddit. Shows that Reddit, basically the last social platform that heavily emphasizes human interaction, may also be soon overrun with AI garbage https://t.co/zbKQZA2HFW pic.twitter.com/yRIwOhngfI

— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) April 23, 2024

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