This seems like the microwaved corpse of the original 2020 deal. Bytedance keeps all the IP, sells Oracle the nearly worthless right to operate the US infra. They can't even call their franken-app Tiktok. The US user data already sits in the US but they'll expect everyone to forget about that so they can brag about this token win.
They'll probably get what they really want, which is an admin console for the algorithm that has a 'political slant' slider that they can slide as far to the reich as they wish.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out though. People follow the money. Investors wouldn't be interested if they didn't see the value. If the new app can snag the network effects, then it will win. What is TikTok worth without the US audience?
The buyers are so absurdly wealthy that it’s not really wealth anymore, it’s power. They’re simply trading some of their dragon hoard of power for some other form of it. These people are above pedestrian worries about ROI.
> People follow the money. Investors wouldn't be interested if they didn't see the value.
The value may well be in currying favor with the Trump regime, not in the actual deal for itself. If you can lose a few billion on becoming best friends with an increasingly authoritarian leadership, you may well get much more power and future opportunities from that.
It might be zionism rather than 'fanboiing' over Trump that motivates him. It seems one has to curry favours with Trump to keep him tolerant of Netanyahu and unconditionally supporting of the state of Israel, and this would likely have such an effect.
Recently the Ellison clan dumped a large amount of money on the infamous genocidaire Bari Weiss and is pushing CBS to accept her as a senior member of their news organisation.
This shit is crazy that it’s really happening. The double whammy is that the youth is not prepared intellectually and will continue contributing their data to this platform.
Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
Why?
The nominal reason for all this is that we didn't want a Chinese company controlling an important social media outlet. I don't love that reasoning, but fine, whatever.
So they're forcibly selling it to an American company. Which should solve the problem, right?
Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies? Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
You're right, it seems obvious. Considering the number of self-professed "free speech absolutists" I have encountered on this site over the years, I'm surprised at how much benefit of the doubt others are giving this.
I'm not. The last few years have made it very clear what the actual political goals of the VC-tech world are. I was as disappointed as anybody, but I'm not surprised anymore.
I was trying to be more neutral, but after some thought, this isn't the time for that. My "surprise" was more than a bit sarcastic. Between this and the FCC going after Kimmel, now is the last chance I will give for anyone claiming to care about free speech to prove they weren't lying. There's no plausible deniability anymore, free speech is unambiguously under attack.
What’s even more hilarious are all the anti cancel culture warriors from the past few years going on about how the Kimmel situation isn’t cancel culture.
Especially since this is probably the only incident in the last couple of decades where the cancelation was a result of the government threatening consequences unless a specific individual was not canceled.
>Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
Well, yes, for starters. I think there's a pretty strong consensus from people on all sides that there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
It's the beneficiary of powerful network effects, it created those effects for itself with a superior app, but nevertheless it is a distinguishing feature. I also would say it's culturally positioned perhaps the best of any major social media app over the present and near term.
And in its current ownership it's required by statute to comply with Chinese national security data requests. And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
I think its pretty obvious how and why, every other platform copied the key parts of Tik tok, youtube has shorts, and others have their own rendition. What they all miss is that this IS Tik Tok its not some additional part of Tik Tok. It's a simple UI that gives you endless content you like, they tag all the content in a meaningful way behind the scenes, and then the recommendation engine works to feed you more of what you like.
> there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
I really have to disagree at this point. Meta has all the money in the world to throw at this, and inference isn't rocket surgery. I think Meta's algorithm caught up a couple years ago, if anything it's even more addictive. Tiktok is simply riding on first mover status, plus it's a Coke/Pepsi thing, a large segment finds Meta properties distasteful for all the obvious reasons.
I agree (not OP). The difference in addictiveness between the three big boys (Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) grows smaller with every passing year as their back-catalog of content grows.
Pretty much everyone I know consumes TikTok style content these days. I personally have blocked myself from this stuff via deleting the Insta, YouTube and I even wrote a TamperMonkey script to block myself from getting trapped down the rabbit hole.
I think it's more the product design is far more distilled for popular (and addictive) short term content. From ad placement to UI to the format of solely being a frictionless video platform with mostly anonymous users.
> but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
I think political scholars will debate on what the net effect of this is actually going to be. As in, are we better off with the GOP or the CCP controlling the algorithm? Certainly, the CCP has anti west incentives that the GOP does not, like trying to confuse us as to how we should feel about protecting Taiwan.
But in the past, the CCP has been interested in sewing discontent in the US and the method by which they have done that is by propping up the GOP. And many ways by which both the CCP and GOP would presumably manipulate the algorithm would be similar—owning libs, promoting radical right wing views, etc. But having the GOP control TikTok is a different thing entirely, they are much more incentivized to propagate their own flavor of politics to skew the nations narrative to their liking, in a much more controlled way than I think the CCP would. See twitter for prior art here.
At least if TikTok is owned in the US there might be some oversight into what’s going on. As bankrupt as Mark is as a person it doesn’t seem like hes pushing his own political views into instagrams algorithm, unlike the case at twitter. I think we have yet to see how Ellison will treat the great power of controlling the TikTok algorithm but I’m cynical.
It's an interesting question, but the information we have so far doesn't seem to be enough to give a meaningful answer yet. E.g. is it something like "one person appointed to oversee the full terms of the transition are kept" or "one person appointed always to make sure TikTok aligns with the government".
I'm not necessarily a fan of either... but to vastly different levels.
Because Trump wants a proxy so he can continue to influence the direction TikTok takes. He wants easier access to data so he can go after his political opponents, as well as get things censored he doesn't like. Of course, this would all be possible without someone on the board, but it can't hurt, and likely will help.
If TikTok removes something, would the fact that there’s a government representative on the board give standing for a first amendment claim? Normally private companies aren’t required to furnish you with first amendment rights, but if one could argue that, if not for the board representative, they might not have prevented that speech, then perhaps you would have standing.
They don’t want you scrolling through insert_controversial_topic at break neck pace. The bandwidth on TikTok in terms of getting a visual out is extremely wide and fast.
Remember though, it's only bad when the other guy does it. We don't want Chinese government involvement in TikTok, but we do want US government involvement. /s
The "Be all you can be" slogan requires more than just a great firewall that China should pay for, it needs a constant vigil to protect it from German nihilists.
i want the worlds most influential social media app to be away from the jurisdiction of any powerful people/organization, whether that’s governments, religions, billionaires, etc…
i find it worrisome that some are implying it’s new controllers are somehow less of a threat.
The USA is also an authoritarian State, it just has better marketing.
I live in Taiwan. I'm no fan of the CPC. But if you zoom out a bit, it's kinda hard to distinguish the two beyond Americans winning global cultural victory (CPC propaganda is still goofy and obvious).
Point at tiananmem square, an atrocious massacre of their own citizenry. The USA has done this - it has locked its citizens in concentration camps, supported their enslavement and recaptured the ones that managed to free themselves, bombed wealthy neighborhoods of the wrong race, had soldiers fire upon striking workers and peaceful protesters. America just has no Tank Man photo and much more subtle media relations - ostensibly free media but in reality controlled through the mutual interests of the billionaire owners of the media conglomerates and the multi millionaire politicians.
The CPC did a genocide in Xinjiang. They were very good at information control here, it's almost impossible to find even an image from the inside of one of their concentration camps. The USA funded a genocide in Palestine, but it can maintain a sort of non culpability. At any point in time the USA can turn on its Israeli allies, and my cynical expectation is that when the government becomes flagrantly fascist enough they'll just blame the Jews and call it done. But, until now, they've maintained an extraordinarily effective marketing campaign propping up Israel as a bastion of freedom and democracy in a demonic environment,values it's managed to market across the entire world that isn't the PRC or cuba or Venezuela, to where people in other countries will say "I can do what I want, it's a free country" even in countries where that really isn't the case e.g. for speech in the UK for example. In actuality it's a more racialized pitch - the Israelis are more credibly white, the Muslims are, well, Muslims. Or Brown. Whichever. But they have this massive marketing apparatus (decades of film and TV) smoothing over these racialized concepts into "freedom and democracy vs savagery and chaos," whereas the CPC with their racialized version just had Han and Normal vs Muslim and Kinda Weird (maybe dangerous!). A much more despicable pitch on the surface which is why they didn't get away with a televised genocide the way America and Israel got away with decades of apartheid against Palestine.
Anyway in summary if we take a look at all the bad the CPC vs the USA have done in their lifetimes, idk man at best the scales at balanced, worse case I think America has been worse for the world overall. I would be curious if people that disagree would be willing to do so with the context of American imperialism in mind - interfering in south America and the middle East for example. Is it still better than a country that has one imperialist action (Tibet) and a genocide under its belt?
When did the concept of "a free country" arise, and what did it mean? It seems to have been in use in the 1600s. Here it is in a tract written, apparently, around 1689 in England:
The freedoms in that instance are freedom of religion, and democracy. (Democracy, the franchise, was limited to about 10% of men, under rules that varied locally from "you have to own a house" to "you have to own the entire region".)
This is (a translation of) Josephus, writing in the first century about a speech by a Roman senator from the time when Claudius was put on the throne, with lines like "our natural freedom", "breath of liberty", and "the Liberty of former Times, that was dead and gone before ever I came into the World ..." I can't work out what that freedom was all about - Claudius came after Caligula, though, so you can make a good guess - but evidently this kind of concept is much older than the United States.
I also found the phrase "it's a free country" in Uncle Tom's Cabin, where the freedom in question is the freedom to control slaves.
My meaning is more like, St. Nicholas and his flying sleigh and reindeer have existed since at least the 1800s, Father Christmas as well, Sinterklaas even earlier most likely, but Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus as the world knows him in 1930s, and the USA did the same for the modern concept of "free country" or "democracy." A couple decades of radio, television, and film dominance was the method.
I guess the US have a kind of Tank Man photo. The girl from Vietnam.
About media. For me, since Trump second term, I just can't watch Superhero movies (DC / Marvel). It just feels strange and wrong for me. Also movies like the Den of Thieves (1), the feel just plain wrong with a brutal police.
This is a gentle reminder that it really doesn't matter what the color of a Muslim's skin is to those who care to distinguish someone as Muslim or not-Muslim. To the racist right wing machine, those that are undeniably white (say, a blond haired blue eyed nord), will be called "Muslim" or "Jew" or "Antifa" or "queer" or "trans" and that'll be that, their whiteness is revoked.
Whiteness, like any race, is a purely cultural concept rooted in the shifting reality of day to day sociology.
A man with as-of-yet undefined politics was identified as the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk. Before he was found, a governor said, "I really hope he's not one of us." When it was discovered that he was a young white male from a Mormon MAGA family, the media machine that had been calling for the elimination of the opposition party in the USA (or various minorities such as LGBT people) went silent for about a day until it was discovered that perhaps the assassin's roommate may have been trans. Immediately he was othered. Calls for prayer for a lost young man turned again into calls for violence against trans people. I imagine Governor Cox breathing a sigh of relief. Whiteness revoked!
> Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies?
That wouldn't be a bad thing. How good has unchecked Zuckerberg been for us, really?
> Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Or the one where there's some level to force on them, like here. If Zuckerberg starts needing government cash to keep Facebook going, I'd expect a similar deal.
> Like church and state, you keep them separate for the good of both.
No, not for the good of both - for the good of the people. It is demonstrably beneficial for those in power in government and megacorps to conspire and consolidate that power, it enables them to further control and extract from the populace. It is the people that should be invested in keeping them separate.
This is such a funny take. In China corporations operate at the behest of the government. In the US the government operates at the behest of corporations.
That's changing, though. They <are> working together, but the balance is tilting towards the US government and worse, towards individuals controlling it.
maybe, but i think what I see here is trump is not interested to beat china, just see what he did with s korea and india.
the only thing may indicate that trump is competing with china is how hard he's trying to please putin, but apparently he needs to work harder to get into the organ harvesting club.
This has always been the case. Such as the White House asking for certain moderation on Twitter (revealed in the Twitter Files) and Meta, Patriot Act, and of course everything Snowden brought to light
As part of Project Texas[1], they've already been using Oracle's infrastructure.
> The central feature of Project Texas is our work with Oracle to isolate the TikTok services serving U.S. users within Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment as an additional safeguard. Although gateways to the storage infrastructure are strictly monitored and controlled, U.S. users of the TikTok platform can still communicate and interact with global users for a cohesive global experience.
That’s very interesting, I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Also, I see creators, trying to create US based TikTok accounts because they believe that this way their content will be shown to Americans, which are better monetized. If that’s the case, I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
It the international creators stay with the international TikTok IMHO that will be a huge win for China, practically displacing American culture for the younger demographic in the rest of the world.
>I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Look at recent events: American government officials want to maintain the same level of toxic culture wars that foreign governments want. They just want to control them, not contain them.
>> I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
If I were China I would do this deal and then ensure that the payout is better outside the US. Try to sway US content creators to use VPN's and post outside the US and essentially limit the impact of the deal.
> I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Huh? Are you not aware of US social media companies?
Everything that's happening on TikTok is also happening on X, Facebook, Friendster, or whatever the kids are using these days. The only difference is that the TikTok algorithm promotes Chinese propaganda and ideology, and enriches the Chinese government and ByteDance. The US can't have that, hence this deal.
This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota. That would require strong regulation of social media companies and adtech in general, and there would be a nationwide revolt if that were even proposed. This is far from being considered anyway, now that Big Tech is deeply entrenched in the government.
>This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota.
Broadly speaking, I think you're probably right that the dynamics on tiktok already exist elsewhere in social media. But I do think a practical upshot of it could be a version of Tiktok where you can criticize the Hong Kong takeover or Xinxianj labor camps or harassment of expatriate dissidents or Taiwan indepence openly and not have it soft-deplatformed. Which could cause stronger domestic consciousness of those issues, and stronger solidarity with Europe and the rest of the Western world.
Oh great now Americans get to talk about things the US government could care less about while at the same time losing the ability to criticize Israel or the current administration. Does not sound like a great win. There were plenty of platforms to talk about those topics already. What didn't exist was a platform that expressly talked about things the US does not like. It could be argued that the rise in pro-palestine awareness post Oct 7 is in part to TikTok. Thats likely going away now so Americans on the whole are left worse off.
> losing the ability to criticize Israel or the current administration
When did Americans lose that ability? I didn't hear about this happening.
> could be argued that the rise in pro-palestine awareness post Oct 7 is in part to TikTok. Thats likely going away now so Americans on the whole are left worse off.
The only thing that changed is that China can't choose what you get shown, do you think that the pro-palestine videos are only there due to Chinese influence?
>When did Americans lose that ability? I didn't hear about this happening.
It fell in between the razer thin "terms & conditions" of most American service providers and the the main point of this thread: controlling the algorithm to suppress these thoughts. I will concede that Americans can still set up their own online service and yell into an empty room.
>The only thing that changed is that China can't choose what you get shown, do you think that the pro-palestine videos are only there due to Chinese influence?
anything that China does not find offensive is there.
Not being able to openly criticize the US or any other government on social media is hardly important. Free speech never existed on privately run platforms to begin with. It's delusional to think that it does or to demand it, when all users must abide with specific terms and conditions. The only people who think that are those whose views happen to align with the views of companies that run the platform. The moment that changes, as we've seen from the Twitter takeover, the previous user base will denounce censorship and deplatforming, while a new user base will celebrate "free speech". It's all a circus of ignorance and disinformation.
The main problem is that allowing foreign propaganda from a political rival to influence your citizens, while giving them free reign to exploit user data, is undeniably a matter of national security. The issue is that taking over a single platform doesn't stop foreign influence and data mining, which is also happening on all other platforms, courtesy of the adtech machinery that powers all of them. We have concrete evidence of this from the Cambridge Analytica leak, which was just the tip of the iceberg of a multi-billion dollar industry.
So unless US companies are willing to take a severe hit on their revenue and drastically change their business models, which can only happen with regulation that in practice will never be enacted, none of this will change.
If you're a user of these platforms, stop worrying about what you can or cannot say, and start worrying about what you're being manipulated to think, say, and do.
Just fwiw, Threads is basically the go-to for Taiwan stuff. It's absurdly popular in Taiwan and people recently used it to help organize one of the largest protests in Taiwan's history.
Wait, so for everyone else this means American content will be off the main app and be contained? If this stems the tide of MAGA brain rot seeping north into Canada it's an absolute win.
MAGA content is easily avoidable, because the algo already prioritizes what you engage with. For me in Canada, there's just a lot of funny/insightful US-based content I do watch.
TikTok got significantly less interesting when the US blocked themselves earlier this year, if that happens permanently it'll probably hurt TikTok worldwide.
Will people just stay with the old app out due to inertia? Or will there be annoying "blocked in your country" type messages until you switch? (at which point you won't know what's been blocked in your country)
Will there be an old app and new app available both to US residents? I don't see how that'd help them reach any of their stated goals, as I'd expect overwhelming majority of users to a) simply not care and stay, b) prefer the better international app with more content from all around the world
The law simply requires that the content recommendation algorithm not be shared between the two apps. [0] Thus, it must be rebuilt by the new team, and not maintained or controlled by the old team.
The licensing approach is a temporary solution to keep the app working from day 1. One of ByteDance's complaints during the lawsuit earlier this year was that is was going to be technically infeasible for engineers to rebuild something as complex and essential as the content algorithm in the short window of time they had before the law went into effect.
"The term “qualified divestiture” means a divestiture or similar transaction that ... would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary; and ... precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between [the two apps/teams], including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing."
All this to "protect the children"... why are US politicians so interested in kids? Politicians being involved in a kids app? Why? Could it be to curate some naughty list for future exploitation (blackmails anyone?) or to get location data about the kids? Mmm wonder when masked """"law enforcement"""" will disappear the parents and traffic the kids somewhere?
Just ban children from the internet, make it the responsibility of the parents. Its that simple. Make it illegal for kids to have access, especially to user generated content (incl chat), same level as firearms, pharma drugs, voting, entering into contracts etc. Internet is and was never a place for children to begin with.
Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of TikTok and have many critical opinions of Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but…
This gives me vibes of a weird company takeover, a la the kinds of things that happened in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: government-driven benefits to large corporations and investors with friends in the right places, government involvement, forced licensure of a core aspect of the product (Rearden Metal?).
I’d like to learn more about: what are some other similar instances of such a thing?
>> US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users
Very interesting! The separate "in content" bit in particular. Sounds like US TikTok will now be one giant echo chamber. Users outside the US will miss some US content but tbh, I find TikTok content is actually quite localised anyway. Big benefits for users outside the US are:
1. US doesn't get my data.
2. Hopefully less US political BS to swipe past.
3. I am much less concerned with the sway China has on Western Europe than the sway the US has and am therefore much happier using a China-backed version of the app sans US content/users/control/propaganda. The extreme brain rot causing people outside the US to care about 'MAGA' or that recently assassinated man will hopefully start to recede. That can only be a good thing. We have plenty of our own polarising issues without importing irrelevant ones.
tl;dr: the entire US media is now controlled by men who've bent the knee to Trump and have demonstrated that theyre willing to take an activist editorial role.
This is precisely why I don’t see the value of “right” and “left”, because it’s absolutely useless and even a distraction from understanding the true nature of these types of topics. It has absolutely nothing to do with “right” or “left” and everything to do with overarching interests.
We still have (hopefully) a democratic choice how this plays out, so the distinction between left/right is meaningful regarding political overreach (beyond the stereotypes propagandists like to attach).
If you are arguing that the left is identical to the right in that regard, you truly deserve your downvotes. I mean ... leftist censorship-cancelation for no good reason.
I've been wondering if enough people would be single issue voters on the Israel question that we could actually get some sort of candidate who attracts a ton of voters from both traditional parties.
It's ironic because (IMO) people like Ben Shapiro and other pro-Israel people deliberately divide us to prevent us from uniting against them, but the genocide has actually united us[1]. Just the other day I saw a Twitter post from one Cenk Ugyur reaching across the aisle and saying "good job" to right wingers who objected to hate speech laws against people who celebrated Kirk's assassination.
Admittedly, if 68% of Americans are opposed to Israel that doesn't necessarily mean all of them are single issue voters... but I think this is the first issue I've seen in my lifetime that gets this close to uniting Americans.
Didn't expect to see the USA employing press censors in my lifetime but here we are.
In Brazil during the dictatorship it was common for newspapers to print cooking recipes in place of censored articles, now I'm waiting to see if media in the USA has the balls to play the malicious compliance game... I guess I won't see it since money is basically God in America.
One could argue they're not the same, but there has been TV broadcast censors for decades in the US. They were still least following somewhat defined laws though.
This goes way beyond this current administration and has nothing to do with China, besides being the foil for the real reason of controlling what people can see and hear because the cabal that controls the USA does not like it.
Just say it instead of hiding your beliefs behind dogwhistles and half-coherent questions, you coward. Is it the jews? It's always the jews with you people. Fucking grow up, there is no secret cabal to blame this awful administration's behavior on, that's the terrifying reality.
TikTok dealt a serious blow to the Western consensus manufacturing apparatus. We saw that with Gaza especially. This deal is a step towards taking back control.
That's how all ruling classes and governments throughout history have operated. It's now just mask-off in a country that people mistakenly thought didn't do that sort of thing.
Yea agree. The US used to be good at making the world believe they're all about freedom and rights etc. Now they don't seem to even bother trying anymore.
I read a lot of anti-American comments like this one, mostly on American websites like Hacker News and Youtube.
I'd say the anti-American comments outnumber the pro-American ones something like 10 to 1.
The US may not be preaching about freedom and rights. But it seems to be practicing it, at least in the narrow sense that anti-American content isn't being censored or suppressed.
My "anti-American" comment is due to the difference between what's preached and what's practiced. "Leader of the free world", "greatest country on earth" etc. I also wouldn't characterize my comment as anti-American so much as disappointed in America.
There is of course more freedom in the US than in say China. But I'm also not holding up China as a beacon of freedom. The US on the other hand, the land of the free, freedoms and rights are being eroded.
>"Leader of the free world", "greatest country on earth" etc.
I don't see Americans referring to their country that way anymore. I think you're arguing with an interlocutor who peaked in the Reagan era and has been on a downtrend ever since.
Personally speaking, as an American, I don't want to lead the free world anymore. I don't want to be the "greatest country in the world" either. I'd rather the US just stick to solving its own problems, and let other countries solve theirs. The whole hero act has clearly been a mistake.
Leaving aside impact to the rest of the world, America being the "leader of the free world" has benefited it immensely. Majority of the global systems were built by Americans. Everything from military power projection to global reserve currency status to pop culture has not only given the US clout and power but also a lot of wealth.
Sticking to solve their own problems is how the Chinese declined into being the "sick man of Asia" hundreds of years ago.
GDP growth stayed on the same trend both before and after the US tried to "lead the free world" post-WW2.
>military power projection
That's a cost for us, not a benefit. I don't want my tax dollars to be "projecting power". I want them helping me and my fellow citizens.
>pop culture has not only given the US clout
The internet is awash in anti-American comments. Trying to "lead the free world" has destroyed our soft power.
>Sticking to solve their own problems is how the Chinese declined into being the "sick man of Asia" hundreds of years ago.
My preferred model is Switzerland, not Qing China. I'm not anti-modernization. I'm anti-imperialism. We shouldn't involve ourselves in wars or military alliances on other continents.
TLDR: The US military backs the dollar as international trade currency, which puts all other nations in a depending position to lend USD. This allowed the US to cheaply amass a gigantic debt that in turn allowed ridiculous (military) budgets.
Please dont answer something like "see, we are in debt for you", since the US got material stuff in return for a fiat currency that can they can devalue on demand but had been accepted on the basis of trust and stability.
Remember when "the market got the yippies" and trump chickened out of broad tarifs? It was also because of long term allies sending a signal by liquidating US bonds:
A continuing drop of bond yields could mean a collapse of the US national budgets. Thats the benedit you enjoyed for decades. Something other nations cannot do.
I really don't think the US has any shortage of self-criticism. I am criticizing US policy at this very moment! It is you who defends current US policy and says it is good (for the US at least). I am the critic here.
But if you really believe what you're saying about self-criticism, that's evidence for my position that the US should not play world police. If we're incapable of self-criticism, we will do a bad job at world policing.
