This seems like the microwaved corpse of the original 2020 deal. Bytedance keeps all the IP, sells Oracle the nearly worthless right to operate the US infra. They can't even call their franken-app Tiktok. The US user data already sits in the US but they'll expect everyone to forget about that so they can brag about this token win.
They'll probably get what they really want, which is an admin console for the algorithm that has a 'political slant' slider that they can slide as far to the reich as they wish.
Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
Why?
The nominal reason for all this is that we didn't want a Chinese company controlling an important social media outlet. I don't love that reasoning, but fine, whatever.
So they're forcibly selling it to an American company. Which should solve the problem, right?
Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies? Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
>Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
Well, yes, for starters. I think there's a pretty strong consensus from people on all sides that there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
It's the beneficiary of powerful network effects, it created those effects for itself with a superior app, but nevertheless it is a distinguishing feature. I also would say it's culturally positioned perhaps the best of any major social media app over the present and near term.
And in its current ownership it's required by statute to comply with Chinese national security data requests. And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
> there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
I really have to disagree at this point. Meta has all the money in the world to throw at this, and inference isn't rocket surgery. I think Meta's algorithm caught up a couple years ago, if anything it's even more addictive. Tiktok is simply riding on first mover status, plus it's a Coke/Pepsi thing, a large segment finds Meta properties distasteful for all the obvious reasons.
I agree (not OP). The difference in addictiveness between the three big boys (Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) grows smaller with every passing year as their back-catalog of content grows.
Pretty much everyone I know consumes TikTok style content these days. I personally have blocked myself from this stuff via deleting the Insta, YouTube and I even wrote a TamperMonkey script to block myself from getting trapped down the rabbit hole.
It's an interesting question, but the information we have so far doesn't seem to be enough to give a meaningful answer yet. E.g. is it something like "one person appointed to oversee the full terms of the transition are kept" or "one person appointed always to make sure TikTok aligns with the government".
I'm not necessarily a fan of either... but to vastly different levels.
Because Trump wants a proxy so he can continue to influence the direction TikTok takes. He wants easier access to data so he can go after his political opponents, as well as get things censored he doesn't like. Of course, this would all be possible without someone on the board, but it can't hurt, and likely will help.
If TikTok removes something, would the fact that there’s a government representative on the board give standing for a first amendment claim? Normally private companies aren’t required to furnish you with first amendment rights, but if one could argue that, if not for the board representative, they might not have prevented that speech, then perhaps you would have standing.
Remember though, it's only bad when the other guy does it. We don't want Chinese government involvement in TikTok, but we do want US government involvement. /s
The "Be all you can be" slogan requires more than just a great firewall that China should pay for, it needs a constant vigil to protect it from German nihilists.
maybe, but i think what I see here is trump is not interested to beat china, just see what he did with s korea and india.
the only thing may indicate that trump is competing with china is how hard he's trying to please putin, but apparently he needs to work harder to get into the organ harvesting club.
This has always been the case. Such as the White House asking for certain moderation on Twitter (revealed in the Twitter Files) and Meta, Patriot Act, and of course everything Snowden brought to light
As part of Project Texas[1], they've already been using Oracle's infrastructure.
> The central feature of Project Texas is our work with Oracle to isolate the TikTok services serving U.S. users within Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment as an additional safeguard. Although gateways to the storage infrastructure are strictly monitored and controlled, U.S. users of the TikTok platform can still communicate and interact with global users for a cohesive global experience.
That’s very interesting, I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Also, I see creators, trying to create US based TikTok accounts because they believe that this way their content will be shown to Americans, which are better monetized. If that’s the case, I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
It the international creators stay with the international TikTok IMHO that will be a huge win for China, practically displacing American culture for the younger demographic in the rest of the world.
>I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Look at recent events: American government officials want to maintain the same level of toxic culture wars that foreign governments want. They just want to control them, not contain them.
>> I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
If I were China I would do this deal and then ensure that the payout is better outside the US. Try to sway US content creators to use VPN's and post outside the US and essentially limit the impact of the deal.
> I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Huh? Are you not aware of US social media companies?
Everything that's happening on TikTok is also happening on X, Facebook, Friendster, or whatever the kids are using these days. The only difference is that the TikTok algorithm promotes Chinese propaganda and ideology, and enriches the Chinese government and ByteDance. The US can't have that, hence this deal.
This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota. That would require strong regulation of social media companies and adtech in general, and there would be a nationwide revolt if that were even proposed. This is far from being considered anyway, now that Big Tech is deeply entrenched in the government.
>This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota.
Broadly speaking, I think you're probably right that the dynamics on tiktok already exist elsewhere in social media. But I do think a practical upshot of it could be a version of Tiktok where you can criticize the Hong Kong takeover or Xinxianj labor camps or harassment of expatriate dissidents or Taiwan indepence openly and not have it soft-deplatformed. Which could cause stronger domestic consciousness of those issues, and stronger solidarity with Europe and the rest of the Western world.
Will people just stay with the old app out due to inertia? Or will there be annoying "blocked in your country" type messages until you switch? (at which point you won't know what's been blocked in your country)
Will there be an old app and new app available both to US residents? I don't see how that'd help them reach any of their stated goals, as I'd expect overwhelming majority of users to a) simply not care and stay, b) prefer the better international app with more content from all around the world
Wait, so for everyone else this means American content will be off the main app and be contained? If this stems the tide of MAGA brain rot seeping north into Canada it's an absolute win.
MAGA content is easily avoidable, because the algo already prioritizes what you engage with. For me in Canada, there's just a lot of funny/insightful US-based content I do watch.
TikTok got significantly less interesting when the US blocked themselves earlier this year, if that happens permanently it'll probably hurt TikTok worldwide.
The law simply requires that the content recommendation algorithm not be shared between the two apps. [0] Thus, it must be rebuilt by the new team, and not maintained or controlled by the old team.
The licensing approach is a temporary solution to keep the app working from day 1. One of ByteDance's complaints during the lawsuit earlier this year was that is was going to be technically infeasible for engineers to rebuild something as complex and essential as the content algorithm in the short window of time they had before the law went into effect.
"The term “qualified divestiture” means a divestiture or similar transaction that ... would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary; and ... precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between [the two apps/teams], including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing."
>> US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users
Very interesting! The separate "in content" bit in particular. Sounds like US TikTok will now be one giant echo chamber. Users outside the US will miss some US content but tbh, I find TikTok content is actually quite localised anyway. Big benefits for users outside the US are:
1. US doesn't get my data.
2. Hopefully less US political BS to swipe past.
3. I am much less concerned with the sway China has on Western Europe than the sway the US has and am therefore much happier using a China-backed version of the app sans US content/users/control/propaganda. The extreme brain rot causing people outside the US to care about 'MAGA' or that recently assassinated man will hopefully start to recede. That can only be a good thing. We have plenty of our own polarising issues without importing irrelevant ones.
This is precisely why I don’t see the value of “right” and “left”, because it’s absolutely useless and even a distraction from understanding the true nature of these types of topics. It has absolutely nothing to do with “right” or “left” and everything to do with overarching interests.
I've been wondering if enough people would be single issue voters on the Israel question that we could actually get some sort of candidate who attracts a ton of voters from both traditional parties.
It's ironic because (IMO) people like Ben Shapiro and other pro-Israel people deliberately divide us to prevent us from uniting against them, but the genocide has actually united us[1]. Just the other day I saw a Twitter post from one Cenk Ugyur reaching across the aisle and saying "good job" to right wingers who objected to hate speech laws against people who celebrated Kirk's assassination.
Admittedly, if 68% of Americans are opposed to Israel that doesn't necessarily mean all of them are single issue voters... but I think this is the first issue I've seen in my lifetime that gets this close to uniting Americans.
Didn't expect to see the USA employing press censors in my lifetime but here we are.
In Brazil during the dictatorship it was common for newspapers to print cooking recipes in place of censored articles, now I'm waiting to see if media in the USA has the balls to play the malicious compliance game... I guess I won't see it since money is basically God in America.
One could argue they're not the same, but there has been TV broadcast censors for decades in the US. They were still least following somewhat defined laws though.
This goes way beyond this current administration and has nothing to do with China, besides being the foil for the real reason of controlling what people can see and hear because the cabal that controls the USA does not like it.
TikTok dealt a serious blow to the Western consensus manufacturing apparatus. We saw that with Gaza especially. This deal is a step towards taking back control.
That's how all ruling classes and governments throughout history have operated. It's now just mask-off in a country that people mistakenly thought didn't do that sort of thing.
Yea agree. The US used to be good at making the world believe they're all about freedom and rights etc. Now they don't seem to even bother trying anymore.
Yes, indeed. As the current administration, any US administration in the last 30-40 or years in fact, is for a fact very pro-Israel, so a move like this can only cement that stance.
Maybe these crypto-zealots who scream about decentralization will actually try and build a thriving decentralized media instead of pumping and dumping shitcoins?
