Hands off my TikTok

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, helms our dispatch, a running recap of the latest digital culture news. This week: anti-TikTok legislation, the Barbie trailer, and Fanci fashion.

TikTok is in trouble. In recent months, lawmakers in the United States, Australia, Europe, and Canada have significantly ramped up efforts to ban the Chinese-owned social media platform, or to severely restrict user access, on the basis of national security. The White House issued a guidance in late February, requiring the app to be uninstalled from all government devices. And Congress has been busy crafting proposed legislation to impose even stricter regulations.

In the five or so years since TikTok’s launch in the US, the app has made a lot of people nervous. In its early days, TikTok was the cool new kid on the block. It had no ads, and was fun to use and highly addictive. Then, it became clear that TikTok was soon becoming a threat to the established hierarchy of social apps. It was disrupting the old world order. What made things worse was the fact that TikTok is a Chinese company. If TikTok was just another app born and bred in Silicon Valley, the scrutiny would probably look quite different.

Lawmakers are worried about how TikTok could share user data, for instance, with the Chinese government and how that information could be mined for covert intelligence operations. Misinformation, as it pertains to US elections, is another concern. For President Joe Biden, imposing some form of TikTok regulation, however legislatively modest, would be a symbolic stand against China. (The Trump administration, after all, failed in its attempt to contain TikTok in 2020.) I’m no legal expert, but an outright ban on the app seems unlikely, given the potential First Amendment violations at hand. It’s not as if TikTok is going to go down easy. The company has spent the past few years bulking up on its lobbying power, according to a Politico investigation. A protracted legal battle is on the horizon. We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, here is some reporting/writing I’ve found helpful in understanding the stakes at hand:

• When TikTok bans come to campus by Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center (Substack)

• A breakdown of the bills to ban or limit TikTok (Axios)

• The campaign to save TikTok has been years in the making (Politico)

• Biden’s TikTok plan looks a lot like Trump’s (Washington Post)

• The Understanding TikTok newsletter by Marcus Bösch, a journalist and research fellow at HAW Hamburg (Substack)

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Vice Media and Tubi have an exclusive contract deal to produce eight original documentaries. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Longtime Netflix executive Lisa Nishimura is leaving the company. “It’s a signal that the most thoughtful, taste-driven era is being driven out,” one industry source tells THR. “Taste-driven era” is a curious phrase…

• This weekend, I’m watching Netflix’s Beef, a limited series starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong.

• Everyone is talking about the new Barbie trailer. Don’t ask me how I feel about it!

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• What’s a creative director for, anyway? (SSENSE)

• Holographic media, a theory by the Berlin-based media collective New Models. (Outland)

• Fanci Club is the new Vietnamese brand that young female celebrities are wearing. I am heavily ~considering~ this dress. You heard it from me first: It's going to be a low-back summer for the girlies. (NYT)

• I enjoyed this NYT Magazine interview with the novelist and artist Gary Indiana. He’s a writer whose work and personality is quite hard to pin down, having worked across a variety of forms (novels, criticism, journalism, playwriting, screenwriting) and with various artist-types. “I don’t travel in any [social] circles,” he says. Indiana doesn’t get writer’s block; he has writer’s hesitation. He says “video is like writing with a camera.” My favorite quote of his lightly disparages critics, on how it’s “not a respectable job for an adult” (ahem).

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