Speaker 1: You know, I was sitting on my couch just a
few weeks ago, doom scrolling as you do, and it
honestly felt like I had stumbled into a digital wake awake. Yeah,
it is late January, the big deadline was looming, and
my entire feed was just well, it was grief. It
was full of people wearing all black in their videos,
playing that sad violin music, you know, the one, giving
these like tearful oscar worthy goodbye speeches to their followers.
There were literal mock funerals happening in the comment sections.
It wasn't just a joke. There was this genuine, palpable
panic that the screen was about to go black for good.
Speaker 2: It was a huge cultural flashpoint, wasn't it.
Speaker 3: I Mean, we really saw the intensity of the connection
people have with this platform. The clock had run out,
the courts had spoken, and the ultimatum from the government
was it was binary and it was brutal cool. Separate
from China or get banned in America.
Speaker 2: That was it. It really felt like the end of
an era was upon us.
Speaker 1: It really really did. It felt like a full blown
evacuation drill online. I had creators, you know, practically screaming
at me through the screen. Download your data, save your drafts,
follow me on Instagram, here's my YouTube, here's my substack.
It was absolute.
Speaker 2: Chaos, the Great Migration.
Speaker 1: The Great Migration exactly, and then the plot twist, the
funeral gets canceled. The patient makes this miraculous recovery. Right
there on the operating table. We'll get the headline that
a deal has been struck, the ink is dry, and
the app is officially saved. It's staying in the US.
Speaker 3: A massive corporate and geopolitical victory.
Speaker 2: Theoretically.
Speaker 1: Theoretically is the perfect word there, because that is the massive,
massive irony we are unpacking today. The app was saved,
it is now legal, safe and quote US owned. And
yet the moments that news broke, the user started fleeing.
We were seeing a one hundred and fifty percent spike
in voluntary deletions of the very app. People were crying
about losing just what a few weeks ago.
Speaker 2: It is the TikTok paradox. It's fascinating.
Speaker 3: We went from please don't take this away from us
to get this thing off my phone immediately in the
span of about seventy two hours.
Speaker 1: So welcome to throwing threads. I'm your host, and today
we're pulling apart the threads of this incredibly complex story.
We aren't just talking about as social media app. We're
talking about a crisis of trust, the intricate scenes of
data sovereignty, and what happens when the solution to a
problem scares people more than the problem itself.
Speaker 3: And I'm here to help guide us through the legal,
the technical, and maybe even the psychological layers of this,
because you're absolutely right, this is about so much more
than dance challenges or viral recipes. It's about who owns
your digital identity.
Speaker 1: Okay, so here is our mission for today's thrilling threads.
We really need to understand why a victory for the
platform became a total nightmare for the user base. We
are going to dissect the anatomy of this new US
ownership deal, like who actually holds the keys to the kingdom. Now,
we're going to go line by line through those privacy
policy updates. It sent everyone into a complete spiral, and
we have to look at the glitch, that mysterious technical
blackout that happened right as the deal closed. It's just
too convenient.
Speaker 3: And we absolutely cannot ignore the political element. There are serious,
documented accusations of censorship following the sale that we need
to examine very very closely.
Speaker 1: Well, it's stop scrolling and start digging.
Speaker 2: Let's get into it.
Speaker 1: I think we have to start with the rescue because
to understand why people are leaving, you first have to
understand the context of the deal that was supposed to
make them stay. For years, the narrative around TikTok in
the US has been a pressure cooker. This didn't just
pop up out of nowhere, right.
Speaker 3: This didn't happen overnight. This is the culmination of years
and years of scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment
in the United States what's known as CFIUS cfi US.
Speaker 1: Right, I've heard that acronym.
Speaker 3: A lot, and the core issue for them was always
the ownership structure. The parent company Bitedance is Chinese, and
under Chinese national security laws, specifically the National Intelligence Law
of twenty seventeen, companies can be compelled. They can be
forced to assist the state in intelligence.
Speaker 1: Gathering, which is I mean a terrifying prospect when you
think about the sheer volume of data involved with an
app like tiktoks.
Speaker 3: The scale of it, it's astronomical. So the fear from
US officials was always twofold. First data security, right, meaning
can the Chinese government see, for example, the precise location
data of American troops based on their fitness tracking videos
or what American teenagers are saying in their private messages.
Speaker 1: And the second fear was foreign influence right, the idea
that they could tweak the algorithm exactly.