Yeah. I'm on Lemmy and Mastodon, but it ain't exactly jumping, and I'm sure part of it is definitely the confusion around how to get going and what it is. Lemmy at least is also pretty buggy, and I'm not able to find posts I saw a few hours ago, but ultimately I don't really know what the draw is or even could be for the average user.
This exists today, it has always existed, and you never needed technology to find the solution to it.
Im a huge fan of the film Rope, because it is just done well. Its also got a ton of coding in it for "homosexual" themes that were very much banned at the time of filming. Understanding these paints the film in a whole new way...
Shakespeare has a ton of contemporary satire coded into it. Unless you're aware of history or reading a version that illuminates the meta-context you would very much be unaware of its existence.
It happens in modern film: Paul Verhoeven is a master of it.
If you dont think there are coded communities on existing social platforms sharing information among in members I have news for you.
Use Fediverse/ActivityPub, XMPP (maybe matrix), IRC. Use protocols, not "apps"/"platforms". Stop using corporate-owned centralized services. Well, unless you like being the subject of exploitation and manipulation of course.
The nuance of protocols vs apps though is lost on the masses. Most people just want to stare at reels or be stared at in reels.
This means that the only people you will encounter in protocols will be privacy freak type nerds and “normal” people you might actually feel better interacting with or watching are on popular apps.
This has been floating around since the end of the first Trump administration, where neither of these interests were accused of being “pro-Israel” but only entrance narrative after the current Palestine debacle:
Therefore I’m only left to conclude this is an entirely unsubstantiated claim, as why wouldn’t it have already been apparent if they were working as shadow brokers of Israeli interests in all this, which the general timeline and verifiable information we know don’t line up with?
The people who have been very vocal about forcing US ownership of TikTok have also been very, very open about their Zionism on social media. A16z has been pushing for this hard since the start of the genocide. Zionists blame "TikTok" for their opposition. They even call the younger people who don't support Israel the "TikTok Generation".
This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control, is very much about Israel and attempting to gain a monopoly on the media.
It's a page in the conservative playbook going back a long time, from consolidating newspapers to talk radio to TV stations and now a new type of media...
And now we see them getting main stream networks on a leash.
Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.
Man, the sheer transactionality that guides these people's lives is pretty disgusting to me. Granted, you probably don't get to be a billionaire unless you are pretty transactional, but I am kind of thankful that the vapid hollowness of these billionaires (despite always cloaking their rapaciousness in some sort of larger societal purpose) has been laid bare over the past few years.
I don’t want either of them, but credit where credit is due. China is doing well as a country and the standard of living has increased even if it’s under an authoritarian regime. I wonder how long that will last. Meanwhile, the USA is becoming Russia. Basically a bunch of misinformed morons living in the past and thinking we are on top of the world while we accelerate towards irrelevance on the global stage if not for a massive stockpile of nukes.
Tariffs are drying up international demand for Chinese goods, and in a bid to keep factories alive, Beijing is urging exporters to turn inward. However, that pivot is compounding the very problem it aims to solve.
Deflation isn’t an abstract threat in China anymore—it’s visible across the economy. After barely holding above zero for much of 2023 and 2024, consumer prices have now dropped for two straight months.
Producer prices have fallen for 29 consecutive months. March’s figures showed the sharpest drop in four months, and forecasts point to an even steeper decline in April.
Yes, I’m fully aware that’s starting so low because of horrible governments in the past and that the current government is far from great, but that’s still moving in the right direction at the time the United States is trying to speed run to a Russian-style oligarchy and most people under 50 think it’s getting worse.
It's really odd how many people on hn are pro china. Why? They are not good guys. At all.
In moral terms they are so far behind the West they are in a different team. (and don't throw in disingenous deflections like gaza and whatever, those are orders of magnitude less bad then China) The West is full of freedom and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. China isn't.
Nobody here is pro Russia or Iran, or even particularly pro India. So why is Communist China different?
What an insane thing to say! But also... how insane is it that I agree with you based on objective reality? Can you imagine seriously saying that 20-30 years ago? 1984's doublethink/doublespeak always seemed over the top, yet we are at a point particularly recently where the anti cancel culture sentiment has lead to... proposals to curb undesirable speech, cancelling people... which in turn is undesirable because it criticises a propagandist's undesirable speech with his own post death quotes in a lot of cases and bristles when accused of sane washing. Or that this won't matter in a few more news cycles as we lurch brokenly into the next phase of dystopia.
I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners.
Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.
The CPC is not attacking the US from within. The Party of Trump has carried out a fascist coup and they are now working to ensure they stay in power permanently.
I loath partisanship and am more than willing to point out failures by the Dems, but this is different. Trump and Co have openly stated that they don't believe in democracy.
If you are not able to see this I'm not sure what I could say to open your eyes.
So incompetent that they control all three branches of the most powerful government on earth. Much of that can be credited to their media ownership strategies.
Really? They are following Putin’s playbook and getting away with it. Controlling media and sharing the spoils with the oligarchs. Together, they are robbing us blind. What about what they are doing makes them incompetent? Evil, yes. But incompetent? They are winning! You think this ends with the next election or when ol’ Agent Orange kicks the bucket? Things are going to be very different here for a very long time unless we collectively get our shit together in a big way and take it back.
Seems like it. It seemed kind of inevitable. Biden made a mistake going down this road - of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term, but Biden should've just left it alone because it wasn't hard to see that this was the likely outcome.
Biden? You do realize Trump attempted to “ban” TikTok in his first term when the original Oracle “deal” happened, right? Pinning this in Biden takes some serious mental gymnastics.
Yeah, I do realize that and in fact mention it in the comment above: of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term. Not "pinning" it on Biden, per se, but he is the one who signed the bill. It would have been much better to leave it alone. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-what...
Do you suspect Biden had a little plaque on his desk saying "The buck stops somewhere else"? He signed the bill. If he didn't want to own it, he doesn't have to put his name on it.
Also this only matters if the Fed is independent. If it’s not, the President can direct it to purchase unlimited treasury bonds, effectively printing unlimited money to fund any program it wants.
Paired with this administration’s assertion of impoundment powers and the pocket rescission, the Congress’s power of the purse is completely neutered in both directions. The executive can decline to spend whatever it doesn’t want to, and it can fund anything it does want.
Recklessly funding the government off of the Fed’s balance sheet will of course cause all sorts of nasty economic effects, but that’s exactly why you need to print money! So your massive immigration enforcement apparatus (newly full of ideological minions thanks to the current hiring surge) can go and assert powers of process-free expedited removal throughout the entire country (per DOJ memo from week 1).
So the economic consequences hardly matter: you simply deport whoever complains.
Maybe the best solution is to adopt a parliamentary system of government? With the executive formally subordinated to the legislature, it can’t spend money against the legislative majority’s wishes, because if it upsets the legislature, the legislature votes it out of power (commonly with no supermajority required, just a simple majority vote in the more numerous legislative house)
It said it could be delayed with some pretty specific parameters. Quoting the Congressional Research Service report on the bill:
"The President can grant a one-time extension of up to 90 additional days when a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, there is evidence of 'significant' progress toward executing the divestiture, and there are legally binding agreements in place to enable the divestiture."
One could argue all day about whether or not there was an identified path or evidence of significant progress, but certainly there weren't legally binding agreements in place at any point, and the deadline has been extended far more than once.
Trump is ignoring the law. The DoJ has asserted that Trump can ignore the law because it would interfere with his duty to "take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States." It is unclear what, if any law, could not be ignored under this doctrine.
I fully expect a decent number of people in favor of this to, without a shred of irony, whine about wanting a free market whenever environmental regulations are in the news again.
It does seem mismatched but it's also an opportunity for Oracle to become relevant in the space, if they handle it right.
Though yeah, if they go the Yahoo-route it's going to be a huge waste. But it's really up to how the company handles the acquisition.
Yahoo missed big time by just trying to change the culture of the userbase way too quickly. They didn't like that people were posting porn on Tumblr when that was one of the most important aspects of the platform for the users. They bled way too many users and took way too long of a time to do anything about it.
I feel like Tumblr should have done their own patreon/OF type of push within the platform but they didn't have the vision. They literally had all the creators of that type of content at some point and they've now all moved to X/Twitter.
I hope (i mean, idgaf but you know it's a figure of speech) that Oracle has a better perspective about the issue so they don't commit another billion(s) dollar(s) crime.
What's to stop ByteDance from waiting a while and making a new TikTok app under a different name? The network effect moats do not seem insurmountable. I'm sure once the US starts meddling with the algorithm people will start looking for alternatives.
>> What's to stop ByteDance from waiting a while and making a new TikTok app under a different name?
I'm sure this deal is more complex than "ByteDance is not allowed to run an app called TikTok within the US". Politicians are morons so I could be wrong but I would hope it's much more liberal than that.
