"... Its Beijing-based owner, ByteDance, is duly creating a new American version of the app and reducing its stake in it to 19.9%. Oracle, a tech giant, and Silver Lake, an investment company—both American—will each take 15%, as will MGX, an Emirati sovereign-wealth fund. The remainder will be owned by 'affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance', which probably means the company’s American shareholders. Users’ data will continue to be held in America by Oracle, which will also retrain TikTok’s algorithm on American data to prevent foreign manipulation."
So the U.S. gets its own version of the app, and there's this retraining to remove foreign influence. It's a win for those who thought Tiktok was a tool of foreign manipulation, but still want to keep it as a viable product.
Various groups in the U.S. wanted Tiktok divested from China, but the ones who were making money (or were hoping to eventually make money) with it did not want to destroy a short-form video app that has hundreds of millions of daily users and is the number one platform in the U.S. I think a lot of the delays are an attempt to keep the ownership transfer out of the public eye and prevent things like "the government is taking over Tiktok it's cookied" type stuff to keep the platform valuable to investors.
If China is developing a separate version for the U.S., and the algorithm is being retrained on it as this article says, then the behavior and vibe of the app might change. Young people will pick up on that pretty quick. I wonder if it will keep its popularity.
I was very much into Tiktok up and decided to quit the night it got shut down for a day. Leading up to that date, many of those who I would follow started telling everyone the other networks they were on, and/or joining other networks. Most went to Instagram. Instagram is just not the same, but I feel like Tiktok was on its way to becoming something different regardless of the outcome of the ban.
bookofjoe•1h ago