I’m not the primary to notice the irony of TikTok users flooding RedNote this week. The TikTok divest-or-ban rule was presupposed to drive Individuals away from a foreign-owned social community that was topic to affect or information harvesting by the Chinese language authorities. As a substitute, it pushed them onto a distinct foreign-owned social community that poses the very same hypothetical dangers — and that could be topic to the very same type of ban.
TikTok faces a ban underneath the Defending Individuals from International Adversary Managed Functions Act, which handed with overwhelming bipartisan assist and was signed final yr by President Joe Biden (who’s reportedly experiencing some buyer’s remorse proper now). Whereas it mentions TikTok and its dad or mum firm, ByteDance, by identify, it may apply to any firm that meets the next standards:
- It operates an internet site or app with greater than 1 million month-to-month customers and lets these customers make accounts to create and share content material.
- It isn’t a service that primarily lets customers “publish product critiques, enterprise critiques, or journey info and critiques.”
- It’s managed by a overseas adversary, a definition that covers North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran. “Management” can imply the corporate is headquartered there, a resident of that nation holds a minimum of a 20 % stake in it, or it’s in any other case “topic to the path or management” of somebody dwelling there.
RedNote reportedly had greater than 300 million month-to-month energetic customers as of 2023, plus a reported 3 million more US users who just lately moved over. It’s headquartered in Shanghai, China. It affords a service similar to TikTok.
If an organization meets the authorized standards, the buck passes to the president, who can resolve whether or not to provoke a divest-or-ban process. This requires a sequence of steps:
- The president should publicly suggest a willpower that the corporate’s app presents a “important menace” to US nationwide safety.
- The president should subject a public report back to Congress, laying out the “particular nationwide safety concern concerned and containing a categorized annex,” plus an outline of what belongings the dad or mum firm would wish to divest. (Congress doesn’t have to approve this — it simply has to obtain it.)
- The president makes an official willpower a minimum of 30 days after notifying Congress, and the corporate has 270 days to make a divestiture that satisfies the president’s necessities. Inside the first 90 days, the app’s dad or mum firm can problem the regulation within the DC Circuit Court docket of Appeals, like TikTok did.
- If it fails to get a courtroom to cease it, the corporate would wish to make a “certified divestiture” or face a ban within the US. The 270-day clock retains ticking until a courtroom pauses it, and the president can solely prolong the deadline as much as one other 90 days.
- The app can keep away from a ban if it’s divested from the overseas adversary’s management. The president should decide, with the assistance of an “interagency course of,” that the sale would end result within the app not being managed by a overseas adversary and that it prevents any type of future operational relationship, like a data-sharing settlement.
- If this doesn’t occur, the regulation forces app retailer operators and web internet hosting providers to stop supporting the app, leading to its efficient shutdown within the US.
The regulation mentions TikTok by identify as a nationwide safety menace, in order that platform is mainly cooked — the divest-or-ban deadline was set in movement as soon as the regulation was signed, bypassing a lot of the method above. The regulation says any subsidiary of ByteDance can be lined by the regulation, so whereas the corporate and US authorities have not yet commented on apps like its social community Lemon8, they’ll seemingly face scrutiny, too. However the president has considerably extra leeway in deciding the destiny of different apps.
The place does RedNote stand, then?
RedNote, so far as publicly obtainable info signifies, could possibly be compelled to divest or face a ban underneath the Defending Individuals from International Adversary Managed Functions Act. A US official has confirmed that, saying it “seems to be the type of app that the statute would apply to.”
However pragmatically, that is the place we exit the realm of coverage and enter the world of politics. The query isn’t actually how RedNote operates; it’s whether or not RedNote makes President-elect Donald Trump or the Silicon Valley oligarchy mad.
TikTok does pose potential safety dangers, however the stress to ban it was about much more than that. Meta was behind a public campaign calling for scrutiny of TikTok — one among its chief opponents — and its ties to China. Members of Congress complained that TikTok was serving an excessive amount of pro-Palestinian content material; there’s no recognized proof China was behind this alleged imbalance, so presenting it as a nationwide safety menace seems pretty suspect. Now, conversely, Trump is in search of ways to save TikTok as a result of he thinks it helped his election marketing campaign.
Primarily based on all of this, let’s extrapolate a path for RedNote. Proper now, its American consumer base seems comparatively minuscule; it’s not clear what number of US customers it had earlier than the previous week, however Reuters reports that it gained about 3 million US users in in the future this week, in comparison with about 170 million month-to-month US TikTok customers as of final yr. The dangers Congress noticed in TikTok — mass information harvesting, covert propaganda — seem to have an effect on a much smaller variety of folks. The dangers which will truly resolve its destiny are just a little extra sophisticated.
Will RedNote preserve a momentum that threatens the egos or companies of MAGA-approved billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? Will it produce political activism that antagonizes Trump (or a future president)? Will rising US hostility towards China’s authorities manifest in a broad crackdown on Chinese language apps? All these items, whereas troublesome to foretell, wouldn’t bode effectively.
For now, although, have enjoyable learning Mandarin.
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