This. I think people in general misunderstand the allure of power and the means to maintain it. Power centers in US are drooling at the opportunity to do what China has done in terms of controlling discourse and language. The interesting thing is that they all assume that this particular measure of control would never be turned against them.
edit: Adjusted weapon to 'measure of control'. I accept people are a little too happy to overreact lately.
In a democracy where the politicians change every 4-8 years this is receipt for disaster. The next administration will undo action taken by the previous one. In effect destroying any momentum or progress for achieving anything. For China and Russia this is not a problem because of the totalitarian state.
These fascist Republicans are not intending on giving up power. A bit China mixed with the sham democracies of Russia, Hungary or Turkey - this is the model they're going for.
What do you think the push behind the new gerrymandered districts is for?
Why are they creating fake emergencies to justify inserting federal police and the national guard in major cities with big Democratic voting populations?
> We are doing state capitalism without China’s “serve the people” bit. Hm, maybe there’s a name for that type of government, idk.
Except China doesn't actually serve its people. Things are way more cut-throat there, with much less safety net. The Chinese government sees workers as grist for the mill, not something to be cared for.
There is a significant difference in a population of 70 million educated workers who need to be maintained for high performance and 400 million low skill workers who are highly replaceable.
I am trying to make no judgement here, just explaining then 'motivational environment'
This math of course is in flux to a degree we haven't seen in maybe 1000+ years though right now.
I think you can it's just shifted by several decades because China took a long dark detour through the Cultural Revolution. QoL exploded in the US in the Post War period, partially imo because we were the only industrialized economy that didn't have significant homeland attacks during WW2 so the US got a straight shot to the top of the heap. China got a similar QoL lift through a similar path, mass manufacturing (this time business taken from the US by being far cheaper) and growth of in country expertise. Now even China is feeling a similar cost squeeze drawing some business to smaller neighbors. They're also just so much larger they can sustain a larger gradient between coasts that look closer to '1st' world costs and poorer interiors where cheaper manufacturing can be done.
Sure, but what's relevant is what sort of political and cultural pressures we're all experiencing now. Maybe China is just a few years behind on the same crunch trajectory we're on, maybe not, but that doesn't matter much to what's going on today.
> Eh, quality of life has gone to the moon in China in living memory. Not nearly as much a positive delta here in the US.
The Chinese rural population still isn't eligible for local equivalent of social security in their old age (that's only for city folks), and IIRC there was a huge unwillingness to provide financial assistance to individuals during COVID.
US users are today 21 of the 49 TikTok accounts with the most followers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...> (not including TikTok itself). When the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020,[1] Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue.
[1] And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move
Nope. I get a lot localised content. The local food reviewers etc. won't miss out on US views. The people creating content in local languages won't notice a difference either. 15 years ago I think things would have went differently but now I think people will want the non-US version. And I wouldn't be surprised if US users grab themselves a VPN and a pirated APK and use it too.
Larry Ellison and A16Z will invest in Truth Social, buy Trump Coin, help his family, (or something) just asynchronously enough that it can’t be directly connected to the TikTok deal.
Doubt they feel the need to wait. Nobody is going to do anything about it, just like nobody has yet done anything effective about the other blatant corruption. Look at the Saudi “investment” in Trump’s crypto.
I'm 61. I've told my kids I could not have ever imagined we got to the state we are in, with the president trying (and largely succeeding) in advancing the "unitary executive" abetted by the Supreme Court. Hell, I wouldn't have believed it even 10 years ago.
Is it common for this sort of company, though? I can see public-private partnerships making sense for infrastructure, for example, but a social media company? That just sounds like a way for a country to censor and push propaganda.
> With, apparently, a board member appointed by the Trump administration.
Trump has essentially selected all of the board members. Its not a coincidence that Larry Ellison and Andreessen are big Trump supporters. The amazing corruption continues.
The term has been so abused that it’s no surprise the current administration was going to push in that direction themselves.
All it takes is a minor rebranding and half the country or more would immediately sign up for it. For all intents and purposes, socialism just means “the people we don’t like”. As long as people feel like they’ll get theirs, I seriously doubt they care what economic system they’re living under.
Users better be running now before they get hit with those new licensing fees.
Oracle: "Your phone has 6-cores and our minimum plan is 64 cores. Additionally, we see you upgraded from an iPhone 16 to the 17. Licenses don't transfer, of course. You owe us 3 kidneys."
For me it’s the potential china influence. Reels and Shorts is at least American and I already have established relations with both companies.
Are we for sure the TikTok algorithm doesn’t bump towards or away from certain issues? The data on the cultural zeitgeist? The ability to promote political messaging?
People keep saying this but shouldn't it be kinda trivially easy to check?
Start new accounts, swipe through the content and establish what kind of algorithm it is. The few attempts I've seen on youtube seem to indicate it's heavily based on your geographical area. They don't really care that much which side the apple falls onto.
I do acknowledge that there's a latent threat that could be activated. And I can see an argument being made on that front, I mean, China doesn't allow access to a lot of American social media for that reason. But I don't really buy the argument right now as I haven't seen a lot of evidence of Tiktok doing things that Meta/Google haven't done.
Like you say, they could target different messages for different geographical areas. Similar to how in the election last year Dearborn, MI (highly middle eastern) got different messaging from both Trump and Kamala wrt Isreal/Palistine compared to the rest of the country on traditional ads.
They can target any age range or demographics, any interests.
We had Uber hiding things from LEO almost a decade ago via geofencing and other tricks, I’m sure it’s a bit more sophisticated now.
You keep bringing Meta/Google into this. I don’t care if they do the same things. I mean, I wouldn’t like it either, but we have solutions available to us. We can pass laws or go to court and handle it internally. A foreign nation is not bound by that.
The "good" news is that they will only own the US operations, with the ROTW continuing to be operated by ByteDance. So if they diverge too far from the original product we can expect to see a discussion about life behind the Great Firewall of America.
I'm curious how bad the misinformation type stuff will be.
It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.
Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.
> Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuf
I don't understand how other people have this experience and I don't. I see targeted ads of course. And every once in a while it starts showing me content for things I don't follow, at which point I start mashing the button they provide to make it go away, and after a handful it pops up something asking if I want to remove all suggested content for a while. I always select yes.
Do other people actually *want* suggested comment? that's bizarre.
Most people aren't actively curating their feed like this. They see an attractive person, eyes wander for a few seconds longer than the usual post before scrolling away, and that is enough.
Short form video is basically worthless outside of comedy and cute animal videos. The format does not allow enough information to determine whether the information provided is accurate or not, for videos that have facts in them. Every time I watch a short form video I feel an overwhelming urge not to trust what I saw and verify it elsewhere, now I just don’t want short form videos at all.
The USA forcibly nationalized TikTok so they can install their own surveillance and censorship apparatus along with skimming from TikTok's profits. All while decrying China for... the same thing.
Isn't this as bipartisan as it gets? Trump wanted China to divest from Tiktok. Congress passed the bill. Biden signed it. The Supreme Court agreed that, yes, this is legal.
Sure, people didn't vote for Larry Ellison to take control. But something like this is what we wanted, right?
Isn't that how it works in China? At least since the 80s. The CCP forces companies to insert their state-backed fund and officials into the cap table. Either through golden shares, forced mergers with state-owned enterprises, or forced equity sales.
They're going to send thugs into businesses demanding to see if any of their employees are secretly using TikTok on company time, then demand the business buy a million dollar corporate license.
I think it's bad news if the US government owns Tiktok data rather than the Chinese government.
Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
The State Department also said it would crack down on non-citizens who have made posts making light of the shooting.
“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country. I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on Thursday. “Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.” [0]
Americans prefer that Tiktok data lives within the jurisdiction of the US government, why? If you don't think Palantir is putting together a centralized database to survey individual Americans for the US government, you are crazy. There will be real consequences where if they don't like what you're saying or doing, they will come after you some how.
I'd much rather have my data based in China.
I've come across at least one businessman who refuses to use anything but a Chinese phone he bought in china, with chinese sim card and chinese apps, for that exact reason.
>Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
It's arguments like this that reminds of the critique of libertarians as akin to house cats that seek to undermine the very systems that allow them to exist in the first place that wouldn't survive outside for minute. Or maybe it's just agitprop right here.
Are there any other examples of something like this happening? A successful (foreign) app is forced to be sold to a US company just because of its country of origin? What happened to the free market? It's remarkable that privacy is even in the conversation when FAANG is just as bad
Not to mention that this is all just a distraction from the very real destruction Trump 2.0 is doing to peoples' lives, safety, financial outlooks, rights, etc and flushing our country and planet down to the toilet for his benefit
Today I learned! I remember it being sold to a Chinese company a few years ago, didn’t know it went back to US ownership. Ironically just deleted it because even with an Adblocker it’s still unusable with all the bots
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
Genuine question: what do you think the alternative is? Ultimately someone will have the power. I don’t know what’s particularly questionable about Larry Ellison. An entrepreneur controlling media seems better than the state or a foreign government.
It less about who and more about how many. Lots of different people, with different points of view, sharing control of the media is way better than one guy having the ability to push whatever narrative they feel like at the time.
