.

Or … maybe the US isn’t the only country in the world?

Yeah same with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, fox news, CNN, News max, Msnbc and every single other media outlet by that logic. Apparently any company not owned Merica is propaganda too.

I’ve always wondered what would happen if ByteDance sells TikTok for $5 to a US Citizen who frequently visits China for lavish vacations, and that US Citizen decide to keep all the algorithms the same.

If China has an ulterior motive with TIkTok, can’t they just find a US Citizen to carry out their ulterior motive?

This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.

To quote the article again, "The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge." Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn't in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It's likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven't been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn't bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it's still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it's just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

“Livestream shopping” is that like QVC or something?

If they want Musks attention they should have valued it at $69b

Because China is trying to influence the US and they need to be in the US market for that

But they can’t continue to make money this way. It will be seen as control. So they’re stuck creating a competitor or just writing off the US market.

Apparently TikTok sent out push notifications telling users to call their representatives. Minors were being provided instructions with their representatives’ phone numbers and contact info, but didn’t even know who they were calling and were asking basic questions like “What is Congress?”

Kind of shows the amount of power TikTok has over American youth.

…house.gov/…/news-rep-bowman-leads-20-social-medi…

You just haven’t been paying attention.

They could sell the user accounts and content and let another company clip that into their own recommendation algo.

I’ve been a part of a few tech acquisitions that have worked this way. They keep their secret sauce but hand over the community.

Worst part about Lemmy being a tech heavy space is that so many users spout shit like “They’re not banning it, just deplatforming it” like yes, dipshit, that’s effectively a ban for something like 99% of people. You think 100,000,000 people are gonna fucking sideload the app? Love this place but it can be a bubble sometimes.

Fediverse TikTok = TikToot?

Reels and YouTube shorts both suck, the algorithms push the most asinine content, or stuff I saw on tiktok MONTHS ago.

They didn’t lobby this bill. Google, oracle, did

There’s no legal case to be had.

The constitution grants congress effectively unlimited power to regulate international trade. Citizens have rights. Foreign actors do not.

Obv without the algorithm TikTok loses some value. However it loses less value than if they just pull the plug.

And facebook isnt? Facebook did experiments on teens to see if theyre easier to manipulate when theyre depressed. They took money to apread fake news to manipulate voters for the presidential election. Yall are so blinded by the china boogeyman its absurd

For spyware the cyber security community seems pretty meh about it…

You wanna talk Chinese spyware, why are they not outright banning Temu? That’s a much better documented case of actually being spyware.

In terms of Tiktok being spyware, they are tracking users in much the same ways that every other big social media company is. Should other nations be worried about Facebook sharing that data with the US govt to produce psyops campaigns against foreign nations?

I’m against any country blocking access to things in the name of “national security” and providing little to no evidence on it. Its been done too many times to trojan horse in other malicious activities that governments want to do.

“Controlled by a foreign adversary” and “foreign adversary country” are the key phrases. The definitions are here.

It refers to United States Code title 10 section 4872(d)(2), which says:

Covered nation .— The term “covered nation” means— (A) the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea; (B) the People’s Republic of China; (C) the Russian Federation; and (D) the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I think those phrases are important when discussing any potential “slippery slope” aspects of this bill. It’s about companies/applications from specific adversary nations. It’s not about just any service that annoys a US politician. The bar here is much higher, and the scope is narrow. While it does identify ByteDance and TikTok by name, it will also apply to other companies from those nations, if they are determined to present a threat to US national security.

I haven’t read the entire bill, so please don’t take this as advice, but in principle, I think it seems like a sensible measure. A major communication platform like TikTok makes a very effective propaganda and misinformation tool. Exactly the sort of thing that an adversary nation would use to sway political discourse, influence elections, even undermine a democracy.

Of course, any law can be abused, so paying attention to how this one is applied and enforced will be important, just as with any other.

This is a good oppertunity to teach young people about tech

Does is specify ISP blocking directly in the bill?? It was my understanding that it would just prevent US based app stores (Apple, Google) from distributing the app in their stores.

I’m not even sure how ISP blocking would work, unless it was to just blackhole DNS queries to tiktok.com. Having attempted to block DNS lookups for TikTok on my own home router via PiHole, I can say that the app either hard codes IP addresses, or resolves DNS over HTTPS independently of the system DNS settings, so I doubt a DNS based ISP block would be feasible.

I don’t think it’s primarily about the algorithm or “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” but instead about data and company ownership. Currently the US and EU are far closer allies with each other than with china. Services that are owned/controlled by their countries are therefore prioritized, and competing services from non-ally countries are way more scrutinized.

I think you have it backwards, in that it’s the US that’s trying to stop all the Chinese propaganda coming from that app.

And if TT pull out of the US, it’s pretty telling that their core drive for that thing wasn’t money.

We already sanction TV stations because of their propaganda content e.g. Russia Today. I see this as no different.

Not really, they would still be operating the same business in every other part of the world, except for the US. So you’d then have US Tiktok competing with World Tiktok. They can’t be forced to sell the global operations due to a mandate from some American court, no matter how much they think to be the world police.

Yeah I agree, there really is no incentive for a for-profit company to choose shutting down over selling. Unless they never cared about profit and had ulterior motives from the very beginning.

Why don’t they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?

Who? What USA citizen is prepared to buy something for the privilege of fighting the USA government with would obviously get mad and probably block the sale if byte Dance TikTok is still involved.

I don’t really follow USA politics but didn’t this law pass by quite large margins? They could obviously ban toktik.

Why don’t they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?

They already did that. TikTok is incorporated in the Cayman Islands with headquarters in Los Angeles. The bill of attainder is post-that

This is part of Section H of H.R.815 that was signed into law:

(A) any of—

(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;

(ii) TikTok;

(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or

(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or

(B) a covered company that—

(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and

(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—

(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and

(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.

(4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY.—The term “foreign adversary country” means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.

So, no, they don’t just get to change their name. They don’t get to change everything and still send data overseas to China. They have to cut ties with the CCP or else they cannot escape this.

IG is owned by FaceBook which actually has about double the userbase of TikTok if you don’t count DouYin’s 700 Million. I kind of hope that they also fuck up and trigger Section I if not full blown Section H of the bill.

deally they’d pass comprehensive privacy protection laws to setup standards that both domestic and foreign companies would be subject to.

No, no, no. That would mean dismantling PRISM and the FISA. Gathering data on citizens is only bad when China does it.

Exactly. I only want my data to be harvested by the NSA. It feels more patriotic.

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Does selling from one hand to the other actually matter when it comes to value? If I own a company and sell it to myself via a shell corporation have I actually lost anything, except a tax write off?

It’s not available in China though interestingly

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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.

Yes, and they should be shut down too. though the difference is facebook is a private entity and tiktok is a tool owned and operated by the chinese government.

You’re point?

I don’t recall the previous commenter mentioning anything about Facebook. Making a comment that is anti something doesn’t automatically mean they’re pro something else.

Step 1: Feel like getting into a comment section argument

Step 2: Put words in the other guy’s mouth and argue against those

Step 3: Make yourself look like a bit of a tool

Is this the best use of your time?

Burn them all.