Image: Triller
Is Triller the next TikTok?

Good morning! This Monday, Trump has a new social platform, Uber and Lyft grapple with a CA shutdown, and Flight Simulator makes an epic comeback.
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In the moments it seemed TikTok might really go away, Triller looked like the app that might step up. It jumped to the top of every app store, creators started registering accounts, and Triller proudly announced that after a 20x increase in weekly downloads, the app had been downloaded 250 million times worldwide.
Over the weekend, Triller scored its biggest coup yet: The Trump campaign joined the platform. So far, @donaldjtrump only has four videos and roughly 10,000 followers, but it's still a significant move.
Trump does feel a bit out of place given the app's entertainment focus. (Comments on most of the account's videos so far are either about TikTok or politics. Mostly TikTok.) But plenty of social networks have cropped up to replace the supposedly problematic ones, and the Trump endorsement is a big one. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more conservative accounts have been following Trump onto the platform over the last couple of days.
This is going to be another crazy week of social chaos, so here's a quick catchup on what else is going on. Facebook started merging Instagram and Facebook Messenger, as part of the Great Combining the company's been promising. Facebook is also testing TikTok-style video in the Facebook app, but only in India for now. Trump gave ByteDance a little more time to divest TikTok, pushing its deadline to after the election. And now the White House may also be looking at banning Alibaba.
I got a push notification from Lyft on Sunday. "Save rideshare in California!" it said, exclamation point and all. "Rideshare is at risk of shutting down next week in California. Learn more."
If I'm doing my math correctly, this Thursday is the big day: 10 days since Judge Ethan Schulman gave Uber and Lyft 10 days to classify their drivers as employees, and since Uber and Lyft immediately threatened to stop operating in California until at least November, when a ballot provision could help decide this issue once and for all.
Yet again, Uber Eats might save Uber. Even if it has to shut down ride-hailing in California, it plans to keep operating Eats. Which, by the way, is the fastest-growing and most successful part of Uber's business. So it could be an interesting test of what Uber's business looks like without its money pit of a primary business.
Either way, it's going to get awfully political, and awfully chippy, between now and Thursday.
I hope you've cleared your schedule (and your hard drive), because Microsoft's new Flight Simulator comes out Tuesday. And by all accounts, it's fantastic. I mean, it better be, it's 14 years in the making!
Flight Simulator is also a loud statement from Satya Nadella and the rest of the Microsoft team about exactly how far ahead they are in cloud gaming, Seth Schiesel writes for Protocol.
Freedom from the limits of a local machine is core to the whole future of gaming. (And computing in general, for that matter.) Rather than prove its chops in a massive tech demo or publish a whitepaper somewhere, Microsoft built an unprecedented system and rolled it into a game.
During the 2020 national political conventions, Protocol will host a two-event series on the tech and policy needed to enable a diverse future workforce and a strong economy. Join us at noon ET on Wednesday for the first event in the series, hosted in partnership with ITI.
Google hates backward compatibility, said Grab engineer (and former Googler) Steve Yegge, and that makes Google Cloud a problem:
President Trump said he's thinking about a pardon for Edward Snowden:
Trump also dismissed the concerns of those worried about the business effects of a WeChat ban:
Rep. Adam Kinzinger said that Republicans need to denounce QAnon. Like, now:
Keep an eye on Uber and Lyft as we approach their Thursday deadline. A lot could change quickly there.
In fact, there are brewing fights everywhere: Apple and Epic, Google and Epic, Apple and Facebook, Trump and WeChat, Trump and TikTok. Everything feels like it's bubbling under the surface, and industry-changing events could happen at any moment.
More predictable are earnings reports, coming from Alibaba and Nvidia this week.
T-Mobile loves to give away free money. And for months, it was giving away a shocking amount of that free money to people in one tiny town in Pennsylvania. The people of Chadds Ford won many thousands of dollars in gift cards and prizes, through what looks like a bot-driven campaign to create entries. It's a shockingly simple scam, and a pretty good example of Internet Rule #46: If you build it, bots will come. And apparently they'll come from small-town Pennsylvania.
During the 2020 national political conventions, Protocol will host a two-event series on the tech and policy needed to enable a diverse future workforce and a strong economy. Join us at noon ET on Wednesday for the first event in the series, hosted in partnership with ITI.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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