>TLDR: The US military backs the dollar as international trade currency, which puts all other nations in a depending position to lend USD. This allowed the US to cheaply amass a gigantic debt that in turn allowed ridiculous (military) budgets.
"There once was a fisherman relaxing on the beach, catching just enough fish to feed his family. A businessman told him he should work hard, hire employees, catch more fish, and grow a big company—then, after many years, he could retire and live a peaceful fisherman's life. The fisherman smiled and said, ‘But isn’t that what I’m doing right now?’"
Assuming you are right: We need the debt to fund our military. We need our military to borrow for our debt. Why are we playing this game, exactly? It's a cyclone of vice.
Personally, I think the USD would actually be a stronger reserve currency if we reduced international adventurism. This would reduce the incentive of other nations like Russia and Israel to interfere in our politics, and thus improve our institutional stability. Switzerland is very stable, and an attractive investment destination, because it is known to be neutral.
It's also not clear to me if reserve currency status is a good thing. It makes our exports less competitive, and increases our trade deficit. It's like eating cookies for every meal. Sure, you're getting a lot of calories. But it's not good for your health in the long term.
If you look at the GDP trendline, it's been the same regardless of USD reserve status. So I'm additionally just not sure this matters either way.
In any case, if you really believe what you are saying, you should be very happy about my advocacy, since it increases the chance that your nation's currency becomes the new reserve currency. Oh boy, your country might take on a ton of debt and become the new self-appointed world police, hated by all, with constant foreign interference in your politics! Isn't it grand?
Why are so worried, then, whether the world is anti-american or not? Why use that term, if you personally don't want see the world through nationalist optics?
I saw a commenter the other day here claiming that in EU, there are lot of "anti-american" far left sentiments. They weren't able to elaborate, who exactly that is; as someone on the left, I don't see it.
For example, I live in EU, I support DiEM25, and I am against NATO, as well as stopping other military activities. I also agree with Chomsky. Is any of this anti-american? How is then yibg's comment anti-american?
I guess you can't have it both ways - the american soft power (you seem to miss) came with exceptionalism. I agree that Switzerland is nice, but they simply don't have that soft power.
If people outside the US complain about what the US does, we should stop doing it. The fact that everyone complains about US foreign policy means we need to course-correct. No one complains about Swiss foreign policy.
I think we agree, since we're both against NATO. Not sure why you're trying to argue with me.
Have you not been paying attention to what's been happening in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination? The government been foaming at the mouth and clamping down on everyone who dares say anything other than obsequious praise about him. ABC just tonight cancelled Jimmy Kimmel at the behest of the head of the FCC!
And I mean, it's not like this is new. The past two years have seen intense crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech. Look at what happened to Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk.
I have no particular opinion about those issues. I'm just pointing out the irony of people complaining about "US propaganda" on discussion platforms where the content is overwhelmingly anti-US.
Yes, indeed. As the current administration, any US administration in the last 30-40 or years in fact, is for a fact very pro-Israel, so a move like this can only cement that stance.
Maybe these crypto-zealots who scream about decentralization will actually try and build a thriving decentralized media instead of pumping and dumping shitcoins?
Yeah. I'm on Lemmy and Mastodon, but it ain't exactly jumping, and I'm sure part of it is definitely the confusion around how to get going and what it is. Lemmy at least is also pretty buggy, and I'm not able to find posts I saw a few hours ago, but ultimately I don't really know what the draw is or even could be for the average user.
This exists today, it has always existed, and you never needed technology to find the solution to it.
Im a huge fan of the film Rope, because it is just done well. Its also got a ton of coding in it for "homosexual" themes that were very much banned at the time of filming. Understanding these paints the film in a whole new way...
Shakespeare has a ton of contemporary satire coded into it. Unless you're aware of history or reading a version that illuminates the meta-context you would very much be unaware of its existence.
It happens in modern film: Paul Verhoeven is a master of it.
If you dont think there are coded communities on existing social platforms sharing information among in members I have news for you.
Use Fediverse/ActivityPub, XMPP (maybe matrix), IRC. Use protocols, not "apps"/"platforms". Stop using corporate-owned centralized services. Well, unless you like being the subject of exploitation and manipulation of course.
The nuance of protocols vs apps though is lost on the masses. Most people just want to stare at reels or be stared at in reels.
This means that the only people you will encounter in protocols will be privacy freak type nerds and “normal” people you might actually feel better interacting with or watching are on popular apps.
Word. Leaving the made-to-be-accessible/engaging hyper-capitalistic walled gardens requires some initiative and/or agency, which unfortunately only the minority of people are willing to bother with. Either way, I like to make it more broadly known: there are, in fact, alternatives. Ask a geek near you to try out some neato stuff that isn't trying to make you spend all your money and/or isn't trying to manipulate your beliefs etc.
But yeah if the normal people are where all the ads and spam and nazis are, I'm fine being a weirdo :)
I know they aren't? The person hinted at something but didn't say anything concrete, so I don't actually know what they're saying, which is why I asked them to clarify.
I've been using mastodon for nearly 10 years. Fediverse, in my actual experience, is overwhelmingly a really good place to meet and chat with interesting, friendly people. Follow and engage with cool people and you'll have a good time. If you go looking for what you don't like, you'll find it, because it's there just like anywhere on the net. The difference is you don't have to see stuff you don't want to see, because the software and protocol have features that allow this. I'm on a pretty small server and we all are pretty much on the same page about what we expect our social interactions to be like. You know you can just filter out content, right? Your server can totally block or defederate from servers that have objectionable content, too (by whatever your collective definition of "objectionable" is). It works pretty well if you use it the way it's designed to be used.
I'm saying it's unlikely to take off because it's pretty taken over by a group fringe enough to push away the average person. I'm not being entirely fair honestly. It's the internet we're in though- the "middle ground" of yesterday that helped sites take off in the past is getting harder to find.
Oh, it already has taken off sufficiently. There are some 10-20 million users[0]. Like I just said in an adjacent comment I've been using it nearly-exclusively for almost 10 years now, myself. It's not built for "growth" or to "compete" with big corporate social media so it's all good. Whoever is interested can try it out for themselves. BTW I've been on the net since 1992 and can say with certainty, every new social technology is dominated by the fringes of culture at first because we're the ones who want to make our own place that isn't full of jerks. Like, fediverse wasn't taken over by any fringe group, it started on the fringes. We're happy to have anyone who isn't a jerk though, it's generally that simple.
Definitely pretty valid points- I'm surprised by how long it's been around I always considered it a covid thing. Society could definitely benefit from the right sort of fringe ideas and people at the moment.
If you have kids, get them off the internet asap. No access. These people thrive because they have illegal contracts with kids. They control the hearts & minds of so many households. Reject the whole system. Cut the cord from all bots, propaganda farms, intelligence agencies that runs a direct line into your child's mind. They are teaching your children to think a specific way. Its gross.
This has been floating around since the end of the first Trump administration, where neither of these interests were accused of being “pro-Israel” but only entrance narrative after the current Palestine debacle:
Therefore I’m only left to conclude this is an entirely unsubstantiated claim, as why wouldn’t it have already been apparent if they were working as shadow brokers of Israeli interests in all this, which the general timeline and verifiable information we know don’t line up with?
The people who have been very vocal about forcing US ownership of TikTok have also been very, very open about their Zionism on social media. A16z has been pushing for this hard since the start of the genocide. Zionists blame "TikTok" for their opposition. They even call the younger people who don't support Israel the "TikTok Generation".
This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control, is very much about Israel and attempting to gain a monopoly on the media.
It's a page in the conservative playbook going back a long time, from consolidating newspapers to talk radio to TV stations and now a new type of media...
And now we see them getting main stream networks on a leash.
Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.
Man, the sheer transactionality that guides these people's lives is pretty disgusting to me. Granted, you probably don't get to be a billionaire unless you are pretty transactional, but I am kind of thankful that the vapid hollowness of these billionaires (despite always cloaking their rapaciousness in some sort of larger societal purpose) has been laid bare over the past few years.
I don’t want either of them, but credit where credit is due. China is doing well as a country and the standard of living has increased even if it’s under an authoritarian regime. I wonder how long that will last. Meanwhile, the USA is becoming Russia. Basically a bunch of misinformed morons living in the past and thinking we are on top of the world while we accelerate towards irrelevance on the global stage if not for a massive stockpile of nukes.
Tariffs are drying up international demand for Chinese goods, and in a bid to keep factories alive, Beijing is urging exporters to turn inward. However, that pivot is compounding the very problem it aims to solve.
Deflation isn’t an abstract threat in China anymore—it’s visible across the economy. After barely holding above zero for much of 2023 and 2024, consumer prices have now dropped for two straight months.
Producer prices have fallen for 29 consecutive months. March’s figures showed the sharpest drop in four months, and forecasts point to an even steeper decline in April.
Yes, I’m fully aware that’s starting so low because of horrible governments in the past and that the current government is far from great, but that’s still moving in the right direction at the time the United States is trying to speed run to a Russian-style oligarchy and most people under 50 think it’s getting worse.
It's really odd how many people on hn are pro china. Why? They are not good guys. At all.
In moral terms they are so far behind the West they are in a different team. (and don't throw in disingenous deflections like gaza and whatever, those are orders of magnitude less bad then China) The West is full of freedom and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. China isn't.
Nobody here is pro Russia or Iran, or even particularly pro India. So why is Communist China different?
What an insane thing to say! But also... how insane is it that I agree with you based on objective reality? Can you imagine seriously saying that 20-30 years ago? 1984's doublethink/doublespeak always seemed over the top, yet we are at a point particularly recently where the anti cancel culture sentiment has lead to... proposals to curb undesirable speech, cancelling people... which in turn is undesirable because it criticises a propagandist's undesirable speech with his own post death quotes in a lot of cases and bristles when accused of sane washing. Or that this won't matter in a few more news cycles as we lurch brokenly into the next phase of dystopia.
I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners.
Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.
The CPC is not attacking the US from within. The Party of Trump has carried out a fascist coup and they are now working to ensure they stay in power permanently.
I loath partisanship and am more than willing to point out failures by the Dems, but this is different. Trump and Co have openly stated that they don't believe in democracy.
If you are not able to see this I'm not sure what I could say to open your eyes.
So incompetent that they control all three branches of the most powerful government on earth. Much of that can be credited to their media ownership strategies.
They are stupid, but also ruthless and willing to ignore the laws they don't like.
They are also surrounded by billionaires that want them to keep it going. Look at how Larry Ellison is buying up Paramount/CBS and soon, Tiktok. They just took Kimmel off the air.
Again, I know this sounds like histrionics on my part but what is happening now is not normal -- the fact that all "old school" republicans have left the GOP and it is now literally the Party of Trump. And they have millions of cult members who are itching to use their second amendment rights against "non-Americans".
I desperately want to be wrong, and would love credible evidence that could demonstrate this.
Really? They are following Putin’s playbook and getting away with it. Controlling media and sharing the spoils with the oligarchs. Together, they are robbing us blind. What about what they are doing makes them incompetent? Evil, yes. But incompetent? They are winning! You think this ends with the next election or when ol’ Agent Orange kicks the bucket? Things are going to be very different here for a very long time unless we collectively get our shit together in a big way and take it back.
Seems like it. It seemed kind of inevitable. Biden made a mistake going down this road - of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term, but Biden should've just left it alone because it wasn't hard to see that this was the likely outcome.
Biden? You do realize Trump attempted to “ban” TikTok in his first term when the original Oracle “deal” happened, right? Pinning this in Biden takes some serious mental gymnastics.
Yeah, I do realize that and in fact mention it in the comment above: of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term. Not "pinning" it on Biden, per se, but he is the one who signed the bill. It would have been much better to leave it alone. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-what...
Do you suspect Biden had a little plaque on his desk saying "The buck stops somewhere else"? He signed the bill. If he didn't want to own it, he doesn't have to put his name on it.
Also this only matters if the Fed is independent. If it’s not, the President can direct it to purchase unlimited treasury bonds, effectively printing unlimited money to fund any program it wants.
Paired with this administration’s assertion of impoundment powers and the pocket rescission, the Congress’s power of the purse is completely neutered in both directions. The executive can decline to spend whatever it doesn’t want to, and it can fund anything it does want.
Recklessly funding the government off of the Fed’s balance sheet will of course cause all sorts of nasty economic effects, but that’s exactly why you need to print money! So your massive immigration enforcement apparatus (newly full of ideological minions thanks to the current hiring surge) can go and assert powers of process-free expedited removal throughout the entire country (per DOJ memo from week 1).
So the economic consequences hardly matter: you simply deport whoever complains.
Maybe the best solution is to adopt a parliamentary system of government? With the executive formally subordinated to the legislature, it can’t spend money against the legislative majority’s wishes, because if it upsets the legislature, the legislature votes it out of power (commonly with no supermajority required, just a simple majority vote in the more numerous legislative house)
It said it could be delayed with some pretty specific parameters. Quoting the Congressional Research Service report on the bill:
"The President can grant a one-time extension of up to 90 additional days when a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, there is evidence of 'significant' progress toward executing the divestiture, and there are legally binding agreements in place to enable the divestiture."
One could argue all day about whether or not there was an identified path or evidence of significant progress, but certainly there weren't legally binding agreements in place at any point, and the deadline has been extended far more than once.
Trump is ignoring the law. The DoJ has asserted that Trump can ignore the law because it would interfere with his duty to "take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States." It is unclear what, if any law, could not be ignored under this doctrine.
I fully expect a decent number of people in favor of this to, without a shred of irony, whine about wanting a free market whenever environmental regulations are in the news again.
Is this all a canard to avoid having to implement actual consumer privacy laws?
The question is more about whether it is an intentional decision to go this route or a built-in, institutional decision. When faced with the foe of consumer data harvesting and tracking, right now it seems the US government has concluded the answer is that it is better to have an American company spy on people rather than a Chinese one.
The best answer would be to enact laws to stop the act of spying on people, but that’s anathema to US political culture right now!
It does seem mismatched but it's also an opportunity for Oracle to become relevant in the space, if they handle it right.
Though yeah, if they go the Yahoo-route it's going to be a huge waste. But it's really up to how the company handles the acquisition.
Yahoo missed big time by just trying to change the culture of the userbase way too quickly. They didn't like that people were posting porn on Tumblr when that was one of the most important aspects of the platform for the users. They bled way too many users and took way too long of a time to do anything about it.
I feel like Tumblr should have done their own patreon/OF type of push within the platform but they didn't have the vision. They literally had all the creators of that type of content at some point and they've now all moved to X/Twitter.
I hope (i mean, idgaf but you know it's a figure of speech) that Oracle has a better perspective about the issue so they don't commit another billion(s) dollar(s) crime.
Facebook tried releasing a product for workplace communication named Workplace/Facebook at Work and that is almost dead.
Microsoft has been eyeing a social media platform for years, and the only relevant product that I am aware of is Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) that is not very good in my opinion.
Oracle has never ever had any product that targets mainstream consumers. They always focused on enterprise products and don't understand consumers. Just like Microsoft never released a hardware product that matches iPhone's success, or Apple never has any enterprise product that remotely competes with Office. It's not in their gene. They'll be lucky enough if they don't run it into the ground.
What's to stop ByteDance from waiting a while and making a new TikTok app under a different name? The network effect moats do not seem insurmountable. I'm sure once the US starts meddling with the algorithm people will start looking for alternatives.
>> What's to stop ByteDance from waiting a while and making a new TikTok app under a different name?
I'm sure this deal is more complex than "ByteDance is not allowed to run an app called TikTok within the US". Politicians are morons so I could be wrong but I would hope it's much more liberal than that.
This. I think people in general misunderstand the allure of power and the means to maintain it. Power centers in US are drooling at the opportunity to do what China has done in terms of controlling discourse and language. The interesting thing is that they all assume that this particular measure of control would never be turned against them.
edit: Adjusted weapon to 'measure of control'. I accept people are a little too happy to overreact lately.
In a democracy where the politicians change every 4-8 years this is receipt for disaster. The next administration will undo action taken by the previous one. In effect destroying any momentum or progress for achieving anything. For China and Russia this is not a problem because of the totalitarian state.
These fascist Republicans are not intending on giving up power. A bit China mixed with the sham democracies of Russia, Hungary or Turkey - this is the model they're going for.
What do you think the push behind the new gerrymandered districts is for?
Why are they creating fake emergencies to justify inserting federal police and the national guard in major cities with big Democratic voting populations?
> We are doing state capitalism without China’s “serve the people” bit. Hm, maybe there’s a name for that type of government, idk.
Except China doesn't actually serve its people. Things are way more cut-throat there, with much less safety net. The Chinese government sees workers as grist for the mill, not something to be cared for.
There is a significant difference in a population of 70 million educated workers who need to be maintained for high performance and 400 million low skill workers who are highly replaceable.
I am trying to make no judgement here, just explaining then 'motivational environment'
This math of course is in flux to a degree we haven't seen in maybe 1000+ years though right now.
I think you can it's just shifted by several decades because China took a long dark detour through the Cultural Revolution. QoL exploded in the US in the Post War period, partially imo because we were the only industrialized economy that didn't have significant homeland attacks during WW2 so the US got a straight shot to the top of the heap. China got a similar QoL lift through a similar path, mass manufacturing (this time business taken from the US by being far cheaper) and growth of in country expertise. Now even China is feeling a similar cost squeeze drawing some business to smaller neighbors. They're also just so much larger they can sustain a larger gradient between coasts that look closer to '1st' world costs and poorer interiors where cheaper manufacturing can be done.
Sure, but what's relevant is what sort of political and cultural pressures we're all experiencing now. Maybe China is just a few years behind on the same crunch trajectory we're on, maybe not, but that doesn't matter much to what's going on today.
> Eh, quality of life has gone to the moon in China in living memory. Not nearly as much a positive delta here in the US.
The Chinese rural population still isn't eligible for local equivalent of social security in their old age (that's only for city folks), and IIRC there was a huge unwillingness to provide financial assistance to individuals during COVID.
> A few hundred million of that rural population have become city folk.
Not legally, IIRC China has an internal passport system, and workers who migrate to the city from the countryside typically remain must registered in the countryside (and are therefore denied access to city benefits).
US users are today 21 of the 49 TikTok accounts with the most followers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...> (not including TikTok itself). 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.
[1] And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move
Nope. I get a lot localised content. The local food reviewers etc. won't miss out on US views. The people creating content in local languages won't notice a difference either. 15 years ago I think things would have went differently but now I think people will want the non-US version. And I wouldn't be surprised if US users grab themselves a VPN and a pirated APK and use it too.
I'm 61. I've told my kids I could not have ever imagined we got to the state we are in, with the president trying (and largely succeeding) in advancing the "unitary executive" abetted by the Supreme Court. Hell, I wouldn't have believed it even 10 years ago.
I'm really surprised that there hasn't been more discussion of the (effective) nationalization of US Steel, so thank you for bringing it up. It's not only that he gets to pick board members, he gets final say on basically any decisions the company makes.
Is it common for this sort of company, though? I can see public-private partnerships making sense for infrastructure, for example, but a social media company? That just sounds like a way for a country to censor and push propaganda.
Governments are much better at free speech than companies are, the US government is much more for free speech than Facebook or Google or Apple or Microsoft is etc.
So it is common for Governments to cooperate with media to ensure they remain independent and not just push corporate propaganda, not just to push government propaganda.
> With, apparently, a board member appointed by the Trump administration.
Trump has essentially selected all of the board members. Its not a coincidence that Larry Ellison and Andreessen are big Trump supporters. The amazing corruption continues.
Larry Ellison and A16Z will invest in Truth Social, buy Trump Coin, help his family, (or something) just asynchronously enough that it can’t be directly connected to the TikTok deal.
Doubt they feel the need to wait. Nobody is going to do anything about it, just like nobody has yet done anything effective about the other blatant corruption. Look at the Saudi “investment” in Trump’s crypto.
So basically devalues TikTok worldwide and TikTok US, presumably a UK/EU user won’t be seen in the US and vice versa? The EU is already preparing a fine I’m sure… such an incredibly strange deal IMO, I can’t work out why anyone would do it?
I am wondering if this is maybe very welcoming for the EU. I don't think the common American creator ads a lot of value to our culture at this point, so maybe nothing of value was lost really.
The term has been so abused that it’s no surprise the current administration was going to push in that direction themselves.
All it takes is a minor rebranding and half the country or more would immediately sign up for it. For all intents and purposes, socialism just means “the people we don’t like”. As long as people feel like they’ll get theirs, I seriously doubt they care what economic system they’re living under.
I think it's bad news if the US government owns Tiktok data rather than the Chinese government.
Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
The State Department also said it would crack down on non-citizens who have made posts making light of the shooting.
“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country. I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on Thursday. “Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.” [0]
Americans prefer that Tiktok data lives within the jurisdiction of the US government, why? If you don't think Palantir is putting together a centralized database to survey individual Americans for the US government, you are crazy. There will be real consequences where if they don't like what you're saying or doing, they will come after you some how.
I'd much rather have my data based in China.
I've come across at least one businessman who refuses to use anything but a Chinese phone he bought in china, with chinese sim card and chinese apps, for that exact reason.
>Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
It's arguments like this that reminds of the critique of libertarians as akin to house cats that seek to undermine the very systems that allow them to exist in the first place that wouldn't survive outside for minute. Or maybe it's just agitprop right here.
Users better be running now before they get hit with those new licensing fees.
Oracle: "Your phone has 6-cores and our minimum plan is 64 cores. Additionally, we see you upgraded from an iPhone 16 to the 17. Licenses don't transfer, of course. You owe us 3 kidneys."
For me it’s the potential china influence. Reels and Shorts is at least American and I already have established relations with both companies.
Are we for sure the TikTok algorithm doesn’t bump towards or away from certain issues? The data on the cultural zeitgeist? The ability to promote political messaging?
People keep saying this but shouldn't it be kinda trivially easy to check?
Start new accounts, swipe through the content and establish what kind of algorithm it is. The few attempts I've seen on youtube seem to indicate it's heavily based on your geographical area. They don't really care that much which side the apple falls onto.
I do acknowledge that there's a latent threat that could be activated. And I can see an argument being made on that front, I mean, China doesn't allow access to a lot of American social media for that reason. But I don't really buy the argument right now as I haven't seen a lot of evidence of Tiktok doing things that Meta/Google haven't done.
Like you say, they could target different messages for different geographical areas. Similar to how in the election last year Dearborn, MI (highly middle eastern) got different messaging from both Trump and Kamala wrt Isreal/Palistine compared to the rest of the country on traditional ads.
They can target any age range or demographics, any interests.
We had Uber hiding things from LEO almost a decade ago via geofencing and other tricks, I’m sure it’s a bit more sophisticated now.
You keep bringing Meta/Google into this. I don’t care if they do the same things. I mean, I wouldn’t like it either, but we have solutions available to us. We can pass laws or go to court and handle it internally. A foreign nation is not bound by that.
The "good" news is that they will only own the US operations, with the ROTW continuing to be operated by ByteDance. So if they diverge too far from the original product we can expect to see a discussion about life behind the Great Firewall of America.
I'm curious how bad the misinformation type stuff will be.
It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.
Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.
> Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuf
I don't understand how other people have this experience and I don't. I see targeted ads of course. And every once in a while it starts showing me content for things I don't follow, at which point I start mashing the button they provide to make it go away, and after a handful it pops up something asking if I want to remove all suggested content for a while. I always select yes.
Do other people actually *want* suggested comment? that's bizarre.
Most people aren't actively curating their feed like this. They see an attractive person, eyes wander for a few seconds longer than the usual post before scrolling away, and that is enough.
Short form video is basically worthless outside of comedy and cute animal videos. The format does not allow enough information to determine whether the information provided is accurate or not, for videos that have facts in them. Every time I watch a short form video I feel an overwhelming urge not to trust what I saw and verify it elsewhere, now I just don’t want short form videos at all.
They're going to send thugs into businesses demanding to see if any of their employees are secretly using TikTok on company time, then demand the business buy a million dollar corporate license.
So finally all that pesky people saying that their own government is funding a brutal genocide with their tax dollars will be banned.
American media is one of the most thightly controlled and censored in the world. They need to carefully control the media to maintain the ilusion of "moral superiority" that is used to justify foreign interventions.