Speaker 3: The algorithm is the crown jewel. Could they use it
to subtly make Americans angrier at each other? Could they
suppress new stories or narratives that were critical of the
Chinese government?
Speaker 1: Information warfare via algorithm precisely.
Speaker 3: It's a very subtle but an incredibly powerful weapon. And
that fear, that dual fear, is what drove the US
government to issue the ultimatum vest or vanish, the breakup
or get out order.
Speaker 1: A lot of US I think thought they wouldn't actually
do it. It just seemed too big to fail, too
culturally ingrained to just switch off. But they really pushed
it to the brink. And then this joint venture was announced.
Speaker 3: And this was pitched as the perfect compromise solution instead
of a total shutdown, which would have been politically messy.
The US operations of TikTok were carved out and moved
under a brand new corporate.
Speaker 1: Entity, a whole new company.
Speaker 3: A whole new company. And the critical piece of this puzzle,
the thing that was supposed to fix everything, is that
this new entity is majority US owned.
Speaker 1: Okay, so on paper, problem solved. No more Chinese ownership dominance.
The threat is neutralized. But we have to talk about
the specific characters in this play, because the person who
took the victory lap wasn't a CEO or a tech founder.
It was President Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: He was incredibly vocal about brokering this specific deal. He
made it a centerpiece of his tech policy. Really, he
framed it as a personal achievement.
Speaker 1: I have the quote right here in the language is well,
it's distinct. He said he was so happy to have
helped in saving TikTok. But then he went on to
describe the new owners, and this is the part that
really got people's attention. He said, the app will now
be owned by a group of great American patriots and investors.
Speaker 3: That specific phrase, great American patriots. That is where the
first thread really starts to fray for a lot of
the users.
Speaker 1: What do you think that is well.
Speaker 3: In a standard mergers and acquisitions announcement, you talk about
shareholder value, you talk about strategic synergy, or maybe market stabilization.
You don't usually describe a multi billion dollar tech acquisition
as an act of patriotism.
Speaker 1: It reframes the whole thing, doesn't it. It stops being a
neutral tech utility like a telephone line or a server,
and it starts feeling like a national asset.
Speaker 2: Or, depending on your politics, a political asset.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 3: It signals a profound ideological shift. It implies that the
app now has an allegiance, a loyalty. Remember, the entire
selling point of this deal to the American public was security.
The press release promised that US user data would be
protected by domestic safeguards. They promised the recommendation algorithm, that
secret sauce that keeps you scrolling for hours and hours
would be free from any foreign tampering.
Speaker 1: Tighter oversight, stronger security. We are building a digital wall
around the data. That was the message.
Speaker 3: It sounded like the perfect solution. Sovereignty solved, the threat
of Beijing removed from the equation, So if.
Speaker 1: Your primary worry was China, this should have been a
champagne moment. You should be cleeping easy at night knowing
that patriots are guarding the server room.
Speaker 3: In theory, yes, absolutely, but the reaction wasn't relief. It
was immediate, widespread suspicion, because almost instantly, the user base
shifted their anxiety from who is losing control of this
app to who is gaining control of it?
Speaker 1: And that general anxiety needed a trigger. It needed something
tangible to latch onto, and boy, oh boy, did it
get one.
Speaker 2: It got one.
Speaker 1: The dreaded terms of service update.
Speaker 2: The click grap moment, the moment of truth.
Speaker 1: We are all guilty of this. You get the pop up,
you scroll to the bottom at mock speed, and you
just like, I agree, yeah, because you just want to
watch the video of the cat jumping over the cucumber.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: We never ate it, never, We just want the content.
Speaker 3: But this time the context was completely different. People were
hyper aware of the ownership change. The news cycle had
been dominating their feeds for weeks, so for the first time,
maybe ever, people actually read it, or, to.
Speaker 1: Be more accurate, screenshots of the scariest parts started circulating
on x and Instagram and everywhere else.
Speaker 2: The panic went viral.
Speaker 1: It really did. So let's break down this list, because
we have the source material on the new privacy policy
right here. It lists categories of sensitive data that this
new patriotic TikTok entity can now collect or process. And
some of these are well, they're intense. The first one
that just set the Internet on fire immigration status.
Speaker 3: That is a radioactive data point in the current political climate.
There is no other way to describe it.
Speaker 1: Why, I mean just why, Why on earth does a
short form video app need to know if I have
a Green card or a visa. I'm there to learn advance,
not to file for asylum. What's the justification?
