ByteDance would rather shut down tiktok than sell it

Alienate a literal entire generation from voting for you lol, lmao.

common demoncrap L
- Outside of presiding over massive inflation, the loss of women’s right to choose, genocide of the Palestinians, the arming of Nazis in a proxy war, increasing terror at the US border, increasing warrantless surveillance on Americans who aren’t in Congress, increasing police budgets everywhere, killing free speech, and making criticism of Israel a hate crime, what mistakes can you point to that Biden has made? We’re actually lucky if you think of all the bad stuff throughout history that he hasn’t presided over.
This is what I am being told by every lib on the Discord servers I am in.
EDIT: They like to repeat the gotcha of when it takes place like its some sort of master move.
- Oh thank god, it won't affect the next election, the most important election of our lives. But I fear the consequences of alienating the youth for the election after, the most important election of our lives
- I clearly remember Dems parading the youth vote as key for Obama winning, and for 2018's marginal D wins. They really must think people forget within 2 years.
- If Trump wins the election I'd bet my left toe that he drops the ban. It's literally free political points in the young demographic, which keeps the GOP off his back.
- Ban discord
- Alienating one of the the only demographics that overwhelmingly votes liberal seems wise
They already banned juuls.
It just seems so obviously gerontocratic that the only things that get stunning bipartisan support (other than genocide) are banning the things the kids like.
In a couple of years, the only laws passed in the US will be laws saying it's illegal to not have dinner with Meemaw and Pep Pep.

Good. China should also retaliate and start forcing American companies in China to hand over ownership

Seize the Tesla factory lmao
- do it xi no balls you won't
They already do....
Almost everything foreign in China is 51% state owned. McDonald's franchises, Costcos, Gucci stores, etc.
- Those places entered into China while agreeing to those restrictions. That’s different than the US allowing foreign investment then rugpulling it and stealing the Chinese owned portion of a business after the fact.
  In order to retaliate, China needs to seize or steal American capital.
- We've gotta pump those numbers up

They did the meme.

I feel like they've got a strong constitutional case. One BBC article I read said that 60% of their company ownership is by global hedge funds so they just plainly aren't a Chinese company. Singling them out for having dissident information through an act of congress is precisely what the 1st Amendment is supposed to protect against. With the sale supposed to happen in November at the earliest, the red scare will either fade by then or become a much larger issue they can capitalise on.

The constitution means jack shit, it wouldn’t matter if it explicitly stated “TikTok shall not be banned”, the state does whatever the fuck it wants and the hardest part is coming up with the weasel words in the judgement that explains how it’s perfectly constitutional, ackshually.
- TikTok is big. Can't they bribe the judges?
a bunch of freaks think the constitution only applies to us citizens.
i can't predict confidently whether business rights or foreign no rights will win out here.
- a bunch of freaks think the constitution only applies to us citizens.
  Supreme Court did say companies that operate in America are still allowed to use slave labor abroad.
- constitution only applies to us citizens
  But also granted by God and has metaphysical power beyond the paper its written on and the willingness to enforce it
Don't worry, if this somehow gets subverted by a court it will somehow be to make things worse (i.e. granting corporations at large more rights)
I'm not an expert on US law, but singling them out like this via legislation smells a whole lot like a bill of attainder, which is banned under Article 1 (not the First Amendment, though that's definitely relevant also) of the Constitution.
Don't US courts normally roll over whenever the regime says "but muh national security!"?

Good, don't give into terrorist's extortion.

Really at this point I am just impressed by how hard they are fighting against both bread and circuses

The Circus is anti-semetic because the gladiators called for a ceasefire.
They hate it when they do not have total control over both. While demanding that others should be fine with their bread and circuses. Classical preaching water and drinking wine.
I think they know they can steal bread as much as they want until people get angry. People will just elect another person expecting them to fix it or anything
- I mean Argentinians electing Milei speaks basically everything about that system, and US is even worse because it is the source and keeper of it globally.

The big difference here is that if your competition can out-compete you using Chinese infrastructure, you will be forced into at least figuring out a way to dual-use it.
Ultimately, this is a Microsoft/Apple situation. It's just who will be Microsoft and who will be Apple. I think that, over time, most of the cutting edge tech will migrate over to Chinese tech, even if the rest of the world doesn't exactly. That said, Africa and Asia (outside of the colonial outposts) will mostly be in the Chinese tech sphere.
Unfortunately, trade protectionism can work pretty well.
For consumers yes people are locked into google or apple ecosystems, but for large scale businesses often they either have their own infrastructure or they do multicloud. Sometimes they even use different vendor mixes per region because there may be local providers who can compete locally with the big boys. What I think would stop large businesses from using Chinese vendors is the US government saying they are not allowed to use Chinese vendors. Their lawyers at that point will simply not allow them to buy Huawei equipment or use Tencent cloud. I dont think these shell games are strictly necessary when it comes to companies doing business in the US. Politically though it may be problematic for them to do that right now.
why do you type like kaplya

If you don't allow the political and invsstment oligarchs control your media outlet, they will either force you to shut down or surrender to an investment oligarch.

the right call for sure, make it hurt politically

This might be sincere, but as someone who worked in M&A in a past life, it’s pretty standard to say “I’m not interested in selling” to bluff the price up a bit.