David Ellison is Larry Ellison's son, and Larry Ellison spent $6 billion on the Paramount deal. It's not really a stretch to imagine that the father might have some influence on the resulting operation. (According to a cursory web search, on paper Larry Ellison now has a 35.5% voting interest and David Ellison has a 64.5% voting interest.)
I agree it’s not that big of a stretch, but it elevates the discussion when you communicate what part of your argument is objectively correct vs a stretch.
My knee-jerk reaction was to upvote the comment, but that’s how Ecco chambers get increasingly divorced from reality.
Actually it's the opposite. Pre-internet, there were a handful of news sources in any given city (mostly newspapers and TV), so they couldn't afford to alienate half of their potential viewers/readers by leaning hard left or right.
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' online. So many that the net effect is that most of those sources lean one way or the other, and by and large people choose to listen mostly or only to those sources they agree with.
No wonder political opinions are so highly divided today. Almost no one ever hears anything from the other side.
Partially, yes? I don’t
see that as particularly controversial at this point. We are beyond consensus manufacturing and into explicit governmental crackdowns on anti-Israel voices in the US.
It’s for money and power. Because of the partisan nature of the power grab, a certain grab bag of evangelical, fossil fuel and anti-gay tenets are going to get reïnforced. But treating those as the cause dangerously misses that this is being started at home.
It's important to remember that the ultra-powerful and wealthy live whatever life they want to live regardless of what their media companies promote.
Someone can own a media company, have it push very specific political ideologies with the goal of turning people against each other and gaining power for themselves. By pushing antagonistic media, they can prop up fringe political figures who'd be more willing to help them with their political goals. (E.g. tax policies that help the wealthy person's companies.)
They can still live whatever life they want, even going against the ideologies the media companies espouse, because they're rich enough that the fallout doesn't impact them.
They're living a very different kind of life than us.
BTW, I'm not explicitly arguing that Larry Ellison is doing this -- I don't have the context or background on that. I am saying that his media companies will 1. do things to help Larry's interests (which are probably political), and 2. that doesn't have to be aligned with however he lives his personal life, since he's effectively immune.
> Larry Ellison’s daughter is gay. Why do you think her brother and father are going to infuse Paramount with anti-gay bigotry?
Sorry, I'm speaking generally. The people in power broadly align with these policies. That means that when they gain control over a pillar of industry, they're broadly going to do influence it to some combination of those ends. The reason they gained power isn't to do those things. Ellison isn't taking control of TikTok to influence the Israel narrative. But when he takes control of it, as a result of the contours of powers that are MAGA, he will probably be forced to put forward an anti-Palestinian editorial bias.
There is a lot of tail wagging the dog conspiracy in this thread. I'm pushing back on that.
Current Oracle CEO Safra Catz lives in Palm Beach and is a frequent visitor to Mar-a-lago. She is actually a big Israel supporter, visiting and donating money often.
If we want neutral, how about a fair arena for opinions and ideas.. at the moment "The Right" yells and screams "Anti-Semite! Terrorist!" if someone protests against the starvation and slaughter of children... So having them control the medium doesn't feel right for me.
Ok someone's going to come and say that "The Left" controlled the medium and disallowed "non-mainstream" messaging about Covid... I admit my bias and consider such messaging lunacy too..
There are tiny pockets of this country that assume this is the singular issue that animates everybody, every day, and that it is impossible to believe in both Israel's right to exist and defend itself and the Palestinians' right to not be bombed because the Israeli PM doesn't want to go to jail.
The problem is the word 'anti'. Being pro something doesn't mean you're anti something else. I can be pro-israel and still have sympathy for the Palestinians and what they are enduring and hoping for peace.
Whenever we take a stance, We identify our ego with that stance. We shall die but die a pro X or pro Y
As such many debates happen in bad faith as well.
Of course everyone has their agenda but one has to understand that agenda is just a framework for understanding the world.
And we need to understand the world because it has no inherent meaning.
So like, if we really have to deduce meaning, if we really have to be pro something that we can die on a hill towards, I'd rather have it be a humanitarian thing.
I am not saying that palestine is good either but rather that in genocide/wars, the people fighting the war/military/families displaced suffer, not the old man causing the war.
I feel like I am a humanist. Wishing to understand the world, yet I feel like some people in this world have hurt me so much that sometimes I just wish the world to burn.
I am sure that people are gonna comment on something like "oh do you support a genocide etc."
But I am trying to make the point that the world should really be just anti suffering,accepting. Yes I am naive but surely with all of this technological improvements, we can improve the structure of society to not be fucking brewing with hate and bullying and resentment.
We can do so much better as a society without even trying much. Just small acts of kindness and basically creating a environment that rewards it and punishes bullying/hate speech etc. might be really nice if I am being honest.
Not sure why we can't be pro this instead of defining ourselves with the confict of two other foreign nations
> This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
Again? People should be talking about the hostile take-over currently in progress and how it is getting exponentially worse. But the billionaire mouthpieces gave everyone a shiny new inconsequential talking point and no one cares about anything that matters.
Why fight a war against class, against oppression when we can sit on a chair and write a comment either defending or arguing against something as petty as religion.
It would be maybe the 3rd point worth discussing definitely after concentration of power & how they can influence our opinion of the masses.
But people made it the first.
There is no such thing as a moral billionaire imo, I saw a video like this and I sorta agree.
I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone owning this much amount of control.
Religion seems so petty to me yet it seems that the world is coming back to it. Fighting us vs them.
We have all forgotten what the people in 1970's esque dreamed of 2025 etc. (I am a genz but I have seen such videos of people thinking what)
And the funny thing is, is that we ourselves have forgotten how to dream of what will happen in 2100
Do we really want to grow old in society where even after 70-80 years, one of our children or grandchildren sees yet again some comment like this and writes something like this that I am writing?
> hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man
Ellison read and responded to the political situation more skilfully than Elon.
He used Stargate to cement himself as a power broker in AI. He used that influence to provide antitrust assurances that gave his son a leg up for Paramount. Meanwhile he used that proximity to media to get a foot in the door with TikTok.
The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy. This is a project all the major Trump donors and high-level supporters contributed to. That Ellison is coming up as one of the new aristocrats is closer to a dice roll; that we have oligarchs, now, is very much by design.
In authoritarian regimes the industrial capacity of an economy is appropriated by the state, where the fruits of the industry are enjoyed by party loyalists.
In this case using the state to choose which business is viable, no
doubt being businesses
that play ball with the party.
-its why sectarian conflicts and power delegation is so high stakes in many parts of the world.
In 2020, 22.4% of the US population voted for Trump. In 2024, 22.7% of the population voted for Trump. I hate how people draw drastic conclusions regarding what the American people want based off the shift of less than half a percentage point of the population.
I don't think that necessarily follows. An abstention is a voting choice that doesn't imply support for one choice or another in the minds of the voter, regardless of the result.
Abstention is not that, it is saying you are comfortable letting others choose for you. You have to consider the end result of the action not the intention of the action to understand what the choice really means.
Everyone who chooses not to vote is voting “I don’t like any candidate” and so voted against all candidates. How is your interpretation more valid than mine?
You aren't voting against anyone. You either vote for someone or you take yourself and your vote out of the picture and ceed political control to more passionate people. That is what they are doing, "I will let the most passionate people choose our leader and I stand by their choice" not "I don't like anyone."
Idk about america, but there's definitely a sentiment echoing I feel like all across the world that there is a concentration of power and the divide between state and class is shrinking and we consider state to be itself (corrupt?) / not working to our wants.
That's my understanding of it. People have given up hope on...well having hope.
But hey lets define what is a woman first, that matters more than people sadly suiciding because they can't take this cruel petty world anymore.
We have induced our cruelness on earth, every animal,tree, air, even other humans. Who have we left?
Have we forgotten humanity? What does humanity even mean when we realize that people literally eat animals which scream to death from pain for the "taste" ?
I myself ate an egg yesterday for "protein" after a few years, I am skinny so I had to convince myself that I needed it but still my heart felt a bit bitter.
I am not judging you if you eat meat, that's not the point because I don't have a point/agenda. I am venting.You almost feel small when you think about it.
I really feel like the world can be a better place so there's hope tho.
> If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
You still make money in that case. It isn't a bad deal for the chinese. The americans who now have yet another censored app controlled by the american government are the only losers here.
Because it's the biggest market. Half of my customers are American. I have never even marketed anything to them. It's the biggest, best market with the most people willing to spend the most money.
Similarly, when the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020, Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue. 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.
>If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
Besides what bluecalm said, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.
Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile Chinese government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
The party of laissez-faire capitalism is now into "let's interfere", with government ownership, presence within companies and of course, dropping the hammer on "unpatriotic" speech, a kind of Amended First Amendment.
10 Small Steps: Executing the Fascist Playbook [0]
This seems like a premature reaction. The Trump administration has been known to anchor to extreme positions as a negotiation tactic.
Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.
Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.
>A new company will be created to operate TikTok, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the report said.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
I doubt it. Oracle has a booming datacenter and cloud business right now. Their role is to host the data in a US jurisdiction, which they can do. It won’t affect the success or failure of TikTok. And frankly it won’t give TikTok users privacy since the data can still be accessed by software written by Chinese employees.
Yea, I’m sure the sociopaths at oracle have the fingers on the pulse of the younger generations. They’re just going to up the censorship and enshittfy it resulting in its users moving on the next new thing.
So finally all that pesky people saying that their own government is funding a brutal genocide with their tax dollars will be banned.
American media is one of the most thightly controlled and censored in the world. They need to carefully control the media to maintain the ilusion of "moral superiority" that is used to justify foreign interventions.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.
Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.
So, same old, basically. When I was a kid it was the same thing, kids spending all evening watching sitcoms and otherwise-trash TV. I was online on my computer learning programming, audio production, trying different operating systems, playing every game I could get my hands on, as well as chatting with people all over the world & making friends who I'm still friends with today, ingesting media from all over the world as well, completely free of corp/govt propaganda. Kids can still do so, if they choose to skip past the pop culture garbage that is shoved in everyone's faces, just as I did 20-30 years ago.
Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>
"Someone said something else was bad and it wasn't, so therefore anything else that someone says is bad is also not bad" is an obviously incoherent argument once you strip it down to its basics.
Yeah no I get what you mean, but my argument is like, you should try to be resilient against the arbitrary whims of the powers that be regardless of what their flavour of the week is. Asymmetric power/influence is a dynamic that will always exist in society, especially exacerbated by the scale and reach we see today.
Absolutely! But one of the tools we created to make this possible is government. There are forces (like multinational corporations) that exceed the power of an individual or many individuals to mitigate.
Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.
Ah totally, I exclaim frequently that there should be government-backed open source and decentralized software[0], putting power of technology into the hands of everyone (rather than letting this power get consolidated into monopolistic corporations) ... but then, what we seem to have currently is a huge correlation of motives between state and industry, and neither seem to have the incentive to put power in the hands of individuals. And individuals often don't even want it either. Either way though, yeah, regulation is long overdue for SO MUCH of this stuff.
Yeah, you are 100% correct. I need to find him a few good hobbies before I release him to the wolf packs.
I don't know. I myself never sticked to a hobby even after trying a lot of them. Genetically speaking he is a lot like me -- lack of discipline, difficult to cool down, impatient, throw tantrums frequently, etc. The list is pretty long :/ Not many good things from this genetic pool TBH.
I feel like short form video is inherently addictive, what special sauce are these smartest minds in the world using that adds to that?
I've never used it, but since YouTube introduced Shorts I've become victim to the addiction and subsequently blocked any trace of Shorts with a browser extension.
I think the way they make recommendations are pretty good (looking over my wife's shoulder sometimes). But that's just my guess, I mean, it could just be pushing the next best viewed video from the same tag.
It's the best I can do honestly. As another commentater mentioned, what can I do if my son's friends use it extensively? I don't know TBH -- the best I can do is to not give him a smart phone too early and try to grow him some other hobbies before brainrot reaches him.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted.
But… but… TokTok put full-page ads in all the big newspapers telling us that thanks to them, a yoga mom in Montana can now take her free-range artisanal oat milk candle-making side-hustle and turn it into a full-time job, paying just a little over minimum wage!
Isn't that worth destroying the minds of millions of American children?
I'm still trying to figure out if putting off the shutdown until they had a deal was even legal.
The Constitution has the worth of toilet paper if the executive can just keep saying "I don't want to enforce this law because my buddy here has a financial interest in that not happening as its supposed to", which is exactly what is happening given how close Larry and Trump are.
Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.
My theory is that it highly depends on the few random people who view New posts and if they upvote/comment.
The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.
Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!
Not really news in this state. Because other than a few more details here it's not any different than the story from last week (which we knew Oracle was in the mix etc). The deal isn't final.
It is funny to say this as if there was some past story on here that everyone saw. In the last month, the story about a potential TikTok deal with the most engagement maxed out at 3 comments and 17 points[1]. This is probably the most important news in the social media sphere since Musk bought Twitter and the HN audience doesn't care about it until contracts are signed? That's pretty unbelievable.
There are so many comically evil villains in ths one deal.
Example: Silver Lake. Many younger HNers may not be that familira with the story of Skype. To summarize, Skype was a big deal, the first real mass market caller-to-caller Internet voice messaging services. It was founded in 2003, bought by eBay (of all people) in 2005 for several billion dollars. There were plans to spin it out on an IPO but Silver Lake led a buyout for less than eBay paid for it I believe in 2009 (~$2.75 billion).
Now in 2011, Microsoft bought it for ~$8.5 billion. That was great for the employees, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I believe the new company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to make it difficult to sue, a bunch of executives were fired before the buyout to avoid paying them out and, most controversially, the options had a clawback option that allowed Silver Lake to forcibly purchase options at the original rather than the buyout price [1].
Larry Ellison is more well known in HN circles as comically evil. Pretty much everything he touches leaves a Grand Moff Tarkin level of stench of evil from his attack on public access to Carbon Beach through his massive property portfolio to his more well known attacks on open source (originally as a threat to Oracle's dominance).
He is a Trump loyalist and true Putinesque oligarch who will probably amass levels of media control well beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest dreams. You can bet your bottom dollar that every media property he touches will serve the administration and I'd be shocked if one or more of these deals doesn't directly enrich Trump and/or his family.
Depends. Better as a word is a little too wide to interpret accurately without some additional information to go on. For example, if you look at my post history, you will know that I am not too keen on social media in general. From that perspective, it could be interpreted as a win. And yet, I think most of us here recognize the development as a whole is not 'good' ( since we are going with generic, not-easily-defined verbiage ).
The problem with that rhetoric is that at some point you need social media to prove legitimacy of your identity.
It already happens at border controls and TSA checks.
Guess when that "you can just not use TikTok" argument will expand to "you can just not use the internet" and effectively be punished monetarily or socially for not wanting to use it.
I hope this is sounding alarm bells for everyone else as much as me.
Larry's son buys Paramount (CBS) and promptly fires Stephen Colbert, a money making machine who was leading his timeslot as what was, in hindsight, a clear message to everyone that nobody is safe if they don't fall in line.
Larry now gets TikTok, which like it or not is the most influential social media platform among today's youth.
Both are Trump fanatics. This is the next stage in the Ailes playbook that has already gone too far in ruining the American experiment.
Conjecture. But, since the article says Colbert has 10 months left, I think this would be a awesome turn of events if they canceled his show for political reasons (to get Trump's FCC approval) only to ultimately keep the show now that the FCC has approved the deal. That would be the purest form of beating Trump at his own game.
What does this “stake” get America at all? Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok? The point of the ban was to avoid national security issues from having an adversarial state (China) controlling speech in America. Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:
>Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
Too popular to ban. Political constraints.
>Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?
"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."
________________
I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.
The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
>(which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework)
The ban wasn't executed on digital privacy concerns. The intent of the original ban was on digital privacy concerns, and that was shot down.
>The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout. But the reason the ban passed the second time around was because China would not censor content about the Gaza genocide. The ban had no legs until October 7th and TikTok frustrated the US/Israel message that Hamas was homicidal terrorist group that spawned from no where.
What seems obvious is that, yes, the new TikTok, will fall in line with other US owned social media companies when it comes to spreading US propoganda.
So while Chinese social networks have "What happened in tiananmen square?", US social networks will have "Is Israel committing a genocide?".
“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.
1. New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.
2. 80% owned by a U.S. investor consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz, 20% by Bytedance.
3. Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
4. All U.S. user data would sit on Oracle infrastructure in the US.
5. Algorithm will be initially licensed, but has to be reengineered to comply with the law.
Not discussed - whether the US tiktok app is allowed to compete with TikTok outside of the US. My guess is NO.
They'll probably get what they really want, which is an admin console for the algorithm that has a 'political slant' slider that they can slide as far to the reich as they wish.
Why?
The nominal reason for all this is that we didn't want a Chinese company controlling an important social media outlet. I don't love that reasoning, but fine, whatever.
So they're forcibly selling it to an American company. Which should solve the problem, right?
Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies? Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
Well, yes, for starters. I think there's a pretty strong consensus from people on all sides that there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
It's the beneficiary of powerful network effects, it created those effects for itself with a superior app, but nevertheless it is a distinguishing feature. I also would say it's culturally positioned perhaps the best of any major social media app over the present and near term.
And in its current ownership it's required by statute to comply with Chinese national security data requests. And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
> And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
Agreed.
I really have to disagree at this point. Meta has all the money in the world to throw at this, and inference isn't rocket surgery. I think Meta's algorithm caught up a couple years ago, if anything it's even more addictive. Tiktok is simply riding on first mover status, plus it's a Coke/Pepsi thing, a large segment finds Meta properties distasteful for all the obvious reasons.