Speaker 3: Well, before we even get to the why, let's look
at the full scope, because.
Speaker 2: It's not just that one thing. The list is long.
Speaker 1: Okay, fair enough, Let's go down the lists. So we
have immigration status, we have sexual orientation, we have gender identity,
we have precise location data and we're not talking New York.
We're talking one twenty three Main Street.
Speaker 2: Apartment four B down to the meter.
Speaker 1: Private messages, AI interactions, and maybe most concerning of all
data link to minors.
Speaker 3: It is a comprehensive surveillance list. There is no other
way to put it. It covers nearly every sensitive aspect
of a person's life.
Speaker 1: That phrase AI interactions. That one really stuck out to
me too. We are moving into a world where people
use chatbots almost like therapists or personal assistance.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: So, if I'm talking to a TikTok ai filter or
some kind of bot, I'm confessing my anxieties or asking
for advice on a personal relationship, are they recording that?
Speaker 3: Are they analyzing it under these new terms, Yes, they
certainly can. It's feeding the model, it's helping them train
their AI, and it's potentially feeding a very, very detailed
profile about you.
Speaker 1: But let's circle back to immigration status. I want you
to play the devil's advocate here for a second, or
maybe the corporate defense attorney. Is there any legitimate, non
nefarious reason for this or is it just as bad
as it looks on the surface.
Speaker 3: Okay, So if we look at this through a purely
legal lens and we take off our user hat for
a moment, some legal experts have pointed out that this
language isn't entirely unique to TikTok It's a trend in
what lawyers call defensive drafting.
Speaker 1: Defensive drafting, explain that to me what does that mean?
Speaker 3: Basically, corporate lawyers are terrified of being sued or fined
by state regulators. Many US states now have extremely specific
and very aggressive privacy laws, you know, California, Illinois, Virginia, others.
And these laws require companies to disclose anything they might
conceivably collect, even if they don't actively go out and
hunt for it.
Speaker 1: So you're saying, if I make a video where I
say I'm an undocumented immigrant and I'm proud, or I
share a story about my visa application issues, the app
has now technically collected that information just because I posted.
Speaker 3: It exactly, or perhaps more likely, if their algorithm infers
it based on the content you watch.
Speaker 2: If you watch fifty videos in a.
Speaker 3: Row about green card application tips, the algorithm tags you
with an interest in that topic. So the lawyers, to
be safe list immigration status in the policy to cover
their bases. I see they're essentially saying, look, we might
stumble across this data in the course of operating our platform,
so we are listing it here so you can't sue
us later for processing it without your explicit disclosure and consent.
Speaker 1: So it's a legal shield, is cya.
Speaker 3: It's a legal shield. But here is the fundamental problem.
Users don't think like corporate lawyers. Users think like well,
like human beings. They see a list of demands for
their most private information.
Speaker 1: It's perception versus precedent.
Speaker 3: Correct, That's the perfect way to put it. It doesn't matter
if Facebook or Instagram has a similar clause buried somewhere
deep in their fifty pages of fine print, and they
often do. What matters is the timing.
Speaker 1: The timing is everything here everything.
Speaker 3: You have a platform that was just forcibly sold to
a business group explicitly labeled American Patriots, a deal endorsed
by a hardline administration known for its very public and
very aggressive stance on immigration, and then three days later,
that same platform is knocking on your digital door asking
for your immigration status and your precise location.
Speaker 1: It feels targeted. It feels like a trap. It feels
like someone is coming to your door asking for your papers,
but they're wearing a mask that says entertainment. It's incredibly chilling.
Speaker 3: It completely shifts the fear dynamic. For years, the argument
from Washington was China is watching you now. Well, for
a significant portion of the user based immigrants, activists, political dissidents,
minority groups, the fear is my own government, or at
least people who are ideologically aligned with them, are watching
me now.
Speaker 1: And that fear is so much more visceral, so much
more immediate. If you are a dreamer or you're in
the LGBTQ plus community, seeing sexual orientation and immigration status
on a list of data points collected by a Trump
aligned entity, that isn't just a data privacy issue. That
feels like an existential threat.
Speaker 3: It converts the app from an entertainment utility, from a
fun escape into a potential surveillance tool in the eyes
of the user. And that's a bell you simply cannot unring.
Once you feel watched, you can't dance the same way.
Speaker 1: And let's not just gloss over precise location that combined
with immigration status, that is technically a deportation targeting tool.
I mean, if I know who you are, what your
legal status is, and exactly where you are standing at
this very moment.
