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Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Steven Mnuchin, former treasury secretary under President Trump and Hollywood producer, said he’s assembling an investor group to acquire TikTok — although there’s no clear indication he could swing a deal with TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, to buy the popular app. Mnuchin’s comments come a day after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a fast-tracked bill — by a wide margin — that would effectively ban TikTok unless China-based ByteDance sold off its ownership stake.

Steven Mnuchin, the former treasury secretary and film financier, says that he’s getting an investor group together to try to buy TikTok.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor TikTok, the massively popular video app owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, apparently has an ally in Donald Trump. The former U.S. president expressed opposition to a national ban of TikTok not for, say, First Amendment reasons but because such a move would likely boost the fortunes of Meta’s Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor With American lawmakers sounding the alarm again over TikTok‘s ties to China’s communist regime, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce committee unanimously voted to approve a bill that would give China’s ByteDance 165 days to divest its ownership of TikTok — or effectively face a U.S. ban.

The US House Energy and Commerce Committee has just unanimously approved a bill targeting TikTok, the app owned by China’s ByteDance, via Reuters.

TikTok users have reported getting push notifications urging them to contact their members of Congress to protest newly proposed legislation that would require that parent Chinese-owned ByteDance divest the app.

TikTok would face a ban in the United States unless it severs ties to ByteDance, its parent company that has long face scrutiny and criticism for its connections to the Chinese government, under new legislation proposed by a bipartisan group of House lawmakers.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Asia’s video industry is set to grow by an annual 2.6% over the next five years to reach $165 billion by 2028, says a new study from research and consultancy firm Media Partners Asia. That follows 5.5% growth in 2023. The firm’s “Asia Pacific Video & Broadband Industry 2024” report spans a widely-defined cluster of free TV, pay-TV, SVOD, premium AVOD and user-generated content and social video in 14 Asia-Pacific countries and territories.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor TikTok users in Big Sky Country are free — for now — to keep watching short-form videos on the app in the new year. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Thursday blocking Montana’s first-of-its-kind U.S. ban of TikTok in the state, ruling that the law set to take effect Jan.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Bytedance, the unlisted Chinese tech giant that owns TikTok, is poised to slash part of its games operations, including Nuverse, which publishes ‘Marvel Snap,’ according to financial news sources. News was reported by Bloomberg, Reuters and other tech news providers The Information and The Verge on Monday that Bytedance will retreat from its mainstream video games operation with the loss of some 1,000 jobs. “We regularly review our businesses and make adjustments to centre on long-term strategic growth areas,” a ByteDance representative said in a statement sent to some media. “Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business.” Variety has also reached out to Bytedance for comment. Nuverse, the unit for most of Bytedance’s games, is understood to have told employees that it will halt nearly all games that have not yet launched.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor New York City is the latest government entity to prohibit the use of TikTok — the popular video entertainment app owned by China’s ByteDance — on devices owned by the city. The NYC Cyber Command, a division of the city’s Office of Technology & Innovation, said city workers must stop using TikTok effective immediately after the online security team determined that the app “posed a security threat to the city’s technical networks.” “While social media is great at connecting New Yorkers with one another and the city, we have to ensure we are always using these platforms in a secure manner,” a rep for the New York City mayor’s office said in a statement to the Verge, which first reported the ban.

