this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.
But if TikTok is a Chinese psyop, they'll just use any of the many legal tricks we allow to change the "owner" while China still retains control. Companies do this all the time, look at shell companies and such. It's super easy for China to mask the true owner if they decide to.
This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.
Tiktok is used globally. Only American politicians seem concerned about the platform why would bytedance sell it when they can just continue operating in 180 other countries around the world?
It's not available in China though interestingly
True story, Tiktok has never been available in mainland China.
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-ban-china-india-376f32d78861e14e65ec4bc78e808a0d
In mainland China it's called Douyin, exactly the same app, same company, not the same content of course. It's separate because Beijing wants a tighter control on social media in mainland China.
Actually many governments are concerned about it. But only the US (so far) had pulled the nuclear option.
I feel like they're threatening a shutdown in the hopes of getting them to reverse their decision because if they just quietly go along with it, other countries will likely quickly follow suit in short order.
The reality is that the lifespan of "most popular social media app" is incredibly short. In the space of a few short years, we've gone from MySpace to Facebook to twitter to vine to Snapchat and now to tiktok.
TikTok will soon enough be replaced by "the next cool thing" and BD knows that if they sell in the US, that new entity will quickly replace them globally because the US effectively IS the influencer market.
Viewers go where the content is, and that's still overwhelmingly American (for better or worse). There is no successful social media app without including the US and BD knows it.