Business
Column: What would banning TikTok accomplish? Answer: Virtually nothing
In just the last few days, a couple of developments involving TikTok have arisen to illustrate the right and wrong way to think about the rapidly expanding social media platform.
The first was a devastating exposé that independent journalist Jonathan M. Katz posted there of a misleading story Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) told during her official GOP response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.
In his TikTok on March 8, the day after the speech, Katz expertly demolished Britt’s claim to have interviewed an immigrant who told of having been sold out as a sex slave and Britt’s attempt to tie the story to Biden’s immigration policy — never mind that the subject’s travails took place 20 years ago, in Mexico, and had nothing to do with immigration policy.
It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.
— Ex-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin
In doing do, Katz also exposed the laziness of our own political press corps, which had to scurry to follow his lead. This was social media at its best — concise, visual and effective.
The second occurrence was the House vote Wednesday to effectively ban TikTok. The measure, which passed by a lopsided, bipartisan vote of 352 to 65, requires TikTok’s Beijing-based owner, ByteDance, to divest the platform’s U.S. operations within six months or face a nationwide ban.
The rationales put forth for the ban are varied and almost uniformly questionable. Its advocates cite the threat of Chinese government breaches of users’ privacy, its potential use as a conduit of Chinese anti-democratic propaganda into the U.S., its purportedly deleterious effect on its youthful users — one critic likened it to “opium.”
The campaign to ban TikTok deserves close scrutiny, covering such issues as who’s really behind it and why this platform is taking more heat from lawmakers than all other social media platforms put together.
The House’s headlong plunge into TikTok-banning smacks of what the fictional panjandrums of “Yes Minister” labeled “politicians’ logic”: “Something must be done; this is something; therefore, we must do it.” The thing that something must be done about is clipping the wings of the Beijing regime.
Whether targeting TikTok will advance that purpose is doubtful in the extreme. As Sir Arnold Robinson and Sir Humphrey Appleby of that classic British political farce understood, this is all about theater.
Let’s start with the huge majority of the House vote, which brought 197 Republicans together with 155 Democrats in favor. The “no” vote, however, was also bipartisan, with 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans opposed.
Capitol Hill observers chuckled over how the issue brought together the strangest of strange bedfellows, with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) voting on the same side (the “no” side) possibly for the first and last time from now to the end of recorded time. The ban’s prospects in the Senate are uncertain, though President Biden has said he’d sign it if it passed.
Donald Trump, who used to advocate a ban and even tried to implement a ban while he was president, more recently reversed himself, notably after a meeting with GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, who owns 15% of ByteDance. That stake is worth about $40 billion, based on the parent company’s putative value of $268 billion as of year-end 2023. (Trump said the subject of TikTok didn’t come up during their encounter.)
Interestingly, a figure who slithered out of the woodwork as a potential buyer of TikTok if ByteDance does divest is Steven T. Mnuchin, who was Trump’s Treasury secretary. He posed less as a savior of TikTok’s users from the sinister designs of Chinese overlords than an investor spotting the main chance on the horizon. More on him in a moment.
First, let’s turn to who’s pulling the strings on a TikTok ban. One evident culprit is Meta, which owns the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta paid for an extensive publicity campaign aimed at eroding TikTok’s reputation by playing up its supposed threats to the health and welfare of young users, the Washington Post reported in 2022.
Meta’s concern isn’t hard to understand: TikTok has become more popular than any of its platforms. Social media marketing surveys indicate that the average monthly time spent on Facebook this year has been around 15.4 hours; on Instagram it’s 16.5 hours and on WhatsApp it’s 16.75 hours. On TikTok, it’s 27.9 hours.
Even worse from Meta’s standpoint, TikTok’s user base has been skewing younger than Instagram’s, its most direct competitor, and much younger than Facebook, which has been trending toward older users.
As for the suggestions that TikTok is somehow uniquely injurious to youthful users, represents a unique threat to users’ privacy, or presents a national security issue, one can only think this is some sort of a gag.