The USA forcibly nationalized TikTok so they can install their own surveillance and censorship apparatus along with skimming from TikTok's profits. All while decrying China for... the same thing.
Isn't this as bipartisan as it gets? Trump wanted China to divest from Tiktok. Congress passed the bill. Biden signed it. The Supreme Court agreed that, yes, this is legal.
Sure, people didn't vote for Larry Ellison to take control. But something like this is what we wanted, right?
It is, if it was Democrats installing a government appointed board seat you'd see a very different response to this event from both sides, but both sides want to do this in the end.
Isn't that how it works in China? At least since the 80s. The CCP forces companies to insert their state-backed fund and officials into the cap table. Either through golden shares, forced mergers with state-owned enterprises, or forced equity sales.
> If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
You still make money in that case. It isn't a bad deal for the chinese. The americans who now have yet another censored app controlled by the american government are the only losers here.
Because it's the biggest market. Half of my customers are American. I have never even marketed anything to them. It's the biggest, best market with the most people willing to spend the most money.
Similarly, when the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020, 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 49 (not including TikTok itself) are American.
>If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
Besides what bluecalm said, 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 Chinese government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
So much for capitalism and the invisible hand of the free market: forced sellout, TikTok US forbidden to compete with TikTok, board member appointed by the government, infrastructure contract has to be given to a selected company ‘oracle’.
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
David Ellison is Larry Ellison's son, and Larry Ellison spent $6 billion on the Paramount deal. It's not really a stretch to imagine that the father might have some influence on the resulting operation. (According to a cursory web search, on paper Larry Ellison now has a 35.5% voting interest and David Ellison has a 64.5% voting interest.)
I agree it’s not that big of a stretch, but it elevates the discussion when you communicate what part of your argument is objectively correct vs a stretch.
My knee-jerk reaction was to upvote the comment, but that’s how Ecco chambers get increasingly divorced from reality.
I don't believe for a second that you're being downvoted by someone with multiple accounts. You're being downvoted because you tried to frame a lukewarm observation (that brought receipts!) as some insane conspiratorial hot take in a really transparent manner, while simultaneously misrepresenting it (zionists vs jews) and ridiculing it (flat earth comparison).
We're no longer accepting this tripe as sane discourse. Anyone of sound mind has seen, over the past 3 years, that Israel's securocrats and Zionists in America and Europe shut down any views that's remotely critical of Israel by influencing the media. It's also as clear as daylight that TikTok's problems started after they gave the world a window into Israel's atrocities in occupied Palestine. Ellison is a self-confessed Zionist.
Whether it's Bari Weiss abetting genocide against Palestinians, Silicon Valley purging anyone who questions it, or actively building the weapons that enable it, you can't glue people's eyes shut or force them not to believe their lying eyes with cries of antisemitism, conspiracy, etc.
Partially, yes? I don’t
see that as particularly controversial at this point. We are beyond consensus manufacturing and into explicit governmental crackdowns on anti-Israel voices in the US.
It’s for money and power. Because of the partisan nature of the power grab, a certain grab bag of evangelical, fossil fuel and anti-gay tenets are going to get reïnforced. But treating those as the cause dangerously misses that this is being started at home.
Also, I wasn't invoking some dog-whistle. I was using the same phraseology of the Zionists. From the CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, addressing the Israeli Knesset[1] :
"Pushing extremists off Wikipedia might not seem equal to the challenge of pushing Hezbollah to north of the Litani River; capturing TikTok might seem less meaningful than holding on to Mount Hermon ; libelous tweets certainly might seem less deadly than missiles from Yemen but this is urgent because the next war will be decided based on how Israel and its allies perform online as much as offline. Make no mistake it's real we saw that in the propaganda that anti-israel groups pushed out in America on October 7th accusing Israel of committing genocide."
He describes Tiktok as a target to be captured, comparing it to a mountain in Syria which Israel conquered late last year in its unannounced invasion of Syria. They make no bones about the fact that our minds are just another battlespace in this war that they're waging.
It's important to remember that the ultra-powerful and wealthy live whatever life they want to live regardless of what their media companies promote.
Someone can own a media company, have it push very specific political ideologies with the goal of turning people against each other and gaining power for themselves. By pushing antagonistic media, they can prop up fringe political figures who'd be more willing to help them with their political goals. (E.g. tax policies that help the wealthy person's companies.)
They can still live whatever life they want, even going against the ideologies the media companies espouse, because they're rich enough that the fallout doesn't impact them.
They're living a very different kind of life than us.
BTW, I'm not explicitly arguing that Larry Ellison is doing this -- I don't have the context or background on that. I am saying that his media companies will 1. do things to help Larry's interests (which are probably political), and 2. that doesn't have to be aligned with however he lives his personal life, since he's effectively immune.
> Larry Ellison’s daughter is gay. Why do you think her brother and father are going to infuse Paramount with anti-gay bigotry?
Sorry, I'm speaking generally. The people in power broadly align with these policies. That means that when they gain control over a pillar of industry, they're broadly going to do influence it to some combination of those ends. The reason they gained power isn't to do those things. Ellison isn't taking control of TikTok to influence the Israel narrative. But when he takes control of it, as a result of the contours of powers that are MAGA, he will probably be forced to put forward an anti-Palestinian editorial bias.
There is a lot of tail wagging the dog conspiracy in this thread. I'm pushing back on that.
Current Oracle CEO Safra Catz lives in Palm Beach and is a frequent visitor to Mar-a-lago. She is actually a big Israel supporter, visiting and donating money often.
In large part, yes. There is also Trump, Republicans and their drive to carve out a bigger conservative-space in a liberal-dominated media landscape. There is Silicon valley, the rising digital-military-industrial complex, the china hawks, the intelligence apparatus and the security state, and the usual self-interests of the billionaire class. All of these forces are currently colluding to control the narrative (i.e. minds) in their favor. But I will argue the Israel angle is a big part of it which is being under-reported on ( by design).
Trump went after TikTok in his first presidency but was ultimately unsuccessful. It was the Biden government that successully banned TikTok last year in a bipartisan bill. What was the impetus then and why did it succeed? Listen to Charlie Kirk's personal take[1] on why Tiktok got banned (and how the right capitalized on it) :
[..] the buried lede of the October 7th was that it it got TikTok banned and remember the Tiktok ban stalled based on just China concerns, but TikTok was the the hub of a lot of the anti-israel sentiment that was brewing with Gen Z and all of a sudden the TikTok ban got resurfaced. Mitt Romney said at a security conference "we are Banning Tik Tok because it is sowing anti-israel sentiment in the United States."
Multiple congressman and representatives have cited anti-israel sentiment as their reason [2].
Tiktok recently hired Erica Mindel - an instructor in the Armoured Corps in the Israeli army’s spokesperson’s unit - to lead the company’s hate speech policy. The potential hiring of Bari Weiss to head the CBS news division reveals a similar underlying motive. One which is laid out by the CEO of the ADL, in his address to the Israeli Knesset[3] :
"Pushing extremists off Wikipedia might not seem equal to the challenge of pushing Hezbollah to north of the Litani River; capturing TikTok might seem less meaningful than holding on to Mount Hermon (A mountain peak in Syria which Israel conquered in their undeclared invasion of Syria late last year); libelous tweets certainly might seem less deadly than missiles from Yemen but this is urgent because the next war will be decided based on how Israel and its allies perform online as much as offline. Make no mistake it's real we saw that in the propaganda that anti-israel groups pushed out in America on October 7th accusing Israel of committing genocide."
Actually it's the opposite. Pre-internet, there were a handful of news sources in any given city (mostly newspapers and TV), so they couldn't afford to alienate half of their potential viewers/readers by leaning hard left or right.
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' online. So many that the net effect is that most of those sources lean one way or the other, and by and large people choose to listen mostly or only to those sources they agree with.
No wonder political opinions are so highly divided today. Almost no one ever hears anything from the other side.
Genuine question: what do you think the alternative is? Ultimately someone will have the power. I don’t know what’s particularly questionable about Larry Ellison. An entrepreneur controlling media seems better than the state or a foreign government.
It less about who and more about how many. Lots of different people, with different points of view, sharing control of the media is way better than one guy having the ability to push whatever narrative they feel like at the time.
If we want neutral, how about a fair arena for opinions and ideas.. at the moment "The Right" yells and screams "Anti-Semite! Terrorist!" if someone protests against the starvation and slaughter of children... So having them control the medium doesn't feel right for me.
Ok someone's going to come and say that "The Left" controlled the medium and disallowed "non-mainstream" messaging about Covid... I admit my bias and consider such messaging lunacy too..
There are tiny pockets of this country that assume this is the singular issue that animates everybody, every day, and that it is impossible to believe in both Israel's right to exist and defend itself and the Palestinians' right to not be bombed because the Israeli PM doesn't want to go to jail.
I don't think Israel is conducting a genocide, to me for something to be a genocide you need to do much more than they are currently doing. To me it seems like they are conducting a fairly standard occupation with very authoritarian military control, that is not genocide.
Words tend to get watered down over time, if they were gassing Palestinians like Hitler gassed yews people would have a very different opinion on this matter, which is why I feel words shouldn't be watered down that much.
Whenever we take a stance, We identify our ego with that stance. We shall die but die a pro X or pro Y
As such many debates happen in bad faith as well.
Of course everyone has their agenda but one has to understand that agenda is just a framework for understanding the world.
And we need to understand the world because it has no inherent meaning.
So like, if we really have to deduce meaning, if we really have to be pro something that we can die on a hill towards, I'd rather have it be a humanitarian thing.
I am not saying that palestine is good either but rather that in genocide/wars, the people fighting the war/military/families displaced suffer, not the old man causing the war.
I feel like I am a humanist. Wishing to understand the world, yet I feel like some people in this world have hurt me so much that sometimes I just wish the world to burn.
I am sure that people are gonna comment on something like "oh do you support a genocide etc."
But I am trying to make the point that the world should really be just anti suffering,accepting. Yes I am naive but surely with all of this technological improvements, we can improve the structure of society to not be fucking brewing with hate and bullying and resentment.
We can do so much better as a society without even trying much. Just small acts of kindness and basically creating a environment that rewards it and punishes bullying/hate speech etc. might be really nice if I am being honest.
Not sure why we can't be pro this instead of defining ourselves with the confict of two other foreign nations
The problem is the word 'anti'. Being pro something doesn't mean you're anti something else. I can be pro-israel and still have sympathy for the Palestinians and what they are enduring and hoping for peace.
> This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
Again? People should be talking about the hostile take-over currently in progress and how it is getting exponentially worse. But the billionaire mouthpieces gave everyone a shiny new inconsequential talking point and no one cares about anything that matters.
Why fight a war against class, against oppression when we can sit on a chair and write a comment either defending or arguing against something as petty as religion.
It would be maybe the 3rd point worth discussing definitely after concentration of power & how they can influence our opinion of the masses.
But people made it the first.
There is no such thing as a moral billionaire imo, I saw a video like this and I sorta agree.
I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone owning this much amount of control.
Religion seems so petty to me yet it seems that the world is coming back to it. Fighting us vs them.
We have all forgotten what the people in 1970's esque dreamed of 2025 etc. (I am a genz but I have seen such videos of people thinking what)
And the funny thing is, is that we ourselves have forgotten how to dream of what will happen in 2100
Do we really want to grow old in society where even after 70-80 years, one of our children or grandchildren sees yet again some comment like this and writes something like this that I am writing?
> hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man
Ellison read and responded to the political situation more skilfully than Elon.
He used Stargate to cement himself as a power broker in AI. He used that influence to provide antitrust assurances that gave his son a leg up for Paramount. Meanwhile he used that proximity to media to get a foot in the door with TikTok.
The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy. This is a project all the major Trump donors and high-level supporters contributed to. That Ellison is coming up as one of the new aristocrats is closer to a dice roll; that we have oligarchs, now, is very much by design.
In authoritarian regimes the industrial capacity of an economy is appropriated by the state, where the fruits of the industry are enjoyed by party loyalists.
In this case using the state to choose which business is viable, no
doubt being businesses
that play ball with the party.
-its why sectarian conflicts and power delegation is so high stakes in many parts of the world.
Ignoring the genocide topic for the moment, it’s relevant from a speech perspective: that’s an alliance of hard-right groups who have spent the last year conflating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and trying to shut down voices which disagree with them (e.g. cuts to research grants based on unrelated actions on campus). Consolidating a large chunk of the information space under a unified group opposed to free speech should concern all of us.
Your post is fair, but it's not how I read the OP, which seems less concerned with consolidation of power than with people supportive of Israel having power. And while I appreciate that criticism of Israel is not anti-semitism, believing that Israel is a legitimate state that has the right to self-defense is all it takes to be labelled as a "Zionist", and at that point it's practically a euphemism for "Jew". I'm not familiar enough with Bari Weiss's views to tell if that's what's being done here, but the use of a pejorative without clarification, combined with the fixation on "Zionists" and the implication that their intent surely must be to issue pro-Israel propaganda in particular makes it sound a lot like old-school anti-semitism.
The wider context here is that the TikTok ban had significant support on the grounds of, what politicians and Zionist lobbying groups called, "anti-Israel bias" and "support for Hamas". Not just the explicitly stated "China Bad" motivations.
The opposition to TikTok on grounds of it's Chinese ownership had been on a slow burn right up to October 2023, when it picked up steam in the wake of the early response to the Gaza War. US politicians were furious that the youth weren't buying the Bipartisan Approved Position(TM) on Israel.
Considering that major world organisations, even holocaust remembrance ones, are now calling Israel's actions genocide, that fury has aged like the finest bottle of raw milk.
Hence:
> and the implication that their intent surely must be to issue pro-Israel propaganda
That is indeed the implication made, for the reasons above, I don't think it is unwarranted.
That’s fair, I can’t say I know their inner thoughts either. Personally I’m concerned about the political unity and lack of respect for other people’s freedom of speech. We’re healthier with a robust public debate.
I sympathize with the sensitivity of the topic and what dog-whistling can look like. However, we're discussing media that people consume and the control that people have over that media. One of the most critical topics being controlled by media right now is the genocide in Gaza. And we're looking at a large section of media, including TikTok, being controlled by someone who not only denies that a genocide is happening, but is also complicit in it with their military contracts with Israel.
I think this is all relevant to the topic at hand.
I'm sympathetic to your argument, because you set explicit boundaries on the issue of concern, and you mention military contracts with concretely align Oracle with Israeli interests. It takes very selective reading between the lines to interpret the OP this charitably, when a direct interpretation reads more like "Jews who sympathize with Israel shouldn't own media platforms, because they will use them for propaganda." Which is maybe four words distanced from last-century anti-semitism.
I will add that TikTok is already being measurably manipulated, which everyone seems to be glossing over, perhaps because the bias runs in the "right" direction.
Only boomers in the US right wing have a net favorable view of Israel and it seems to me a lot of that is driven by contrarianism in response to the Left. The left hate it to therefore I must like it… that and the evangelicals. As the genocide drags on I think it’s putting many boomers off and more up to date polling may find that Israel is underwater there too. That would only leave the right wing leadership being net pro Israel which simply highlights the disconnect between politicians and the people that vote for them.
I’m pretty sure buying media companies like this is an attempt to stop the bleeding.
> Only boomers in the US right wing have a net favorable view of Israel
One, source? Because it's broader than that.
Two, you're measuing sign but not magnitude. A majority of Americans now have a negative view of Israel. A vast majority of Americans are unwilling to prioritise this issue in elections. (To the degree there are folks willing to do so, they're in deep-blue cities. Their power is in Democrat primaries. Not in general elections, and certainly not over the GOP.)
Republicans aged 19-49 have are split 50-50 on Israel with a strong and clear trend in the negative direction. That only leaves 50+ Republicans, sure a stretch of 'boomer' to include 50-61 in that but that only means it'll take a bit longer for the 50-61 cohort to hit net negative.
This isn't a problem for Israel now but I believe it's existential for them in the future.
> isn't a problem for Israel now but I believe it's existential for them in the future
"A slight majority of Americans (53%) now express[ing] a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel" is new, but given "the share of U.S. adults who voice very unfavorable views of Israel" is only "19% in 2025" (up from "10% in 2022"), it's not fair to call the threat existential. If that latter rises into the 30s, one could expect the American-Israeli alliance to start fracturing.
(Given the size of Israel's economy and potency of its military, it's also naïve to assume it couldn't replace America as a security partner. What it probably couldn't get from its new friends would be as favourable, deferential terms.)
It's a bit weird to say Israel could replace the US as a security partner without giving an example of who that would be. Russia? China? The EU? And what money are they to buy the materials with, their own? American? Who would continue to bribe their neighbors they're not at war with and restrain those they are at war with. What if Iran really does get nukes, what if a 3rd country gives them one.
Currently the Americans are trying to figure out how much sovereignty they really have and are discovering that it's indeed effectively none. What do you think that does to a population, especially during a sustained economic recession, where the fed is dropping interest rates, while stocks are at all time highs. It seems like the only thing Americans can agree on is that 'this cannot last', I don't know what'll replace it but there is a reasonably good chance it won't be good for Israel.
> weird to say Israel could replace the US as a security partner without giving an example of who that would be. Russia? China?
China, Russia and India come to mind. (The latter two need Israeli weapons expertise and are transactional about their geopolitics. The last is in the growing throes of anti-Muslim ethnonationalism. The first and third import energy.)
> what money are they to buy the materials with, their own?
Yes. Amercan aid to Israel is less than 1% of its GDP [1][2]. We buy influence with that money, but it's not existential.
> What if Iran really does get nukes, what if a 3rd country gives them one
...Israel already has nukes and superior delivery mechanisms to Iran. Also, if Iran gets nukes, I put Israel becoming a regional hegemon protecting the Gulf from a nuclear Iran on the board.
> Americans are trying to figure out how much sovereignty they really have and are discovering that it's indeed effectively none
This is dumb. America's Israel policy until about 2025 has been broadly popular with the electorate. (Israel could have become unpopular earlier, but nobody particularly likes folks occupying universities and blocking bridges.)
With regards to sovereignty I was referring to US foreign policy, not dealing with annoying libs. Right now the struggle is between the Restrainers and the Primacists to decide if a war with China should be preceded by a war with Iran. Israel is pushing for the war with Iran because it wants to be the local hegemony. No American gets to vote on this and those who thought they were voting against it actually voted for the person most likely to enable it. Hence zero sovereignty, well maybe that’s negative sovereignty.
1% is absolutely huge with regards to a GDP (money spent). Also that’s not all inclusive, you need to throw in all the other money the US spends on the Middle East.
I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind on this, but I generally am interested in exploring the bounds of others. Unless you have something new and interesting to share I think we’re done here.
> No American gets to vote on this and those who thought they were voting against it actually voted for the person most likely to enable it. Hence zero sovereignty
You're mixing up sovereignty with direct democracy.
We're a republic. We have total sovereignty when it comes to geopolitics. None of that requires Americans voting on foreign policy issues, which in reality, given even informed Americans' international literacy, would be horrific.
> 1% is absolutely huge with regards to a GDP (money spent)
But easy enough to replace, even solely with domestic resources.
> you need to throw in all the other money the US spends on the Middle East
This is nonsense. One, we're not abandoning the Gulf for a variety of financial and geostrategic reasons. Two, even if we do, that's an opportunity for Israel as an emerging regional hegemonic.
> I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind on this
Wouldn't have expected otherwise. These discussions can still be interesting for us, as you mentioned, and for others.
I know Israel sees its future as a regional, and perhaps global, kingmaker. The fulcrum upon which the multipolar world balances and that this is an attractive proposition to them. But it’ll be entering into a world with a combination of circumstances that have never happened before, which I think is one hell of a risk, a risk that has a good chance of ending disastrously for them, let alone the rest of the world. And what should happen to them if they fail.
It’ll be like singing ‘we’ll be home by Christmas,’ or ‘King Cotton,’ often many of the assumptions that underpin these beliefs do not pan out. I guess it’s now ‘free beachside real estate.’
You said conspiracies always land on one place, which clearly implied blaming "the jews". There is no point in debating people like you but I will reiterate a point you should care deeply about. Israel, right or wrong, is losing massive support among the younger generations world wide. And pretending they aren't massacring civilians and intentionally starving them only weakens Israel in the long run. So keep it up, you are actively eroding future support.
Ellison claims his Zionism is disconnected from his mother being Jewish. He has also distanced himself from his Judaism. It is also worth noting that more American Zionists are Evangelicals than Jews. Last I saw, Netanyahu has a higher approval rating among American Evangelicals than he has in his own country. This issue is very much Zionists vs anti-Zionists. Attempts to frame it as Jews vs non-Jews is just a different flavor of anti-Semitism.
Thank you for saying this. The American Christian Right's staunch pro-Israel voting bloc is way underappreciated by most critics of the lobby money. These people are legion, and would not vote against Israel if you paid them: it's part of their Christian messianic religion that the Jews be in the Holy Land.
If the American Christian Right were purchasing TikTok, then it might be relevant to a discussion about the purchase of TikTok. Instead we have... this whole subthread of pointless crap and justifications for the pointless crap.
The original complaint here is that American Zionists are purchasing TikTok. The point being discussed in this subthread is that American Zionism is more in line with the American Right than American Jews. Therefore the relevant trait of the purchasers being criticized is their right wing ideology and not their religion.
I’m pretty sure the conflation has entered US law at the state level in most states. Not sure where it’s at the US federal level but it’s either conflated there as well or it is about to be.
Recently, I've been shocked to witness how normalized Jew hatred (which I distinguish from criticism of Israel) has become within Gen Z, even among people who exhibit progressive views and are otherwise vocally critical of racial/ethnic discrimination. I doubt it will stop with the genocide/war.
On the flip side, I see very little actual hatred of Jews, either cultural or religious, but I do see a lot of people claiming that any kind of opposition to the IDF flattening Gaza is equivalent to Jew hatred.
Because there is an ongoing genocide being perpetrated by Israel?
For instance, would it be strange to dig into the ideological and personal ties of a businessman to South Africa at the height of apartheid? Or is it only strange when it has to do with Israel?
I'm gonna go on a limb and guess that since its a social media platform where people have been widely protesting a zionist led genocide by a Israel. the fact that the investor is a zionist and Israel supporter is probably very relevant.
more or less akin to a coal miner operator taking control over the EPA even.
It’s absolutely being missed. The cause isn’t the Israeli sympathy. That’s an effect of the party pushing to put American media under the thumb of the President. (Ironically, by a President who was helped to his position by TikTok.)
There is a lot of tail wagging the dog conspiracy in this thread. It dangerously reverses causation.
A16z and many other Zionists were pushing hard for this ban under Biden. Trump is doing their bidding, not the other way around. You can look up their X posts about it.
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Is the argument that the Larry Ellison doesn't have huge sway over the companies he's owns outright or in part, or that saying him and Elon Musk have outsized control over America's information environment is conspiratorial? Either seem laughably wrong since these things are all public information
The consolidation of US media under a small number of right wing owners is an easily verifiable fact, not some conspiracy. Also, it's bad. Free markets need diversity, both in products AND in ideas.
In 2020, 22.4% of the US population voted for Trump. In 2024, 22.7% of the population voted for Trump. I hate how people draw drastic conclusions regarding what the American people want based off the shift of less than half a percentage point of the population.
I don't think that necessarily follows. An abstention is a voting choice that doesn't imply support for one choice or another in the minds of the voter, regardless of the result.
Abstention is not that, it is saying you are comfortable letting others choose for you. You have to consider the end result of the action not the intention of the action to understand what the choice really means.
Everyone who chooses not to vote is voting “I don’t like any candidate” and so voted against all candidates. How is your interpretation more valid than mine?
You aren't voting against anyone. You either vote for someone or you take yourself and your vote out of the picture and ceed political control to more passionate people. That is what they are doing, "I will let the most passionate people choose our leader and I stand by their choice" not "I don't like anyone."
How can you possibly feel comfortable ascribing a motive to over a hundred million people? You didn't answer the question on why this interpretation is more valid than mine.
I'm not ascribing a motive. They might believe whatever to justify their inaction. I'm just outlining the actual effect of their choice, which is quite literally to allow for others to choose.
This is a subtle moving of the goalposts. The original point from misnome was that people who didn't vote "voted for whoever won". Your last point was that non-voters inherently "stand by their choice". Neither of those is "the actual effect of their choice". They’re attempts to interpret the intention of non-voters.
