TikTok Fights In Federal Court To Keep Platform Alive

TikTok is currently facing off against the federal government in court as they fight to keep their platform operational after the Biden administration forced them to either sell or shut down. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

TikTok is currently facing off against the federal government in court as they fight to keep their platform operational after the Biden administration forced them to either sell or shut down. Pick this up. We've told this, we've gone through this story again and again. You know what struck me is that we're talking about TikTok and their foreign ownership, headline buddy, Politico, foreign owned. Politico, we gonna do the same thing to Politico? Spotify, foreign owned. Are we gonna do the same thing to Spotify? This has just gotten so cranked out of control to where these people actually believe they can do this. And any federal judges are gonna say, wait a second. You're anticipating that TikTok is gonna do something wrong. At this point, they've said there hadn't been anything done wrong. But we're anticipating that it might be. We're anticipating that they're gonna take all this information that they're scraping off, the same stuff that Facebook scrapes off, the same stuff that Instagram scrapes off and somehow the Chinese are gonna use it. That's their argument.

Well, and the argument from the lawyers for the government is it's okay when American companies take your data because they can sell it. We use it for targeted advertisements and things like that. But they said, the problem is that same data is extremely valuable to a foreign adversary trying to compromise the security of the United States.

They can buy it right now.

Exactly.

China can buy every bit that Facebook has scraped away from everybody watching this program or Instagram. You don't think these folks are doing the same thing? They're taking everything they can. All China's gotta do is get on the phone. Hello Instagram, I'd like to buy all your data. They'd have exactly the same thing.

Exactly. But I think it's just so insane that the federal government's lawyers have walked into this court in front of this three judge panel and said, listen, it's okay when we do it. There's no problem with that. And to their credit, the lawyers working for TikTok and the plaintiffs, the other plaintiffs, because there's other people that are involved in this lawsuit, but those lawyers pointed out, okay, well Politico, that's owned by a foreign country, Spotify, as you said, it's owned by a foreign country. Why are you targeting us? Is this about really working for national security or is this just because you don't like this company or this country? Because you cannot legislate based on your animosity towards one country.

You know who's really trying to put 'em out of business is corporate media. Okay. Now you know why that is, right? We talk about this all the time. We have come up, you and I have come up for 20 plus years doing stories that corporate media refuses to do because their corporate advertisers wouldn't let 'em do it. Whether it's a drug that's killing people. Whether its mom and pop having all their money stolen from banks in New York. Whether it's a company like DuPont or 3M destroying entire ecosystems. We would try to go on the air and tell those stories. I can't even count the number of times that we were stopped. Matter of fact, I got a call from Washington Post doing a story about the threat of Russia speech, and asking me, well, what was your experience with that? And I said, you know, here's my experience. The only time I've been censored by trying to tell a story about corporate malfeasance is on MSNBC or any of the cable stations. You can't tell those stories. I remember one story we did on, do you remember the Yellowwood story?

Yep.

Okay. So the Yellowwood story, I'm trying to tell the story about a company that has arsenic all over their wood, and that they want to take that wood and they want to make into children's playground equipment. So I go on, do the story. They want me to come back and apologize the next day.