>> This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security.

I disagree. I think was about making sure Americans see the "RIGHT" propaganda.

I'm also a little "meh" on the "innovatively incompetent" bit.

People get tunnel-vision. Facebook is for "Facebook things", TikTok is for "TikTok things". Reels, stories, whatevers isn't "TikTok".

It's why Facebook bought Instagram. No matter if Facebook copied Instagram down to the pixel, it still wouldn't be Instagram. And it's why the branding has remained consistent.

Same thing with Google and YouTube.

It's why these acquisitions happen and why these companies become something else. Google to Alphabet, Facebook to Meta, etc.

This just forces the sale of TikTok to someone in the U.S.

Are they even stealing anything or are they buying the top?

> I think when PAFACA passed and set up a ban of TikTok

No, when it passed it was about covering up a genocide that we finance. Before that, when it failed, it was just your standard anti-China nastiness meant to give the hot property with the youth mindshare to local cronies who were amenable to total social media censorship in general, like what all of the other networks were meeting with the last administration weekly to do.

Now the property will be given to local cronies and primarily used to help cover up a genocide, sounds like exactly what people who supported this stupid bill of attainder were begging for. Partisans of the last administration just thought they'd be in power forever for some reason, and they could use it as an additional means to attack supporters of what became the current administration.

They all seem to be fighting for the minds of young people who hate them all. I think they're just going to start leaving the entire internet like a previous generation left facebook when it got taken over by their radical centrist fossil parents. The kids will have to get bored with TikTok eventually, unless their daily pharmaceutical cocktails have stunted their brain development. Especially with the deluge of AI.

Not true, YouTube is the dominant player in short form content, and while TikTok has a loyal fanbase, I don't think it's a wall YouTube couldn't climb.

For those that are downvoting this based on vibes, please feel free to get recent view counts that prove me wrong.

Tiktok is not heroin. Tiktok does not make you vomit if you quit using it. Tiktok does not give you a 5 year life expectancy. You can't overdose on it and die. Tiktok does not make you rob a grandma to get your next fix of it.

I hate social media more than most people do, and I don't use tiktok and don't think anyone else should, but can we all please stop comparing a mobile phone app to using heroin? It's misinformed and dangerous to make rhetorical comparisons like that.

Completely anecdotally, I've seen Tiktok get replaced almost entirely by Instagram Reels in the sample space of, well, links to funny videos people send me. It doesn't count for much, but I do feel people might have slightly overestimated how much sticking power a platform like this has.

>Tiktok is the digital equivalent of "getting kids addicted to heroin"

I heard this argument about TV and videogames before

I wish no one had taken over. The threat of TikTok is easy to understand right now. It’s going to be much more murky after this deal is complete.

> and that was accomplished

It's very optimistic to assume that China was beaten here.

Bytedance still owns the algorithm and 30% of the new company. This new wrapper firm is just being granted the license to serve as Bytedance's operations, essentially. All the stuff about it being 'trained on US content' and 'overseen' by Oracle is smoke and mirrors. This is really just the zombie of the deal that was done four years[1] ago and then quietly scrubbed.

This isn't significantly different than the way TikTok has been operating all along, the only difference is a few of the administration's cronies are able to get their heads into the feeding trough.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/19/trump-says-he-has-approved-t...

> The stated purpose of the law was to get TikTok out of the hands of a foreign adversary, and that was accomplished.

I don't know how we conclude that:

> The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX.

> the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance)

> 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”

Now we have oligarchs, plus a major surveillance investor group, plus the Chinese.

This doesn't seem to be a solution to anything except that "a deal was made", and any further attempts at cleaning up credible risks have so many players to deal with, they would be DOA.

> it’s hard to see what regular users actually win from this

They won't. The entire point of this charade is to remind Americans we can't expect any better than instagram or youtube.

The point of the whole Congressional exercise was to grab ownership of a highly lucrative social network on the cheap to the American investor class. Whoever won the presidential election got to choose the winners.

I don’t know. In a way I don’t think it matters if China are currently actively engaged in altering the opinions of Americans, what matters is whether they can. And an unknowable algorithm absolutely gives them the power to.

IMO the bigger problem is that national security is only part of the problem. An unknowable algorithm controlled by the Ellisons is not necessarily less dangerous than one controlled by China, the motivations are just different.

Regardless of where you stand on American politics, it is just plain bad for all Americans for China to advance its geopolitical ambitions.

This is not a left versus right thing. China being unchallenged in the world will spell a quality of life decrease for us in the West. They are not “the good guys.” You’re free to see both parties as ‘neutral’ in alignment, but you still don’t want to have to be the losing party when they come into conflict. My point is China is not going to be sharing any of what they gain with Americans, even the ones who cheer for them - it’ll in fact be coming at your expense.

The CPC having a direct feed into the brains of every Gen Z and younger American is trivially easy to exploit - and there is a 0% chance that they won’t do so next year when they will likely invade Taiwan. If China is in control of TikTok, they’ll boost a ton of propaganda, supposedly people “from Taiwan” who greet the PLA as liberators, explaining how Taiwan being independent is actually oppression, and how they’ve always considered themselves part of the PRC, only evil politicians were keeping them apart. And they’ll make sure to suppress all media that exposes the violence on the ground. Finally, they’ll boost content urging Americans to protest US involvement and to sabotage the military, such as by chaining themselves to ships, etc.

Ryan McBeth has made a ton of videos laying out how this will work, and he does a better job than I have of explaining this.

TikTok is a cyberweapon.

But inside that shit, tiny little gold nuggets

You're not wrong. It was very clearly illegal for TikTok to maintain operations in the US since the law started applying, and yet the US government ordered everyone to disregard the law and they just went along with it.

This is another sign of the US' decline. The refusal to follow inconvenient laws.

> and install Barron Trump on the TikTok Board of Directors

Can cronyism become more blatant?

Quoting TFA: "It’s worth noting that none of this was really legal; the law technically stated that TikTok shouldn’t have been allowed to exist for much of this year. Everyone just looked the other way while Trump and his cronies repeatedly ignored deadlines and hammered away at the transfer."

They I understand it: There was a deal to ban TikTok unless ownership changes --- the original intention was no Chinese involvement, but now it seems "ownership change" means the ownership is amicable to the current president. There was also something of a grace period for when that ban went into effect if TikTok could show they were actively in the process of finding a new owner. The current president basically just kept insisting that grace period was in effect while he constructed a bid for ownership that aligned with his and his friends (business) interests.

Basically, Congress did not do its job and ignored the very law they voted for.

It is not access to our data that was the concern. It is manipulating the opinions of Americans by controlling the algorithms that determine what Americans see. How is that concern alleviated by this deal? It is not. And that's the problem with this deal. The algorithm is still controlled by China.

“Your information” was never the important thing. That’s a sideshow. The important thing is that controlling an algorithmic feed that is wildly popular amongst multiple generations of Americans means the CPC can control American public opinion at the touch of a button. Literally no country would allow a sworn adversary to do that. Why do you think China doesn’t allow Facebook or Twitter? And those aren’t even government-controlled American companies (sure, they’re subject to coercion, but not to the extent Chinese companies are).

I hate to tell you this, but that's how most countries operate. Actually, China is a shining example of digital protectionism. Turnabout is fair play.