Speaker 3: Technically, yes, the capability is there now, whether they would
ever use it that way as a whole other legal
and ethical question but the capacity is what drives the fear.
And in the security world we always say judge system
bit its capabilities, not by its stated intentions.
Speaker 1: And while everyone was hyperventilating over the privacy policy and
what it all meant, the app itself decided to have
a complete and total, nervous breakdown. The glitch, the timing
was just it was almost cinematic. It's too perfect. Right
as the hashtag hashtag delete TikTok started to gain serious
momentum and trend, the app broke. It was like a
bad movie script.
Speaker 3: It was the perfect storm for a conspiracy theory. You
couldn't have planned it better if you had tried to.
Speaker 1: So tell us what happened technically, because it wasn't just
a simple case of the app is down. The failures
were weirdly specific and seemed to affect certain people more
than others.
Speaker 3: Right, it wasn't a total outage. Users started reporting that
load times were slowing to a crawl. Things were buffering endlessly,
but more alarmingly, uploads were vanishing.
Speaker 2: Into the ether.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by vanishing?
Speaker 3: You post a video, your phone would say upload complete
and then it would just be gone.
Speaker 2: It wasn't in your drafts.
Speaker 3: It wasn't on your profile, no notification, no error message,
just gone wow. And then a lot of people started
getting the dreaded zero views bug, which for a creator
is like shouting into a void. Usually even a bad
video gets a few hundred views just from the algorithm
testing it out. Zero implies the distribution mechanism has been
deliberately turned off for your content.
Speaker 1: And I saw reports that some high profile creators, specifically
political ones, people who are very critical of the administration,
saw their feeds go completely blank, like their entire account
was wiped clean for a few hours.
Speaker 3: Yes, that happened to several prominent accounts, so naturally the
Internet did what the Internet does.
Speaker 1: It's spiral.
Speaker 2: It's spiral.
Speaker 3: They didn't assume, oh, a server rack probably overheated in
a data center in Virginia.
Speaker 2: They assumed the.
Speaker 1: Purge has begun, which given the context, doesn't seem like
that big of a leap, not at all.
Speaker 3: And TikTok's official explanation was a incredibly, almost comically mundane.
They released a short statement blaming a power outage at
a major US data center. They insisted the issues were
purely technical and temporary.
Speaker 1: A power outage.
Speaker 2: That was the official line.
Speaker 1: Do you buy that? It's implausible.
Speaker 3: Look on a technical level, data centers loose power. It
happens more often than people think. Aws goes down, Azure
goes down, Cooling systems fail, backup generators don't kick in.
It is a physical reality of the Internet. It relies
on copper and electricity and plumbing. But again, we have
to go back to the issue of trust. When trust
is high, you accept power outage at face value. When
trust is at rock bottom and you have just signed
a deeply controversial ownership deal involving the transfer of control
over the entire platform, power outage sounds a lot like
data migration.
Speaker 1: That was the theory. I saw everywhere people were convinced
saying they aren't offline. They are actively migrating our data
to the new servers, or worse, they are scrubbing the content.
They're deleting videos they don't want the new owners to see,
or that the new owners don't want on.
Speaker 3: The platform, a soft reboot to sanitize the platform. It's
a very common fear during any corporate acquisition that the
new owners are coming into clean house.
Speaker 1: And that suspicion wasn't helped at all by the fact
that when things came back online, the vibe just felt different.
The algorithm felt.
Speaker 3: Off, which brings us to the most contentious part of
this entire fallout, the censorship accusations.
Speaker 1: This is where the rubber really meets the road. We
established earlier that the new Owners are a Trump aligned
business group. That is the description from the source material.
So the reports start coming in almost immediately after the
glitch resolves. Creators are claiming that their political content is
being systematically choked off. It's not being banned outright. You
don't get a user band notification. It's much much subtler
than that.
Speaker 2: It's shadow banning.
Speaker 1: Right, the classic shadow ban. You post a video that's
critical of the administration, or maybe it's discussing a protest
or just presenting a viewpoint that's not aligned with the
new owner. The video exists, you can see it on
your own profile, but no one else sees it.
Speaker 2: It never hits the for you page.
Speaker 1: Never, it gets zero traction. It's like being put in
a soundproof room with a glass window. You can scream
all you want, but nobody can hear you.
Speaker 3: And our source material for this episode mentions that there
were independently confirmed reports of instances of suppressed content critical
of President Trump Specifically, this wasn't just anecdotal user feeling.