Idk about america, but there's definitely a sentiment echoing I feel like all across the world that there is a concentration of power and the divide between state and class is shrinking and we consider state to be itself (corrupt?) / not working to our wants.
That's my understanding of it. People have given up hope on...well having hope.
But hey lets define what is a woman first, that matters more than people sadly suiciding because they can't take this cruel petty world anymore.
We have induced our cruelness on earth, every animal,tree, air, even other humans. Who have we left?
Have we forgotten humanity? What does humanity even mean when we realize that people literally eat animals which scream to death from pain for the "taste" ?
I myself ate an egg yesterday for "protein" after a few years, I am skinny so I had to convince myself that I needed it but still my heart felt a bit bitter.
I am not judging you if you eat meat, that's not the point because I don't have a point/agenda. I am venting.You almost feel small when you think about it.
I really feel like the world can be a better place so there's hope tho.
Are there any other examples of something like this happening? A successful (foreign) app is forced to be sold to a US company just because of its country of origin? What happened to the free market? It's remarkable that privacy is even in the conversation when FAANG is just as bad
Not to mention that this is all just a distraction from the very real destruction Trump 2.0 is doing to peoples' lives, safety, financial outlooks, rights, etc and flushing our country and planet down to the toilet for his benefit
Today I learned! I remember it being sold to a Chinese company a few years ago, didn’t know it went back to US ownership. Ironically just deleted it because even with an Adblocker it’s still unusable with all the bots
The party of laissez-faire capitalism is now into "let's interfere", with government ownership, presence within companies and of course, dropping the hammer on "unpatriotic" speech, a kind of Amended First Amendment.
10 Small Steps: Executing the Fascist Playbook [0]
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.
Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.
So, same old, basically. When I was a kid it was the same thing, kids spending all evening watching sitcoms and otherwise-trash TV. I was online on my computer learning programming, audio production, trying different operating systems, playing every game I could get my hands on, as well as chatting with people all over the world & making friends who I'm still friends with today, ingesting media from all over the world as well, completely free of corp/govt propaganda. Kids can still do so, if they choose to skip past the pop culture garbage that is shoved in everyone's faces, just as I did 20-30 years ago.
Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>
"Someone said something else was bad and it wasn't, so therefore anything else that someone says is bad is also not bad" is an obviously incoherent argument once you strip it down to its basics.
Yeah no I get what you mean, but my argument is like, you should try to be resilient against the arbitrary whims of the powers that be regardless of what their flavour of the week is. Asymmetric power/influence is a dynamic that will always exist in society, especially exacerbated by the scale and reach we see today.
Absolutely! But one of the tools we created to make this possible is government. There are forces (like multinational corporations) that exceed the power of an individual or many individuals to mitigate.
Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.
Ah totally, I exclaim frequently that there should be government-backed open source and decentralized software[0], putting power of technology into the hands of everyone (rather than letting this power get consolidated into monopolistic corporations) ... but then, what we seem to have currently is a huge correlation of motives between state and industry, and neither seem to have the incentive to put power in the hands of individuals. And individuals often don't even want it either. Either way though, yeah, regulation is long overdue for SO MUCH of this stuff.
Yeah, you are 100% correct. I need to find him a few good hobbies before I release him to the wolf packs.
I don't know. I myself never sticked to a hobby even after trying a lot of them. Genetically speaking he is a lot like me -- lack of discipline, difficult to cool down, impatient, throw tantrums frequently, etc. The list is pretty long :/ Not many good things from this genetic pool TBH.
I feel like short form video is inherently addictive, what special sauce are these smartest minds in the world using that adds to that?
I've never used it, but since YouTube introduced Shorts I've become victim to the addiction and subsequently blocked any trace of Shorts with a browser extension.
I think the way they make recommendations are pretty good (looking over my wife's shoulder sometimes). But that's just my guess, I mean, it could just be pushing the next best viewed video from the same tag.
It's the best I can do honestly. As another commentater mentioned, what can I do if my son's friends use it extensively? I don't know TBH -- the best I can do is to not give him a smart phone too early and try to grow him some other hobbies before brainrot reaches him.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted.
But… but… TokTok put full-page ads in all the big newspapers telling us that thanks to them, a yoga mom in Montana can now take her free-range artisanal oat milk candle-making side-hustle and turn it into a full-time job, paying just a little over minimum wage!
Isn't that worth destroying the minds of millions of American children?
This seems like a premature reaction. The Trump administration has been known to anchor to extreme positions as a negotiation tactic.
Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.
Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.
>A new company will be created to operate TikTok, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the report said.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
I doubt it. Oracle has a booming datacenter and cloud business right now. Their role is to host the data in a US jurisdiction, which they can do. It won’t affect the success or failure of TikTok. And frankly it won’t give TikTok users privacy since the data can still be accessed by software written by Chinese employees.
Yea, I’m sure the sociopaths at oracle have the fingers on the pulse of the younger generations. They’re just going to up the censorship and enshittfy it resulting in its users moving on the next new thing.
Madness for the USA, but a win for Europe if our kids are shielded from right wing American content. I wish Europe could do this with X. Force Elon to create a wall between US and EU users.
There are so many comically evil villains in ths one deal.
Example: Silver Lake. Many younger HNers may not be that familira with the story of Skype. To summarize, Skype was a big deal, the first real mass market caller-to-caller Internet voice messaging services. It was founded in 2003, bought by eBay (of all people) in 2005 for several billion dollars. There were plans to spin it out on an IPO but Silver Lake led a buyout for less than eBay paid for it I believe in 2009 (~$2.75 billion).
Now in 2011, Microsoft bought it for ~$8.5 billion. That was great for the employees, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I believe the new company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to make it difficult to sue, a bunch of executives were fired before the buyout to avoid paying them out and, most controversially, the options had a clawback option that allowed Silver Lake to forcibly purchase options at the original rather than the buyout price [1].
Larry Ellison is more well known in HN circles as comically evil. Pretty much everything he touches leaves a Grand Moff Tarkin level of stench of evil from his attack on public access to Carbon Beach through his massive property portfolio to his more well known attacks on open source (originally as a threat to Oracle's dominance).
He is a Trump loyalist and true Putinesque oligarch who will probably amass levels of media control well beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest dreams. You can bet your bottom dollar that every media property he touches will serve the administration and I'd be shocked if one or more of these deals doesn't directly enrich Trump and/or his family.
I'm still trying to figure out if putting off the shutdown until they had a deal was even legal.
The Constitution has the worth of toilet paper if the executive can just keep saying "I don't want to enforce this law because my buddy here has a financial interest in that not happening as its supposed to", which is exactly what is happening given how close Larry and Trump are.
Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.
My theory is that it highly depends on the few random people who view New posts and if they upvote/comment.
The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.
I think just like how new comments can go to the top of a post, I think HN should change the algorithm such that new posts can sometimes go to the top of HN as a way to quickly test if the post is worthy or not.
A lot of high quality posts have 0 upvote and 0 comment.
Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!
Not really news in this state. Because other than a few more details here it's not any different than the story from last week (which we knew Oracle was in the mix etc). The deal isn't final.
It is funny to say this as if there was some past story on here that everyone saw. In the last month, the story about a potential TikTok deal with the most engagement maxed out at 3 comments and 17 points[1]. This is probably the most important news in the social media sphere since Musk bought Twitter and the HN audience doesn't care about it until contracts are signed? That's pretty unbelievable.
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
— Bryan Cantrill
It makes me uneasy to let a company that was literally named after a CIA program and given billions of dark money over the years selectively educate our next generation.
Plus, Ellison on surveillance tech: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,”
Don't worry. His son is also odds on favorite to own half of the US broadcast, film, and streaming media via Paramount, CBS and are in talks to purchase Warner Brothers, HBO, Discovery, and all their other cable brands. Oh wait, maybe we should worry about that a little.
I wonder if the license fee will be based on the number of followers. I hope it’s based on real engagement. I don’t want to pay just because a bunch of bots are following me. /s
Depends. Better as a word is a little too wide to interpret accurately without some additional information to go on. For example, if you look at my post history, you will know that I am not too keen on social media in general. From that perspective, it could be interpreted as a win. And yet, I think most of us here recognize the development as a whole is not 'good' ( since we are going with generic, not-easily-defined verbiage ).
The problem with that rhetoric is that at some point you need social media to prove legitimacy of your identity.
It already happens at border controls and TSA checks.
Guess when that "you can just not use TikTok" argument will expand to "you can just not use the internet" and effectively be punished monetarily or socially for not wanting to use it.
I hope this is sounding alarm bells for everyone else as much as me.
Larry's son buys Paramount (CBS) and promptly fires Stephen Colbert, a money making machine who was leading his timeslot as what was, in hindsight, a clear message to everyone that nobody is safe if they don't fall in line.
Larry now gets TikTok, which like it or not is the most influential social media platform among today's youth.
Both are Trump fanatics. This is the next stage in the Ailes playbook that has already gone too far in ruining the American experiment.
Conjecture. But, since the article says Colbert has 10 months left, I think this would be a awesome turn of events if they canceled his show for political reasons (to get Trump's FCC approval) only to ultimately keep the show now that the FCC has approved the deal. That would be the purest form of beating Trump at his own game.
Why is it that for nearly every story involving a Jewish name, someone has to come in and complain about Israel? Besides, there are plenty of venues to criticize Israeli policy and actions, especially if you do so respectfully.
What does this “stake” get America at all? Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok? The point of the ban was to avoid national security issues from having an adversarial state (China) controlling speech in America. Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:
>Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
Too popular to ban. Political constraints.
>Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?
"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."
________________
I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.
The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
>(which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework)
The ban wasn't executed on digital privacy concerns. The intent of the original ban was on digital privacy concerns, and that was shot down.
>The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout. But the reason the ban passed the second time around was because China would not censor content about the Gaza genocide. The ban had no legs until October 7th and TikTok frustrated the US/Israel message that Hamas was homicidal terrorist group that spawned from no where.
What seems obvious is that, yes, the new TikTok, will fall in line with other US owned social media companies when it comes to spreading US propoganda.
So while Chinese social networks have "What happened in tiananmen square?", US social networks will have "Is Israel committing a genocide?".
“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.
Key details:
1. New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.
2. 80% owned by a U.S. investor consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz, 20% by Bytedance.
3. Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
4. All U.S. user data would sit on Oracle infrastructure in the US.
5. Algorithm will be initially licensed, but has to be reengineered to comply with the law.
Not discussed - whether the US tiktok app is allowed to compete with TikTok outside of the US. My guess is NO.
This seems like the microwaved corpse of the original 2020 deal. Bytedance keeps all the IP, sells Oracle the nearly worthless right to operate the US infra. They can't even call their franken-app Tiktok. The US user data already sits in the US but they'll expect everyone to forget about that so they can brag about this token win.
They'll probably get what they really want, which is an admin console for the algorithm that has a 'political slant' slider that they can slide as far to the reich as they wish.
Is the US data accessible to non-US entities? The point right now, as I understood it, is to cut off PRC access to the data completely.
Before: we’re spying on you, but here’s a copy!
After: we’ve moved the spy machine to Ashburn VA, here are the keys.
Wait the US version can’t even be called TikTok?
It will be interesting to see how this plays out though. People follow the money. Investors wouldn't be interested if they didn't see the value. If the new app can snag the network effects, then it will win. What is TikTok worth without the US audience?
The buyers are so absurdly wealthy that it’s not really wealth anymore, it’s power. They’re simply trading some of their dragon hoard of power for some other form of it. These people are above pedestrian worries about ROI.
> People follow the money. Investors wouldn't be interested if they didn't see the value.
The value may well be in currying favor with the Trump regime, not in the actual deal for itself. If you can lose a few billion on becoming best friends with an increasingly authoritarian leadership, you may well get much more power and future opportunities from that.
This. Ellison is a Trump+power fanboi. Through a few billion at a project to get multiples in return in other projects.
It might be zionism rather than 'fanboiing' over Trump that motivates him. It seems one has to curry favours with Trump to keep him tolerant of Netanyahu and unconditionally supporting of the state of Israel, and this would likely have such an effect.
Recently the Ellison clan dumped a large amount of money on the infamous genocidaire Bari Weiss and is pushing CBS to accept her as a senior member of their news organisation.
This shit is crazy that it’s really happening. The double whammy is that the youth is not prepared intellectually and will continue contributing their data to this platform.
Some will. There’s a good chance any modification to the algorithm will make it less sticky and the youth will migrate to another app.
It’s part of a larger trend of the buying platforms for obvious propaganda. It seems to be a successful strategy.
So Bytedance can still access user data going forward?
Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
Why?
The nominal reason for all this is that we didn't want a Chinese company controlling an important social media outlet. I don't love that reasoning, but fine, whatever.
So they're forcibly selling it to an American company. Which should solve the problem, right?
Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies? Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
Seems obvious to me that this is so the government can force the platform to silence users who are critical of the government.
You're right, it seems obvious. Considering the number of self-professed "free speech absolutists" I have encountered on this site over the years, I'm surprised at how much benefit of the doubt others are giving this.
I'm not. The last few years have made it very clear what the actual political goals of the VC-tech world are. I was as disappointed as anybody, but I'm not surprised anymore.
I was trying to be more neutral, but after some thought, this isn't the time for that. My "surprise" was more than a bit sarcastic. Between this and the FCC going after Kimmel, now is the last chance I will give for anyone claiming to care about free speech to prove they weren't lying. There's no plausible deniability anymore, free speech is unambiguously under attack.
What’s even more hilarious are all the anti cancel culture warriors from the past few years going on about how the Kimmel situation isn’t cancel culture.
Especially since this is probably the only incident in the last couple of decades where the cancelation was a result of the government threatening consequences unless a specific individual was not canceled.
Cancel culture has been firmly adopted by all political sides now. It is simply too powerful and effective a weapon to be not used.
That, and boosting the influencers they want to be heard.
Particularly the Israeli government.
Honestly curious how much of this is about stopping people from knowing what Israel (and the US by extension) are doing.
Just in time for them to “finish the job”
EDIT: Found this: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/tiktok-ban-fueled-by-israe...
>Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
Well, yes, for starters. I think there's a pretty strong consensus from people on all sides that there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
It's the beneficiary of powerful network effects, it created those effects for itself with a superior app, but nevertheless it is a distinguishing feature. I also would say it's culturally positioned perhaps the best of any major social media app over the present and near term.
And in its current ownership it's required by statute to comply with Chinese national security data requests. And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
>> Are we going to be putting [US] government-appointed directors on all [US] social media companies?
> And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
Agreed.
I think its pretty obvious how and why, every other platform copied the key parts of Tik tok, youtube has shorts, and others have their own rendition. What they all miss is that this IS Tik Tok its not some additional part of Tik Tok. It's a simple UI that gives you endless content you like, they tag all the content in a meaningful way behind the scenes, and then the recommendation engine works to feed you more of what you like.
Pinterest but for short videos.
> there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
I really have to disagree at this point. Meta has all the money in the world to throw at this, and inference isn't rocket surgery. I think Meta's algorithm caught up a couple years ago, if anything it's even more addictive. Tiktok is simply riding on first mover status, plus it's a Coke/Pepsi thing, a large segment finds Meta properties distasteful for all the obvious reasons.
I agree (not OP). The difference in addictiveness between the three big boys (Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) grows smaller with every passing year as their back-catalog of content grows.
Pretty much everyone I know consumes TikTok style content these days. I personally have blocked myself from this stuff via deleting the Insta, YouTube and I even wrote a TamperMonkey script to block myself from getting trapped down the rabbit hole.
Self shout out: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/534969-begone-youtube-shor...
I think it's more the product design is far more distilled for popular (and addictive) short term content. From ad placement to UI to the format of solely being a frictionless video platform with mostly anonymous users.
> but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
I think political scholars will debate on what the net effect of this is actually going to be. As in, are we better off with the GOP or the CCP controlling the algorithm? Certainly, the CCP has anti west incentives that the GOP does not, like trying to confuse us as to how we should feel about protecting Taiwan.
But in the past, the CCP has been interested in sewing discontent in the US and the method by which they have done that is by propping up the GOP. And many ways by which both the CCP and GOP would presumably manipulate the algorithm would be similar—owning libs, promoting radical right wing views, etc. But having the GOP control TikTok is a different thing entirely, they are much more incentivized to propagate their own flavor of politics to skew the nations narrative to their liking, in a much more controlled way than I think the CCP would. See twitter for prior art here.
At least if TikTok is owned in the US there might be some oversight into what’s going on. As bankrupt as Mark is as a person it doesn’t seem like hes pushing his own political views into instagrams algorithm, unlike the case at twitter. I think we have yet to see how Ellison will treat the great power of controlling the TikTok algorithm but I’m cynical.
> CCP has anti west incentives that the GOP does not
The GOP wants to destroy the west even more than the CCP, yes.
> And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
At the rate the US is going this will be interesting for Europe and Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, in probably the near future.
It's an interesting question, but the information we have so far doesn't seem to be enough to give a meaningful answer yet. E.g. is it something like "one person appointed to oversee the full terms of the transition are kept" or "one person appointed always to make sure TikTok aligns with the government".
I'm not necessarily a fan of either... but to vastly different levels.
Because Trump wants a proxy so he can continue to influence the direction TikTok takes. He wants easier access to data so he can go after his political opponents, as well as get things censored he doesn't like. Of course, this would all be possible without someone on the board, but it can't hurt, and likely will help.
If TikTok removes something, would the fact that there’s a government representative on the board give standing for a first amendment claim? Normally private companies aren’t required to furnish you with first amendment rights, but if one could argue that, if not for the board representative, they might not have prevented that speech, then perhaps you would have standing.
Yeah, the supreme court will get right on that
As soon as the appointee is appointed by a Democratic politician, at least.
When has this government give a single care about free speech or the constitution or even the law in general?
Pushing trad wife and Christ is king content to young people is worth it. Propaganda works.
That is a seat reserved for AIPAC.
You know the answer lol
They don’t want you scrolling through insert_controversial_topic at break neck pace. The bandwidth on TikTok in terms of getting a visual out is extremely wide and fast.
Remember though, it's only bad when the other guy does it. We don't want Chinese government involvement in TikTok, but we do want US government involvement. /s
The "Be all you can be" slogan requires more than just a great firewall that China should pay for, it needs a constant vigil to protect it from German nihilists.
Build a [fire]wall and make China pay for it is an amusing — if bleak — joke. Thank you :)
What do you mean though by protection from “German nihilists”? Is that a satirical name you imagine the US government might use for the EU?
I mean I do want the world's most influential social media app to be within the jurisdiction of a non-authoritarian state, yes.
So... we're transferring it to one who requires a government representative on its board?
"non-authoritarian" state said completely unironically.
So then you agree that putting our current government even partially in charge of the new company would be a bad idea?
i want the worlds most influential social media app to be away from the jurisdiction of any powerful people/organization, whether that’s governments, religions, billionaires, etc…
i find it worrisome that some are implying it’s new controllers are somehow less of a threat.
The USA is also an authoritarian State, it just has better marketing.
I live in Taiwan. I'm no fan of the CPC. But if you zoom out a bit, it's kinda hard to distinguish the two beyond Americans winning global cultural victory (CPC propaganda is still goofy and obvious).
Point at tiananmem square, an atrocious massacre of their own citizenry. The USA has done this - it has locked its citizens in concentration camps, supported their enslavement and recaptured the ones that managed to free themselves, bombed wealthy neighborhoods of the wrong race, had soldiers fire upon striking workers and peaceful protesters. America just has no Tank Man photo and much more subtle media relations - ostensibly free media but in reality controlled through the mutual interests of the billionaire owners of the media conglomerates and the multi millionaire politicians.
The CPC did a genocide in Xinjiang. They were very good at information control here, it's almost impossible to find even an image from the inside of one of their concentration camps. The USA funded a genocide in Palestine, but it can maintain a sort of non culpability. At any point in time the USA can turn on its Israeli allies, and my cynical expectation is that when the government becomes flagrantly fascist enough they'll just blame the Jews and call it done. But, until now, they've maintained an extraordinarily effective marketing campaign propping up Israel as a bastion of freedom and democracy in a demonic environment,values it's managed to market across the entire world that isn't the PRC or cuba or Venezuela, to where people in other countries will say "I can do what I want, it's a free country" even in countries where that really isn't the case e.g. for speech in the UK for example. In actuality it's a more racialized pitch - the Israelis are more credibly white, the Muslims are, well, Muslims. Or Brown. Whichever. But they have this massive marketing apparatus (decades of film and TV) smoothing over these racialized concepts into "freedom and democracy vs savagery and chaos," whereas the CPC with their racialized version just had Han and Normal vs Muslim and Kinda Weird (maybe dangerous!). A much more despicable pitch on the surface which is why they didn't get away with a televised genocide the way America and Israel got away with decades of apartheid against Palestine.
Anyway in summary if we take a look at all the bad the CPC vs the USA have done in their lifetimes, idk man at best the scales at balanced, worse case I think America has been worse for the world overall. I would be curious if people that disagree would be willing to do so with the context of American imperialism in mind - interfering in south America and the middle East for example. Is it still better than a country that has one imperialist action (Tibet) and a genocide under its belt?
When did the concept of "a free country" arise, and what did it mean? It seems to have been in use in the 1600s. Here it is in a tract written, apparently, around 1689 in England:
https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-tract-su...
The freedoms in that instance are freedom of religion, and democracy. (Democracy, the franchise, was limited to about 10% of men, under rules that varied locally from "you have to own a house" to "you have to own the entire region".)
But here the concept is again in ancient times:
https://archive.org/details/BiblicalCollectionPrintedBetween...
This is (a translation of) Josephus, writing in the first century about a speech by a Roman senator from the time when Claudius was put on the throne, with lines like "our natural freedom", "breath of liberty", and "the Liberty of former Times, that was dead and gone before ever I came into the World ..." I can't work out what that freedom was all about - Claudius came after Caligula, though, so you can make a good guess - but evidently this kind of concept is much older than the United States.
I also found the phrase "it's a free country" in Uncle Tom's Cabin, where the freedom in question is the freedom to control slaves.
So the concept is:
• Not modern,
• Not well defined,
• But not meaningless, either.
My meaning is more like, St. Nicholas and his flying sleigh and reindeer have existed since at least the 1800s, Father Christmas as well, Sinterklaas even earlier most likely, but Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus as the world knows him in 1930s, and the USA did the same for the modern concept of "free country" or "democracy." A couple decades of radio, television, and film dominance was the method.
I guess the US have a kind of Tank Man photo. The girl from Vietnam.
About media. For me, since Trump second term, I just can't watch Superhero movies (DC / Marvel). It just feels strange and wrong for me. Also movies like the Den of Thieves (1), the feel just plain wrong with a brutal police.
This is your annual reminder that white Muslims do in fact exist.
This is a gentle reminder that it really doesn't matter what the color of a Muslim's skin is to those who care to distinguish someone as Muslim or not-Muslim. To the racist right wing machine, those that are undeniably white (say, a blond haired blue eyed nord), will be called "Muslim" or "Jew" or "Antifa" or "queer" or "trans" and that'll be that, their whiteness is revoked.
Whiteness, like any race, is a purely cultural concept rooted in the shifting reality of day to day sociology.
A man with as-of-yet undefined politics was identified as the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk. Before he was found, a governor said, "I really hope he's not one of us." When it was discovered that he was a young white male from a Mormon MAGA family, the media machine that had been calling for the elimination of the opposition party in the USA (or various minorities such as LGBT people) went silent for about a day until it was discovered that perhaps the assassin's roommate may have been trans. Immediately he was othered. Calls for prayer for a lost young man turned again into calls for violence against trans people. I imagine Governor Cox breathing a sigh of relief. Whiteness revoked!
> Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies?
That wouldn't be a bad thing. How good has unchecked Zuckerberg been for us, really?
> Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Or the one where there's some level to force on them, like here. If Zuckerberg starts needing government cash to keep Facebook going, I'd expect a similar deal.
>That wouldn't be a bad thing
The government should be the government, and corporations should be corporations. Nothing good will come of having them bleed together.
Like church and state, you keep them separate for the good of both.
> Like church and state, you keep them separate for the good of both.
