Goodbye to our personal Chinese spies. With five days left until the date by which TikTok is to be either sold or banned in the United States, millions of users are reckoning with what happens when one of the internet’s most important media platforms just up and disappears. (Or, more likely, sticks around for a while, consistently gets worse, and then dies with a whimper.)
On this episode of The Vergecast, we reckon with how we got here, and where we go next. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner walks us through the years-long history of the fight over TikTok, and takes us inside last week’s Supreme Court hearing, where the country’s highest court appeared to be in favor of the ban. Even with a few days left, though, the story’s not over: Donald Trump has said he wants to save the app, and he’ll be inaugurated as president the day after the ban is set to go into effect. And now there are rumors Elon Musk might be involved with the app’s future, too. If we’ve learned one thing about the TikTok ban, it’s that it’s always coming and seemingly never actually here. But it sure feels close now.
After that, we chat with Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor about a different kind of creator platform….
