TikTok’s Rivals Can Expect Revenue and User Gains if US Bans App
TikTok is dark for 170 million of its US users as of this writing following a ban over national security concerns that the Supreme Court unanimously held up late last week.
The Financial Times breaks down the economic implications should the prohibition stand until the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, cedes control of US operations. Meta and YouTube stand to gain the most from the America blackout, to the tune of roughly half of TikTok’s $10 billion in digital advertising revenues. Those and other social media players have been tweaking their platforms to mimic TikTok’s wildly popular short video-sharing capabilities. Rivaling its renowned savvy with algorithms may prove more difficult.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, whose administration began a day after the ban went into place, has promised a reprieve for TikTok. The FT also reports that Beijing pols are in talks to lean on Elon Musk to broker a deal for American ownership.
Will Lewis’ first year at ‘Washington Post’: Cancellations, red ink and an exodus
“The Post‘s reporting, from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to January 6, places it among the pantheon of vital American journalistic institutions,” writes NPR’s David Folkenflik. “But it is a diminished outlet on the eve of Trump’s second term.”
Folkenflik interviewed 10 WaPo staffers for the piece, which comes a year into Will Lewis’s disastrous tenure as publisher and CEO of the paper. Over 400 Post journalists recently joined a petition asking owner Jeff Bezos to intervene.
They tell the post that the “backlash against Lewis encompasses Bezos to some degree.” The well-documented debacles mentioned in the article include a new policy that the paper shouldn’t report stories about itself, the recent killing of a cartoon critical of Bezos kowtowing to Trump and, of course, the decision to end presidential endorsements by the editorial board. The latter move stoked a reader revolt that ultimately cost the Post 300,000 (out of roughly 3 million) subscribers.
“They are compromised,” ex-Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who resigned last week, tells NPR. “Journalism is not about balancing the financial interests of your owner against your journalistic obligations.”
India’s Fact-Checkers React to Meta’s Policy Change
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would do away with third party fact-checkers rightfully set off consternation about the untrammeled spread of digital disinformation during the second Trump term. That it arrived just steps ahead of Trump’s return to the White House, and followed the Meta owner’s $1 million donation to the president-elect’s inauguration fund, hardly allayed those fears, which have risen on the back of gleeful reporting on the ebb of “woke” and DEI culture.
Columbia Journalism Review’s Meghnad Bose offers a unique angle on the news, writing of its effect on journalists at The Quint, an Indian outlet of 40 journalists who received crucial funding from grants given to its special division “fighting mis- and disinformation and improving media literacy.”
Zuckerberg’s perceived capitulation to Trump as Silicon Valley oligarchs, seemingly as a black tied unit, relish his return to power, doesn’t just signal a new free speech era in the US. Journalists abroad are likely to suffer from a “sense of stability that has now abruptly been lost.”
This article previously appeared in Hearst’s CT Times.