No, not for the good of both - for the good of the people. It is demonstrably beneficial for those in power in government and megacorps to conspire and consolidate that power, it enables them to further control and extract from the populace. It is the people that should be invested in keeping them separate.
Unchecked Zuckerberg is still preferable to anyone appointed by the current admin.
> Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
In other words, one's data will now be under the scrutiny of amoral radicals who have decided to target people for political speech.
We are slowly becoming Communist China.
Won't be long until all companies will be required to have a party office.
This is such a funny take. In China corporations operate at the behest of the government. In the US the government operates at the behest of corporations.
That's changing, though. They <are> working together, but the balance is tilting towards the US government and worse, towards individuals controlling it.
The U.S. is moving to state capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism) which is common in fascist regimes (think Nazi Germany or fascist Italy)
That's not true. You won't have state care or education
maybe, but i think what I see here is trump is not interested to beat china, just see what he did with s korea and india.
the only thing may indicate that trump is competing with china is how hard he's trying to please putin, but apparently he needs to work harder to get into the organ harvesting club.
US bought a big stake in Intel; the US is quickly attempting to replicate China's system of State Capitalism. If you can't beat em, join em, I guess.
This has always been the case. Such as the White House asking for certain moderation on Twitter (revealed in the Twitter Files) and Meta, Patriot Act, and of course everything Snowden brought to light
Weren't they just reporting to Twitter when they saw posts breaker twitters existing policies?
Key word here is "asking".
> All U.S. user data would sit on Oracle infrastructure in the US.
Legally required to use the services of a specific company, that's a sweet deal right there.
As part of Project Texas[1], they've already been using Oracle's infrastructure.
> The central feature of Project Texas is our work with Oracle to isolate the TikTok services serving U.S. users within Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment as an additional safeguard. Although gateways to the storage infrastructure are strictly monitored and controlled, U.S. users of the TikTok platform can still communicate and interact with global users for a cohesive global experience.
[1]https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-about
TikTok has been on Oracle cloud for years. One of its biggest customers.
I suspect the legal requirement is for it to be in the US, the Oracle part is probably just because they're the ones investing.
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That’s very interesting, I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Also, I see creators, trying to create US based TikTok accounts because they believe that this way their content will be shown to Americans, which are better monetized. If that’s the case, I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
It the international creators stay with the international TikTok IMHO that will be a huge win for China, practically displacing American culture for the younger demographic in the rest of the world.
>I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Look at recent events: American government officials want to maintain the same level of toxic culture wars that foreign governments want. They just want to control them, not contain them.
Giving power to the radicals that want division wouldn't have that effect, and it's bizarre to even suggest that it would.
>> I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
If I were China I would do this deal and then ensure that the payout is better outside the US. Try to sway US content creators to use VPN's and post outside the US and essentially limit the impact of the deal.
> I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.
Huh? Are you not aware of US social media companies?
Everything that's happening on TikTok is also happening on X, Facebook, Friendster, or whatever the kids are using these days. The only difference is that the TikTok algorithm promotes Chinese propaganda and ideology, and enriches the Chinese government and ByteDance. The US can't have that, hence this deal.
This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota. That would require strong regulation of social media companies and adtech in general, and there would be a nationwide revolt if that were even proposed. This is far from being considered anyway, now that Big Tech is deeply entrenched in the government.
>This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota.
Broadly speaking, I think you're probably right that the dynamics on tiktok already exist elsewhere in social media. But I do think a practical upshot of it could be a version of Tiktok where you can criticize the Hong Kong takeover or Xinxianj labor camps or harassment of expatriate dissidents or Taiwan indepence openly and not have it soft-deplatformed. Which could cause stronger domestic consciousness of those issues, and stronger solidarity with Europe and the rest of the Western world.
Oh great now Americans get to talk about things the US government could care less about while at the same time losing the ability to criticize Israel or the current administration. Does not sound like a great win. There were plenty of platforms to talk about those topics already. What didn't exist was a platform that expressly talked about things the US does not like. It could be argued that the rise in pro-palestine awareness post Oct 7 is in part to TikTok. Thats likely going away now so Americans on the whole are left worse off.
> losing the ability to criticize Israel or the current administration
When did Americans lose that ability? I didn't hear about this happening.
> could be argued that the rise in pro-palestine awareness post Oct 7 is in part to TikTok. Thats likely going away now so Americans on the whole are left worse off.
The only thing that changed is that China can't choose what you get shown, do you think that the pro-palestine videos are only there due to Chinese influence?
>When did Americans lose that ability? I didn't hear about this happening.
It fell in between the razer thin "terms & conditions" of most American service providers and the the main point of this thread: controlling the algorithm to suppress these thoughts. I will concede that Americans can still set up their own online service and yell into an empty room.
>The only thing that changed is that China can't choose what you get shown, do you think that the pro-palestine videos are only there due to Chinese influence?
anything that China does not find offensive is there.
Not being able to openly criticize the US or any other government on social media is hardly important. Free speech never existed on privately run platforms to begin with. It's delusional to think that it does or to demand it, when all users must abide with specific terms and conditions. The only people who think that are those whose views happen to align with the views of companies that run the platform. The moment that changes, as we've seen from the Twitter takeover, the previous user base will denounce censorship and deplatforming, while a new user base will celebrate "free speech". It's all a circus of ignorance and disinformation.
The main problem is that allowing foreign propaganda from a political rival to influence your citizens, while giving them free reign to exploit user data, is undeniably a matter of national security. The issue is that taking over a single platform doesn't stop foreign influence and data mining, which is also happening on all other platforms, courtesy of the adtech machinery that powers all of them. We have concrete evidence of this from the Cambridge Analytica leak, which was just the tip of the iceberg of a multi-billion dollar industry.
So unless US companies are willing to take a severe hit on their revenue and drastically change their business models, which can only happen with regulation that in practice will never be enacted, none of this will change.
If you're a user of these platforms, stop worrying about what you can or cannot say, and start worrying about what you're being manipulated to think, say, and do.
Just fwiw, Threads is basically the go-to for Taiwan stuff. It's absurdly popular in Taiwan and people recently used it to help organize one of the largest protests in Taiwan's history.
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> 1. New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.
IMO this significantly impacts the value I would get from TikTok, as much of the content I consume on the app is from outside the US
I guess they are hoping the US market will be big enough so self sustain and even entice some foreigners to join the US only app?
Wait, so for everyone else this means American content will be off the main app and be contained? If this stems the tide of MAGA brain rot seeping north into Canada it's an absolute win.
MAGA content is easily avoidable, because the algo already prioritizes what you engage with. For me in Canada, there's just a lot of funny/insightful US-based content I do watch.
TikTok got significantly less interesting when the US blocked themselves earlier this year, if that happens permanently it'll probably hurt TikTok worldwide.
Will people just stay with the old app out due to inertia? Or will there be annoying "blocked in your country" type messages until you switch? (at which point you won't know what's been blocked in your country)
Will there be an old app and new app available both to US residents? I don't see how that'd help them reach any of their stated goals, as I'd expect overwhelming majority of users to a) simply not care and stay, b) prefer the better international app with more content from all around the world
In other words, TikTok US becomes TruthSocial Reels?
I wonder where all the liberal content will go.
> 5. Algorithm will be initially licensed, but has to be reengineered to comply with the law.
The government board director is one thing, but what exactly does this mean?
The law simply requires that the content recommendation algorithm not be shared between the two apps. [0] Thus, it must be rebuilt by the new team, and not maintained or controlled by the old team.
The licensing approach is a temporary solution to keep the app working from day 1. One of ByteDance's complaints during the lawsuit earlier this year was that is was going to be technically infeasible for engineers to rebuild something as complex and essential as the content algorithm in the short window of time they had before the law went into effect.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
"The term “qualified divestiture” means a divestiture or similar transaction that ... would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary; and ... precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between [the two apps/teams], including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing."
Gotcha, ok - that’s less alarming.
"Hey Claude, please re-write this algorithm"
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
All this to "protect the children"... why are US politicians so interested in kids? Politicians being involved in a kids app? Why? Could it be to curate some naughty list for future exploitation (blackmails anyone?) or to get location data about the kids? Mmm wonder when masked """"law enforcement"""" will disappear the parents and traffic the kids somewhere?
Just ban children from the internet, make it the responsibility of the parents. Its that simple. Make it illegal for kids to have access, especially to user generated content (incl chat), same level as firearms, pharma drugs, voting, entering into contracts etc. Internet is and was never a place for children to begin with.
This is a land grab under the guise of "protecting the children"
N. 2 and 3 concerns me quite a lot. This looks like a thing people would 'mock' China for
Won't this separate out the US community on TikTok completely? Almost like the GFW ironically.
Massive win for Meta as it'll push a lot of folks towards Instagram Reels, which won't be siloed from the rest of the world.
The split between the US and the rest of the world maybe never was bigger than today
Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of TikTok and have many critical opinions of Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but…
This gives me vibes of a weird company takeover, a la the kinds of things that happened in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: government-driven benefits to large corporations and investors with friends in the right places, government involvement, forced licensure of a core aspect of the product (Rearden Metal?).
I’d like to learn more about: what are some other similar instances of such a thing?
10% of intel 80% of TikTok ??% Meta ??% Google ??% Amazon ??% S&P500
Cool. Chuck Schumer will clutch something and say “this may be a sign of something not good.”
government appointed commissars eh. i see were bringing it back eh. bet they will make sure it wont criticize a certain group of people lol
id like to see a similiar setup done in canada for each of the US big tech companies.
owned by canadian oligarchs, with one CBC appointed director
I could see local variants of American data dealers for Europe as well. Facebook without all the privacy issues would be borderline useable, maybe.
>> US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users
Very interesting! The separate "in content" bit in particular. Sounds like US TikTok will now be one giant echo chamber. Users outside the US will miss some US content but tbh, I find TikTok content is actually quite localised anyway. Big benefits for users outside the US are:
1. US doesn't get my data.
2. Hopefully less US political BS to swipe past.
3. I am much less concerned with the sway China has on Western Europe than the sway the US has and am therefore much happier using a China-backed version of the app sans US content/users/control/propaganda. The extreme brain rot causing people outside the US to care about 'MAGA' or that recently assassinated man will hopefully start to recede. That can only be a good thing. We have plenty of our own polarising issues without importing irrelevant ones.
Of all the tech companies, Oracle seems to be making the most and a killing due to Larry's cosy relations with Trump.
Last week's announcement that they have a 500 B deal with Open AI, and now this.
Elon really fucked up!
> Oracle... Horowitz
tl;dr: the entire US media is now controlled by men who've bent the knee to Trump and have demonstrated that theyre willing to take an activist editorial role.
I was really disappointed by this. Do Americans have no dignity or ego? Are they so conditioned to fall in line with a leader?
Key details:
1. DOA app nobody wants
2. whocares
3. see 2
Good luck to the administration while trying to roll this out.
> one member designated by the US government.
Why does the board of TikTok need a gov member? Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too? And Oracle surely needs one as well.
Is the gov putting out a call for board member civil servants? Like where does this person even come from?
Same reason they put a guy at CBS as a "bias monitor":
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fcc-cbs-ne...
They want their guy to make sure things go their way / people say the "right" things.
> a guy at CBS as a "bias monitor"
Kenneth Weinstein.
"Mr. Weinstein has had a long career in right-leaning and neoconservative public policy circles. He is a firm and vocal champion of Israel." (NyTimes)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_R._Weinstein
This is precisely why I don’t see the value of “right” and “left”, because it’s absolutely useless and even a distraction from understanding the true nature of these types of topics. It has absolutely nothing to do with “right” or “left” and everything to do with overarching interests.
The US political party system has no "right" and "left" -- it has "right" and "righter right."
At the grassroots level there is a bit of a "left" in the Democratic party, but it has no power anywhere.
We still have (hopefully) a democratic choice how this plays out, so the distinction between left/right is meaningful regarding political overreach (beyond the stereotypes propagandists like to attach).
If you are arguing that the left is identical to the right in that regard, you truly deserve your downvotes. I mean ... leftist censorship-cancelation for no good reason.
So at least 5 accounts not only do see the value in dividing people into “left” and “right”, but they also were compelled to vote it down?
Or was it just abuse of the system?
I've been wondering if enough people would be single issue voters on the Israel question that we could actually get some sort of candidate who attracts a ton of voters from both traditional parties.
It's ironic because (IMO) people like Ben Shapiro and other pro-Israel people deliberately divide us to prevent us from uniting against them, but the genocide has actually united us[1]. Just the other day I saw a Twitter post from one Cenk Ugyur reaching across the aisle and saying "good job" to right wingers who objected to hate speech laws against people who celebrated Kirk's assassination.
Admittedly, if 68% of Americans are opposed to Israel that doesn't necessarily mean all of them are single issue voters... but I think this is the first issue I've seen in my lifetime that gets this close to uniting Americans.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-militar...
Cenk Ugyur agreeing with right wing talking points is not "reaching across the aisle." Not even a little bit.
Didn't expect to see the USA employing press censors in my lifetime but here we are.
In Brazil during the dictatorship it was common for newspapers to print cooking recipes in place of censored articles, now I'm waiting to see if media in the USA has the balls to play the malicious compliance game... I guess I won't see it since money is basically God in America.
One could argue they're not the same, but there has been TV broadcast censors for decades in the US. They were still least following somewhat defined laws though.
> They were still least following somewhat defined laws though.
I expect them to continue to do so, except that uncle Donald is the law now.
> Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too?
They already got quite a few, post 2024 election.
https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/dana-white-john-elkann-cha...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/tech/robby-starbuck-meta-ai-a...
Ha. I hadn’t seen the news in the latter link.
Washed-up music video director to professional Twitter poster to advisor at Facebook. What a display of the American meritocracy.
> Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too?
I believe the technical name is "Political Commissar."
Edit: Dana White, of MMA fame, now sits on Meta's board, though it is at Zuckerberg's request.
The whole country is turning into a joke, that's why.
Oracle doesn’t need one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32596903
It's the political komissar, here to make sure nothing too critical of the current administration is allowed on the platform.
This goes way beyond this current administration and has nothing to do with China, besides being the foil for the real reason of controlling what people can see and hear because the cabal that controls the USA does not like it.
Just so we know, who's the cabal?
Any do you act ignorant?
Just say it instead of hiding your beliefs behind dogwhistles and half-coherent questions, you coward. Is it the jews? It's always the jews with you people. Fucking grow up, there is no secret cabal to blame this awful administration's behavior on, that's the terrifying reality.
Why do you assume everyone knows?
List stuff out for all to see and learn.
Yeah I want to know who the cabal is too. Release the kraken or whatever.
What do you mean - the CCP has always had someone sit on the board of major companies… oh wait which country was this again?
TikTok dealt a serious blow to the Western consensus manufacturing apparatus. We saw that with Gaza especially. This deal is a step towards taking back control.
Taking back control by _checks notes_ handing the Chinese propaganda tool to supporters of the current administration?
Yes exactly. The US government likes propaganda. They just don't like it when other countries do it.
That's how all ruling classes and governments throughout history have operated. It's now just mask-off in a country that people mistakenly thought didn't do that sort of thing.
Yea agree. The US used to be good at making the world believe they're all about freedom and rights etc. Now they don't seem to even bother trying anymore.
I read a lot of anti-American comments like this one, mostly on American websites like Hacker News and Youtube.
I'd say the anti-American comments outnumber the pro-American ones something like 10 to 1.
The US may not be preaching about freedom and rights. But it seems to be practicing it, at least in the narrow sense that anti-American content isn't being censored or suppressed.
> But it seems to be practicing it
This deal cuts the US off from worldwide content. Just like China does.
The US TikTok will literally be a bubble that the US gov controls. So it's not even pretending to practice 'freedom' here.
> Just like China does.
this deal is a direct copy of the one China forced onto Microsoft MSN Messenger's China operation some 15 years ago. almost 100% the same.
Can't speak for others.
My "anti-American" comment is due to the difference between what's preached and what's practiced. "Leader of the free world", "greatest country on earth" etc. I also wouldn't characterize my comment as anti-American so much as disappointed in America.
There is of course more freedom in the US than in say China. But I'm also not holding up China as a beacon of freedom. The US on the other hand, the land of the free, freedoms and rights are being eroded.
>"Leader of the free world", "greatest country on earth" etc.
I don't see Americans referring to their country that way anymore. I think you're arguing with an interlocutor who peaked in the Reagan era and has been on a downtrend ever since.
Personally speaking, as an American, I don't want to lead the free world anymore. I don't want to be the "greatest country in the world" either. I'd rather the US just stick to solving its own problems, and let other countries solve theirs. The whole hero act has clearly been a mistake.
Leaving aside impact to the rest of the world, America being the "leader of the free world" has benefited it immensely. Majority of the global systems were built by Americans. Everything from military power projection to global reserve currency status to pop culture has not only given the US clout and power but also a lot of wealth.
Sticking to solve their own problems is how the Chinese declined into being the "sick man of Asia" hundreds of years ago.
>America being the "leader of the free world" has benefited it immensely.
It doesn't make a difference. See this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/GDP_per_...
GDP growth stayed on the same trend both before and after the US tried to "lead the free world" post-WW2.
>military power projection
That's a cost for us, not a benefit. I don't want my tax dollars to be "projecting power". I want them helping me and my fellow citizens.
>pop culture has not only given the US clout
The internet is awash in anti-American comments. Trying to "lead the free world" has destroyed our soft power.
>Sticking to solve their own problems is how the Chinese declined into being the "sick man of Asia" hundreds of years ago.
My preferred model is Switzerland, not Qing China. I'm not anti-modernization. I'm anti-imperialism. We shouldn't involve ourselves in wars or military alliances on other continents.
> military power projection
> That's a cost for us, not a benefit.
If id get a cent for every US-american not understanding their hegemonial privilege...
(Sorry, shouldnt be an insult. Its just so prevalent and to me, a sign of lacking self criticism on a worringly massive scale.)
Eg:
https://business.columbia.edu/research-brief/dollars-dominan...
TLDR: The US military backs the dollar as international trade currency, which puts all other nations in a depending position to lend USD. This allowed the US to cheaply amass a gigantic debt that in turn allowed ridiculous (military) budgets.
Please dont answer something like "see, we are in debt for you", since the US got material stuff in return for a fiat currency that can they can devalue on demand but had been accepted on the basis of trust and stability.
Remember when "the market got the yippies" and trump chickened out of broad tarifs? It was also because of long term allies sending a signal by liquidating US bonds:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-bond-y...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/15/us-treasurys-selloff-what-ha...
A continuing drop of bond yields could mean a collapse of the US national budgets. Thats the benedit you enjoyed for decades. Something other nations cannot do.
>lacking self criticism
I really don't think the US has any shortage of self-criticism. I am criticizing US policy at this very moment! It is you who defends current US policy and says it is good (for the US at least). I am the critic here.
But if you really believe what you're saying about self-criticism, that's evidence for my position that the US should not play world police. If we're incapable of self-criticism, we will do a bad job at world policing.
>TLDR: The US military backs the dollar as international trade currency, which puts all other nations in a depending position to lend USD. This allowed the US to cheaply amass a gigantic debt that in turn allowed ridiculous (military) budgets.
"There once was a fisherman relaxing on the beach, catching just enough fish to feed his family. A businessman told him he should work hard, hire employees, catch more fish, and grow a big company—then, after many years, he could retire and live a peaceful fisherman's life. The fisherman smiled and said, ‘But isn’t that what I’m doing right now?’"
Assuming you are right: We need the debt to fund our military. We need our military to borrow for our debt. Why are we playing this game, exactly? It's a cyclone of vice.
Personally, I think the USD would actually be a stronger reserve currency if we reduced international adventurism. This would reduce the incentive of other nations like Russia and Israel to interfere in our politics, and thus improve our institutional stability. Switzerland is very stable, and an attractive investment destination, because it is known to be neutral.
It's also not clear to me if reserve currency status is a good thing. It makes our exports less competitive, and increases our trade deficit. It's like eating cookies for every meal. Sure, you're getting a lot of calories. But it's not good for your health in the long term.
If you look at the GDP trendline, it's been the same regardless of USD reserve status. So I'm additionally just not sure this matters either way.
In any case, if you really believe what you are saying, you should be very happy about my advocacy, since it increases the chance that your nation's currency becomes the new reserve currency. Oh boy, your country might take on a ton of debt and become the new self-appointed world police, hated by all, with constant foreign interference in your politics! Isn't it grand?
Why are so worried, then, whether the world is anti-american or not? Why use that term, if you personally don't want see the world through nationalist optics?
I saw a commenter the other day here claiming that in EU, there are lot of "anti-american" far left sentiments. They weren't able to elaborate, who exactly that is; as someone on the left, I don't see it.
For example, I live in EU, I support DiEM25, and I am against NATO, as well as stopping other military activities. I also agree with Chomsky. Is any of this anti-american? How is then yibg's comment anti-american?
I guess you can't have it both ways - the american soft power (you seem to miss) came with exceptionalism. I agree that Switzerland is nice, but they simply don't have that soft power.
If people outside the US complain about what the US does, we should stop doing it. The fact that everyone complains about US foreign policy means we need to course-correct. No one complains about Swiss foreign policy.
I think we agree, since we're both against NATO. Not sure why you're trying to argue with me.
According to swiss news orange man does in fact complain about swiss foreign policies to the American public.
News to me.
Ex. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/04/swiss-presid...
He literally made a personal point out of it calling the swiss president things in public.
I don't see any complaints about the Swiss policy of neutrality, which is what I want to adopt in the US.
Have you not been paying attention to what's been happening in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination? The government been foaming at the mouth and clamping down on everyone who dares say anything other than obsequious praise about him. ABC just tonight cancelled Jimmy Kimmel at the behest of the head of the FCC!
And I mean, it's not like this is new. The past two years have seen intense crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech. Look at what happened to Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk.
I have no particular opinion about those issues. I'm just pointing out the irony of people complaining about "US propaganda" on discussion platforms where the content is overwhelmingly anti-US.
It's very likely that after a few of these comments you aren't getting a visa anymore. That is far from practiced freedom
That has been a long while ago since they stopped trying to portrait this image
You wrote this as a snarky rebuttal but you seem to be agreeing with OP? Confusing post.
I didn't realize I was agreeing with op tbh (and I'm still not certain)
Yes, indeed. As the current administration, any US administration in the last 30-40 or years in fact, is for a fact very pro-Israel, so a move like this can only cement that stance.
Maybe these crypto-zealots who scream about decentralization will actually try and build a thriving decentralized media instead of pumping and dumping shitcoins?
The problem is that it's hard to make these things popular.
There are several ActivityPub services that are pretty good and even have decent UXes, but they aren't super active.
A major issue is it's confusing and the funds are limited.
Yeah. I'm on Lemmy and Mastodon, but it ain't exactly jumping, and I'm sure part of it is definitely the confusion around how to get going and what it is. Lemmy at least is also pretty buggy, and I'm not able to find posts I saw a few hours ago, but ultimately I don't really know what the draw is or even could be for the average user.
Federated chat/social always goes back to similar usability and technical problems as email, except with a broader scope so it's even harder
> try and build a thriving decentralized media
This exists today, it has always existed, and you never needed technology to find the solution to it.
Im a huge fan of the film Rope, because it is just done well. Its also got a ton of coding in it for "homosexual" themes that were very much banned at the time of filming. Understanding these paints the film in a whole new way...
Shakespeare has a ton of contemporary satire coded into it. Unless you're aware of history or reading a version that illuminates the meta-context you would very much be unaware of its existence.
It happens in modern film: Paul Verhoeven is a master of it.
If you dont think there are coded communities on existing social platforms sharing information among in members I have news for you.
More like walking straight into another form of "consensus manufacturing". You are not more informed than people a decade ago.
It's not a matter of more or less it's a matter of what information you receive and in what order.
Oracle owned Tiktok with right-wing and Trump friend Larry Ellison at the helm is a step in the right direction? That's crazy.
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I'm not an expert but this makes me think that it might time to turn off the screens and stop letting half-trillionaires decide what we look at.
Use Fediverse/ActivityPub, XMPP (maybe matrix), IRC. Use protocols, not "apps"/"platforms". Stop using corporate-owned centralized services. Well, unless you like being the subject of exploitation and manipulation of course.
