| If you're finding value in our Creator Economy newsletter, I encourage you to consider subscribing to The Information. It contains exclusive reporting on the most important stories in tech. Save up to $250 on your first year of access. Welcome to a special edition of Creator Economy! Things are not looking great for TikTok. I spent the morning hearing TikTok's lawyers present their arguments to convince a Washington appeals court that a ban would infringe on the First Amendment rights of 170 million American users, as well as creators. The response from the court—a panel of three judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit—was telling. They spent more time questioning TikTok lawyers than the U.S. government. And their questions for TikTok focused on national security concerns rather than the First Amendment, signaling the court may make its decision by determining whether security risks override harms to free speech. That's not what TikTok wants. It successfully fought off the state of Montana's attempt to ban the app by arguing it infringed on its users' freedom of speech. Another China-owned app, WeChat, in 2020 got a court to block former President Donald Trump's ban, also citing violation of its users' First Amendment rights. But the Justice Department has argued the TikTok legislation was necessary because Chinese parent ByteDance poses a national security concern. And the judges seemed to take that concern seriously. In one exchange, Andrew Pincus, partner at TikTok's outside law firm Mayer Brown, defended TikTok's ownership by noting that U.S. media outlets Politico and Business Insider are owned by "foreign entities." (Germany's Axel Springer owns both media outlets.) Judge Neomi Rao cut in to say, "But not foreign adversaries." Later on, Judge Douglas Ginsburg told Jeffrey Fisher, the lawyer representing a lawsuit from users and creators of TikTok, "Instead of saying foreign control, let's say adversary control." Ginsburg also seemed to take issue with TikTok lawyers' repeated arguments around the type of scrutiny the government should be subjected to in order to justify the law. (TikTok has argued the court should apply "strict scrutiny" to the law, a type of judicial review that sets a high bar for the government to prove a law doesn't violate the constitution.) "By talking about levels of scrutiny, I'm not sure we should have wasted all this time on, frankly, or use all this time on," Ginsburg said, which drew laughs from the courtroom. The judges also pressed the Justice Department's lawyer Daniel Tenney on why the ban wouldn't infringe on free speech. Rao noted that TikTok in the U.S. "is a U.S. corporation. What about the First Amendment interest there?" All told, however, TikTok took the brunt of the tough questions. "This was very bad for TikTok," said Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who watched a livestream of the hearing. "TikTok [and the creators' lawyer] got a lot of hard questions, whereas the government was softballed." He thinks a 3-0 victory for the government would be "extremely likely." The case, which is expected to go to the Supreme Court, would in that case, have "the wind at the government's back," Rozenshtein said. One of the talking points that TikTok has used to argue against ban attempts publicly didn't play a part in the court proceedings—that a ban would prevent millions of creators and small merchants from making a livelihood from the app. But three creators made the point after. Talia Cadet, Kiera Spann and Paul Tran, who are plaintiffs in a lawsuit financed by TikTok, held a short press conference after the oral arguments concluded, outside of the court. Cadet declared that TikTok "changed her life," saying a ban would mean losing her community, livelihood and freedom of expression. Tran echoed that sentiment, noting he and his wife's skincare brand "Love & Pebble" relies on 90% of its sales from the app. The next step is the court's decision, which both sides have requested come by December so there is enough time for a possible appeal before the Jan. 19 law deadline. Here's what else is going on… See The Information's Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors. Meta Platforms said it will soon start training its AI models on public content, such as photos and comments, shared by adult users on Facebook and Instagram in the U.K. In June, Meta paused its launch to address regulator scrutiny in the region. The company also said it wouldn't use people's private messages to train AI. Separately, Facebook and Instagram are making AI labels less prominent when it determines that the content was modified or edited with AI tools, rather than being entirely created using the technology. LTK, a creator-focused commerce startup, unveiled LTK Co-Pilot, a new suite of free AI tools to help creators better manage their businesses, at its annual conference LTKCon on Monday. The features include auto-generated video captions, as well as automatically tagging products in a creator's photos. Yahoo Finance announced that eight financial creators will join the newsroom to offer their points of view and content that makes "financial topics more engaging, accessible, actionable, and personalized." For example, Tiffany Aliche, known to her 660,000 Instagram followers as the @thebudgetnista, will host a new show called "Money Glow Up" focused on financial education for women, while other influencer-focused shows will focus on retirement and financial markets. Netflix is in talks to livestream special episodes of the popular YouTube show "Hot Ones," where celebrities answer questions while eating increasingly spicier chicken wings, Bloomberg reported. The show, which is owned by BuzzFeed, is hosted by its creator Sean Evans. "We love our meme-makers," Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump campaign adviser, told the New York Times as part of a story about how presidential campaigns are increasingly communicating using memes on social media. "Meme-makers are truth-tellers, unlike the liberal mainstream media, and the left can't meme." Democrats have been meme-ing up a storm, though. Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign formed a TikTok operation, called the digital rapid response" team composed of under 25-year-olds, who are spinning up videos designed to go viral, the Washington Post reported. Thank you for reading the Creator Economy Newsletter! I'd love your feedback, ideas and tips: kaya@theinformation.com. If you think someone else might enjoy this newsletter, please pass it forward or they can sign up here: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/creator-economy | 
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