The worst serial violator of users’ privacy is arguably Meta. The company drew a record $5-billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, when it was known as Facebook. That fine arose from Facebook’s violations of a settlement the company had reached with the government in 2012 over its previous privacy violations, as well as a habit of deceiving users into thinking their privacy was secure.
The FTC isn’t done with Meta yet; as recently as Tuesday, the agency obtained a ruling from a federal appeals court allowing it to continue investigating the company’s privacy practices, including allegations that it deceives parents about policies designed to protect children from online contacts with potential abusers.
Spreading anti-democratic propaganda? Facebook’s connections with the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which facilitated the spread of political propaganda in the presidential election and Brexit vote in 2016, have been thoroughly documented. (That’s not to excuse the Chinese regime’s appetite for censorship, or its mistreatment of ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs.)
Anyone inclined to wring their hands over TikTok’s role in sullying public discourse and internet safety in this country must acknowledge the role of all the leading social media platforms — not only Meta but X and YouTube.
All have fallen down on the job of policing disinformation, racism, antisemitism and other forms of hate speech on their sites. X bathes in all this as examples of “free speech,” as the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, brags. All have undertaken layoffs that eviscerated their “trust and safety” teams, allowing untrustworthy and dangerous content to inundate their users.
That brings us to Mnuchin. He surfaced Thursday on CNBC and the financial press with an announcement that he was putting together an investment consortium to take TikTok off ByteDance’s hands, if the divestment becomes mandated. “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” he said.
Would that make TikTok any safer for its users or democracy? Why would anyone think so? The last takeover of a social media company by a prominent individual was Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now renamed X. From the standpoint of users or anyone interested in a civil, reliable, safe public space, that deal has been disastrous. Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has become a sub-functional hellscape of filth that has evolved into a megaphone for its owner to pump conspiracy theories and hate speech out onto the internet.
But the ban-TikTok campaign really isn’t about any of that. As Jason Koebler of 404Media observes, a TikTok ban would “have the effect of further entrenching and empowering gigantic, monopolistic American social media companies that have nearly all of the same problems that TikTok does.”
He’s right. At its heart, TikTok today is no different from the other platforms, and it won’t become different no matter who owns it. All of them share the same business model, which is to deceive their users into thinking they’re getting a valuable service for free, when in fact the users are simply raw material to be sold to advertisers and political manipulators, en masse.
SpaceX stock dropped below its initial public offering price for the first time on Wednesday, signaling dwindling hype around the Elon Musk company.
Shares dipped below their IPO price of $135 on Wednesday morning for the first time since listing, a humbling loss for the stock, which had skyrocketed more than 50% in its first days of trading last month.
The shares regained some ground later in the day, closing at $135.27.
The initial offering gave the company a market cap of $2.2 trillion, making it one of the world’s most valuable public companies. For a short period, the IPO also made owner Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, though his net worth now is about $800 billion.
On July 7, the company was added to the Nasdaq-100 after a rule change allowed companies to join 15 days after their IPOs.
SpaceX raised a total of $86 billion after underwriters exercised their right to sell additional shares, on top of the $75 billion initially raised. It was the largest IPO in history.
SpaceX, based near Austin, Texas, is the leading launch services company in the world, with its Falcon 9 rocket accounting for the vast majority of satellites launched last year.
It is also the leading satellite-based broadband provider with its Starlink service. The extraordinary interest in the IPO was driven by Musk’s plans to make the company an AI leader — including plans to launch orbiting satellite data centers powered by the sun that crunch AI data.
The company’s headquarters moved from Hawthorne to Texas in 2024, but it retains large operations in the South Bay city and blasts off regularly from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Since the IPO, SpaceX has used its newfound wealth to expand in the AI space.
It announced last month that it was acquiring the AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter. The San Francisco company, founded in 2022, enables engineers to instruct software in English to run coding tasks autonomously.
Musk also merged his xAI artificial intelligence company into SpaceX earlier this year. The combined entity recently announced it was leasing computing power to rivals Anthropic and Google at two terrestrial data centers it has constructed.
Since the IPO, investors have expressed concerns about the company’s spending plans and debt load.
Even with the volatility of the last month, there’s still more uncertainty to come.