The nuance of protocols vs apps though is lost on the masses. Most people just want to stare at reels or be stared at in reels.
This means that the only people you will encounter in protocols will be privacy freak type nerds and “normal” people you might actually feel better interacting with or watching are on popular apps.
Word. Leaving the made-to-be-accessible/engaging hyper-capitalistic walled gardens requires some initiative and/or agency, which unfortunately only the minority of people are willing to bother with. Either way, I like to make it more broadly known: there are, in fact, alternatives. Ask a geek near you to try out some neato stuff that isn't trying to make you spend all your money and/or isn't trying to manipulate your beliefs etc.
But yeah if the normal people are where all the ads and spam and nazis are, I'm fine being a weirdo :)
Protocols are good- but respectfully at this point fediverse is basically a transgender support group.
What are you saying? Fediverse is bad because scary transgenders?
They aren’t saying that - and you know they aren’t. They’re also correct.
Fediverse, in my actual experience, is overwhelmingly filled with hyper left leaning echo chamber content that I’m not interested in.
I know they aren't? The person hinted at something but didn't say anything concrete, so I don't actually know what they're saying, which is why I asked them to clarify.
I've been using mastodon for nearly 10 years. Fediverse, in my actual experience, is overwhelmingly a really good place to meet and chat with interesting, friendly people. Follow and engage with cool people and you'll have a good time. If you go looking for what you don't like, you'll find it, because it's there just like anywhere on the net. The difference is you don't have to see stuff you don't want to see, because the software and protocol have features that allow this. I'm on a pretty small server and we all are pretty much on the same page about what we expect our social interactions to be like. You know you can just filter out content, right? Your server can totally block or defederate from servers that have objectionable content, too (by whatever your collective definition of "objectionable" is). It works pretty well if you use it the way it's designed to be used.
I'm saying it's unlikely to take off because it's pretty taken over by a group fringe enough to push away the average person. I'm not being entirely fair honestly. It's the internet we're in though- the "middle ground" of yesterday that helped sites take off in the past is getting harder to find.
Oh, it already has taken off sufficiently. There are some 10-20 million users[0]. Like I just said in an adjacent comment I've been using it nearly-exclusively for almost 10 years now, myself. It's not built for "growth" or to "compete" with big corporate social media so it's all good. Whoever is interested can try it out for themselves. BTW I've been on the net since 1992 and can say with certainty, every new social technology is dominated by the fringes of culture at first because we're the ones who want to make our own place that isn't full of jerks. Like, fediverse wasn't taken over by any fringe group, it started on the fringes. We're happy to have anyone who isn't a jerk though, it's generally that simple.
[0] https://federated.works/page/collaboration/statistics
Definitely pretty valid points- I'm surprised by how long it's been around I always considered it a covid thing. Society could definitely benefit from the right sort of fringe ideas and people at the moment.
If you have kids, get them off the internet asap. No access. These people thrive because they have illegal contracts with kids. They control the hearts & minds of so many households. Reject the whole system. Cut the cord from all bots, propaganda farms, intelligence agencies that runs a direct line into your child's mind. They are teaching your children to think a specific way. Its gross.
Without screens, how do you get the scale needed to organise and influence the direction of your country?
It's time to go take the half-trillion from them.
Is this a coup by conservative government to gain control of this social network to promote it's ideologies?
first Twitter, now Tiktok, both controlled by conservative interests?
Suppress the "enemies" and bolster "allies". Oh and mindfukc the children to fall in line.
It's a coup by pro-Israel interests like Larry Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz.
This has been floating around since the end of the first Trump administration, where neither of these interests were accused of being “pro-Israel” but only entrance narrative after the current Palestine debacle:
Therefore I’m only left to conclude this is an entirely unsubstantiated claim, as why wouldn’t it have already been apparent if they were working as shadow brokers of Israeli interests in all this, which the general timeline and verifiable information we know don’t line up with?
Is this an AI comment? They have vast business interest and contracts with Israel.
The people who have been very vocal about forcing US ownership of TikTok have also been very, very open about their Zionism on social media. A16z has been pushing for this hard since the start of the genocide. Zionists blame "TikTok" for their opposition. They even call the younger people who don't support Israel the "TikTok Generation".
This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control, is very much about Israel and attempting to gain a monopoly on the media.
> This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control
Conspiracy theory.
CNN, CBS, TikTok, Zionist bot networks. You can’t argue with facts.
What evidence do you need to see?
Russia Today American Edition
I mean why not unban them too?
It's a page in the conservative playbook going back a long time, from consolidating newspapers to talk radio to TV stations and now a new type of media...
And now we see them getting main stream networks on a leash.
Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.
Yes. And to enrich their buddies and campaign donors like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
I thought Ben Horowitz supported Kamala during the 2024 presidential election.
He did not.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/16/felicia-ben-horowitz-party...
Man, the sheer transactionality that guides these people's lives is pretty disgusting to me. Granted, you probably don't get to be a billionaire unless you are pretty transactional, but I am kind of thankful that the vapid hollowness of these billionaires (despite always cloaking their rapaciousness in some sort of larger societal purpose) has been laid bare over the past few years.
That's bonus. The real thing is to make tiktok a right-wing ideology machine. I'd rather have the CPC than the GOP at the helm.
I don’t want either of them, but credit where credit is due. China is doing well as a country and the standard of living has increased even if it’s under an authoritarian regime. I wonder how long that will last. Meanwhile, the USA is becoming Russia. Basically a bunch of misinformed morons living in the past and thinking we are on top of the world while we accelerate towards irrelevance on the global stage if not for a massive stockpile of nukes.
Remember that you can't have a democracy and increase the standard of living of your people and don't have USA planning a coup.
>> China is doing well as a country and the standard of living has increased even if it’s under an authoritarian regime.
What do you mean "doing well"?
https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/chinas-economy-on-cusp-of-a-de...
May 2025:
Tariffs are drying up international demand for Chinese goods, and in a bid to keep factories alive, Beijing is urging exporters to turn inward. However, that pivot is compounding the very problem it aims to solve.
Deflation isn’t an abstract threat in China anymore—it’s visible across the economy. After barely holding above zero for much of 2023 and 2024, consumer prices have now dropped for two straight months.
Producer prices have fallen for 29 consecutive months. March’s figures showed the sharpest drop in four months, and forecasts point to an even steeper decline in April.
Look at the past 15 years in the US vs the past 15 years in China, it’s fairly obvious
Yes, trade wars suck but overall if you’re a young Chinese citizen today you’re doing better than your parents or grandparents could’ve dreamed:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Yes, I’m fully aware that’s starting so low because of horrible governments in the past and that the current government is far from great, but that’s still moving in the right direction at the time the United States is trying to speed run to a Russian-style oligarchy and most people under 50 think it’s getting worse.
It's a strange set of affairs where prices dropping is a terrible thing and prices increasing is good.
It's really odd how many people on hn are pro china. Why? They are not good guys. At all.
In moral terms they are so far behind the West they are in a different team. (and don't throw in disingenous deflections like gaza and whatever, those are orders of magnitude less bad then China) The West is full of freedom and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. China isn't.
Nobody here is pro Russia or Iran, or even particularly pro India. So why is Communist China different?
What an insane thing to say! But also... how insane is it that I agree with you based on objective reality? Can you imagine seriously saying that 20-30 years ago? 1984's doublethink/doublespeak always seemed over the top, yet we are at a point particularly recently where the anti cancel culture sentiment has lead to... proposals to curb undesirable speech, cancelling people... which in turn is undesirable because it criticises a propagandist's undesirable speech with his own post death quotes in a lot of cases and bristles when accused of sane washing. Or that this won't matter in a few more news cycles as we lurch brokenly into the next phase of dystopia.
I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners. Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.
> wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners
So that’s where the name of that David sylvian / ryuichi sakamoto song came from.
I always thought it was just a throw away from the subject matter.
The CPC is not attacking the US from within. The Party of Trump has carried out a fascist coup and they are now working to ensure they stay in power permanently.
I loath partisanship and am more than willing to point out failures by the Dems, but this is different. Trump and Co have openly stated that they don't believe in democracy.
If you are not able to see this I'm not sure what I could say to open your eyes.
The GOP is still more incompetent than anything I've ever seen.
Bullying, yes. Competency, no.
So incompetent that they control all three branches of the most powerful government on earth. Much of that can be credited to their media ownership strategies.
Underestimate them at your own peril...
The unfortunate thing about democracy is that competency at getting elected doesn't always translate to competency at governing.
They are stupid, but also ruthless and willing to ignore the laws they don't like.
They are also surrounded by billionaires that want them to keep it going. Look at how Larry Ellison is buying up Paramount/CBS and soon, Tiktok. They just took Kimmel off the air.
Again, I know this sounds like histrionics on my part but what is happening now is not normal -- the fact that all "old school" republicans have left the GOP and it is now literally the Party of Trump. And they have millions of cult members who are itching to use their second amendment rights against "non-Americans".
I desperately want to be wrong, and would love credible evidence that could demonstrate this.
It takes a lot of competence to defeat the concept of an objective fact.
Really? They are following Putin’s playbook and getting away with it. Controlling media and sharing the spoils with the oligarchs. Together, they are robbing us blind. What about what they are doing makes them incompetent? Evil, yes. But incompetent? They are winning! You think this ends with the next election or when ol’ Agent Orange kicks the bucket? Things are going to be very different here for a very long time unless we collectively get our shit together in a big way and take it back.
They put loyal, useful idiots on the public stage. The real leaders are not on TV, you dont even know their names.
Seems like it. It seemed kind of inevitable. Biden made a mistake going down this road - of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term, but Biden should've just left it alone because it wasn't hard to see that this was the likely outcome.
Biden? You do realize Trump attempted to “ban” TikTok in his first term when the original Oracle “deal” happened, right? Pinning this in Biden takes some serious mental gymnastics.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/914032065/tiktok-ban-averted-...
Yeah, I do realize that and in fact mention it in the comment above: of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term. Not "pinning" it on Biden, per se, but he is the one who signed the bill. It would have been much better to leave it alone. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-what...
Do you suspect Biden had a little plaque on his desk saying "The buck stops somewhere else"? He signed the bill. If he didn't want to own it, he doesn't have to put his name on it.
No one can seem to remember who was president in 2020...
Biden signed the bill.
With very large and rare bipartisan support
This law passed during the Biden administration, but its implementation has been delayed repeatedly by the Trump administration.
> but it has been broken repeatedly by the Trump administration
fixed that for you
The bill itself outlines specifically how and why it can be delayed. That was violated in the very first "delay".
Turns out not having any penalty for the executive failing to apply the law is a mistake.
Who could have predicted this.
There is a penalty just congress has to enforce it.
The only penalty congress can enforce on the executive is cutting the budget of things the executive wants funded.
Also this only matters if the Fed is independent. If it’s not, the President can direct it to purchase unlimited treasury bonds, effectively printing unlimited money to fund any program it wants.
Paired with this administration’s assertion of impoundment powers and the pocket rescission, the Congress’s power of the purse is completely neutered in both directions. The executive can decline to spend whatever it doesn’t want to, and it can fund anything it does want.
Recklessly funding the government off of the Fed’s balance sheet will of course cause all sorts of nasty economic effects, but that’s exactly why you need to print money! So your massive immigration enforcement apparatus (newly full of ideological minions thanks to the current hiring surge) can go and assert powers of process-free expedited removal throughout the entire country (per DOJ memo from week 1).
So the economic consequences hardly matter: you simply deport whoever complains.
It turns out that if you won't impeach an executive on any principle whatsoever, you may as well grab the boot and put it on your own neck.
Maybe the best solution is to adopt a parliamentary system of government? With the executive formally subordinated to the legislature, it can’t spend money against the legislative majority’s wishes, because if it upsets the legislature, the legislature votes it out of power (commonly with no supermajority required, just a simple majority vote in the more numerous legislative house)
Absolutely. There's a reason the US didn't replicate its own structure when it set up governments in Europe and Japan.
or impeachment?
I mean I’m as anti-Trump as the next, but didn’t the bill say it could be delayed to finalize a sale to American owners?
You could make the case that this sale means the Trump admin actually didn’t break the rules here.
It said it could be delayed with some pretty specific parameters. Quoting the Congressional Research Service report on the bill:
"The President can grant a one-time extension of up to 90 additional days when a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, there is evidence of 'significant' progress toward executing the divestiture, and there are legally binding agreements in place to enable the divestiture."
One could argue all day about whether or not there was an identified path or evidence of significant progress, but certainly there weren't legally binding agreements in place at any point, and the deadline has been extended far more than once.
Trump is ignoring the law. The DoJ has asserted that Trump can ignore the law because it would interfere with his duty to "take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States." It is unclear what, if any law, could not be ignored under this doctrine.
Only one extension was allowed.
Biden was on board with the TikTok takeover, and it had support from both left and right wing pro-Israel groups.
[flagged]
I’m not sure what you are saying… Are you suggesting that US Conservative viewpoints are aligned with those of China’s government?
Well we’re clearly in the “don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake” territory.
Allied, not aligned.
Sounds like you preferred it when it was controlled by liberal interests.
Liberal interests ≠ Democrat government
I fully expect a decent number of people in favor of this to, without a shred of irony, whine about wanting a free market whenever environmental regulations are in the news again.
What are principles?
Rhetorical devices to get a certain demographic to buy your product.
Open AI, free speech platforms, save the planet, democratize information. At the end of the day, it’s always about power.
Useful additional context
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-trump-ally-may-soon...
Is this all a canard to avoid having to implement actual consumer privacy laws?
The question is more about whether it is an intentional decision to go this route or a built-in, institutional decision. When faced with the foe of consumer data harvesting and tracking, right now it seems the US government has concluded the answer is that it is better to have an American company spy on people rather than a Chinese one.
The best answer would be to enact laws to stop the act of spying on people, but that’s anathema to US political culture right now!
Beyond spying, the government wants to be able to actively manipulate the feed to amplify certain voices and suppress other ones is my guess.
Reminds me of Yahoo buying Tumblr. Mismatched. Their best bet is to change little to nothing, but not sure the administration will let them.
It does seem mismatched but it's also an opportunity for Oracle to become relevant in the space, if they handle it right.
Though yeah, if they go the Yahoo-route it's going to be a huge waste. But it's really up to how the company handles the acquisition.
Yahoo missed big time by just trying to change the culture of the userbase way too quickly. They didn't like that people were posting porn on Tumblr when that was one of the most important aspects of the platform for the users. They bled way too many users and took way too long of a time to do anything about it.
I feel like Tumblr should have done their own patreon/OF type of push within the platform but they didn't have the vision. They literally had all the creators of that type of content at some point and they've now all moved to X/Twitter.
I hope (i mean, idgaf but you know it's a figure of speech) that Oracle has a better perspective about the issue so they don't commit another billion(s) dollar(s) crime.
That never worked.
Google had Google+ which was a massive failure.
Facebook tried releasing a product for workplace communication named Workplace/Facebook at Work and that is almost dead.
Microsoft has been eyeing a social media platform for years, and the only relevant product that I am aware of is Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) that is not very good in my opinion.
Oracle has never ever had any product that targets mainstream consumers. They always focused on enterprise products and don't understand consumers. Just like Microsoft never released a hardware product that matches iPhone's success, or Apple never has any enterprise product that remotely competes with Office. It's not in their gene. They'll be lucky enough if they don't run it into the ground.
>Current users of the app will be asked to shift to a new app
So it's just going to fade into obscurity then huh
So it's just going to fade into obscurity then huh
We won't be so lucky.
What's to stop ByteDance from waiting a while and making a new TikTok app under a different name? The network effect moats do not seem insurmountable. I'm sure once the US starts meddling with the algorithm people will start looking for alternatives.
>> What's to stop ByteDance from waiting a while and making a new TikTok app under a different name?
I'm sure this deal is more complex than "ByteDance is not allowed to run an app called TikTok within the US". Politicians are morons so I could be wrong but I would hope it's much more liberal than that.
so US users will be cut off from the rest of the world? Wow. Thats crazy.
TikTok in China is already cut off from the rest of the world. The US is just copying China's homework.
This. I think people in general misunderstand the allure of power and the means to maintain it. Power centers in US are drooling at the opportunity to do what China has done in terms of controlling discourse and language. The interesting thing is that they all assume that this particular measure of control would never be turned against them.
edit: Adjusted weapon to 'measure of control'. I accept people are a little too happy to overreact lately.
In a democracy where the politicians change every 4-8 years this is receipt for disaster. The next administration will undo action taken by the previous one. In effect destroying any momentum or progress for achieving anything. For China and Russia this is not a problem because of the totalitarian state.
These fascist Republicans are not intending on giving up power. A bit China mixed with the sham democracies of Russia, Hungary or Turkey - this is the model they're going for.
What do you think the push behind the new gerrymandered districts is for?
Why do you think they are assembling a national voter registration database that hasn't existed before? https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-doj-national-...
Why are they creating fake emergencies to justify inserting federal police and the national guard in major cities with big Democratic voting populations?
Get your surprised pikachu memes ready for the day martial law is called to permanently postpone the election.
I thought conservatives were the conspiracy theorists.
1. Gerrymandering is and always has been a thing, blue and red. Nothing has changed.
2. Government puts government data from multiple government places into one government place. More news at 11.
3. Because you get stabbed/shot for just existing in them? Because of the riots earlier this year?
Fascism = Something I don't like. Get a grip.
for 3 it cant be about riots, the president is a riot fan - he bukk pardoned the DC rioters, so its a thing he doesnt consider to be bad.
i dont think thats a good guess
Have mid decade redistrictings at the request of the president so he doesn't lose his ass in the midterms always been a thing?
I'm sure that by now someone on the Trump administration has also realized this and has some plan to keep the politicians from changing.
We are doing state capitalism without China’s “serve the people” bit. Hm, maybe there’s a name for that type of government, idk.
"Democratic People's Republic of America"
Probably more like "Republican People's Democracy of America"
Careful now, you don't want to accused of spreading hate speech
> We are doing state capitalism without China’s “serve the people” bit. Hm, maybe there’s a name for that type of government, idk.
Except China doesn't actually serve its people. Things are way more cut-throat there, with much less safety net. The Chinese government sees workers as grist for the mill, not something to be cared for.
> The Chinese government sees workers as grist for the mill, not something to be cared for.
I think this is universal, but perhaps China indeed may be worse.
There is a significant difference in a population of 70 million educated workers who need to be maintained for high performance and 400 million low skill workers who are highly replaceable.
I am trying to make no judgement here, just explaining then 'motivational environment'
This math of course is in flux to a degree we haven't seen in maybe 1000+ years though right now.
> 70 million educated workers who need to be maintained for high performance
But what if AI surpasses human skill and now you have need for 0 educated workers. Not good for human citizens...
Eh, quality of life has gone to the moon in China in living memory. Not nearly as much a positive delta here in the US.
I think you can it's just shifted by several decades because China took a long dark detour through the Cultural Revolution. QoL exploded in the US in the Post War period, partially imo because we were the only industrialized economy that didn't have significant homeland attacks during WW2 so the US got a straight shot to the top of the heap. China got a similar QoL lift through a similar path, mass manufacturing (this time business taken from the US by being far cheaper) and growth of in country expertise. Now even China is feeling a similar cost squeeze drawing some business to smaller neighbors. They're also just so much larger they can sustain a larger gradient between coasts that look closer to '1st' world costs and poorer interiors where cheaper manufacturing can be done.
Sure, but what's relevant is what sort of political and cultural pressures we're all experiencing now. Maybe China is just a few years behind on the same crunch trajectory we're on, maybe not, but that doesn't matter much to what's going on today.
> Eh, quality of life has gone to the moon in China in living memory. Not nearly as much a positive delta here in the US.
The Chinese rural population still isn't eligible for local equivalent of social security in their old age (that's only for city folks), and IIRC there was a huge unwillingness to provide financial assistance to individuals during COVID.
Sure, and also quality of life has gone to the moon in China in living memory.
A few hundred million of that rural population have become city folk.
> A few hundred million of that rural population have become city folk.
Not legally, IIRC China has an internal passport system, and workers who migrate to the city from the countryside typically remain must registered in the countryside (and are therefore denied access to city benefits).
A government-provided safety net is not an absolute good; you need to ask what holes are being filled.
Just because you have fewer full-body casts than someone who just got in a bad wreck, does not mean you are worse off.
This is just the first step (and a big one given TikTok's reach) to a US great firewall.
More like the other way around.
US users are today 21 of the 49 TikTok accounts with the most followers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...> (not including TikTok itself). 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.
[1] And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move
Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of global users ended up using the US app instead of TikTok.
You won’t get the option to do it through the app stores, so pretty much no one’s going to do it.
Why would anyone want to use OracleTok?
TikTok is banned in India. OracleTok might not be.. So that's a lot of potential users.
Same way everyone uses all the other US apps?
In this case we're talking about them actually having a choice.
Like Tiktok?
Nope. I get a lot localised content. The local food reviewers etc. won't miss out on US views. The people creating content in local languages won't notice a difference either. 15 years ago I think things would have went differently but now I think people will want the non-US version. And I wouldn't be surprised if US users grab themselves a VPN and a pirated APK and use it too.
If anyone want's to save stuff off tiktok just incase this doesn't go through, just remove the "OK" from the URL, ending up at https://tikt.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283876
I am ashamed to be an American. We are going to have so much healing to do.
I'm 61. I've told my kids I could not have ever imagined we got to the state we are in, with the president trying (and largely succeeding) in advancing the "unitary executive" abetted by the Supreme Court. Hell, I wouldn't have believed it even 10 years ago.
TikTok is going to be dead in US either way whether it's banned or sell to Oracle. Snap to the moon.
With, apparently, a board member appointed by the Trump administration.
The U.S Steel deal included three board seats, but the Intel deal did not include any.
This is starting to look like the way China does things, with the central government having a financial stake in important companies.
I'm really surprised that there hasn't been more discussion of the (effective) nationalization of US Steel, so thank you for bringing it up. It's not only that he gets to pick board members, he gets final say on basically any decisions the company makes.
I'm not a fan of the administration by any means but a lot of democracies do this. Public/Private partnerships are commonplace in Europe.
Is it common for this sort of company, though? I can see public-private partnerships making sense for infrastructure, for example, but a social media company? That just sounds like a way for a country to censor and push propaganda.
Governments are much better at free speech than companies are, the US government is much more for free speech than Facebook or Google or Apple or Microsoft is etc.
So it is common for Governments to cooperate with media to ensure they remain independent and not just push corporate propaganda, not just to push government propaganda.
Yeah, I don't mind the public profiting if public money and or concessions were made to set up the business. And especially for bailouts!
> With, apparently, a board member appointed by the Trump administration.
Trump has essentially selected all of the board members. Its not a coincidence that Larry Ellison and Andreessen are big Trump supporters. The amazing corruption continues.
> The amazing corruption continues.
Also known as industrial policy. They are inseparable.
One thing I’m looking for in all of this is how trump will get a piece of this deal.
Larry Ellison and A16Z will invest in Truth Social, buy Trump Coin, help his family, (or something) just asynchronously enough that it can’t be directly connected to the TikTok deal.
Doubt they feel the need to wait. Nobody is going to do anything about it, just like nobody has yet done anything effective about the other blatant corruption. Look at the Saudi “investment” in Trump’s crypto.
So basically devalues TikTok worldwide and TikTok US, presumably a UK/EU user won’t be seen in the US and vice versa? The EU is already preparing a fine I’m sure… such an incredibly strange deal IMO, I can’t work out why anyone would do it?
I am wondering if this is maybe very welcoming for the EU. I don't think the common American creator ads a lot of value to our culture at this point, so maybe nothing of value was lost really.
I cant figure out why someone would buy Twitter and completely change the name and branding but here we are.
Between this and the US government taking ownership in Intel the "small government is good" and "socialism is bad" crowd have been very very quiet.
But its different. It's national soc... Wait...
They have been on a leash since the first term. Look what happened to Paul Ryan, the deficit, money supply, and federal reserve balance sheet.
The term has been so abused that it’s no surprise the current administration was going to push in that direction themselves.
All it takes is a minor rebranding and half the country or more would immediately sign up for it. For all intents and purposes, socialism just means “the people we don’t like”. As long as people feel like they’ll get theirs, I seriously doubt they care what economic system they’re living under.
