Facebook's Zuckerberg Pumped Millions Into Getting TikTok Ban

President Biden has officially signed legislation that says TikTok either has to be sold or be shut down within the next 12 months. The legislation is going to set up a massive legal battle, and the facts aren’t on the government’s side. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Link - https://www.npr.org/2024/04/24/1246663779/biden-ban-tiktok-us

Link - https://readsludge.com/2024/04/23/meta-shatters-lobbying-record-as-house-passes-tiktok-ban/

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

President Biden has officially signed legislation that says TikTok either has to be sold or be shut down within the next 12 months. The legislation is gonna set up a massive legal battle, and the facts aren't on the government side on this. You'd agree with this?
I agree that the facts are definitely not on the government side. Look, this is something, obviously, we've seen it coming in slow motion and we have dissected this from every angle. And I think the most important one is that the talking point about, oh, China could use this to get your data. Even the government itself says that that's literally never happened and probably will never happen.
And they say we have no evidence of it.
Right.
You would think if this was going on the NSA or the FBI or the CIA might know about it. Look, this is just a product of the other tech companies saying, TikTok, we want you to go away. And there's really good, there's really good information that points in that direction with Facebook or whatever they're called today, spending millions of dollars to try to make this happen, right?
Yeah. Just in the last, or the first three months of this year, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, Instagram, all that, $7.6 million they spent on lobbying, more than they've ever spent in a single quarter. And even though they didn't specifically mention TikTok, they said they were lobbying on national security concern. Basically all the same thing they're using to trash TikTok. So, yes, I think at this point it is safe to say Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, is the driving force behind this ban.
Oh, of course. He's hired a bunch of lobbyists. He's put millions of dollars into doing away with his competition because it would increase his business by something like 50%.
Yeah.
I mean, the numbers are staggering, if he can do away with TikTok. And of course Congress buys into it because they're getting a lot of money, a lot of money being spread around by Meta. But it's clearly, this is a jihad by Zuckerberg. I don't think there's any question about it. And so you look at this and the arguments are, well, we're doing this because we're worried about security. We're worried about this company finding out about your personal data. Like, really? Like it's not out there already. Like Meta doesn't already have it. Come on.
Right. I've gotten multiple emails from AT&T in the last couple weeks letting me know that, hey, we had a big data breach. Your data was accessed by outside individuals. So we have that happening with our companies here, either by selling it to people or by just not having security to protect their own platforms. So I'm not gonna sit here and be worried about TikTok doing it when I'm getting emails every other week from American companies saying, oops, we accidentally gave your data away.
Right. Okay. So here's the argument. Simple argument. We're different. Instagram saying we're different. Can you identify anything that's different? Anything at all that's different about them spying on folks the same way that they're accusing TikTok of doing? Processing their data, selling the data, they're doing everything. But we're saying, oh no, we're different. The only difference is that Zuckerberg has spread around more money than TikTok. That's all that's going on here.
Yeah, absolutely. Meta has all the money in the world that they want to spend, and they're using it. This is what lobbying is all about. If you have the most money, you're gonna win the day.