Redbox parent Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment has set a deal with TikTok that will see the platform’s short-form videos stream on screens atop some 3,000 Redbox kiosks nationwide.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Redbox’s newest addition to its famous DVD kiosks: viral TikTok videos. Redbox, looking for a new way to turn heads and generate incremental revenue, signed a deal with short-form video platform TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance. Under the pact, TikTok will provide Redbox with “top content” curated from the app, which will be featured on more than 3,000 video screens on Redbox kiosks across the U.S. In addition, brands will have the opportunity to buy advertising that runs alongside the TikTok content. Redbox — founded in 2002, well before the video-streaming revolution — was acquired by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment last year in an all-stock deal valued at about $370 million. The Redbox network currently comprises approximately 31,000 kiosks across the U.S.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor The majority of Americans — about 59% — say TikTok a threat to the national security of the United States, according to a recent survey of U.S. adults. The findings from Pew Research Center’s survey of U.S. adults come as TikTok, the popular short-form video app owned by Chinese internet conglomerate ByteDance, continues to be targeted by American lawmakers wary over its ties to China and how TikTok handles user data. Just 17% of Americans say the platform is not a threat to national security, while 23% say they are unsure, per the Pew survey. Opinions about the national security threat posed by TikTok differ by political affiliation and age. Roughly 70% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say TikTok is either a minor or major threat to national security in the U.S., compared with 53% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. The perception of TikTok as a threat also varies by age: Just 13% of adults 18-29 say TikTok is a “major” threat; that rises to 24% among those 30-49, 35% among those 50-64; and 46% among Americans 65 and older.

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music After months of speculation, TikTok is finally launching its own “social music streaming service,” initially in Indonesia and Brazil, the company announced Thursday, with licensing from all three major music companies. The service, hich is premium-only, will allow users to synch with their existing accounts and also share and download the tracks they discover on TikTok. The service is now available in both countries with a one-month free trial, according to The new service will replace the company’s existing streaming service, Resso, on Sept. 5. The transition began in May, which TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, announced that Resso would become a premium-only service.

Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs’ Candle Media has struck a partnership with TikTok, with an initial focus on Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine to uncover underrepresented independent authors and literary material from the #BookTok community.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor TikTok says Montana’s newly enacted law that would criminalize usage of the short-form video app is unconstitutional — and the app company has taken legal action to fight the state’s ban. TikTok filed a lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana seeking to have the law reversed. It was signed into law last week by Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, who said it would “protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.” TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a China-based internet conglomerate. “We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana,” the app maker said in a statement. “We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts.”

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal finds that the popular video-streaming app TikTok compiled a list of users who were being monitored after watching gay-themed content on the app.According to former company employees in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, TikTok compiled a list of users who watched clips tagged as “LGBT” and stored it on a dashboard.Lists were also compiled for users who perused videos dealing with other topics, but the employees didn’t believe that those lists raised the same level of concern for users’ safety and privacy.The former employees, who objected to the policy, were worried that the users’ information would be shared with outside parties or could be potentially used to blackmail users.They brought their concerns to top executives at the company in 2020 and 2021.Typically, many social media companies compile data on users based on their online behavior, with the intention of using it to select content or advertisements that a user might be interested in seeing while using the app.But best practices among social media companies generally discourage tracking traits such as sexuality, especially in parts of the world where homosexuality is criminalized or where LGBTQ people can be harassed or assaulted for their identities. Last year, the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD urged tech companies to take greater steps to safeguard user data and privacy, including stopping targeted surveillance advertising, over concerns that such information could harm LGBTQ people if it fell into the wrong hands.According to the former TikTok employees, the app organizes all the videos its users post into a web of clusters, sorted by topic.The clusters are labeled with identifiers, including ones

Montana just became the first American state to ban TikTok after its legislature voted to give final approval to a bill nixing the social media app’s presence within its borders.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Montana would become the first state in America to fully ban TikTok starting in 2024, after the state’s legislature on Friday passed a bill banning the short-form app. The bill now goes to the desk of Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte before it becomes law. Under the Montana legislation, TikTok would face fines if it continued to operate in the state. In addition, the state could impose penalties on Apple and Google if they allowed users in Montana to download the app. TikTok blasted the passage of the bill as an attempt to “censor American voices.” “The bill’s champions have admitted that they have no feasible plan for operationalizing this attempt to censor American voices and that the bill’s constitutionality will be decided by the courts,” TikTok said in a statement. “We will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach.”

Popular video sharing platform TikTok has been fined £12.7m for “misusing children’s data” and allowing underage children on the app. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found that up to 1.4 million kids under 13 were using the platform in 2020, which was against its terms of service.