Journalists were able to verify some of these claims.
Speaker 1: This is the critical juncture in the story. Picktok. The
corporation officially denied this. Their PR team went into overdrive.
They said there are no content bands in place. They
blame the algorithm trying to recalibrate after the massive outage.
It's not censorship, is just a broken server.
Speaker 3: But the pattern was very hard to ignore. If you
are a creator who critiques the president and suddenly your
views drop from a million per video to practically zero,
the very weak his patriots take over the app. You
don't need a degree in computer science to feel suspicious, right.
Correlation isn't always causation, but sometimes it is really really
staring you in the face.
Speaker 1: It just brings us back to that massive central irony
of this whole situation. The entire intervention by the US
government was framed as a mission to protect Americans from
foreign influence and potential censorship exactly.
Speaker 3: The argument was that ByteDance under pressure from the Chinese
Communist Party might censor content that Beijing didn't like.
Speaker 2: That was the threat we had to be saved from.
Speaker 1: And the result of that intervention is that US users
are now accusing the new US owners of domestic political censorship.
We traded one fear for another. We traded a hypothetical
foreign censor for a perceived domestic one.
Speaker 2: It makes you wonder what the real goal was.
Speaker 1: It really does. It raises the question is the goal
of these kinds of government interventions actually free speech or
is it controlled speech?
Speaker 3: The users seem to have decided it's the latter. It's
not we want a free and O and Internet for everyone.
It's we want our guys controlling the narrative, not their guys.
And if you happen to not be on our guys team,
well you're out of luck.
Speaker 1: And that realization, that chilling realization, is what is driving
the exodus. Let's talk about the refugees.
Speaker 2: TikTok refugees.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating term to see popping up in biodeescriptions
on other apps, like on Instagram or YouTube.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so evocative.
Speaker 3: It implies displacement. It implies you didn't want to leave,
that this was your home, but you were forced to
for your own safety or your own principles, and.
Speaker 1: The stats are undeniable. We set it at the top,
but it's worth repeating. App deletions are up one hundred
and fifty percent since the deal was announced. Now we
have to be fair here. The app still has two
hundred million users in the US. It isn't MySpace yet.
It's not a ghost town overnight. No.
Speaker 3: The raw engagement is still very strong.
Speaker 2: But the trend is the story.
Speaker 3: The velocity of the change is what's alarming for the platform.
These trends often start with the early adopters and the
cultural creators. If they leave, the audience eventually follows them.
Speaker 1: I think that's the most important psychological part of this
whole story. Before the deal, even with all the fears
about China, users felt like the app was theirs. It
was this chaotic, messy, creative community space where weird trends
happened organically from the bottom up.
Speaker 3: We call that a sense of digital ownership. It's not
legal ownership, of course, but it's a powerful psychological ownership.
The users create the culture, so they feel like they
own the space. It's like a public park the city
owns the land, but the people who use it every
day feel like it belongs to them.
Speaker 1: And after the deal, what happened to that feeling?
Speaker 3: That illusion was completely shattered. The updated terms, the glitches,
the censorship claims, it all sent one clear message. This
app is a tool, and it is a tool owned
and operated by powerful people with a clear agenda.
Speaker 1: The park has been fenced off exactly.
Speaker 3: The park has been fenced off, and now the regards
at the gate, checking IDs and telling you what you
can and can't say.
Speaker 1: There was a line in the research that really hit me.
Something has broken, not the app, the belief that it
was theirs.
Speaker 3: It's a loss of innocence, a fundamental breach of the
social contract of the platform. You can't just dance anymore.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Every time you open the app, you have these lingering
questions in the back of your mind. Who is watching
this video? Who is access to my data? Why is
this specific video on my for you page? Is it
because it's genuinely funny or is it because someone wants
me to see it?
Speaker 1: That algorithm question is huge. We used to think the
algorithm was this like mystical, almost psychic thing that just
knew we liked cat videos or cooking tutorials. Now it
feels engineered, it feels compromised. How are decisions like algorithm
boosts being made? Now? Yeah, that's a question nobody can answer.
Speaker 3: And when the magic box becomes a black box of
potential political influence, the fun just evaporates. If you suspect
the machine is trying to manipulate you, you stop wanting
to engage with the machine.
Speaker 1: It's the Splinternet in action, isn't it. This is what
people have been warning about.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 3: We are watching the end of the globe Internet ideal
in real time. We are moving toward a fractured web,
a US Internet, a Chinese Internet, a European Internet, and
in each of those zones, the local powers want total
control over the data and the narrative, and.
