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Jan 21, 2025
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Welcome back! President Trump delays enforcement of TikTok sale-or-ban law by 75 days while revoking Biden's AI safety executive order. Instagram launches rival video editing app to ByteDance's CapCut.
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President Trump signed an executive order to delay the enforcement of the TikTok sale-or-ban law for 75 days from Monday. In the order, Trump said his administration plans to find a solution “that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans,“ adding that the new administration must also review relevant intelligence relating to national security concerns and evaluate “the sufficiency of mitigation measures TikTok has taken to date.” The order also instructed the Department of Justice not to impose penalties for any noncompliance of the TikTok ban law during the 75-day period and shortly before the signing of the order. The move could prevent Oracle, which has already resumed its cloud services for TikTok, from getting punished, while
providing assurance for Apple and Google to start hosting TikTok again in their app stores. The signing of the executive order follows Trump’s earlier proposal to pursue a joint venture under which TikTok is 50% owned by the U.S. Any deal would require approval by the Chinese government, which blocks the export of algorithms developed by ByteDance that are used in TikTok. Also on Monday, Trump said his administration could impose tariffs on China if the country got in the way of a good deal, according to Axios.
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President Trump on Monday revoked dozens of executive orders issued by the Biden administration including a key directive related to artificial intelligence. Biden’s executive order on AI was issued in October 2023 and required companies developing advanced AI models to share information with the U.S. government about the safety and security of their AI systems. The directive also addressed the problem of deep fakes and mandated that cloud service providers report their foreign customers to the U.S. government, among other rules. However, the Republican Party said the executive order was “dangerous” and hindered innovation. The Trump administration is expected to take a more hands-off approach to government regulation on AI and other areas.
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Instagram is creating a competitor to ByteDance’s video creation and editing app CapCut, called Edits, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on Sunday. The announcement came after CapCut and TikTok, the larger ByteDance-owned app, shut off services for U.S. users late Saturday. A federal law came into effect on Sunday requiring the apps to cut ties with ByteDance or face a ban. But president-Elect Donald Trump on Sunday said he would delay enforcement of the ban, which gave TikTok enough reassurances to restart. CapCut, however, was still offline for users on Sunday, citing the divest-or-ban law. “There’s a lot going on right now, but no matter what happens, it’s our job to provide the best possible tools for creators,” Mosseri wrote in a post on Instagram. Instagram over the last week has made a series of moves to more closely resemble TikTok, including testing profile grids with vertical photos and extending the maximum length for its short-form video product Reels from 90 seconds to three minutes.
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A parade of tech luminaries were prominent amongst attendees at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday, signaling a major shift in relations between the tech industry and Trump for his second term. Among high level people sitting immediately behind Trump as he was sworn in was Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Further back in the group was TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Many of the tech executives donated $1 million to the inauguration personally, or via their
companies.
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President-elect Donald Trump on Friday evening announced on social media the launch of his “official” meme token, a solana-based asset whose price jumped to $26 per token within a day, giving it a market value of $5 billion on paper. The token, called $TRUMP, is intended to be an expression of support for Trump and not an investment opportunity, contract or security, its website says. It has no relations to any political campaign or office or governmental agency, it adds. The majority of the token supply is owned by affiliates of the Trump Organization. Trump and his children earlier were involved with the launch of World Liberty Financial, another crypto project. His rising business interests in crypto could raise ethics concerns, such as whether businesses could influence him by buying his tokens.
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Donald Trump said he plans to issue an executive order on Monday to delay the enforcement of the TikTok ban and bring the app back. Trump also proposed a joint venture deal for TikTok with 50% U.S. ownership to allow the app to stay in operation in the U.S. “I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!” Trump said in a post on his social media site Truth Social. Trump, who will become president on Monday, said that his executive order “will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.” TikTok switched off its app for U.S. users late Saturday, just before the U.S. ban came into effect on Sunday under a federal law that required the app to cut its ties with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban. To save TikTok, “I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture,” Trump said in the Truth Social post. “Without U.S. approval, there is no TikTok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars—maybe trillions,” he said.
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Meta Platforms will break up a team that trained employees on civil rights, sought to prevent the company’s algorithms from spreading harmful or disrespectful content and helped the company develop technology to more equitably distribute ads, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The team’s members, “along with some of their work,” will move to other teams at Meta, a spokesperson for the company said. Meta’s vice president of civil rights Roy Austin, who led the team, announced his departure last week, on the same day that the company ended many of its
diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In a post on LinkedIn, Austin said he would leave in March. When Austin joined Meta in 2021 to lead the civil rights team, the company called it “an incredibly important role for Facebook and for the tech industry.” The civil rights team had helped develop a system to address
racial and other disparities in how Meta distributed ads on its apps. The work was part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2022 over allegations that Meta had engaged in housing discrimination by allowing advertisers to restrict who could see their ads based on characteristics such as race and gender. Meta | | | |
