> President Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the deal the go ahead. Vance said the Chinese government put up some resistance before the agreement
I find these two paragraphs particularly interesting
TikTok was not sold. This is an announcement of an executive order endorsing a proposal to sell TikTok.
> No representatives from ByteDance were present at the signing, and the company hasn’t acknowledged that a transaction is taking place. No purchase price was mentioned, and there’s no indication that the Chinese government has made changes to laws that would be necessary for a deal to take place.
Fascism is private ownership but state control of the means of production through political and economic pressure, or if that fails by direct edict. The state gets all the benefits of owning the means of production but none of the responsibility, and also gets to pick winners. The winners it picks are generally people aligned with the regime, so over time the business world gets stacked with partisans.
(I'm talking about the economic component of fascism, which usually comes with other ideological components like ultra-reactionary social doctrines and extreme nationalism.)
Capitalism in the free market sense is private ownership and private control, with businesses having a significant amount of independence from the state. This independence is both economic and ideological, e.g. free enterprises openly criticizing or even opposing the political class. Fascism seeks to stamp this out and force business to align with state authority.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew...
Sure the sale didn't take place via well trodden and codified procedure but it still happened. At the end of the day might makes right in this kind of thing, as unfortunate as it may be.
As far as I know TikTok in Africa and Eurasia will still be owned, and operated, by ByteDance from China.
How all of this is going to work out content wise is going to be... interesting, indeed.
Of the top 50 most-followed accounts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>, 21 of 49 (not including TikTok itself) are American.
When Tiktok was banned in India, everyone tried to recreate it, include Instagram. Everyone failed to get anywhere close to TikTok for you page.
Once the new algorithm is live, expect massive backlash.
It is not even like I disagree with the gist. Sadly, my feelings don't decide fact... or so the lesswrong weirdos keep telling me. If it was incredibly damaging, it would be incredibly easy to show. Instead, it's some poorly picked cherries by someone (Haidt) who should know better. Worse still, the best you can get from the data is a "maybe. I mean it is not immediately dis-proven... which is a start."
Try spending time with a phone addicted teen and you might have a more sympathetic take.
> The kind of person...
Let me take the temp down and ask it a different way. You don't feel weird saying there is an epidemic happening to our kids (again, something I’m at least partially convinced of), but we can't really put together a narrative one-tenth as cohesive as what we have for the efficacy of gray-market/off-label Ozempic?
I don't think your example of off-label Ozempic is isomorphic - the more apt comparison is one I already gave: Why did it take us 30 years to realize cigarettes cause 400k deaths a year? The answer is because there was simply huge amounts of money involved.
It reminds me of the oligarchs in Russia, license raj in India, privatization in Mexico etc…
being close to political power lets folks buy up crown-jewel assets at a fraction of their true value.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-26/bytedance... (archive: https://archive.ph/4m7Ms)
I think, in the context of something like a financial crisis, there could be a "this is the least bad thing at this point" argument to be made. But for tiktok today, this has to be among the worst things.
It looks like this massively undervalues TikTok's US operations, meaning the current administration is essentially gifting tens of billions to a friendly oligarch.
What a time of corruption we live in.
The US government is mandating the transaction happening in the first place, so of course there is going to be government input into the terms. Look at the forced sale of Bayer's US division during WW1. Or, the government requiring very specific actions by GM in return for the 2009 bailout.
>It looks like this massively undervalues TikTok's US operations
Valuation is an art, not a science.
It's a sale required by law, so it's not surprising that the terms are lower than what may be achievable through a public auction. Also, the details of the transaction matter; much of TikTok's value is in the algorithm, and how and whether that is transferred is unclear. But I'm not going to complain about American buyers paying less than they might otherwise.
>meaning the current administration is essentially gifting tens of billions to a friendly oligarch.
"Oligarch" = rich guy you don't like
Abu Dhabi royal family to take stake in TikTok US
This headline is completely misleading and incorrect. I don't think it necessarily needs flagging, but could be fine corrected to reflect the actual event.
etchalon•4mo ago
fidotron•4mo ago
TikTok have a much more valuable audience than WhatsApp had, and we've had significant inflation since.
ta1243•4mo ago
tomComb•4mo ago
fullshark•4mo ago
netdur•4mo ago
plasticsoprano•4mo ago
advisedwang•4mo ago
So the "TikTok ban" effectively gave TikTok's US operations to US oligarchs for a steal.