Thing is, it's only the US that would be threatening to ban it. And if they sell, this FreedumbTok would be available in most other countries. It would create a world-class competitor overnight, exactly equivalent to their product, that would also have a gigantic competitive advantage- access to US consumers and businesses. FreedumbTok would likely eat away at TikTok in the rest of the world. They won't sell
My understanding is that the algorithm at the core of TikTok cannot be ecported from China without the approval of Chinese regulators, and it seems pretty likely that they'll not approve a sale at gunpoint.
It also makes sense to me that they'd rather just amputate their US operations to preserve their IP and prevent an American competitor from fighting over their market share everywhere else.
- it seems pretty likely that they'll not approve a sale at gunpoint
  This seems like the issue to me: if the U.S. can force this sale at a deadline-discounted price, what would stop the U.S. from doing this to every Chinese company that has success in the U.S.?
- I might be wrong but I think their data centers are in the US and there's not really that complicated of an algorithm, just a lot of raw data on what each user likes/watches
I can't imagine there's that many suitors for this thing, it's a big bite

Does FB, Insta, Zitter, Google, MicroShit, Discord, Github, etc. all have to divest as well? No? So they can just keep harvesting our data?

Aren’t those the probable buyers?
- There is no probable buyer because they aren't likely to sell it

Waiting for the spike in searches for VPN to dwarf all the state porn ban ones.

Isn’t it tiresome for the people in power to be in conflict with like 4 billion people globally at all hours of the day?

No, because they aren't the ones footing the expenses
No, because they are obviously smarter and betterer at running things than us poors or else they wouldn't be so very rich.

Take me back smh

A masterful gambit by Mr Biden

They should block all US users and on the block page have an ad for a VPN service.

The politicians are shooting themselves in the head over tiktok.

good

The best outcome. I don’t like TikTok, but red scare forcing them to sell is bad too.

it's the best social media site.
when I post about trans issues on TikTok I'll get thousands upon thousands of likes and lots of really supportive comments. Only a couple trolls.
Post it on youtube and you get like 40 views, a bunch of dislikes, and a couple of slurs
- it's the best social media site.
  Hexbear put on fucking blast
- It’s gotten much worse because of American meddling. The site was intentionally suppressing videos about BLM in 2020. They also have a ´beauty’ algorithm that gives preference to white, skinny, young influencers at the expense of everybody else.
- yeah trolls on tiktok still without fail comment "post this is on instagram reels" under trans, neurodivergent, etc. people's videos to imply they'd get ruthlessly bullied if they'd have posted outside of tiktok. insta comments and content are pretty unfiltered and i guess that attracts the most edgy type of people. plus, tiktok straight up started out being run by teenage queer cosplayers, instagram is just zoomer/millennial facebook
- OH also, this is fucking wild OK.
  Most of the time, YouTube Shorts literally DO NOT ALLOW WOMEN TO VIEW VIDEO GAME RELATED CONTENT. YouTube Analytics has a demographic report and it the typical split is GREATER THAN 99 PERCENT MALE.
  My TikTok consistently does like 70/30 for gaming stuff (the vast majority of my videos) and like 60/40 or 55/45 for non-gaming stuff.
- It consistently shows me news/protests/major events early and sometimes I don't even see those things reported anywhere else
i stopped using TikTok because I was spending too much time on it, also the format encourages broad generalization and flashy statements to keep attention, which annoys me even from people I agree with (this is not a moral judgement just a personal grievance). politically the users are much better than any other mainstream social media.
i've tried getting back on there to keep up with events in Palestine but that stuff doesn't show up as much anymore.

Incredibly based

Do it.

Can't wait until

buys it

They have the greatest opportunity they will ever have to do something awesome right now. Shutting down is not it.

Bye bytedance

Apparently this thing is marginally profitable

ByteDance is a private profit-maximising company. What would make most financial sense to them now?

Leave the profitable US market and continue with less revenue
Sell everything at fire sale prices to oligarchs connected to the US regime
Somehow split into a TikTok for the free world and one for Burgerland and just sell the latter to the US oligarchs, thereby exposing their algorithms to the yanks.

And is it likely that the Chinese government would be intervening to get one outcome over another?

-Start a VPN subsidiary, market it heavily in the months they have before TikTok is banned
Aren't Douyin and TikTok fairly separate? I've never actually looked into it.

The election is Joever

Bullshit.

What would they gain from shutting it down that's worth more than $100 billion?

I don’t think it’s a choice between selling or completely shutting down, it’s a choice between selling and pulling out of the US market. So if they choose not to sell, they’ll still be profiting from operating in the rest of the countries where it’s currently available
- Plus VPNs and app sideloading exists and isn't that hard to use in 2024. Never underestimate taking away apps from pissed off zoomers. When i was a kid I went through hell and high water to get access to social media and internet against my parents wishes, including buying a satellite dish I put outside my window that picked up my friend's wifi from a block away.
<15% of Tiktok's monthly user base are American. They wouldn't shut the entire app down, just the US portion, which is already more expensive because they implemented US-only servers and moderation they don't do for other countries in 2022.
- Not to mention they have almost 10k US employees, 2k of them being engineers averaging ~400k salaries
  Meanwhile senior ByteDance engineers in China make like 100k USD
In the article at least they claim it's the algo itself

:loop: Stardust, this is getting frustrating, just ask for help from your ~~family~~ party already

Good hell yeah!!