Breaking news, Joe Biden to just before we began recording today, on Wednesday, signed the Bill that would force TikTok to either divest itself, to sell itself to some other company in the United States or shut down. Those are the two choices it passed as part of an aid package to Ukraine, Israel. There’s some humanitarian aid for Gaza in that package. The house passed it as part of that aid Bill. They extended the timeline and the divestiture, which was the big holdup in the Senate before.
So now there’s, now TikTok has nine months to figure out a sale process. And if they’re making progress, whoever is the president has, can add three months per the president’s discretion, bringing the total to a year. So ByteDance basically has a year to figure this out. The clock is now ticking that the Bill assigned. It’s the law. No one knows what’s gonna happen next.
Yeah, I like, there’s so many strange unknowns about this, things like who is going to be president when we hit the nine month. Yeah, like it’s so obvious to me that a big part of the sticking point was to move this past the election, right? That whatever is going to happen should have to happen after Election Day. And it’ll either be our problem after we’ve been reelected, if you’re the Democrats, or it’ll be their problem. Yeah, if you’re the Republicans. Right. Like.
That was in Lawrence reporting too. Is that a lot of these senators signed on to prove this Bill because it pushed it past the deadline, because it gave him a little bit more space to do it. So.
Yeah, no, I think it’s it’s it’s such an easy maneuver at such an odd moment. And we’ve talked so much about the politics of this, especially among young people in the United States and all the weird ways that’s gonna go and all of the stuff I’ve been reading recently has been very strange that like intellectually, overwhelmingly it seems like if you ask people, is TikTok sort of bad in whatever like mysterious way you want to define bad? People say yes. Like, yeah, all of the polls are basically like, yes, most people believe TikTok is a net bad, but then I think the reality of like waking up in TikTok suddenly being gone is a thing in an election season that nobody actually wants to deal with. Yeah, it’s very strange. I also don’t think that part is ever actually going to happen, but we can talk about that.
Look, I love eating handfuls of m and Ms at midnight. Something I love. I know it’s bad. I know I shouldn’t do that. Super do it all the time. That feels like our relationship to social media is a country right now. And maybe TikTok in particular. But in general, a relationship to social media is like as making us feel bad and maybe it’s measurable or maybe it’s not or maybe this guy is just a grift or trying to sell a book. Whatever it is, some ambient sense of I should need MNMS at midnight is there. And then everyone just like, give him to me. Yeah, like, let me have him.
The thing that’s really interesting, right? It just got signed today. It was inevitable all week that this would get signed. That was, the momentum was there. Lauren Finer, her reporting suggested the deadlines were coming ever faster. Like usually the bills, there’s delays and last minute and this was just happening. And it actually happened, I think, a little faster than we anticipated would happen, like a day faster. Now it’s done. There’s no more argument whether you should ban TikTok. Like they did it, they passed the Bill or Biden assigned it. It’s the law. I.
Mean, I do think you could ask the question of I, is what Joe Biden signed intended to be a ban of TikTok? Like it’s not nothing to me that in his statement about signing the Bill and his excitement and enthusiasm for the fact that this got done after all this time, didn’t mention TikTok once or any of this stuff once. It’s buried like halfway down this long Bill after I forget the exact heading of the thing, but it’s like miscellaneous and then TikTok. Like this is not the point of the Bill, right? Which I think is a strange thing that is going to play out potentially in some interesting ways as we go through the inevitable chaos of the next nine months. This got past in service of passing something else. And I think what everybody decided along this process is passing this other thing is so important that sure will ban TikTok. And so I think, I don’t know if that changes anything about the way this actually plays out. I think the Bill is still law like it did happen. But it’s a strange way that we got here that makes me wonder like, does Joe Biden actually wanna ban TikTok or is that just a price everyone is willing to pay in order to get this important aid Bill.
Oh, it’s 100% of price everybody was willing to pay, right? Like this was a really the, the, so the whole Bill was hard, was a hard fund battle for everybody involved. And this was just like, you know what, we just need to get this Bill out the door. If somebody wants to put this in. This is like so s. So at the back of most of our lists, it’s fine. Which I thought was really interesting to go from like TikTok being like this huge center of discussion for everybody to being like of essentially a footnote and a much larger Bill.
Yeah, I mean, they did have the house did have the uptown vote on the standalone TikTok Bill, which had a much shorter timeline. And I think a lot of people had problems that shorter timeline, and that just sort of arrived in the Senate with nothing. So at least one part of our government had the straight up down vote. That’s true. Right. And after the house voted to pass that version of the Bill, Biden said, I’m gonna sign it. I’ll sign it. You get it to me and I’ll sign it. Whether or not they skirted it through the Senate by attaching it to a Bill that everyone wanted to get done. Yeah, I mean, like on the margins, but that’s like how so many things get done. Totally. But I think you have, you had the house just the straight up time boat and you had Biden saying, I’m gonna sign it.
So the motivations I think are clear. Whether or not Biden wants to run around crowing TikTok, I think is very different, like politically very different. The White House, for example, announced say that’s gonna keep campaigning on TikTok. They’re just gonna, they’re gonna be like, I don’t know if anyone’s ready for that ratio that is gonna, in the history of ratios on the internet. Every post the White House now makes, every post now makes on TikTok is gonna get ratio to Helen back. back and its gonna be delightful and thats fine。