ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US

Awesome, do META next please!
- Before X?
  
  You can make a good case for breaking up Facebook. Twitter is just twitter and is slowly eating itself. Eventually, the advertisers will see just how much of the userbase are bots and either pull or negotiate for lower rates.
- But how does that help capitalists make more money by eliminating their competition?
- As far as I'm concerned META ruined the Oculus. As soon as they bought them out, I bought a Vive (which has worked great for years).
- Never happen, why would the government shut down one of its favorite surveillance tools.

Even better

There will be a rush of US startups to replace it, and they will all be stage 1 enshittification, so they might actually be good for a while, like TikTok once was.
- Or people will just migrate to the YouTube and Insta clones.
  
  snapchats spotlight will do the best probably in terms of memes
  
  Still better than the Chinese propaganda machine
  
  YouTube shorts is such a hellhole that tiktokers migrating to it might improve things.

If they said or implied anything else, they would lose all leverage. The public couldn't care less about who owns tiktok, so they need people to think they'll lose it to have any public support.

I see this as a win win
- Of course you do. You're all just the old man yelling at cloud meme and it's honestly sad.
  
  Oh, eat a Hello Kitty lunchbox full of dicks. There's plenty of reasons to hate on TikTok (and Facebook, insta, YouTube, ad-infinitum/ad-nauseum). They're a damn cancer on society.
  
  Dude, I was there for when Vine was born and for when it died, and Vine didn't even get picked up for mass disinformation, and y'know what? Life moved on. If you think that makes me old and out of touch then fine.
  
  You really live up to your username.
  
  Wow people get so upset when you take away their soft core child porn.

Call their bluff
- It's probably not a bluff. They've pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there's not much room left to grow here. It would make more sense to focus their efforts on growing in other regions where they have plenty of headroom to increase their userbase and monetization. Depending on how things play out, they could match their current revenue in a matter of years and still have room left to grow. There's also the potential to re-enter the U.S. market down the line. Why would they throw that all away and essentially create their own competitor by selling their core technology and diluting/confusing their brand with whatever U.S. company they sell to?
  
  I'd think the fact they've saturated the US market is exactly why it'd be too valuable to give up. They'd lose a ton of revenue, tanking their valuation. They may be better off selling. From there they could prob just clone it and promote a competing service in those unclaimed markets using a portion of the extra sale price they get for maintaining (and selling a product with) US market dominance
  
  They’ve pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there’s not much room left to grow here
  That... doesn't make sense to me. So because there's no room to grow, they pull out of the U.S. and lose the likely ~$1 bil spent on digital stickers for live streamers?
- The tiktok algorithm is good in the same sense that cocaine is good.
  
  Is it good or do they just have a massive network and data advantage. If tik tok left and everyone switched over to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and they had the same amount of data tik tok has I think the experience would converge to whatever was on tik tok in a month or so.
  There's no secret sauce to tik tok, they're throwing massive amounts of data at a recommendation AI and telling it to optimize for watch time, any sufficiently scaled company can do that nowadays. It's more a matter of getting and maintaining an audience to create that data and content creators, both of which due to the network effect, and without federation, are drawn to the biggest service, not necessarily to the best.
  
  I love how the media has thrown around the word algorithm. They don’t need to sell their algorithm for a competitor to compete. An algorithm produces some result output. So you could easily clone an algorithm without knowing its exact implementation.
  Maybe I know quicksort, but you know mergesort. The customer doesn’t give a fuck which algorithm was used, so long as it’s sorted.

US should call their bluff. If Tiktok gets banned, people will complain for a little bit until people forget and move on to what's next. Why doesn't an American company make something that's practically identical? People will be all desperate for their 5 second dopamine rush that they will download anything.
- Vine.co returns!
  
  I think Elon might just do that based on what I've been reading.
- India did this and Instagram reels is the main one that benefited. Probably be the same for US if it pulls through on this.
- YouTube and Instagram already have identical features. Most US creators who post on Tik Tok also use those platforms already

It's Vine time! What? Just... just bring it back. Call it "Kudzu" or some crap if Elon Musk owns the rights to Vine.
- It’s fre
  Free sha voc a doo.
  