Pretty much everyone I know consumes TikTok style content these days. I personally have blocked myself from this stuff via deleting the Insta, YouTube and I even wrote a TamperMonkey script to block myself from getting trapped down the rabbit hole.
Self shout out: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/534969-begone-youtube-shor...
I'm not necessarily a fan of either... but to vastly different levels.
In other words, one's data will now be under the scrutiny of amoral radicals who have decided to target people for political speech.
Won't be long until all companies will be required to have a party office.
the only thing may indicate that trump is competing with china is how hard he's trying to please putin, but apparently he needs to work harder to get into the organ harvesting club.
Legally required to use the services of a specific company, that's a sweet deal right there.
> The central feature of Project Texas is our work with Oracle to isolate the TikTok services serving U.S. users within Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment as an additional safeguard. Although gateways to the storage infrastructure are strictly monitored and controlled, U.S. users of the TikTok platform can still communicate and interact with global users for a cohesive global experience.
[1]https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-about
Also, I see creators, trying to create US based TikTok accounts because they believe that this way their content will be shown to Americans, which are better monetized. If that’s the case, I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
It the international creators stay with the international TikTok IMHO that will be a huge win for China, practically displacing American culture for the younger demographic in the rest of the world.
Look at recent events: American government officials want to maintain the same level of toxic culture wars that foreign governments want. They just want to control them, not contain them.
If I were China I would do this deal and then ensure that the payout is better outside the US. Try to sway US content creators to use VPN's and post outside the US and essentially limit the impact of the deal.
Huh? Are you not aware of US social media companies?
Everything that's happening on TikTok is also happening on X, Facebook, Friendster, or whatever the kids are using these days. The only difference is that the TikTok algorithm promotes Chinese propaganda and ideology, and enriches the Chinese government and ByteDance. The US can't have that, hence this deal.
This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota. That would require strong regulation of social media companies and adtech in general, and there would be a nationwide revolt if that were even proposed. This is far from being considered anyway, now that Big Tech is deeply entrenched in the government.
Broadly speaking, I think you're probably right that the dynamics on tiktok already exist elsewhere in social media. But I do think a practical upshot of it could be a version of Tiktok where you can criticize the Hong Kong takeover or Xinxianj labor camps or harassment of expatriate dissidents or Taiwan indepence openly and not have it soft-deplatformed. Which could cause stronger domestic consciousness of those issues, and stronger solidarity with Europe and the rest of the Western world.
I wonder where all the liberal content will go.
IMO this significantly impacts the value I would get from TikTok, as much of the content I consume on the app is from outside the US
I guess they are hoping the US market will be big enough so self sustain and even entice some foreigners to join the US only app?
TikTok got significantly less interesting when the US blocked themselves earlier this year, if that happens permanently it'll probably hurt TikTok worldwide.
The government board director is one thing, but what exactly does this mean?
The licensing approach is a temporary solution to keep the app working from day 1. One of ByteDance's complaints during the lawsuit earlier this year was that is was going to be technically infeasible for engineers to rebuild something as complex and essential as the content algorithm in the short window of time they had before the law went into effect.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
"The term “qualified divestiture” means a divestiture or similar transaction that ... would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary; and ... precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between [the two apps/teams], including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing."
Last week's announcement that they have a 500 B deal with Open AI, and now this.
Elon really fucked up!
1. DOA app nobody wants
2. whocares
3. see 2
Good luck to the administration while trying to roll this out.
Very interesting! The separate "in content" bit in particular. Sounds like US TikTok will now be one giant echo chamber. Users outside the US will miss some US content but tbh, I find TikTok content is actually quite localised anyway. Big benefits for users outside the US are:
1. US doesn't get my data.
2. Hopefully less US political BS to swipe past.
3. I am much less concerned with the sway China has on Western Europe than the sway the US has and am therefore much happier using a China-backed version of the app sans US content/users/control/propaganda. The extreme brain rot causing people outside the US to care about 'MAGA' or that recently assassinated man will hopefully start to recede. That can only be a good thing. We have plenty of our own polarising issues without importing irrelevant ones.
Why does the board of TikTok need a gov member? Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too? And Oracle surely needs one as well.
Is the gov putting out a call for board member civil servants? Like where does this person even come from?
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fcc-cbs-ne...
They want their guy to make sure things go their way / people say the "right" things.
Kenneth Weinstein.
"Mr. Weinstein has had a long career in right-leaning and neoconservative public policy circles. He is a firm and vocal champion of Israel." (NyTimes)
It's ironic because (IMO) people like Ben Shapiro and other pro-Israel people deliberately divide us to prevent us from uniting against them, but the genocide has actually united us[1]. Just the other day I saw a Twitter post from one Cenk Ugyur reaching across the aisle and saying "good job" to right wingers who objected to hate speech laws against people who celebrated Kirk's assassination.
Admittedly, if 68% of Americans are opposed to Israel that doesn't necessarily mean all of them are single issue voters... but I think this is the first issue I've seen in my lifetime that gets this close to uniting Americans.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-militar...
In Brazil during the dictatorship it was common for newspapers to print cooking recipes in place of censored articles, now I'm waiting to see if media in the USA has the balls to play the malicious compliance game... I guess I won't see it since money is basically God in America.
I expect them to continue to do so, except that uncle Donald is the law now.
I believe the technical name is "Political Commissar."
Edit: Dana White, of MMA fame, now sits on Meta's board, though it is at Zuckerberg's request.
They already got quite a few, post 2024 election.
https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/dana-white-john-elkann-cha...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/tech/robby-starbuck-meta-ai-a...
Washed-up music video director to professional Twitter poster to advisor at Facebook. What a display of the American meritocracy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32596903
There are several ActivityPub services that are pretty good and even have decent UXes, but they aren't super active.
A major issue is it's confusing and the funds are limited.
This exists today, it has always existed, and you never needed technology to find the solution to it.
Im a huge fan of the film Rope, because it is just done well. Its also got a ton of coding in it for "homosexual" themes that were very much banned at the time of filming. Understanding these paints the film in a whole new way...
Shakespeare has a ton of contemporary satire coded into it. Unless you're aware of history or reading a version that illuminates the meta-context you would very much be unaware of its existence.
It happens in modern film: Paul Verhoeven is a master of it.
If you dont think there are coded communities on existing social platforms sharing information among in members I have news for you.
This means that the only people you will encounter in protocols will be privacy freak type nerds and “normal” people you might actually feel better interacting with or watching are on popular apps.
first Twitter, now Tiktok, both controlled by conservative interests?
Therefore I’m only left to conclude this is an entirely unsubstantiated claim, as why wouldn’t it have already been apparent if they were working as shadow brokers of Israeli interests in all this, which the general timeline and verifiable information we know don’t line up with?
This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control, is very much about Israel and attempting to gain a monopoly on the media.
Conspiracy theory.
Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/16/felicia-ben-horowitz-party...
What do you mean "doing well"?
https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/chinas-economy-on-cusp-of-a-de...
May 2025:
Tariffs are drying up international demand for Chinese goods, and in a bid to keep factories alive, Beijing is urging exporters to turn inward. However, that pivot is compounding the very problem it aims to solve.
Deflation isn’t an abstract threat in China anymore—it’s visible across the economy. After barely holding above zero for much of 2023 and 2024, consumer prices have now dropped for two straight months.
Producer prices have fallen for 29 consecutive months. March’s figures showed the sharpest drop in four months, and forecasts point to an even steeper decline in April.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Yes, I’m fully aware that’s starting so low because of horrible governments in the past and that the current government is far from great, but that’s still moving in the right direction at the time the United States is trying to speed run to a Russian-style oligarchy and most people under 50 think it’s getting worse.
In moral terms they are so far behind the West they are in a different team. (and don't throw in disingenous deflections like gaza and whatever, those are orders of magnitude less bad then China) The West is full of freedom and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. China isn't.
Nobody here is pro Russia or Iran, or even particularly pro India. So why is Communist China different?
I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners. Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.
So that’s where the name of that David sylvian / ryuichi sakamoto song came from.
I always thought it was just a throw away from the subject matter.
I loath partisanship and am more than willing to point out failures by the Dems, but this is different. Trump and Co have openly stated that they don't believe in democracy.
If you are not able to see this I'm not sure what I could say to open your eyes.
Bullying, yes. Competency, no.
Underestimate them at your own peril...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/914032065/tiktok-ban-averted-...
fixed that for you
The bill itself outlines specifically how and why it can be delayed. That was violated in the very first "delay".
Who could have predicted this.
Paired with this administration’s assertion of impoundment powers and the pocket rescission, the Congress’s power of the purse is completely neutered in both directions. The executive can decline to spend whatever it doesn’t want to, and it can fund anything it does want.
Recklessly funding the government off of the Fed’s balance sheet will of course cause all sorts of nasty economic effects, but that’s exactly why you need to print money! So your massive immigration enforcement apparatus (newly full of ideological minions thanks to the current hiring surge) can go and assert powers of process-free expedited removal throughout the entire country (per DOJ memo from week 1).
