The Biden Campaign for Resolving the Senate Biktok Bill: A Brief Press Briefing with a White House View of the National Security Council

Makena Kelly: This happened so fast, especially for Congress, which moves strikingly slow basically every other time something happens. A couple of weeks ago, the House passed a bill that required TikTok to find an American owner or it would be banned for six months. It was going to go to the Senate but it wasn’t happy with it. Senator Maria Cantwell was kind of in support but she wanted to extend it to nine months. After some negotiations, the House and Senate included that language. The Senate voted on Tuesday night to send it to the president, after the House voted on it again.

Less than an hour after the Senate passed the Tiktok bill, President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign was updating their website with new content. In a video posted around 10pm, Biden appears with a labor group, smiling ear to ear, to a round of applause.

It doesn’t seem like the administration or campaign has plans for Biden to address it either. After the Wednesday speech, I reached out to the White House to ask whether we could expect anything from the president in the near future. I was redirected to the National Security Council, which directed me to statements made by national security adviser Jake Sullivan during Wednesday’s White House press briefing. I also pinged the Biden campaign, and didn’t get a clear answer there either.

WIRED Politics Lab: The Centered X Account and the Tiktok Ultimatum Is Here. What Does It Mean?

“I think it’s probably smart to not center it, but it means there’s no counterprogramming, which I think allows for some of the conspiracies to go unchecked,” the user behind the X account @organizermemes told me over DMs Wednesday afternoon. I guess doing that would have affected the issue.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Makena Kelly has the name “kelly makena”. Tori Elliott is @Telliotter. Write to us at [email protected]. JakeHarper is the producer of our show. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer and Amar Lal mixed this episode. Chris Bannon is the head of audio at Condé Nast and Jordan Bell is the Executive Producer of Audio Development.

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Source: The TikTok Ultimatum Is Here. What Does It Mean?

Tik Tok and the WIRED Politics Desk: Status and Outlook after the Biden-Biden Black-Box Scenario

Biden signed the national security package that was passed by the House and the Senate over the weekend.

On today’s show, we’re going to talk about TikTok and how the law affects politicians, and how it affects people who use the app. The WIRED Politics desk is in New York, and this week it has Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott with me. Makena, Tori, how are you doing after this very newsy week?