Jeffrey Steven Yass is an American billionaire businessman. According to Forbes, Yass had a net worth of $27.6 billion in April 2024 which grew to $49.6 billion by September 2024 and is the richest man in Pennsylvania. He is a registered Libertarian who gives money to conservative super-PACs including Club for Growth Action and the Protect Freedom Political Action Committee. He and his wife Janine Yass are supporters of school choice, a cause to which they have donated tens of millions of dollars.
Douglas M. Leone is an American billionaire venture capitalist and former managing partner of Sequoia Capital, from which role he stepped aside in 2022 while remaining a general partner. As of August 2022, his net worth was estimated at US$6.1 billion.
Keith Rabois is an American technology executive and investor. He is a managing director at Khosla Ventures. He was an early-stage startup investor, and executive, at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square. Rabois invested in Yelp and the Xoom Corporation prior to each company's initial public offering (IPO). For both investments he insisted on being a board of directors member.
Jeffrey Neale Jackson is an American politician, attorney, military officer, and North Carolina attorney general-elect serving as the U.S. representative for North Carolina's 14th congressional district since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the 37th district in the North Carolina Senate from 2014 to 2022.
Joshua S. Gottheimer is an American politician, attorney, writer, and public policy adviser who has served as the U.S. representative for New Jersey's 5th congressional district since 2017. The district stretches along the northern border of the state from New York City's densely populated metropolitan suburbs in Bergen County northwest through exurban and rural territory in northern Passaic and Sussex Counties.
Michael John Gallagher is an American foreign policy advisor and Republican politician from Brown County, Wisconsin. He served four terms in the United States House of Representatives, representing Wisconsin's 8th congressional district from 2017 until his resignation in April 2024.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app or the web.
DCM (also known as DCM Ventures) is a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley, Tokyo and Beijing. DCM was one of the first venture capital firms to invest in the early-stage technology sector in China, beginning in 1999. It has increasingly shifted away from Chinese investments due to US sanctions against China.
U.S. WeChat Users Alliance (USWUA) v. Trump was 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. The lawsuit was dismissed in July 2021, following the Biden Administration's rescission of the executive order.
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. The order prohibited the usage of TikTok in five stages, the first being the prohibition of downloading the application. 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.
Many countries have imposed past or ongoing restrictions on the video sharing social network TikTok. Bans from government devices usually stem from national security concerns over potential access of data by the Chinese government. Other bans have cited children's well-being and offensive content such as pornography.
The Entity List is a trade restriction list published by the United States Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), consisting of certain foreign persons, entities, or governments. It is published as Supplement 4 of Part 744 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Entities on the Entity List are subject to U.S. license requirements for the export or transfer of specified items, such as some U.S. technologies. However, U.S. persons or companies are not prohibited from purchasing items from a company on the Entity List. Being included on the Entity List is less severe than being designated a "denied person" and more severe than being placed on the Unverified List (UVL).
There are reports of TikTok censoring political content related to China and other countries as well as content from minority creators. TikTok says that its initial content moderation policies, many of which are no longer applicable, were aimed at reducing divisiveness and were not politically motivated.
In 2020, the United States government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-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.
TikTok has sparked concerns over potential user data collection and influence operations by the Chinese government, leading to restrictions and bans in the United States.
The RESTRICT Act is a proposed law that was first introduced in the United States Senate on March 7, 2023. Introduced by Senator Mark Warner, the Act proposed that the Secretary of Commerce be given the power to review business transactions involving certain information and communications technologies products or services when they are connected to a "foreign adversary" of the United States, and pose an "undue and unacceptable risk" to the national security of the United States or its citizens.
Antisemitism on social media can manifest in various forms such as emojis, GIFs, memes, comments, and reactions to content. Studies have categorized antisemitic discourse into different types: hate speech, calls for violence, dehumanization, conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) is an act of Congress that was signed into law on April 24, 2024, as part of Public Law 118-50. It would ban social networking services within 270 to 360 days if they are determined by the president of the United States and relevant provisions to be a "foreign adversary controlled application"; the definition covers websites and application software, including mobile apps. The act explicitly applies to ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries—including TikTok—without the need for additional determination. It ceases to be applicable if the foreign adversary controlled application is divested and no longer considered to be controlled by a foreign adversary of the United States.
The Hill and Valley Forum is a consortium of American lawmakers and venture capitalists first convened in March 2023 to combat China's influence on the US technology industry. Founded by United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission member Jacob Helberg alongside venture capitalists Christian Garrett and Delian Asparahouv, the working group also includes Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla. The forum's initial private dinner in Washington, D.C. was held in advance of congressional testimony by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, and was attended by then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr.
