From The New Yorker Radio Hour: The TikTok Ban Is “Rooted in Hypocrisy” with Katie Drummond

From The New Yorker Radio Hour: The TikTok Ban Is “Rooted in Hypocrisy” with Katie Drummond

Author: WIRED June 6, 2024 Duration: 21:42
David Remnick talks with Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired magazine, about the TikTok ban that just passed with bipartisan support in Washington. The app will be removed from distribution in U.S. app stores unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, sells it to an approved buyer. TikTok is suing to block that law. Is this a battle among tech giants for dominance, or a real issue of national security? Drummond sees the ban as a corporate crusade by Silicon Valley to suppress a foreign competitor with a superior product. The claim that TikTok is a national-security threat she finds “a vast overreach that is rooted in hypotheticals and that is rooted in hypocrisy, and in … a fundamental refusal to look across the broad spectrum of social media platforms, and treat all of them from a regulatory point of view with the same level of care and precision.”

Navigating today's political landscape means understanding the forces that shape it online, where the lines between news, conspiracy, and entertainment are increasingly blurred. WIRED Politics Lab is a weekly exploration of this digital arena, hosted by WIRED's own reporters. They don't just recount the headlines; they delve into the mechanics of internet extremism and the spread of disinformation, examining how these phenomena influence real-world politics and policy. Each episode functions as a guided tour through a complex and often chaotic information ecosystem. You'll hear conversations grounded in factual reporting and research, designed to unpack the week's most pressing and puzzling developments. The goal is to provide more than just analysis-it's about equipping you with context and clarity. This podcast offers tools to critically assess the narratives flooding our feeds, helping to distinguish signal from noise. Tune in for a substantive, sometimes surprising look at how politics operates in the age of algorithms and viral campaigns, and leave with a sharper understanding of the digital currents driving our collective future.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 37

WIRED Politics Lab
Podcast Episodes
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Far-right militia, extremist groups are using Facebook to organize ahead of the US presidential election. After laying low for several years after the Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorg…
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This might be the end of TikTok. President Joe Biden signed a bill this week which allows the US government to ban the platform if TikTok doesn't divest from it's China-based owner, ByteDance, within a year. Today on the…
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In the year since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. officially launched his presidential campaign, his extreme conspiracies and very online outreach tactics have added up to a pretty effective independent bid. Today on Wired Politic…
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Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target electio…
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