Speaker 1: The user is just stuck in the middle, trying to
watch a recipe video without accidentally giving up their civil liberties.
Speaker 3: Essentially, yes, the user has become the product in a
much more dangerous way. It's not just about our data
being sold for ad revenue. I think we all kind
of accepted that faust bargain years ago.
Speaker 1: Right, the ship has sailed.
Speaker 3: Now we are the product for political capital, our attention,
our eyeballs, our emotions are being weaponized in a domestic
political context.
Speaker 1: It's exhausting. I feel exhausted just talking about it.
Speaker 2: It is, and that is why people are leaving.
Speaker 3: It's not because they suddenly hate the app's features, but
because they are exhausted by the baggage that now comes
with it. They just want to have fun, and the
fun has become heavy.
Speaker 1: The TikTok paradox, Yeah, saved by the deal, deleted by
the user. It really is the perfect title for this
whole mess.
Speaker 3: It highlights a fundamental truth that I think a lot
of people in Washington and Silicon Valley forget.
Speaker 2: You cannot legislate trust.
Speaker 3: You can force a sale, you can change the board
of directors, you can rewrite the code from the ground up.
But if the users don't trust you, you have bought
an empty shell. You've bought the building, but all the
tenants have moved down.
Speaker 1: You've bought a ghost town, or at least a town
that is rapidly emptying out.
Speaker 3: Two hundred million users is a lot of momentum. But
momentum works both ways. Once the cool kids leave, once
the creators feel stifled or unsafe. The decline can be
much faster than the rise.
Speaker 1: We've seen it before. We saw it with Vine, we
saw it with MySpace. Even platforms that seem invincible like
x have seen huge shifts in their user base and
culture based on ownership changes. Tech giants seem immortal until
the day they aren't exactly.
Speaker 3: History is littered with essential apps that are now just
forgotten digital artifacts.
Speaker 1: We wrap up this deep dive, this journey through the
threads of the TikTok saga. Let's just quickly recap the
journey we've been on, because it's been a wild ride
in a very short period of time.
Speaker 3: We started with a deal that was supposed to be
a patriotic victory, President Trump saving the app from the
clutches of China.
Speaker 1: Which immediately led to a privacy policy update that asked
for things like immigration status and sexual orientation, which absolutely
terrified the user base.
Speaker 3: Then came the technical glitches, the so called power outage
that looks suspiciously like a data purge or a clumsy
migration to the users on the ground.
Speaker 1: And finally the direct accusations of political censorship, the palpable
feeling that the new patriotic owners were systematically silencing critics,
leading to a massive, quantifiable exodus of trust.
Speaker 3: It is a perfect cake study and how fragile the
relationship between a platform and its community really is. And
it shows how quickly the concept of safety can feel
like danger when the context changes.
Speaker 1: It leaves us with a lot to think about regarding
the future of our digital lives, not just on TikTok,
but everywhere.
Speaker 3: I have one final provocative thought on this, if I may.
We often talk about banning apps. We think the only
way to kill a platform is for the government to
pass a.
Speaker 1: Lot and shut it down right the kill switch.
Speaker 3: But this story suggests something different, something maybe more insidious.
Speaker 2: You don't need to ban an app to destroy it.
Speaker 3: You just need to make the users feel like they
are being watched, not by a distant foreign adversary, but
by their own government.
Speaker 1: That is a chilling thought. The death of fun by
a thousand cuts of suspicion.
Speaker 3: It's the death of digital freedom disguised as an act
of national security.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, on that cheerful note. We want to hear
from you. This is thrilling threads, and this conversation isn't over.
We want to know what you think?
Speaker 2: What is your stand here? Where do you fall on this?
Speaker 1: If a platform changes ownership to quote protect you, but
then immediately asks for your immigration status and your precise location,
do you feel safer or do you feel targeted?
Speaker 2: Are you one of refugees?
Speaker 3: Did you delete the app in protest? Or are you
staying put maybe hoping to ride out the storm.
Speaker 1: Leave a comment and let us know. We really want
to understand where the line is for you, because apparently,
for one hundred and fifty percent more people this week,
that line was crossed. Indeed, thanks for listening to thrilling threads.
We'll see you in the next deep dive.
Speaker 3: Stay curious and always always.
Speaker 2: Read the fine print.
Speaker 1: Always read the fine print. Bye everyone,