I think this just validates China’s social, cultural, and digital hegemony.
Banning (if you can call it that? Divesting?) a single product like this is a strange move. It’s using a shovel to clear the early crumbs of an avalanche.
I don’t think this is the right move. Yes, it threatens the monopolies that companies like Facebook have established. And let’s assume that Haidt is right and social media and the surrounding ecosystem is a cesspool of negativity being lunged at the youth. I still think that it’s in a way petulant and reactive to pass a bill for this. A foreign country is not responsible for our leaders having failed to nurture us into sensible adults who do not fall prey to these dark patterns and tactics. I will refrain from the angle that our leaders intentionally did not want us to be critical, independent thinkers to further their own agendas by treating us like lepers.
I don't care either way. I think it'll be really interesting to see how people react to this though. Do Americans learn how vpns work suddenly, do tiktok users just switch to reels like nothing happened. Do we snap out of our social media trance. It's like playing sim city and causing a little social chaos lol
> “In the context of social media platforms used by nearly half of Americans, it’s not hard to imagine how a platform that facilitates so much commerce, political discourse, and social debate could be covertly manipulated to serve the goals of an authoritarian regime, one with a long track record of censorship, transnational repression, and promotion of disinformation.”
Mark Warner (D-VA), Senate Intelligence Committee Chair
That's the crux of it for me. Not protecting the data of Americans.
watching from the sideline, I think this move has a lot to do with Palestine. Do you know how much Palestine information on TikTok, comparing to YouTube and Facebook, apparently those contents were suppressed on other platforms, and TikTok is the odd one here. I personally believe, regardless what politicians are saying, this is actually a big reason.
Cool. Do Facebook next.
Nice, now let’s do the rest of social media.
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Veto it on the grounds that it would cost Biden the election and that would be disastrous for me personally
For those who say "TikTok can just exit the US market", 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. Of the top 50 most-followed accounts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>, 21 of 50 are American.
TikTok's buyer does not have to be American. 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 government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
^1 And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move
FYI, I used a tool I develop [1] to look into this, and came to the following conclusions:
- Biden will sign the bill (>95%)
- The Commerce Secretary will start the 12 month clock (>95%)
- TikTok will challenge the ruling (>95%), which may delay the clock starting to delist or divest, but they are unlikely to win (20%)
- And if they lose, they will succeed in selling to a US company (75%)
- The sale will be for $30-50B (CI 50%), assuming it does not include certain ByteDance IP
- Walmart and Oracle won’t compete to buy it this time. Microsoft or Amazon are the top contenders, along with a consortium led by Susquehanna or Steven Mnuchin, possibly in partnership with Snap or X.
I hope ByteDance sell tiktok to North Korea. This bill is so misguided and inflammatory. It's clearly OK for Google and Meta to freely harvest our data and sell it for a profit, but I guess they can't charge tariffs on data so they'll make up excuses and bully foreign companies over it. I hope the Chinese join the EU and start pushing on our tech monopolies since our government is too busy with bills like this to uphold the laws already on the books.