The Evangelical thought-police republicans seem to have beat the libertarian republicans into submission.
I think it's bad news if the US government owns Tiktok data rather than the Chinese government.
Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
Americans prefer that Tiktok data lives within the jurisdiction of the US government, why? If you don't think Palantir is putting together a centralized database to survey individual Americans for the US government, you are crazy. There will be real consequences where if they don't like what you're saying or doing, they will come after you some how. I'd much rather have my data based in China.[0]https://time.com/7316628/charlie-kirk-death-celebrations-soc...
When you reach the point of choosing the lesser evil, you might just as well uninstall TikTok.
If you're a Chinese citizen, use all American services and hardware if you can.
And vice versa!
I've come across at least one businessman who refuses to use anything but a Chinese phone he bought in china, with chinese sim card and chinese apps, for that exact reason.
That's strange. It wasn't because China mandates government spyware on phones?
It's not about owning the data, it's about controlling the message.
>Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
It's arguments like this that reminds of the critique of libertarians as akin to house cats that seek to undermine the very systems that allow them to exist in the first place that wouldn't survive outside for minute. Or maybe it's just agitprop right here.
basically seizing a foreign product/service. should do wonders for the 'free market'
Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.
Users better be running now before they get hit with those new licensing fees.
Oracle: "Your phone has 6-cores and our minimum plan is 64 cores. Additionally, we see you upgraded from an iPhone 16 to the 17. Licenses don't transfer, of course. You owe us 3 kidneys."
It's like a 100 year old with hardware crypto wallet.
Not sure why I thought of Bill Belichick
I've always been fine with Tiktok dying, surely that will be expedited under their leadership
> Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.
I'm hopeful. With any luck they'll ruin TikTok and it will die, a satisfying result.
First they will start launching TikTok Enterprise.
An all-buzzwords compliant subscription based solution for enterprise and professional content creators.
why do people hate TikTok as a product so much?
if TikTok dies then one of the alternatives: instagram reels or youtube shorts would take its place.
the brainrot will be the same. I guess people think tiktok's algorithm is particularly pervasive over Google's or Meta's? But I don't see why.
Those "alternatives" didn't exist before TikTok, not the same way. Hating the inventor of a drug more than the copycats is reasonable IMO.
> why do people hate TikTok as a product so much?
That's like asking why to people hate heroin a product so much. After all, most its users can't get enough! Must be good, eh?
For me it’s the potential china influence. Reels and Shorts is at least American and I already have established relations with both companies.
Are we for sure the TikTok algorithm doesn’t bump towards or away from certain issues? The data on the cultural zeitgeist? The ability to promote political messaging?
Brainrot the same. Intentions, maybe not.
People keep saying this but shouldn't it be kinda trivially easy to check?
Start new accounts, swipe through the content and establish what kind of algorithm it is. The few attempts I've seen on youtube seem to indicate it's heavily based on your geographical area. They don't really care that much which side the apple falls onto.
I do acknowledge that there's a latent threat that could be activated. And I can see an argument being made on that front, I mean, China doesn't allow access to a lot of American social media for that reason. But I don't really buy the argument right now as I haven't seen a lot of evidence of Tiktok doing things that Meta/Google haven't done.
It's delightfully naive to think that a new account is 'fresh' and can't be associated with previous usage.
Like you say, they could target different messages for different geographical areas. Similar to how in the election last year Dearborn, MI (highly middle eastern) got different messaging from both Trump and Kamala wrt Isreal/Palistine compared to the rest of the country on traditional ads.
They can target any age range or demographics, any interests.
We had Uber hiding things from LEO almost a decade ago via geofencing and other tricks, I’m sure it’s a bit more sophisticated now.
You keep bringing Meta/Google into this. I don’t care if they do the same things. I mean, I wouldn’t like it either, but we have solutions available to us. We can pass laws or go to court and handle it internally. A foreign nation is not bound by that.
Larry will sue those alternatives for 'stealing' tiktok IP.
I immediately had the same thought. One can hope!
The "good" news is that they will only own the US operations, with the ROTW continuing to be operated by ByteDance. So if they diverge too far from the original product we can expect to see a discussion about life behind the Great Firewall of America.
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I'm curious how bad the misinformation type stuff will be.
It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.
Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.
I don't know about tik-tok, but Instagram is totally unhinged. Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuff.
YouTube shorts gets all the hate, but I find the content to consistently be the most sophisticated? PG rated? educational?
> Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuf
I don't understand how other people have this experience and I don't. I see targeted ads of course. And every once in a while it starts showing me content for things I don't follow, at which point I start mashing the button they provide to make it go away, and after a handful it pops up something asking if I want to remove all suggested content for a while. I always select yes.
Do other people actually *want* suggested comment? that's bizarre.
Most people aren't actively curating their feed like this. They see an attractive person, eyes wander for a few seconds longer than the usual post before scrolling away, and that is enough.
I agree, YouTube shorts tends to be noticeably better.
Short form video is basically worthless outside of comedy and cute animal videos. The format does not allow enough information to determine whether the information provided is accurate or not, for videos that have facts in them. Every time I watch a short form video I feel an overwhelming urge not to trust what I saw and verify it elsewhere, now I just don’t want short form videos at all.
Short form video is tailored for the fast, instinctive, emotional brain. Not the slower, deliberative, logical brain.
The modern propaganda machine does not run on meaningful facts, nor does it give a shit about not being able to convince you.
It cares about convincing people in general.
Lol is that why the Oracle stock jumped. Probably someone timed it with the other announcement to make it look innocent.
How will this not be used by trump/republicans?
Did anyone say it won't? Welcome to America the land of trump
Oracle is then going to mandate license fees from every user, together with 22% support fees with 8% increase every year.
They'll then rewrite TikTok in Java, and migrate to Oracle Database.
The Android .APK files are already Java.
To be fair, that doesn't mean they can't be re-written in Java.
IIRC, but I read the TikTok app is mostly WebViews, which was a design choice to help keep it functioning in the face of an App Store ban.
IIRC TikTok is built using their own framework, https://lynxjs.org/
I totally forgot about this... I might have to look at it again. Thank you.
The Enoracleification of Tiktok.
They're going to send thugs into businesses demanding to see if any of their employees are secretly using TikTok on company time, then demand the business buy a million dollar corporate license.
So finally all that pesky people saying that their own government is funding a brutal genocide with their tax dollars will be banned.
American media is one of the most thightly controlled and censored in the world. They need to carefully control the media to maintain the ilusion of "moral superiority" that is used to justify foreign interventions.
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The USA forcibly nationalized TikTok so they can install their own surveillance and censorship apparatus along with skimming from TikTok's profits. All while decrying China for... the same thing.
Republicans, not USA
USA is correct. Joe Biden signed the law, and Democrats didnt roll it back
Isn't this as bipartisan as it gets? Trump wanted China to divest from Tiktok. Congress passed the bill. Biden signed it. The Supreme Court agreed that, yes, this is legal.
Sure, people didn't vote for Larry Ellison to take control. But something like this is what we wanted, right?
It is, if it was Democrats installing a government appointed board seat you'd see a very different response to this event from both sides, but both sides want to do this in the end.
>The USA forcibly nationalized TikTok
Unlike most nationalizations though in this case the company will be compensated: the new US entity will pay ByteDance licensing fees.
Isn't that how it works in China? At least since the 80s. The CCP forces companies to insert their state-backed fund and officials into the cap table. Either through golden shares, forced mergers with state-owned enterprises, or forced equity sales.
I dont know.
Why would any company want to operate in America, sell to Americans or onboard American users anymore?
If you're not successful you just wasted a ton of time and money.
If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
Doesn't sound like a country worth investing in anymore.
> If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
You still make money in that case. It isn't a bad deal for the chinese. The americans who now have yet another censored app controlled by the american government are the only losers here.
Because it's the biggest market. Half of my customers are American. I have never even marketed anything to them. It's the biggest, best market with the most people willing to spend the most money.
Similarly, when the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020, 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 49 (not including TikTok itself) are American.
Anything to get a suckle at the teet that is the fed money printing machine.
Americans are good at spending money.
>If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
Besides what bluecalm said, 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 Chinese government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
So much for capitalism and the invisible hand of the free market: forced sellout, TikTok US forbidden to compete with TikTok, board member appointed by the government, infrastructure contract has to be given to a selected company ‘oracle’.
That’s something you see in Russia, not America.
This would just make them go in a situationship.
Both are not compatible with each other in any way, but they are in a great deal, one they can't say no to.
This is where either one fails or sometimes both.
I've built a 12k follower audience for TikTok's on product management and project management. Time to migrate to YouTube.
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
[2] - https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...
Thank you for providing the media take over angle. I wish the people down voting you would explain why.
He’s got the wrong guy on the paramount deal. It’s David Ellison though they’re related:
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramount-warner-bros-disco...
David Ellison is Larry Ellison's son, and Larry Ellison spent $6 billion on the Paramount deal. It's not really a stretch to imagine that the father might have some influence on the resulting operation. (According to a cursory web search, on paper Larry Ellison now has a 35.5% voting interest and David Ellison has a 64.5% voting interest.)
I agree it’s not that big of a stretch, but it elevates the discussion when you communicate what part of your argument is objectively correct vs a stretch.
My knee-jerk reaction was to upvote the comment, but that’s how Ecco chambers get increasingly divorced from reality.
how do you know if anyone is downvoting a comment?
The text gets lighter in color and harder to read. People may come later and vote for it, darkening the text again.
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I don't believe for a second that you're being downvoted by someone with multiple accounts. You're being downvoted because you tried to frame a lukewarm observation (that brought receipts!) as some insane conspiratorial hot take in a really transparent manner, while simultaneously misrepresenting it (zionists vs jews) and ridiculing it (flat earth comparison).
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https://fixupx.com/infolibnews/status/1968177947724198243?s=...
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Enough with the tone policing. The original comment is accurate: Paramount seeks to install Zionist Bari Weiss. This is uncontroversially true.
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Can you explain the conspiracy?
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We're no longer accepting this tripe as sane discourse. Anyone of sound mind has seen, over the past 3 years, that Israel's securocrats and Zionists in America and Europe shut down any views that's remotely critical of Israel by influencing the media. It's also as clear as daylight that TikTok's problems started after they gave the world a window into Israel's atrocities in occupied Palestine. Ellison is a self-confessed Zionist.
Whether it's Bari Weiss abetting genocide against Palestinians, Silicon Valley purging anyone who questions it, or actively building the weapons that enable it, you can't glue people's eyes shut or force them not to believe their lying eyes with cries of antisemitism, conspiracy, etc.
mate.
You cannot accept whatever you want
personally, I think the whole “the Jews control the media” narrative is a bit, I don’t know, antisemetic?
Any time I find myself thinking “the x, y” I find that its probably racist.
“the muslims make child rape gangs”
“the welsh shag sheep”
“the blacks are fatherless”
“the whites are culture-less”
Grow up.
As a jew (it's a shame I need to admit this in order to get through your dishonest screening), he's talking about zionists, not jews.
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"hostile take-over of the American mind"
You mean, to support Israel? Is that what this is about?
Partially, yes? I don’t see that as particularly controversial at this point. We are beyond consensus manufacturing and into explicit governmental crackdowns on anti-Israel voices in the US.
So if I say, here or anywhere, that I disagree with Israel’s actions related to Gaza, I should be afraid?
Well, here I am. Come and get me.
> to support Israel? Is that what this is about?
It’s for money and power. Because of the partisan nature of the power grab, a certain grab bag of evangelical, fossil fuel and anti-gay tenets are going to get reïnforced. But treating those as the cause dangerously misses that this is being started at home.
I'd like to hear from the person I'm responding to, as it sounds an awful lot like a dog whistle.
I replied to your original comment.
Also, I wasn't invoking some dog-whistle. I was using the same phraseology of the Zionists. From the CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, addressing the Israeli Knesset[1] :
He describes Tiktok as a target to be captured, comparing it to a mountain in Syria which Israel conquered late last year in its unannounced invasion of Syria. They make no bones about the fact that our minds are just another battlespace in this war that they're waging.[1] - https://x.com/DelGroyp/status/1856577467596845279 https://xcancel.com/DelGroyp/status/1856577467596845279
> anti-gay
Larry Ellison’s daughter is gay. Why do you think her brother and father are going to infuse Paramount with anti-gay bigotry?
It's important to remember that the ultra-powerful and wealthy live whatever life they want to live regardless of what their media companies promote.
Someone can own a media company, have it push very specific political ideologies with the goal of turning people against each other and gaining power for themselves. By pushing antagonistic media, they can prop up fringe political figures who'd be more willing to help them with their political goals. (E.g. tax policies that help the wealthy person's companies.)
They can still live whatever life they want, even going against the ideologies the media companies espouse, because they're rich enough that the fallout doesn't impact them.
They're living a very different kind of life than us.
BTW, I'm not explicitly arguing that Larry Ellison is doing this -- I don't have the context or background on that. I am saying that his media companies will 1. do things to help Larry's interests (which are probably political), and 2. that doesn't have to be aligned with however he lives his personal life, since he's effectively immune.
> Larry Ellison’s daughter is gay. Why do you think her brother and father are going to infuse Paramount with anti-gay bigotry?
Sorry, I'm speaking generally. The people in power broadly align with these policies. That means that when they gain control over a pillar of industry, they're broadly going to do influence it to some combination of those ends. The reason they gained power isn't to do those things. Ellison isn't taking control of TikTok to influence the Israel narrative. But when he takes control of it, as a result of the contours of powers that are MAGA, he will probably be forced to put forward an anti-Palestinian editorial bias.
There is a lot of tail wagging the dog conspiracy in this thread. I'm pushing back on that.
> Ellison isn't taking control of TikTok to influence the Israel narrative.
he might be doing it for money, but if he wasnt going to influence the Israel narrative in a specific way, he wouldnt be allowed to own TikTok
Current Oracle CEO Safra Catz lives in Palm Beach and is a frequent visitor to Mar-a-lago. She is actually a big Israel supporter, visiting and donating money often.
So what?
In large part, yes. There is also Trump, Republicans and their drive to carve out a bigger conservative-space in a liberal-dominated media landscape. There is Silicon valley, the rising digital-military-industrial complex, the china hawks, the intelligence apparatus and the security state, and the usual self-interests of the billionaire class. All of these forces are currently colluding to control the narrative (i.e. minds) in their favor. But I will argue the Israel angle is a big part of it which is being under-reported on ( by design).
Trump went after TikTok in his first presidency but was ultimately unsuccessful. It was the Biden government that successully banned TikTok last year in a bipartisan bill. What was the impetus then and why did it succeed? Listen to Charlie Kirk's personal take[1] on why Tiktok got banned (and how the right capitalized on it) :
Multiple congressman and representatives have cited anti-israel sentiment as their reason [2].Tiktok recently hired Erica Mindel - an instructor in the Armoured Corps in the Israeli army’s spokesperson’s unit - to lead the company’s hate speech policy. The potential hiring of Bari Weiss to head the CBS news division reveals a similar underlying motive. One which is laid out by the CEO of the ADL, in his address to the Israeli Knesset[3] :
[1] - https://x.com/DelGroyp/status/1856577467596845279 https://xcancel.com/DelGroyp/status/1856577467596845279[2] - https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest... https://archive.is/20250918033631/https://theintercept.com/2...
[3] - https://x.com/infolibnews/status/1968177947724198243 https://xcancel.com/infolibnews/status/1968177947724198243
[4] - https://jewishinsider.com/2025/07/tiktok-hate-speech-manager... , https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/tiktok-hires-ex-israe...
To be completly frank, its better to focus on the media consolidation part. That's the real problem.
Actually it's the opposite. Pre-internet, there were a handful of news sources in any given city (mostly newspapers and TV), so they couldn't afford to alienate half of their potential viewers/readers by leaning hard left or right.
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' online. So many that the net effect is that most of those sources lean one way or the other, and by and large people choose to listen mostly or only to those sources they agree with.
No wonder political opinions are so highly divided today. Almost no one ever hears anything from the other side.
For a large share of the population social media is the only media they consume, so this is part of your real problem
> So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN.
That's not Larry Ellison, it's his nepo baby David Ellison.
This is just crazy. No single person should have this amount of power, in particular if they have the moral integrity of Larry Ellison...
It is two people here. David Ellison who took over Paramount is the son of Larry Ellison of Oracle.
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison
Durin I, Durin II…
>moral integrity of Larry Ellison...
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
Genuine question: what do you think the alternative is? Ultimately someone will have the power. I don’t know what’s particularly questionable about Larry Ellison. An entrepreneur controlling media seems better than the state or a foreign government.
It less about who and more about how many. Lots of different people, with different points of view, sharing control of the media is way better than one guy having the ability to push whatever narrative they feel like at the time.
Is Larry Ellison owning TikTok objectively better for US citizens than the current Chinese owners?
Larry the lawnmower Ellison?
Trying to be neutral. Did we consider China's relationship with Palestine? Were we ok with American minds being swayed by a foreign country?
That is one of the prime reasons congress banned TikTok.
If we want neutral, how about a fair arena for opinions and ideas.. at the moment "The Right" yells and screams "Anti-Semite! Terrorist!" if someone protests against the starvation and slaughter of children... So having them control the medium doesn't feel right for me.
Ok someone's going to come and say that "The Left" controlled the medium and disallowed "non-mainstream" messaging about Covid... I admit my bias and consider such messaging lunacy too..
What's the problem with being pro-israel? Everyone needs to be pro-whatever-you-prefer? I'm pro-israel too.
> What's the problem with being pro-israel?
There are tiny pockets of this country that assume this is the singular issue that animates everybody, every day, and that it is impossible to believe in both Israel's right to exist and defend itself and the Palestinians' right to not be bombed because the Israeli PM doesn't want to go to jail.
Did you miss the news that they're conducting a genocide?
I don't think Israel is conducting a genocide, to me for something to be a genocide you need to do much more than they are currently doing. To me it seems like they are conducting a fairly standard occupation with very authoritarian military control, that is not genocide.
Words tend to get watered down over time, if they were gassing Palestinians like Hitler gassed yews people would have a very different opinion on this matter, which is why I feel words shouldn't be watered down that much.
The problem is that the pro stands from problem.
Whenever we take a stance, We identify our ego with that stance. We shall die but die a pro X or pro Y
As such many debates happen in bad faith as well.
Of course everyone has their agenda but one has to understand that agenda is just a framework for understanding the world.
And we need to understand the world because it has no inherent meaning.
So like, if we really have to deduce meaning, if we really have to be pro something that we can die on a hill towards, I'd rather have it be a humanitarian thing.
I am not saying that palestine is good either but rather that in genocide/wars, the people fighting the war/military/families displaced suffer, not the old man causing the war.
I feel like I am a humanist. Wishing to understand the world, yet I feel like some people in this world have hurt me so much that sometimes I just wish the world to burn.
I am sure that people are gonna comment on something like "oh do you support a genocide etc."
But I am trying to make the point that the world should really be just anti suffering,accepting. Yes I am naive but surely with all of this technological improvements, we can improve the structure of society to not be fucking brewing with hate and bullying and resentment.
We can do so much better as a society without even trying much. Just small acts of kindness and basically creating a environment that rewards it and punishes bullying/hate speech etc. might be really nice if I am being honest.
Not sure why we can't be pro this instead of defining ourselves with the confict of two other foreign nations
I think it stems from being a selfish species. All our life we pick sides - a sport team, university, town, etc.
We can't pick sides on violence. In wars, everybody loses.
I don't even know if we can consider things to win if that means that childrens have to die in screams.
I don't want such victories to be celebrated.
I want peace to be celebrated.
I don't think that its highly unusual to have a functioning society that doesn't actively partake where the children/woman/helpless suffer.
We have failed as a society if we can't stop it/actively pick sides in it.
The only side that one should pick is peace.
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The problem is the word 'anti'. Being pro something doesn't mean you're anti something else. I can be pro-israel and still have sympathy for the Palestinians and what they are enduring and hoping for peace.
Well I'm pro anti-israel
> This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
Again? People should be talking about the hostile take-over currently in progress and how it is getting exponentially worse. But the billionaire mouthpieces gave everyone a shiny new inconsequential talking point and no one cares about anything that matters.
> No one cares about anything that matters.
Maybe that's what they wanted all along.
Why fight a war against class, against oppression when we can sit on a chair and write a comment either defending or arguing against something as petty as religion.
It would be maybe the 3rd point worth discussing definitely after concentration of power & how they can influence our opinion of the masses.
But people made it the first.
There is no such thing as a moral billionaire imo, I saw a video like this and I sorta agree.
I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone owning this much amount of control.
Religion seems so petty to me yet it seems that the world is coming back to it. Fighting us vs them.
We have all forgotten what the people in 1970's esque dreamed of 2025 etc. (I am a genz but I have seen such videos of people thinking what)
And the funny thing is, is that we ourselves have forgotten how to dream of what will happen in 2100
Do we really want to grow old in society where even after 70-80 years, one of our children or grandchildren sees yet again some comment like this and writes something like this that I am writing?
I feel a little frustrated.
> hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man
Ellison read and responded to the political situation more skilfully than Elon.
He used Stargate to cement himself as a power broker in AI. He used that influence to provide antitrust assurances that gave his son a leg up for Paramount. Meanwhile he used that proximity to media to get a foot in the door with TikTok.
The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy. This is a project all the major Trump donors and high-level supporters contributed to. That Ellison is coming up as one of the new aristocrats is closer to a dice roll; that we have oligarchs, now, is very much by design.
In authoritarian regimes the industrial capacity of an economy is appropriated by the state, where the fruits of the industry are enjoyed by party loyalists.
In this case using the state to choose which business is viable, no doubt being businesses that play ball with the party.
-its why sectarian conflicts and power delegation is so high stakes in many parts of the world.
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He (or she) lists several other characteristics of these people as well.
Ignoring the genocide topic for the moment, it’s relevant from a speech perspective: that’s an alliance of hard-right groups who have spent the last year conflating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and trying to shut down voices which disagree with them (e.g. cuts to research grants based on unrelated actions on campus). Consolidating a large chunk of the information space under a unified group opposed to free speech should concern all of us.
Your post is fair, but it's not how I read the OP, which seems less concerned with consolidation of power than with people supportive of Israel having power. And while I appreciate that criticism of Israel is not anti-semitism, believing that Israel is a legitimate state that has the right to self-defense is all it takes to be labelled as a "Zionist", and at that point it's practically a euphemism for "Jew". I'm not familiar enough with Bari Weiss's views to tell if that's what's being done here, but the use of a pejorative without clarification, combined with the fixation on "Zionists" and the implication that their intent surely must be to issue pro-Israel propaganda in particular makes it sound a lot like old-school anti-semitism.
The wider context here is that the TikTok ban had significant support on the grounds of, what politicians and Zionist lobbying groups called, "anti-Israel bias" and "support for Hamas". Not just the explicitly stated "China Bad" motivations.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tiktok-ban-israel-... (Note: Article from November 2023)
The opposition to TikTok on grounds of it's Chinese ownership had been on a slow burn right up to October 2023, when it picked up steam in the wake of the early response to the Gaza War. US politicians were furious that the youth weren't buying the Bipartisan Approved Position(TM) on Israel.
Considering that major world organisations, even holocaust remembrance ones, are now calling Israel's actions genocide, that fury has aged like the finest bottle of raw milk.
Hence:
> and the implication that their intent surely must be to issue pro-Israel propaganda
That is indeed the implication made, for the reasons above, I don't think it is unwarranted.
That’s fair, I can’t say I know their inner thoughts either. Personally I’m concerned about the political unity and lack of respect for other people’s freedom of speech. We’re healthier with a robust public debate.
I sympathize with the sensitivity of the topic and what dog-whistling can look like. However, we're discussing media that people consume and the control that people have over that media. One of the most critical topics being controlled by media right now is the genocide in Gaza. And we're looking at a large section of media, including TikTok, being controlled by someone who not only denies that a genocide is happening, but is also complicit in it with their military contracts with Israel.
I think this is all relevant to the topic at hand.
I'm sympathetic to your argument, because you set explicit boundaries on the issue of concern, and you mention military contracts with concretely align Oracle with Israeli interests. It takes very selective reading between the lines to interpret the OP this charitably, when a direct interpretation reads more like "Jews who sympathize with Israel shouldn't own media platforms, because they will use them for propaganda." Which is maybe four words distanced from last-century anti-semitism.