So the economic consequences hardly matter: you simply deport whoever complains.
You could make the case that this sale means the Trump admin actually didn’t break the rules here.
"The President can grant a one-time extension of up to 90 additional days when a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, there is evidence of 'significant' progress toward executing the divestiture, and there are legally binding agreements in place to enable the divestiture."
One could argue all day about whether or not there was an identified path or evidence of significant progress, but certainly there weren't legally binding agreements in place at any point, and the deadline has been extended far more than once.
Trump is ignoring the law. The DoJ has asserted that Trump can ignore the law because it would interfere with his duty to "take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States." It is unclear what, if any law, could not be ignored under this doctrine.
Open AI, free speech platforms, save the planet, democratize information. At the end of the day, it’s always about power.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-trump-ally-may-soon...
Though yeah, if they go the Yahoo-route it's going to be a huge waste. But it's really up to how the company handles the acquisition.
Yahoo missed big time by just trying to change the culture of the userbase way too quickly. They didn't like that people were posting porn on Tumblr when that was one of the most important aspects of the platform for the users. They bled way too many users and took way too long of a time to do anything about it.
I feel like Tumblr should have done their own patreon/OF type of push within the platform but they didn't have the vision. They literally had all the creators of that type of content at some point and they've now all moved to X/Twitter.
I hope (i mean, idgaf but you know it's a figure of speech) that Oracle has a better perspective about the issue so they don't commit another billion(s) dollar(s) crime.
So it's just going to fade into obscurity then huh
We won't be so lucky.
I'm sure this deal is more complex than "ByteDance is not allowed to run an app called TikTok within the US". Politicians are morons so I could be wrong but I would hope it's much more liberal than that.
edit: Adjusted weapon to 'measure of control'. I accept people are a little too happy to overreact lately.
What do you think the push behind the new gerrymandered districts is for?
Why do you think they are assembling a national voter registration database that hasn't existed before? https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-doj-national-...
Why are they creating fake emergencies to justify inserting federal police and the national guard in major cities with big Democratic voting populations?
1. Gerrymandering is and always has been a thing, blue and red. Nothing has changed.
2. Government puts government data from multiple government places into one government place. More news at 11.
3. Because you get stabbed/shot for just existing in them? Because of the riots earlier this year?
Fascism = Something I don't like. Get a grip.
Except China doesn't actually serve its people. Things are way more cut-throat there, with much less safety net. The Chinese government sees workers as grist for the mill, not something to be cared for.
I think this is universal, but perhaps China indeed may be worse.
I am trying to make no judgement here, just explaining then 'motivational environment'
This math of course is in flux to a degree we haven't seen in maybe 1000+ years though right now.
The Chinese rural population still isn't eligible for local equivalent of social security in their old age (that's only for city folks), and IIRC there was a huge unwillingness to provide financial assistance to individuals during COVID.
Just because you have fewer full-body casts than someone who just got in a bad wreck, does not mean you are worse off.
US users are today 21 of the 49 TikTok accounts with the most followers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...> (not including TikTok itself). When the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020,[1] Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue.
[1] And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move
The U.S Steel deal included three board seats, but the Intel deal did not include any.
This is starting to look like the way China does things, with the central government having a financial stake in important companies.
Trump has essentially selected all of the board members. Its not a coincidence that Larry Ellison and Andreessen are big Trump supporters. The amazing corruption continues.
Also known as industrial policy. They are inseparable.
All it takes is a minor rebranding and half the country or more would immediately sign up for it. For all intents and purposes, socialism just means “the people we don’t like”. As long as people feel like they’ll get theirs, I seriously doubt they care what economic system they’re living under.
Oracle: "Your phone has 6-cores and our minimum plan is 64 cores. Additionally, we see you upgraded from an iPhone 16 to the 17. Licenses don't transfer, of course. You owe us 3 kidneys."
I'm hopeful. With any luck they'll ruin TikTok and it will die, a satisfying result.
An all-buzzwords compliant subscription based solution for enterprise and professional content creators.
if TikTok dies then one of the alternatives: instagram reels or youtube shorts would take its place.
the brainrot will be the same. I guess people think tiktok's algorithm is particularly pervasive over Google's or Meta's? But I don't see why.
Are we for sure the TikTok algorithm doesn’t bump towards or away from certain issues? The data on the cultural zeitgeist? The ability to promote political messaging?
Brainrot the same. Intentions, maybe not.
Start new accounts, swipe through the content and establish what kind of algorithm it is. The few attempts I've seen on youtube seem to indicate it's heavily based on your geographical area. They don't really care that much which side the apple falls onto.
I do acknowledge that there's a latent threat that could be activated. And I can see an argument being made on that front, I mean, China doesn't allow access to a lot of American social media for that reason. But I don't really buy the argument right now as I haven't seen a lot of evidence of Tiktok doing things that Meta/Google haven't done.
They can target any age range or demographics, any interests.
We had Uber hiding things from LEO almost a decade ago via geofencing and other tricks, I’m sure it’s a bit more sophisticated now.
You keep bringing Meta/Google into this. I don’t care if they do the same things. I mean, I wouldn’t like it either, but we have solutions available to us. We can pass laws or go to court and handle it internally. A foreign nation is not bound by that.
It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.
Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.
YouTube shorts gets all the hate, but I find the content to consistently be the most sophisticated? PG rated? educational?
I don't understand how other people have this experience and I don't. I see targeted ads of course. And every once in a while it starts showing me content for things I don't follow, at which point I start mashing the button they provide to make it go away, and after a handful it pops up something asking if I want to remove all suggested content for a while. I always select yes.
Do other people actually *want* suggested comment? that's bizarre.
It cares about convincing people in general.
Sure, people didn't vote for Larry Ellison to take control. But something like this is what we wanted, right?
Unlike most nationalizations though in this case the company will be compensated: the new US entity will pay ByteDance licensing fees.
They'll then rewrite TikTok in Java, and migrate to Oracle Database.
Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
Americans prefer that Tiktok data lives within the jurisdiction of the US government, why? If you don't think Palantir is putting together a centralized database to survey individual Americans for the US government, you are crazy. There will be real consequences where if they don't like what you're saying or doing, they will come after you some how. I'd much rather have my data based in China.[0]https://time.com/7316628/charlie-kirk-death-celebrations-soc...
It's arguments like this that reminds of the critique of libertarians as akin to house cats that seek to undermine the very systems that allow them to exist in the first place that wouldn't survive outside for minute. Or maybe it's just agitprop right here.
Both are not compatible with each other in any way, but they are in a great deal, one they can't say no to.
This is where either one fails or sometimes both.
IIUC, Oracle has strong connections to the CIA, and Andreessen the person lately seems right-wing activist.
1. Under the current administration, maybe it doesn't much matter that there's a government monitor?
2. But if a more left-wing administration comes back into power, then a government appointee there could help moderate the other influences?
Not to mention that this is all just a distraction from the very real destruction Trump 2.0 is doing to peoples' lives, safety, financial outlooks, rights, etc and flushing our country and planet down to the toilet for his benefit
*edited for clarity and fixed typos
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
[2] - https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramount-warner-bros-disco...
My knee-jerk reaction was to upvote the comment, but that’s how Ecco chambers get increasingly divorced from reality.
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' online. So many that the net effect is that most of those sources lean one way or the other, and by and large people choose to listen mostly or only to those sources they agree with.
No wonder political opinions are so highly divided today. Almost no one ever hears anything from the other side.
You mean, to support Israel? Is that what this is about?
It’s for money and power. Because of the partisan nature of the power grab, a certain grab bag of evangelical, fossil fuel and anti-gay tenets are going to get reïnforced. But treating those as the cause dangerously misses that this is being started at home.
Larry Ellison’s daughter is gay. Why do you think her brother and father are going to infuse Paramount with anti-gay bigotry?
Someone can own a media company, have it push very specific political ideologies with the goal of turning people against each other and gaining power for themselves. By pushing antagonistic media, they can prop up fringe political figures who'd be more willing to help them with their political goals. (E.g. tax policies that help the wealthy person's companies.)
They can still live whatever life they want, even going against the ideologies the media companies espouse, because they're rich enough that the fallout doesn't impact them.
They're living a very different kind of life than us.
BTW, I'm not explicitly arguing that Larry Ellison is doing this -- I don't have the context or background on that. I am saying that his media companies will 1. do things to help Larry's interests (which are probably political), and 2. that doesn't have to be aligned with however he lives his personal life, since he's effectively immune.
Sorry, I'm speaking generally. The people in power broadly align with these policies. That means that when they gain control over a pillar of industry, they're broadly going to do influence it to some combination of those ends. The reason they gained power isn't to do those things. Ellison isn't taking control of TikTok to influence the Israel narrative. But when he takes control of it, as a result of the contours of powers that are MAGA, he will probably be forced to put forward an anti-Palestinian editorial bias.