  I honestly think about this a lot. She did a good job with what she was given.

Could they please pull from Europe, too?

We tried that with facebook in the eu. Didn’t work
- Me, an American, to my German cousin:
  "So, yeah, I'm changing email addresses, here's my new one."
  "Email? Are you using WhatsApp?"
  "Er, no, how about text?"
  "We all have WhatsApp."
  "Okay, maybe Google Chat?"
  "WhatsApp? WhatsApp."
  
  I've had basically the same conversation with my sister who lives in Albania. I just want to use something encrypted like signal but she just refuses and says it's either WhatsApp or Facebook messenger. Cause of that I barely talk to her.
  
  Here's the trick (maybe): "Don't you know that WhatsApp is owned by Meta and collecting information on your chat metadata (who you chat to, when, your contacts, their contacts)."
  Tell them to get Signal. If there's any country on this planet where convincing people to use Signal is easier, it must be Germany. GMaps streetview was banned there until recently, everyone uses fake names on Facebook, if they even made one in the first place.
  Surely they must be amenable to Signal
- We're gonna try harder next time

Google knew youtube shorts didn't stand a chance in a fair market.

If money wasn't the point, then influence was. Congress is right to shut them down.
Foreign owned, FARA-unregistered influence operations have never been a facet of "free speech" in the USA.
- It's pretty weird that they'd admit it.
  The smart move would have been to sell it and take the L, and use the new money to build the next thing.
- Money is still the point. There's an entire world outside the US.
- I mean, not on the surface. But lobby groups working for foreign governments operate in Washington to this day, and they’re ignored because Congress doesn’t want to shut the money tap off.
- They'd lose money in a sale as they'd lose their IP.

If the Chinese government is behind this, it's a great play. Having Joe Biden be "the guy who banned tik tok" would severely undermine his election chances.
- 14 year olds don't vote
  
  The largest demographic of tiktok is women between the ages of 18 and 29.
  
  14 year olds aren't the only people who use Tik Tok
  
  They were 14 four years ago
- Why would China want Biden to lose?
  
  Because Trump is equivalent to self destruction.

Awesome

Bye Felecia

Even better

Nice hope they won't budge.

Okay bye Felicia

Well, it's better than what could've happened. I'll accept this.

First, negotiations are not yet over, so they’re hoping courts overturn the ban.
Second, TikTok is very popular outside the US too, though 40% of ad revenue is in the US. They’d survive.
- Even if they do plan to sell they wouldn't say it. If buyers think that a sale is inevitable they can offer less because they "don't have a choice" but to sell. If they act as if their plan is to pull out the buyers need to not just make them an offer that is higher than the others, but also high enough to make them reconsider their whole position.
  
  This is right on. The best PR right now is to say they’ll never sell. Take a hard line while they challenge the law in court. They can always have acquisition meetings in private, and announce it out of nowhere at the last second if they do find a buyer.

Good 1 less spyware app

For good

Good?
- Yeah

Excellent

Cool, please do.

Another example of the falling US influence.
- Exactly. We spent four years playing into their hands, its going to take us decades to recover from that mistake.
- Nah, they'll sell. It would be foolish for them to admit it publicly, that would drive down the price. They'd also lose influence in the American media landscape if they killed TikTok. Finally, they're fighting this law in the courts, and admitting they'd sell if forced too would be weakening their position. It's not like selling would really hamper CCP control all that much, they'd just send texts to people's personal phones when they need something instead of sending official emails.