The stock could fall further as locked-up shares held by current and former employees are released.
At least 20% of the shares will be released after second-quarter results are disclosed sometime in the coming months, with all the lockups expiring in December.
But Space X isn’t the only megacap stock to experience ups and downs early on.
Shares of Meta, then named Facebook, fell significantly below the IPO price of $38 before recovering. After its May 2012 launch, shares plummeted by nearly 50% and hit a record low of $19.69 in August 2012.
The company took more than 14 months to rebound, finally surpassing its $38 IPO price in July 2013.
In the latest lawsuit against Paramount Skydance, a corporate shareholder has alleged corruption at the highest levels of the company, which is battling to complete its $111-billion takeover of rival Warner Bros. Discovery to create a new media behemoth.
Controlling shareholders Larry Ellison and his son David have presided over a firm that allegedly made “illegal promises and payments to secure regulatory approval,” for the Ellison family’s Paramount purchase last summer, according to the shareholder lawsuit filed this week in Delaware court.
Larry Ellison allegedly discussed with President Trump how Paramount’s pending Warner Bros. acquisition would result in a shake-up at CNN, states the lawsuit filed by Paramount shareholder Paul Robbins.
“The Ellisons [won] the bidding war for Warner Bros. by promising sweeping changes at CNN and other personal benefits to President Trump,” according to the 59-page complaint.
The case was brought on Robbins’ behalf by the nonprofit Public Integrity Project and the advocacy group Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has been critical of the Trump administration‘s policies toward the media.
The complaint noted that Netflix withdrew from the bidding in February — the same day Co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos met at the White House with then-Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and another top official.
The lawsuit suggests Netflix dropped out after recognizing the challenges of dealing with the Trump administration and that Trump always wanted to see the prize go to Paramount because of his close ties to the Ellison family, who have ushered in more favorable news coverage of Trump and the departure of late-night comedian Stephen Colbert.
Robbins does not appear to have firsthand accounts supporting his claims, which are based on public documents and media reports about dealings between the Ellisons and Trump. He has owned Paramount stock since 2021, but the lawsuit does not say how many shares he owns.
He could not be reached for comment.
Paramount, in a statement, pushed back against his claims, saying the “lawsuit recycles allegations that have already been reported and already addressed.”
“As we’ve said consistently: No commitments from either David or Larry Ellison have been made to any government body, state AG or federal agency regarding the future of CNN or any other news property, other than the goal to deliver truth-based journalism,” Paramount said.
It’s the third lawsuit lobbed at Paramount this week. On Monday, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta led a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general that filed a federal antitrust lawsuit seeking to block the Paramount-Warner merger due to concerns about consolidation in movie distribution and cable channels.
The Writers Guild of America added another antitrust lawsuit against Paramount on Tuesday, alleging the massive merger would result in fewer jobs and lower pay for writers.
Many in Hollywood are opposed to the deal due to fears that another studio consolidation would bring more layoffs, programming cutbacks and a fragile business environment due to the heavy debt burden — nearly $80 billion — that Paramount would have to take on to buy Warner Bros.
The shareholder lawsuit noted that Paramount participated in a raucous event with UFC fighters on the White House lawn in June to celebrate Trump’s 80th birthday and the nation’s 250th anniversary. Paramount has UFC broadcast rights.
The event came two days after Trump’s Justice Department wrapped its regulatory review of Paramount’s Warner Bros. proposal, giving the merger a key green light.
Justice Department investigators reportedly did not have a chance to express potential antitrust concerns when high-level Justice Department officials closed the inquiry — a major win for Paramount and the Ellisons, the lawsuit states.
“There have been some line attorneys in the DOJ that have reviewed this [merger] and have some concerns,” New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James said Tuesday during a virtual town hall with opponents of the merger. “Their analysis of this particular case was ignored by the front office, if you will, at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. [the White House] That’s the front office.”
Ellison’s Skydance Media emerged with its deal to buy Paramount two years ago. Previous controlling shareholder Shari Redstone was desperate for an exit and Trump was mounting his White House comeback by battling then-President Biden, then Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump declined an invitation to appear on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” then under Redstone control. He became infuriated by an October 2024 interview with Harris on “60 Minutes.”