There is a lot of tail wagging the dog conspiracy in this thread. I'm pushing back on that.
That's not Larry Ellison, it's his nepo baby David Ellison.
Ok someone's going to come and say that "The Left" controlled the medium and disallowed "non-mainstream" messaging about Covid... I admit my bias and consider such messaging lunacy too..
There are tiny pockets of this country that assume this is the singular issue that animates everybody, every day, and that it is impossible to believe in both Israel's right to exist and defend itself and the Palestinians' right to not be bombed because the Israeli PM doesn't want to go to jail.
Whenever we take a stance, We identify our ego with that stance. We shall die but die a pro X or pro Y
As such many debates happen in bad faith as well.
Of course everyone has their agenda but one has to understand that agenda is just a framework for understanding the world.
And we need to understand the world because it has no inherent meaning.
So like, if we really have to deduce meaning, if we really have to be pro something that we can die on a hill towards, I'd rather have it be a humanitarian thing.
I am not saying that palestine is good either but rather that in genocide/wars, the people fighting the war/military/families displaced suffer, not the old man causing the war.
I feel like I am a humanist. Wishing to understand the world, yet I feel like some people in this world have hurt me so much that sometimes I just wish the world to burn.
I am sure that people are gonna comment on something like "oh do you support a genocide etc."
But I am trying to make the point that the world should really be just anti suffering,accepting. Yes I am naive but surely with all of this technological improvements, we can improve the structure of society to not be fucking brewing with hate and bullying and resentment.
We can do so much better as a society without even trying much. Just small acts of kindness and basically creating a environment that rewards it and punishes bullying/hate speech etc. might be really nice if I am being honest.
Not sure why we can't be pro this instead of defining ourselves with the confict of two other foreign nations
Again? People should be talking about the hostile take-over currently in progress and how it is getting exponentially worse. But the billionaire mouthpieces gave everyone a shiny new inconsequential talking point and no one cares about anything that matters.
Maybe that's what they wanted all along.
Why fight a war against class, against oppression when we can sit on a chair and write a comment either defending or arguing against something as petty as religion.
It would be maybe the 3rd point worth discussing definitely after concentration of power & how they can influence our opinion of the masses.
But people made it the first.
There is no such thing as a moral billionaire imo, I saw a video like this and I sorta agree.
I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone owning this much amount of control.
Religion seems so petty to me yet it seems that the world is coming back to it. Fighting us vs them.
We have all forgotten what the people in 1970's esque dreamed of 2025 etc. (I am a genz but I have seen such videos of people thinking what)
And the funny thing is, is that we ourselves have forgotten how to dream of what will happen in 2100
Do we really want to grow old in society where even after 70-80 years, one of our children or grandchildren sees yet again some comment like this and writes something like this that I am writing?
I feel a little frustrated.
Ellison read and responded to the political situation more skilfully than Elon.
He used Stargate to cement himself as a power broker in AI. He used that influence to provide antitrust assurances that gave his son a leg up for Paramount. Meanwhile he used that proximity to media to get a foot in the door with TikTok.
The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy. This is a project all the major Trump donors and high-level supporters contributed to. That Ellison is coming up as one of the new aristocrats is closer to a dice roll; that we have oligarchs, now, is very much by design.
In this case using the state to choose which business is viable, no doubt being businesses that play ball with the party.
-its why sectarian conflicts and power delegation is so high stakes in many parts of the world.
Idk about america, but there's definitely a sentiment echoing I feel like all across the world that there is a concentration of power and the divide between state and class is shrinking and we consider state to be itself (corrupt?) / not working to our wants.
That's my understanding of it. People have given up hope on...well having hope.
But hey lets define what is a woman first, that matters more than people sadly suiciding because they can't take this cruel petty world anymore.
We have induced our cruelness on earth, every animal,tree, air, even other humans. Who have we left?
Have we forgotten humanity? What does humanity even mean when we realize that people literally eat animals which scream to death from pain for the "taste" ?
I myself ate an egg yesterday for "protein" after a few years, I am skinny so I had to convince myself that I needed it but still my heart felt a bit bitter.
I am not judging you if you eat meat, that's not the point because I don't have a point/agenda. I am venting.You almost feel small when you think about it.
I really feel like the world can be a better place so there's hope tho.
If you're not successful you just wasted a ton of time and money.
If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
Doesn't sound like a country worth investing in anymore.
You still make money in that case. It isn't a bad deal for the chinese. The americans who now have yet another censored app controlled by the american government are the only losers here.
Besides what bluecalm said, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.
Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile Chinese government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
I don't know whether they'll be blocked on the web.
10 Small Steps: Executing the Fascist Playbook [0]
The Fascists’ Playbook [1]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/10-small-steps-executing-the-...
[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/08/the-fascists-playboo...
Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.
Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
Source?
American media is one of the most thightly controlled and censored in the world. They need to carefully control the media to maintain the ilusion of "moral superiority" that is used to justify foreign interventions.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.
Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.
If everyone around your kids is brainrotted or subject to destructive propaganda, your kids suffer too.
Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>
Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.
[0] luckily EU seems to be doing a lot more in that direction, e.g. https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive...
I don't know. I myself never sticked to a hobby even after trying a lot of them. Genetically speaking he is a lot like me -- lack of discipline, difficult to cool down, impatient, throw tantrums frequently, etc. The list is pretty long :/ Not many good things from this genetic pool TBH.
I've never used it, but since YouTube introduced Shorts I've become victim to the addiction and subsequently blocked any trace of Shorts with a browser extension.
But… but… TokTok put full-page ads in all the big newspapers telling us that thanks to them, a yoga mom in Montana can now take her free-range artisanal oat milk candle-making side-hustle and turn it into a full-time job, paying just a little over minimum wage!
Isn't that worth destroying the minds of millions of American children?
The Constitution has the worth of toilet paper if the executive can just keep saying "I don't want to enforce this law because my buddy here has a financial interest in that not happening as its supposed to", which is exactly what is happening given how close Larry and Trump are.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759336
The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.
Sometimes we re-up things for that reason (basically the second-chance pool mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). I've done that with this one.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249430
Example: Silver Lake. Many younger HNers may not be that familira with the story of Skype. To summarize, Skype was a big deal, the first real mass market caller-to-caller Internet voice messaging services. It was founded in 2003, bought by eBay (of all people) in 2005 for several billion dollars. There were plans to spin it out on an IPO but Silver Lake led a buyout for less than eBay paid for it I believe in 2009 (~$2.75 billion).
Now in 2011, Microsoft bought it for ~$8.5 billion. That was great for the employees, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I believe the new company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to make it difficult to sue, a bunch of executives were fired before the buyout to avoid paying them out and, most controversially, the options had a clawback option that allowed Silver Lake to forcibly purchase options at the original rather than the buyout price [1].
Larry Ellison is more well known in HN circles as comically evil. Pretty much everything he touches leaves a Grand Moff Tarkin level of stench of evil from his attack on public access to Carbon Beach through his massive property portfolio to his more well known attacks on open source (originally as a threat to Oracle's dominance).
He is a Trump loyalist and true Putinesque oligarch who will probably amass levels of media control well beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest dreams. You can bet your bottom dollar that every media property he touches will serve the administration and I'd be shocked if one or more of these deals doesn't directly enrich Trump and/or his family.
Welcome to the tleptocracy.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/
We are truly looking at 1984 as a blueprint not a warning.
Wouldn't it be better if these investors lose money on this investment?
It already happens at border controls and TSA checks.
Guess when that "you can just not use TikTok" argument will expand to "you can just not use the internet" and effectively be punished monetarily or socially for not wanting to use it.
Larry's son buys Paramount (CBS) and promptly fires Stephen Colbert, a money making machine who was leading his timeslot as what was, in hindsight, a clear message to everyone that nobody is safe if they don't fall in line.
Larry now gets TikTok, which like it or not is the most influential social media platform among today's youth.
Both are Trump fanatics. This is the next stage in the Ailes playbook that has already gone too far in ruining the American experiment.
Unfortunately not: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/business/media/stephen-co...
[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-colbert-got-canceled
(which has a clearer title that's not that much different than days ago news: U.S. Investors, Trump Close In on TikTok Deal With China)
However, TikTok is still a brain rot slop machine and we would be right to question Ellison's motivations.
As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
Too popular to ban. Political constraints.
>Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?
"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."
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I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.
The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The ban wasn't executed on digital privacy concerns. The intent of the original ban was on digital privacy concerns, and that was shot down.
>The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout. But the reason the ban passed the second time around was because China would not censor content about the Gaza genocide. The ban had no legs until October 7th and TikTok frustrated the US/Israel message that Hamas was homicidal terrorist group that spawned from no where.
What seems obvious is that, yes, the new TikTok, will fall in line with other US owned social media companies when it comes to spreading US propoganda.
So while Chinese social networks have "What happened in tiananmen square?", US social networks will have "Is Israel committing a genocide?".
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) was _passed by a Republican House_.
“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.