I think this is a good move honestly, they want it to be an algo similar to meta which you know is terrible, meta is like mostly dudes saying gen Z men are AWAKE and hate LGBT people and tate clips. They seem to have much less success in the algorithm on tiktok

I do wonder if this is america being anti communist as history has shown before. Not to say China is actually communist but the economic system is hybrid socialist/capitalist and China is catching up or surpassing america so with this said what's to say america starts using this tactic against more of chinas Chinese owned exports?
Beyond that america has meta which has done much the same as tiktok, targeting youth, furthering mental health issue, spying, anti trust and coverups yet they get a slap on the wrists.
- Anti communist? With everything else we buy from China, this is the tipping point to be anti-communist? How about all the US social media platforms that China won’t let in? Is that “anti-capitalist?”
  
  socialism has always been anti capitalism. socialism is based on principles like international revolution and a highly configured economic structures whereas capitalism is extraction of capital which western countries have been doing in china as much as china will allow but this isn't what i am arguing.
  something to keep in mind is that we don't buy tiktok, similarly to meta and alphabet (google).
  brief easy to read history of cold war activity.
  Cuba and North Korea (the forgotten war) are both good to look in to. i hope the history can bring context to my previous statement as geopolitics is never as it seems.
- https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/
  It's less about communism and more about authoritarianism. Even historically, communism was (IMO) just the trigger word associated with a slide into authoritarianism ... which is what seemingly happened in countries that had a communist uprising to overthrow the government and broader "owning class."
  China seemed like they were on course to be a friendly communist country at one point, but they've slid back into authoritarianism under Xi.
  I fully expect more hostility towards Chinese exports. Part of the reason for that is going to be that China is happy to use government money to subsidize certain industries to help gain dominance (Sherrod Brown - D Ohio) was recently speaking out about the risk Chinese subsidized EVs pose to the US auto industry domestically and internationally.
  
  communism is not innately authoritarian same with libertarianism and capitalism instead its bad actors that make it so and once bad actors get involved then communism is not meeting its definition. china is a weird one where its communist in name alone with its hybrid economic system and repressive regime which goes against core principles of socialism/communism. i think the death of the USSR which had lead the revolution, as well as the many western embargoes on socialist countries have soured relations.
  if your interested in podcasts id like to recommend you listen to blowback as it follows US hostilities against socialism/communism. i believe its on several platforms
- It's America being "anti criticise Israel "

✌🏽

Back to Vine we go

Very unlikely.

This would be a win for Facebook and Twitter/X.

They'd basically instantly be undermining literally every narrative they were trying to push about this by doing that lol
All those kids that were defending the shit TikTok pulls because "well American companies do it too!" are really gonna have to get that egg off their faces
- I'm just baffled, why am I not free to install whatever crap I want onto my phone?
  
  Let me ask you a question. How do you think they're going to "ban" TikTok? Remove it from the app store on Google and apple? You'll still be able to download the app and use it as long as you have the Internet.

They would say that at this stage. They are still working on getting the law overturned by courts and threat of shutdown mobilizes people against the law in a way that selling it wouldn't.
When the time comes to shut down they will probably do some paper work fuckery that technically makes it an Irish company but doesn't change the people in the company.

Let's be honest, this is only their outlook until the courts make their decision. They'll sell if that doesn't go in their favour.

while i'm obviously sure it's a bluff, pulling out instead of selling would be the clearest admittance that tiktok is (or at that point: was) not about the profit, but about Chinese influence in the US. the message being "we rather leave a hudred billion dollars on the table than give away our surveillance technology to some US company."
but yeah, they will def. sell if they need to.
- There are valid commercial reasons not to go through a forced sale with a ticking time limit, which will inevitably carry a steeply discounted price. Rather than getting robbed, it makes sense to hang on to the company and take profits from the rest of the world.
- It's more like their US profits are no match for their Chinese profits. Social media use in China and other Asian countries dwarfs US use.

They should redirect US users to a walled garden that says "Trump is against the ban. Vote Trump 2024" and see how quickly they reverse this. Oh political interference? Trump is all about that too.
Oh man, imagine what hellscape awaits us under a second Trump administration. Glory to Arstotzka!

Leaving US in darkness
- TikTok users are already in darkness, unless you think it's a happy coincidence that their algorithm suppresses anti-China views, support for Hong Kong, and support for Taiwan. Just because you can't notice you're being deceived doesn't mean you aren't.