Tiktok Deal Is the Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse

You can, of course, make the argument that Facebook, Twitter, etc are also similar threats to other countries and _that is why they aren't allowed in China_.

I agree that this resolution is a worst-case-scenario outcome, though.

What I imagine the incentive is is not the ability to censor the media, but to have the media on record of who posts it and who engages with it and maintain that ledger. When people get banned and slandered for denouncing a genocide, it becomes harder and harder to call this stuff "low-IQ conspiracy slop".

I disagree. I think was about making sure Americans see the "RIGHT" propaganda.

No, when it passed it was about covering up a genocide that we finance. Before that, when it failed, it was just your standard anti-China nastiness meant to give the hot property with the youth mindshare to local cronies who were amenable to total social media censorship in general, like what all of the other networks were meeting with the last administration weekly to do.

Now the property will be given to local cronies and primarily used to help cover up a genocide, sounds like exactly what people who supported this stupid bill of attainder were begging for. Partisans of the last administration just thought they'd be in power forever for some reason, and they could use it as an additional means to attack supporters of what became the current administration.

They all seem to be fighting for the minds of young people who hate them all. I think they're just going to start leaving the entire internet like a previous generation left facebook when it got taken over by their radical centrist fossil parents. The kids will have to get bored with TikTok eventually, unless their daily pharmaceutical cocktails have stunted their brain development. Especially with the deluge of AI.

People get tunnel-vision. Facebook is for "Facebook things", TikTok is for "TikTok things". Reels, stories, whatevers isn't "TikTok".

It's why Facebook bought Instagram. No matter if Facebook copied Instagram down to the pixel, it still wouldn't be Instagram. And it's why the branding has remained consistent.

Same thing with Google and YouTube.

It's why these acquisitions happen and why these companies become something else. Google to Alphabet, Facebook to Meta, etc.

This just forces the sale of TikTok to someone in the U.S.

I heard this argument about TV and videogames before

I don't know how we conclude that:

> The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX.

> the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance)

> 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”

Now we have oligarchs, plus a major surveillance investor group, plus the Chinese.

This doesn't seem to be a solution to anything except that "a deal was made", and any further attempts at cleaning up credible risks have so many players to deal with, they would be DOA.

It's very optimistic to assume that China was beaten here.

Bytedance still owns the algorithm and 30% of the new company. This new wrapper firm is just being granted the license to serve as Bytedance's operations, essentially. All the stuff about it being 'trained on US content' and 'overseen' by Oracle is smoke and mirrors. This is really just the zombie of the deal that was done four years[1] ago and then quietly scrubbed.

This isn't significantly different than the way TikTok has been operating all along, the only difference is a few of the administration's cronies are able to get their heads into the feeding trough.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/19/trump-says-he-has-approved-t...

They won't. The entire point of this charade is to remind Americans we can't expect any better than instagram or youtube.

2026 in a nutshell, yes. The Daily Watergate of American history.

IMO the bigger problem is that national security is only part of the problem. An unknowable algorithm controlled by the Ellisons is not necessarily less dangerous than one controlled by China, the motivations are just different.

This is not a left versus right thing. China being unchallenged in the world will spell a quality of life decrease for us in the West. They are not “the good guys.” You’re free to see both parties as ‘neutral’ in alignment, but you still don’t want to have to be the losing party when they come into conflict. My point is China is not going to be sharing any of what they gain with Americans, even the ones who cheer for them - it’ll in fact be coming at your expense.

The CPC having a direct feed into the brains of every Gen Z and younger American is trivially easy to exploit - and there is a 0% chance that they won’t do so next year when they will likely invade Taiwan. If China is in control of TikTok, they’ll boost a ton of propaganda, supposedly people “from Taiwan” who greet the PLA as liberators, explaining how Taiwan being independent is actually oppression, and how they’ve always considered themselves part of the PRC, only evil politicians were keeping them apart. And they’ll make sure to suppress all media that exposes the violence on the ground. Finally, they’ll boost content urging Americans to protest US involvement and to sabotage the military, such as by chaining themselves to ships, etc.

Ryan McBeth has made a ton of videos laying out how this will work, and he does a better job than I have of explaining this.

TikTok is a cyberweapon.