Peter Hamby
speaker
144 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 24 Jun
Peter Hamby’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There are Democrats, progressives in particular, who have been defending TikTok because they think Republicans who want to ban it are automatically bad, but also... This is where young people are gathering and getting information. The information is quite frequently dog shit, lies, news adjacent.
It is, by the way, lots of, quote, news creators who are ripping off the reporting of actual journalists and doing commentary around it. You and I both look at TikTok. You get fun basketball highlights. You get cooking recipes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The content is good. Yeah. In certain ways. Gay drama.
Yeah. I would never, ever look at gay drama. Ew. But like the macro view on all of this is, and by the way, shame on Ed Markey for doing what Trump wants just because he wants his young progressives in Massachusetts to reelect him. The free speech arguments that TikTok made before the Supreme Court were very dumb to begin with, I think.
I'm not an attorney, but do you think that Samuel Alito and John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor are going to, one, understand that, oh, creators are having their free speech rights removed or agree with that because those creators can obviously just post on Snapchat on Spotlight or Reels or YouTube Shorts or whatever. You can still stand on an apple crate in this country and scream through a bullhorn.
But two, the First Amendment argument that they presented is that TikTok as a private company has a right to control editorially what's on its platform. And I think it was Alito, who I don't like, but Alito shot back like... Okay, cool, but that's China. That's not a U.S. company, right? Like, why are you making this argument? I think there is a libertarian argument to be made.
Yeah, let George answer that. But according to my reading of the transcripts of the Supreme Court hearings, the justices were not open to the idea that China deserves to have editorial control over its company because it's not a U.S. company. And we've had Friendster, we've had Vine, we've had MySpace, Tumblr withered, Facebook sort of became irrelevant. Platforms come and go, they die, whatever.
These people need to realize that this company is not unambiguously good. It is crazy the amount of subtle... propaganda on this platform, beginning with their own corporate propaganda. When their CEO testified before Congress last year, before the House, and I think also the Senate, you know, there were some dumb members of Congress who like didn't get the tech.
But most of the questions were actually pretty probing and good. And the popular media coverage of it was tough hearing for TikTok. If you went on TikTok after that hearing, it was nothing but like Dear Leader, the CEO, we love you. TikTok is great. Even Redbook, there's reports out there that they're also downranking and removing content that's deemed offensive.
It's just really gross the way people just like the app and therefore think there are no national security concerns. They can't
influence public opinion united states they already are based on that one tweet i just read you i thought that was really great but also it's like one thing i'm interested in tim is trump obviously he's filed a amicus brief because he wants to stay what's your prediction where does this land yeah we got five days trump comes in on the 20th the day after there's some discussion that elon's talking about purchasing it by dance was by dance was back on that but what do you think how do you think trump plays it they want to ban tiktok and trump
Doesn't. And he told Charlie Kirk, I will never ban TikTok. I think my prediction is there might be a window where it's not available on the app stores, but Trump will find some sort of like U.S. buyer for it. But I'm not sure. The other thing, by the way, I should say this. This can punctuate this conversation just to bring it back to Soupy.
and her brain soup it's not fascist that congress passed a law to ban an app that might be hoovering up data not just on you this is what tiktok does they get data on tim but also data on the people in your contact book okay like there's a lot of data collection going on but i think the influence campaign stuff is worse you know it'd be really fascist tim what's that
something Trump could do, which is this. Trump could become president the day after the ban and tell Pam Bondi, his new attorney general, just not to enforce the law. That can happen. That would be fucking fascist. That would be a president of the United States telling his justice department not... That'd be freedom for Sufi. Freedom for Sufi, but that's actual fascism.
A president telling, just ignoring a law that was passed and signed by a previous president without any sort of process to unwind it. So I think we're actually in the middle ground. I think we are coming up on a ban on January 19th. TikTok is saying it's not for sale, or ByteDance is saying it's not for sale. And I think Ryan Broderick, who's a good tech writer, pointed this out.
They don't need us. They want us. They want our data. But TikTok doesn't make money from advertising. It's an e-commerce platform, and it's available in most other countries, except for China. China.
Well, last time this was an issue in 2020. By the way, I think he could have actually banned it then. Now it's much more enmeshed in our culture. I should mention, according to Pew, more young people use Snapchat than TikTok, by the way.
Okay, fine. But I talked to Lindsey Graham in 2020 around that moment. And he was like, I saved TikTok. I was like, what are you talking about, Lindsey? He goes, well, so my niece called me and she was like, Lindsey, I heard they're going to ban TikTok. And so I called Trump and I was like, we got to get a solution to this. So Lindsey Graham took credit for saving it last time.
No one talks about this.
I've been on a huge Fontaines DC kick. Not just their last album, but I'm a super fan of them now. I've been listening to them over and over, all their albums. I've been listening to a lot of Fontaines lately. How about you? What's getting you through watching this from afar? What are you going to be listening to on Monday, Tim, when Trump is sworn in?
There was some... I saw... I hate saying this. I saw a TikTok the other night and it was a girl who grew up in Altadena, black girl. And she posted like one of those TikToks. It's like a slideshow of just pictures. And it was like pictures of her and her big family through the generations and like. the fruit tree in their yard, and just how much she loved Altadena.
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