Trump filed a $10-billion lawsuit against CBS (he later upped it to $20 billion). After Trump won the election, he had considerable sway over Paramount because it needed his administration’s approval for the sale to the Ellisons.
Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to end his “60 Minutes” lawsuit, allowing the sale to go forward. The Ellisons acquired Paramount in August, then set their sights on Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
“The Ellisons proceeded to remake CBS in the President’s image, bought properties he enjoyed, and even hosted events to honor him,” the lawsuit said. “This helped the Ellisons, but it appears to have hurt Paramount and its media outlets.”
On Wednesday, Paramount said Ellison and other high-level executives had dealings with administration officials but “throughout … the review of the proposed acquisition of Paramount, Skydance has fully complied with all applicable laws, including our nation’s anti-bribery laws.”
In late April, David Ellison hosted an elaborate dinner in Washington to honor the “Trump White House,” according to invitations to the event, “even though President Trump continually insulted journalists at CBS and elsewhere,” the lawsuit said.
On Wednesday, during a confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) blasted acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche for his attendance at the dinner while his agency was reviewing the Paramount deal.
Also on Wednesday, the nonprofit news site ProPublica reported Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has accepted $63,000 in free tickets from CBS in recent years — while Paramount mergers were pending.
Times staff writer Ben Wieder contributed to this report.
Grocery Outlet is opening new locations across California, rebuilding its network in the Golden State after closing stores early this year.
A new branch in Ontario Ranch is scheduled to open July 23, and more openings are planned for later this summer.
The location will be operated by independent owners Gloria and Jason Pineda. By the end of August, the discount grocery retailer plans to open stores in Ramona, San Francisco, Clovis and Petaluma as well.
The Emeryville, Calif.-based chain announced the closure of 36 stores in March, including nine California locations. The closures were an attempt to roll back an overexpansion in the wrong markets, resulting in a loss in 2025. Grocery Outlet did not announce which locations would be closed at the time, but they were listed for sublease by advisory firm Gordon Bros.
Among those listed was an Ontario location closer than seven miles from the soon-to-open site.
Five other Southern California locations were marked for closing in Azusa, Brawley, El Cajon, La Habra, Ontario and Poway. In Central California, the Kerman, Patterson and Ridgecrest stores were also listed for sublease. Outside of California, stores in Idaho, New Jersey, Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania also were listed.
In an earnings call in May, Grocery Outlet Chief Executive Jason Potter said the restructuring was helping boost the company’s profit.
“These closures are now complete and have improved fleet quality and will strengthen the earnings profile of the business over time,” he said.
Grocery Outlet was founded in San Francisco in 1946 as a discount grocery store chain selling overstock of limited-time or holiday food items. There are about 280 Grocery Outlet locations in California, accounting for more than half of its total store count.
Though Grocery Outlet has cultivated a dedicated consumer base on TikTok and other social media posts from grocery bargain hunters, it faces fierce competition from other budget grocery chains, including Aldi, which is set to open 180 stores in 2026. It also competes with Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Amazon, which have steadily gained customers.
Last year it was also hurt by the lapse in federal food assistance during the 43-day government shutdown.
In the wake of rising grocery prices and economic anxiety, some low-income customers who would once have shopped at budget grocery chains such as Grocery Outlet are turning to food banks instead. According to Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, 1.2 million people visit its food banks per month.
Grocery Outlet’s net sales rose 4% in the first quarter from a year earlier to $1.17 billion. It recorded a net loss of $180 million for the period.
It said it had closed locations as part of its optimization plan. It also underwent a store refresh program, changing products and is clustering locations to boost profit and customer traffic.
“Our value-oriented product offering continues to resonate with consumers. While we’re encouraged by the progress we’re beginning to see, we’re not satisfied with our current level of performance and are focused on the work we have in front of us,” Potter said on the earnings call.
Grocery Outlet shares have fallen more than 25% over the last 12 months. The Dow Jones industrial average has climbed more than 15% during the same period.
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