The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is an inter-agency committee of the United States Government that reviews the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies or operations. Chaired by the United States Secretary of the Treasury, CFIUS includes representatives from 16 U.S. departments and agencies, including the Defense, State and Commerce departments, as well as the Department of Homeland Security.
The USA PATRIOT Act was passed by the United States Congress in 2001 as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. It has ten titles, each containing numerous sections. Title III: International Money Laundering Abatement and Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 is actually an act of Congress in its own right as well as being a title of the USA PATRIOT Act, and is intended to facilitate the prevention, detection and prosecution of international money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The title's sections primarily amend portions of the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 and the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.
Kevin A. Mayer is an American business executive who is the chairman of DAZN Group. He also serves as co-chairman and co-CEO of Forest Road Acquisition Corp II and as a senior advisor to Forest Road Acquisition Corp. He was CEO of TikTok and COO of its parent company ByteDance Ltd in 2020. Mayer is the former Chairman of the Direct-to-Consumer & International division of The Walt Disney Company. He was previously the senior executive vice president and chief strategy officer of Disney where he led their acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, BamTech, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox. He also directed the divestitures of Miramax and ABC Radio.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese multinational internet technology company headquartered in Beijing and legally domiciled in the Cayman Islands.
TikTok, known in China as Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts a variety of short-form user videos, from genres like pranks, stunts, tricks, jokes, dance, and entertainment with durations from 15 seconds to ten minutes. TikTok is an international version of Douyin, which was originally released in the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018.
Carl John Nichols is a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Zhang Yiming is a Chinese internet entrepreneur. He founded ByteDance in 2012 and developed the news aggregator Toutiao and the video sharing platform TikTok (Douyin/抖音), formerly known as Musical.ly. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhang's personal wealth in 2022 was estimated at $44.5 billion. On November 4, 2021, Zhang Yiming stepped down as CEO of ByteDance, completing a leadership handover announced in May 2021.
ShareChat is an Indian social media and social networking service, developed by Bangalore based Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd. It was founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, and incorporated on 8 January 2015. ShareChat has over 250 million monthly active users across 15 Indian languages. The company's application offers features that include private messaging, tagging and a personal messaging feature, enabling users to share videos, jokes, songs and other language based social content with other unknown users.
Charli D'Amelio is an American social media personality and dancer. She was a competitive dancer for over 10 years before starting her social media career in 2019, when she started actively posting content on the video-sharing platform TikTok, where she began posting dance videos which started trending on the platform. She quickly amassed a large following and subsequently became the most-followed creator on the platform.
Clash is an American short-form video hosting service and social network where users can create looping videos that are between 2–16 seconds long. It was created by a team led by Dom Hofmann as a successor to Vine, which Hofmann co-founded.
Addison Rae Easterling is an American social media personality, actress, dancer and singer. In August 2020, she was named as the highest-earning TikTok personality by Forbes. In 2021, Addison Rae made the Forbes "30 Under 30" list for social media influencers. Her accolades include a Streamy Award of four nominations, and additional nominations for two People's Choice Awards and three Kids' Choice Awards.
Zynn was a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by Kuaishou, a Beijing-based internet technology company established in 2011 by Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao. It was used to create and share short videos, and it pays its users for using the app and referring others. Zynn was launched on May 7, 2020. It became the most-downloaded app in the App Store in the same month. It has also been criticized for being a "pyramid scheme", and it has faced accusations of plagiarism and stealing content. Aside from Zynn in North America, Kuaishou is available under the name Kwai in Russia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, America, India, and the Middle East. Kwai used to be available in Australia and the United States on the App Store, but was removed at an unknown date. Zynn was permanently shut down on 20 August 2021.
Triller is an American video-sharing social networking service. The service allows users to create and share short-form videos, including videos set to, or automatically synchronized to music using artificial intelligence technology. Triller was released for iOS and Android in 2015, and initially operated as a video editing app before adding social networking features.
U.S. WeChat Users Alliance (USWUA) v. Trump is a court case pending before the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction on September 20, 2020, blocking the Trump administration's ban order against WeChat based on concerns raised about harm to First Amendment rights and the hardships imposed on a minority community using the app as a primary means of communication.
TikTok v. Trump was a lawsuit before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia filed in September 2020 by TikTok as a challenge to President Donald Trump's executive order of August 6, 2020, prohibiting the usage of the application in five stages, the first being the prohibition of downloading TikTok. On September 27, 2020, a preliminary injunction was issued by Judge Carl J. Nichols blocking enforcement of that executive order. The lawsuit, by then captioned TikTok v. Biden, was dismissed in July 2021, following the Biden Administration's rescission of the executive order.
Multiple governmental agencies and private business have imposed or attempted impose bans on the social media service TikTok. Countries like India and the United States have expressed concerns about the app’s ownership by the Chinese company, ByteDance, attempting to ban it from app stores. Countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh have banned it on the basis of pornography-related concerns, while others like Armenia and Azerbaijan have implemented restrictions to mitigate the spread of information which could lead to conflict.
Ratatouille the Musical is an Internet meme and crowdsourced musical based on the 2007 Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille. TikTok user Emily Jacobsen created a short comedic song in tribute to Remy, a rat with a talent for cooking and the main character of the film, in August 2020. This led to another TikTok user, Daniel Mertzlufft, arranging Jacobsen's tribute as if it were a finale to a Disney musical. From there, additional TikTok users continued to add to Mertzlufft's video to envision a full musical, including a playbill, scenic design, choreography, and more songs. In December 2020, Seaview Productions announced a charity benefit concert presentation of the musical. The benefit concert was streamed for 72 hours beginning on January 1, 2021, followed by an encore presentation on January 10, 2021. In total, the production raised $2 million for The Actors Fund and had 350,000 total viewers.
Censorship on TikTok affects material published by people on the Chinese social media platform TikTok. There is evidence that TikTok has down-weighted the posts of political dissidents, LGBT people, disabled people, and certain African-American hashtags. Explanations for this vary, ranging from attempting to protect users from bullying to algorithmic mistakes.
In 2020, the U.S. government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-U.S. president Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat. The result was that TikTok owner ByteDance—which initially planned on selling a small portion of TikTok to an American company—agreed to divest TikTok to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries where restrictions are also being considered due to privacy concerns, which themselves are mostly related to its ownership by a firm based in China.
