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TikTok will not be sold, Chinese parent ByteDance tells US (www.bbc.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] nucleative -2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Still think it's a baited headline given their stated intention to go to court to fight the "unconstitutional ruling". I'm not so sure the constitution gives foreign companies many legal rights so in that regard they'd perhaps be more protected if they were an American company. Whoops.

TikTok's 80% of investors who aren't ByteDance won't pass up billions of dollars in cash either if the alternative is that they forever get zero from the American market.

They've been investing heavily in the US market for the last couple years too, so I doubt they are in the black.

They've just all around played politics the American way very poorly. I can't really comment on whether that's good or bad but I'm blown away this Shou Chew CEO dude still has a job after this came down.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

A thing never mentioned in these debates is that noone in the world is buying tiktok without buying the underlying algorithm, the same algorithm the app runs on worldwide, the algorithm is the special sauce. They are not going to sell the basis for their app just for a single payday in the US market, which after buying it, they could rebrand and then once successful in the US, compete in the global market against tiktok but with the income of the most lucrative app market in the world behind them. It’s an extremely stupid business move.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They're probably going to find themselves having to explain what it means that a social media platform is itself engaged in speech, instead of functioning as a platform for others to speak. TikTok users, whose voices are allegedly curtailed by the ban, aren't exactly prevented from going to another platform.

If they say that it's Tiktok's speech that's curtailed, they're going to have to explain carefully how they're not a foreign influence operation.

The language of the first amendment is pretty stark, but the courts have always understood it has various limits.