I will add that TikTok is already being measurably manipulated, which everyone seems to be glossing over, perhaps because the bias runs in the "right" direction.
What the other side is doing exactly? They try to ban every Israeli, including composers, athletes, scientists etc. It's much worse in my opnion.
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Only boomers in the US right wing have a net favorable view of Israel and it seems to me a lot of that is driven by contrarianism in response to the Left. The left hate it to therefore I must like it… that and the evangelicals. As the genocide drags on I think it’s putting many boomers off and more up to date polling may find that Israel is underwater there too. That would only leave the right wing leadership being net pro Israel which simply highlights the disconnect between politicians and the people that vote for them.
I’m pretty sure buying media companies like this is an attempt to stop the bleeding.
> Only boomers in the US right wing have a net favorable view of Israel
One, source? Because it's broader than that.
Two, you're measuing sign but not magnitude. A majority of Americans now have a negative view of Israel. A vast majority of Americans are unwilling to prioritise this issue in elections. (To the degree there are folks willing to do so, they're in deep-blue cities. Their power is in Democrat primaries. Not in general elections, and certainly not over the GOP.)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/04/08/how-ameri...
Republicans aged 19-49 have are split 50-50 on Israel with a strong and clear trend in the negative direction. That only leaves 50+ Republicans, sure a stretch of 'boomer' to include 50-61 in that but that only means it'll take a bit longer for the 50-61 cohort to hit net negative.
This isn't a problem for Israel now but I believe it's existential for them in the future.
Thank you for the source.
> isn't a problem for Israel now but I believe it's existential for them in the future
"A slight majority of Americans (53%) now express[ing] a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel" is new, but given "the share of U.S. adults who voice very unfavorable views of Israel" is only "19% in 2025" (up from "10% in 2022"), it's not fair to call the threat existential. If that latter rises into the 30s, one could expect the American-Israeli alliance to start fracturing.
(Given the size of Israel's economy and potency of its military, it's also naïve to assume it couldn't replace America as a security partner. What it probably couldn't get from its new friends would be as favourable, deferential terms.)
It's a bit weird to say Israel could replace the US as a security partner without giving an example of who that would be. Russia? China? The EU? And what money are they to buy the materials with, their own? American? Who would continue to bribe their neighbors they're not at war with and restrain those they are at war with. What if Iran really does get nukes, what if a 3rd country gives them one.
Currently the Americans are trying to figure out how much sovereignty they really have and are discovering that it's indeed effectively none. What do you think that does to a population, especially during a sustained economic recession, where the fed is dropping interest rates, while stocks are at all time highs. It seems like the only thing Americans can agree on is that 'this cannot last', I don't know what'll replace it but there is a reasonably good chance it won't be good for Israel.
> weird to say Israel could replace the US as a security partner without giving an example of who that would be. Russia? China?
China, Russia and India come to mind. (The latter two need Israeli weapons expertise and are transactional about their geopolitics. The last is in the growing throes of anti-Muslim ethnonationalism. The first and third import energy.)
> what money are they to buy the materials with, their own?
Yes. Amercan aid to Israel is less than 1% of its GDP [1][2]. We buy influence with that money, but it's not existential.
> What if Iran really does get nukes, what if a 3rd country gives them one
...Israel already has nukes and superior delivery mechanisms to Iran. Also, if Iran gets nukes, I put Israel becoming a regional hegemon protecting the Gulf from a nuclear Iran on the board.
> Americans are trying to figure out how much sovereignty they really have and are discovering that it's indeed effectively none
This is dumb. America's Israel policy until about 2025 has been broadly popular with the electorate. (Israel could have become unpopular earlier, but nobody particularly likes folks occupying universities and blocking bridges.)
[1] https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Israel
With regards to sovereignty I was referring to US foreign policy, not dealing with annoying libs. Right now the struggle is between the Restrainers and the Primacists to decide if a war with China should be preceded by a war with Iran. Israel is pushing for the war with Iran because it wants to be the local hegemony. No American gets to vote on this and those who thought they were voting against it actually voted for the person most likely to enable it. Hence zero sovereignty, well maybe that’s negative sovereignty.
1% is absolutely huge with regards to a GDP (money spent). Also that’s not all inclusive, you need to throw in all the other money the US spends on the Middle East.
I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind on this, but I generally am interested in exploring the bounds of others. Unless you have something new and interesting to share I think we’re done here.
> No American gets to vote on this and those who thought they were voting against it actually voted for the person most likely to enable it. Hence zero sovereignty
You're mixing up sovereignty with direct democracy.
We're a republic. We have total sovereignty when it comes to geopolitics. None of that requires Americans voting on foreign policy issues, which in reality, given even informed Americans' international literacy, would be horrific.
> 1% is absolutely huge with regards to a GDP (money spent)
But easy enough to replace, even solely with domestic resources.
> you need to throw in all the other money the US spends on the Middle East
This is nonsense. One, we're not abandoning the Gulf for a variety of financial and geostrategic reasons. Two, even if we do, that's an opportunity for Israel as an emerging regional hegemonic.
> I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind on this
Wouldn't have expected otherwise. These discussions can still be interesting for us, as you mentioned, and for others.
I know Israel sees its future as a regional, and perhaps global, kingmaker. The fulcrum upon which the multipolar world balances and that this is an attractive proposition to them. But it’ll be entering into a world with a combination of circumstances that have never happened before, which I think is one hell of a risk, a risk that has a good chance of ending disastrously for them, let alone the rest of the world. And what should happen to them if they fail.
It’ll be like singing ‘we’ll be home by Christmas,’ or ‘King Cotton,’ often many of the assumptions that underpin these beliefs do not pan out. I guess it’s now ‘free beachside real estate.’
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The most complicated thing about Bari Weiss, who lost in a battle of wits against Joe Rogan (a rather low bar), is how she continues to fail upwards.
Fail upwards? She started a successful business and sold for a large value.
Not sure if that counts if it’s part of all the same influence project.
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You said conspiracies always land on one place, which clearly implied blaming "the jews". There is no point in debating people like you but I will reiterate a point you should care deeply about. Israel, right or wrong, is losing massive support among the younger generations world wide. And pretending they aren't massacring civilians and intentionally starving them only weakens Israel in the long run. So keep it up, you are actively eroding future support.
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Ellison claims his Zionism is disconnected from his mother being Jewish. He has also distanced himself from his Judaism. It is also worth noting that more American Zionists are Evangelicals than Jews. Last I saw, Netanyahu has a higher approval rating among American Evangelicals than he has in his own country. This issue is very much Zionists vs anti-Zionists. Attempts to frame it as Jews vs non-Jews is just a different flavor of anti-Semitism.
Thank you for saying this. The American Christian Right's staunch pro-Israel voting bloc is way underappreciated by most critics of the lobby money. These people are legion, and would not vote against Israel if you paid them: it's part of their Christian messianic religion that the Jews be in the Holy Land.
If the American Christian Right were purchasing TikTok, then it might be relevant to a discussion about the purchase of TikTok. Instead we have... this whole subthread of pointless crap and justifications for the pointless crap.
The original complaint here is that American Zionists are purchasing TikTok. The point being discussed in this subthread is that American Zionism is more in line with the American Right than American Jews. Therefore the relevant trait of the purchasers being criticized is their right wing ideology and not their religion.
I’m pretty sure the conflation has entered US law at the state level in most states. Not sure where it’s at the US federal level but it’s either conflated there as well or it is about to be.
Recently, I've been shocked to witness how normalized Jew hatred (which I distinguish from criticism of Israel) has become within Gen Z, even among people who exhibit progressive views and are otherwise vocally critical of racial/ethnic discrimination. I doubt it will stop with the genocide/war.
On the flip side, I see very little actual hatred of Jews, either cultural or religious, but I do see a lot of people claiming that any kind of opposition to the IDF flattening Gaza is equivalent to Jew hatred.
Because there is an ongoing genocide being perpetrated by Israel?
For instance, would it be strange to dig into the ideological and personal ties of a businessman to South Africa at the height of apartheid? Or is it only strange when it has to do with Israel?
I'm gonna go on a limb and guess that since its a social media platform where people have been widely protesting a zionist led genocide by a Israel. the fact that the investor is a zionist and Israel supporter is probably very relevant.
more or less akin to a coal miner operator taking control over the EPA even.
> the fact that the investor is a zionist and Israel supporter is probably very relevant
To that issue, sure. What's being missed is that any buyer Trump signed off on would need to align with his views.
This is literally the entire issue behind why people think things like this are a bad idea.
I don't think it was missed. It was just so obvious that it didn't need to be called out explicitly.
It’s absolutely being missed. The cause isn’t the Israeli sympathy. That’s an effect of the party pushing to put American media under the thumb of the President. (Ironically, by a President who was helped to his position by TikTok.)
There is a lot of tail wagging the dog conspiracy in this thread. It dangerously reverses causation.
A16z and many other Zionists were pushing hard for this ban under Biden. Trump is doing their bidding, not the other way around. You can look up their X posts about it.
No one missed that.
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This kind of hyperbole is both ridiculous and offensive.
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Racism isn't welcome here. Please take it elsewhere.
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You should be emailing the staff with that request, not complaining in a thread. You should also include your evidence.
They read these threads just fine. I don't recommend emailing since that loses context. Additionally, it makes other people aware of the problem.
Alright, then, why don't you cite the relevant "raging genocidal Zionist" posts and comments here?
It's right there in what you wrote. It's why you got downvoted.
Are you calling me a genocidal Zionist? Yes or no, and on what, precisely, is your conclusion based?
And what other posts and comments are you referring to in your complaint?
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You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter how right you are or feel you are. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Is the argument that the Larry Ellison doesn't have huge sway over the companies he's owns outright or in part, or that saying him and Elon Musk have outsized control over America's information environment is conspiratorial? Either seem laughably wrong since these things are all public information
The argument is that adding "zionist" multiple times was an irrelevant and conspiracy theorist laden addition.
The consolidation of US media under a small number of right wing owners is an easily verifiable fact, not some conspiracy. Also, it's bad. Free markets need diversity, both in products AND in ideas.
Nothing hostile about it. This is what the American people voted for.
In 2020, 22.4% of the US population voted for Trump. In 2024, 22.7% of the population voted for Trump. I hate how people draw drastic conclusions regarding what the American people want based off the shift of less than half a percentage point of the population.
Everyone who chooses not to vote is voting “I don’t care” and so voted for whoever won.
I don't think that necessarily follows. An abstention is a voting choice that doesn't imply support for one choice or another in the minds of the voter, regardless of the result.
Abstention is not that, it is saying you are comfortable letting others choose for you. You have to consider the end result of the action not the intention of the action to understand what the choice really means.
Everyone who chooses not to vote is voting “I don’t like any candidate” and so voted against all candidates. How is your interpretation more valid than mine?
You aren't voting against anyone. You either vote for someone or you take yourself and your vote out of the picture and ceed political control to more passionate people. That is what they are doing, "I will let the most passionate people choose our leader and I stand by their choice" not "I don't like anyone."
How can you possibly feel comfortable ascribing a motive to over a hundred million people? You didn't answer the question on why this interpretation is more valid than mine.
I'm not ascribing a motive. They might believe whatever to justify their inaction. I'm just outlining the actual effect of their choice, which is quite literally to allow for others to choose.
This is a subtle moving of the goalposts. The original point from misnome was that people who didn't vote "voted for whoever won". Your last point was that non-voters inherently "stand by their choice". Neither of those is "the actual effect of their choice". They’re attempts to interpret the intention of non-voters.
This.
Idk about america, but there's definitely a sentiment echoing I feel like all across the world that there is a concentration of power and the divide between state and class is shrinking and we consider state to be itself (corrupt?) / not working to our wants.
That's my understanding of it. People have given up hope on...well having hope.
But hey lets define what is a woman first, that matters more than people sadly suiciding because they can't take this cruel petty world anymore.
We have induced our cruelness on earth, every animal,tree, air, even other humans. Who have we left?
Have we forgotten humanity? What does humanity even mean when we realize that people literally eat animals which scream to death from pain for the "taste" ?
I myself ate an egg yesterday for "protein" after a few years, I am skinny so I had to convince myself that I needed it but still my heart felt a bit bitter.
I am not judging you if you eat meat, that's not the point because I don't have a point/agenda. I am venting.You almost feel small when you think about it.
I really feel like the world can be a better place so there's hope tho.
Are there any other examples of something like this happening? A successful (foreign) app is forced to be sold to a US company just because of its country of origin? What happened to the free market? It's remarkable that privacy is even in the conversation when FAANG is just as bad
Not to mention that this is all just a distraction from the very real destruction Trump 2.0 is doing to peoples' lives, safety, financial outlooks, rights, etc and flushing our country and planet down to the toilet for his benefit
*edited for clarity and fixed typos
Yes, in 2020 Grindr was forced to sell for similar reasons.
And why didn't people get up in arms over that?
Today I learned! I remember it being sold to a Chinese company a few years ago, didn’t know it went back to US ownership. Ironically just deleted it because even with an Adblocker it’s still unusable with all the bots
Sorry for the silly question: is the US geofenced from the global tiktok?
They will be on the app, and the app will also be removed from the app store/play marketplace.
I don't know whether they'll be blocked on the web.
Questions regarding the US government-appointed director (CCP style?)...
IIUC, Oracle has strong connections to the CIA, and Andreessen the person lately seems right-wing activist.
1. Under the current administration, maybe it doesn't much matter that there's a government monitor?
2. But if a more left-wing administration comes back into power, then a government appointee there could help moderate the other influences?
The party of laissez-faire capitalism is now into "let's interfere", with government ownership, presence within companies and of course, dropping the hammer on "unpatriotic" speech, a kind of Amended First Amendment.
10 Small Steps: Executing the Fascist Playbook [0]
The Fascists’ Playbook [1]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/10-small-steps-executing-the-...
[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/08/the-fascists-playboo...
You can’t call them fascists - that’s dangerous, illegal rhetoric that incites violence.
Oracle is just really going wild to get into the media and social media spaces.
Reminds me of when Cisco bought Flip Video
so there will be three tiktok versions - US tiktok, Chinese douyin, tiktok international.
nice
Just don't use it.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.
Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.
Obviously someone not using it themselves mitigates only a fraction of the harm of these things.
If everyone around your kids is brainrotted or subject to destructive propaganda, your kids suffer too.
So, same old, basically. When I was a kid it was the same thing, kids spending all evening watching sitcoms and otherwise-trash TV. I was online on my computer learning programming, audio production, trying different operating systems, playing every game I could get my hands on, as well as chatting with people all over the world & making friends who I'm still friends with today, ingesting media from all over the world as well, completely free of corp/govt propaganda. Kids can still do so, if they choose to skip past the pop culture garbage that is shoved in everyone's faces, just as I did 20-30 years ago.
Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>
"Someone said something else was bad and it wasn't, so therefore anything else that someone says is bad is also not bad" is an obviously incoherent argument once you strip it down to its basics.
Yeah no I get what you mean, but my argument is like, you should try to be resilient against the arbitrary whims of the powers that be regardless of what their flavour of the week is. Asymmetric power/influence is a dynamic that will always exist in society, especially exacerbated by the scale and reach we see today.
Absolutely! But one of the tools we created to make this possible is government. There are forces (like multinational corporations) that exceed the power of an individual or many individuals to mitigate.
Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.
Ah totally, I exclaim frequently that there should be government-backed open source and decentralized software[0], putting power of technology into the hands of everyone (rather than letting this power get consolidated into monopolistic corporations) ... but then, what we seem to have currently is a huge correlation of motives between state and industry, and neither seem to have the incentive to put power in the hands of individuals. And individuals often don't even want it either. Either way though, yeah, regulation is long overdue for SO MUCH of this stuff.
[0] luckily EU seems to be doing a lot more in that direction, e.g. https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive...
Yeah, you are 100% correct. I need to find him a few good hobbies before I release him to the wolf packs.
I don't know. I myself never sticked to a hobby even after trying a lot of them. Genetically speaking he is a lot like me -- lack of discipline, difficult to cool down, impatient, throw tantrums frequently, etc. The list is pretty long :/ Not many good things from this genetic pool TBH.
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I feel like short form video is inherently addictive, what special sauce are these smartest minds in the world using that adds to that?
I've never used it, but since YouTube introduced Shorts I've become victim to the addiction and subsequently blocked any trace of Shorts with a browser extension.
I think the way they make recommendations are pretty good (looking over my wife's shoulder sometimes). But that's just my guess, I mean, it could just be pushing the next best viewed video from the same tag.
Just "not using it" doesn't ward off from the deleterious societal consequences of such a powerful propaganda tool simply existing.
It's the best I can do honestly. As another commentater mentioned, what can I do if my son's friends use it extensively? I don't know TBH -- the best I can do is to not give him a smart phone too early and try to grow him some other hobbies before brainrot reaches him.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted.
But… but… TokTok put full-page ads in all the big newspapers telling us that thanks to them, a yoga mom in Montana can now take her free-range artisanal oat milk candle-making side-hustle and turn it into a full-time job, paying just a little over minimum wage!
Isn't that worth destroying the minds of millions of American children?
This seems like a premature reaction. The Trump administration has been known to anchor to extreme positions as a negotiation tactic.
Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.
Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.
The thing is there is a law directing that TikTok be sold or shut down. Trump has already illegally given extensions several times.
I swear I saw all these exact comments yesterday - why are they showing that they were posted 10 minutes ago?
I believe the HN team is intentionally consolidating the thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270431#45277295
>A new company will be created to operate TikTok, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the report said.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
The good news is, I can’t see “being owned by Oracle” as anything other than a death sentence.
I doubt it. Oracle has a booming datacenter and cloud business right now. Their role is to host the data in a US jurisdiction, which they can do. It won’t affect the success or failure of TikTok. And frankly it won’t give TikTok users privacy since the data can still be accessed by software written by Chinese employees.
> since the data can still be accessed by software written by Chinese employees.
Source?
Yea, I’m sure the sociopaths at oracle have the fingers on the pulse of the younger generations. They’re just going to up the censorship and enshittfy it resulting in its users moving on the next new thing.
Oracle hosts data for many corporations, I don't think they will have any moderation input.
This is more than just hosting, they will be owning and managing.
LawyerTok
So now we will split American TikTok users from those of the rest of the world? Madness.
Madness for the USA, but a win for Europe if our kids are shielded from right wing American content. I wish Europe could do this with X. Force Elon to create a wall between US and EU users.
Why do you want to exist in an echo chamber? Suppressing ideas doesn't make them go away.
if the algorthm server isn't in the US, it's pretty useless.
One of the biggest grifts in history ...
There are so many comically evil villains in ths one deal.
Example: Silver Lake. Many younger HNers may not be that familira with the story of Skype. To summarize, Skype was a big deal, the first real mass market caller-to-caller Internet voice messaging services. It was founded in 2003, bought by eBay (of all people) in 2005 for several billion dollars. There were plans to spin it out on an IPO but Silver Lake led a buyout for less than eBay paid for it I believe in 2009 (~$2.75 billion).
Now in 2011, Microsoft bought it for ~$8.5 billion. That was great for the employees, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I believe the new company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to make it difficult to sue, a bunch of executives were fired before the buyout to avoid paying them out and, most controversially, the options had a clawback option that allowed Silver Lake to forcibly purchase options at the original rather than the buyout price [1].
Larry Ellison is more well known in HN circles as comically evil. Pretty much everything he touches leaves a Grand Moff Tarkin level of stench of evil from his attack on public access to Carbon Beach through his massive property portfolio to his more well known attacks on open source (originally as a threat to Oracle's dominance).
He is a Trump loyalist and true Putinesque oligarch who will probably amass levels of media control well beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest dreams. You can bet your bottom dollar that every media property he touches will serve the administration and I'd be shocked if one or more of these deals doesn't directly enrich Trump and/or his family.
Welcome to the tleptocracy.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/
I'm still trying to figure out if putting off the shutdown until they had a deal was even legal.
The Constitution has the worth of toilet paper if the executive can just keep saying "I don't want to enforce this law because my buddy here has a financial interest in that not happening as its supposed to", which is exactly what is happening given how close Larry and Trump are.
Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759336
My theory is that it highly depends on the few random people who view New posts and if they upvote/comment.
The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.
Exactly. Depending on the traffic in newest, stories can slip in disappear in the flow
I think just like how new comments can go to the top of a post, I think HN should change the algorithm such that new posts can sometimes go to the top of HN as a way to quickly test if the post is worthy or not.
A lot of high quality posts have 0 upvote and 0 comment.
There's too much randomness to expect any consistency.
Sometimes we re-up things for that reason (basically the second-chance pool mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). I've done that with this one.
Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!
Not really news in this state. Because other than a few more details here it's not any different than the story from last week (which we knew Oracle was in the mix etc). The deal isn't final.
It is funny to say this as if there was some past story on here that everyone saw. In the last month, the story about a potential TikTok deal with the most engagement maxed out at 3 comments and 17 points[1]. This is probably the most important news in the social media sphere since Musk bought Twitter and the HN audience doesn't care about it until contracts are signed? That's pretty unbelievable.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249430
details, NO algorythm, Trumpy, China, Money, Twitteresque user base revolt....or worse so it's very much as you state, non final
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It's rather amazing. They found one of the few organizations I trust less than the Chinese government to run this.
Ya, the only comparably worse choices would have been IBM or Salesforce. Also known as the toxic techs.
> They found one of the few organizations
Or, the Org found them! It helps to kiss the ring.
Compared to Larry Ellison, Kim Jong-un strikes me as a supreme humanist, a beacon of goodness and generosity.
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. — Bryan Cantrill
Probably a better neighbor too.
Indeed. And since you are so nice to Kim he can get a job as remote IT worker.
Oh my. Forgot that nowadays people need to be explicitly warned about sarcasm or irony as they tend to interpret everything literally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_remote_worker_sch...
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I don't think the average braindead tiktok user who watches choreographies all day long knows / cares / can even spell Oracle.
I know what you will tell me: "but these people vote"... Hum, yes.
It makes me uneasy to let a company that was literally named after a CIA program and given billions of dark money over the years selectively educate our next generation.
Plus, Ellison on surveillance tech: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,”
https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveill...
They clearly have a plan. Ellison gifted his son NBC or ABC or some large network recently, if I recall correctly.
Why do they need to control the media?
To push a pro-Israel agenda. That's why Larry Ellison put Israeli loyalist Bari Weiss in charge of CBS.
Don't worry. His son is also odds on favorite to own half of the US broadcast, film, and streaming media via Paramount, CBS and are in talks to purchase Warner Brothers, HBO, Discovery, and all their other cable brands. Oh wait, maybe we should worry about that a little.
The delightful world of democracy and free enterprise!
You are free to choose among the things the options the cabal provides you. What are you complaining about?
Free to chose which pedophile you prefer.
I wonder if the license fee will be based on the number of followers. I hope it’s based on real engagement. I don’t want to pay just because a bunch of bots are following me. /s
Link?
It's sarcasm
We hope it's not predictive sarcasm.
Idiocracy was too
The most terrifying thing is there will be a trump-government representative in the governing body.
We are truly looking at 1984 as a blueprint not a warning.
Political officers on ships was quite normal in the cold war, makes sense to have political officers in companies too.
You can just not use TikTok.
That doesn't diminish the impact it has on the rest of humanity, and by proxy, on me.
Wouldn't it be better if fewer people used TikTok, given negative impact of social media on individuals and society?
Wouldn't it be better if these investors lose money on this investment?
Depends. Better as a word is a little too wide to interpret accurately without some additional information to go on. For example, if you look at my post history, you will know that I am not too keen on social media in general. From that perspective, it could be interpreted as a win. And yet, I think most of us here recognize the development as a whole is not 'good' ( since we are going with generic, not-easily-defined verbiage ).
Yes but how likely do you think it is that that will happen?
The problem with that rhetoric is that at some point you need social media to prove legitimacy of your identity.
It already happens at border controls and TSA checks.
Guess when that "you can just not use TikTok" argument will expand to "you can just not use the internet" and effectively be punished monetarily or socially for not wanting to use it.
I hope this is sounding alarm bells for everyone else as much as me.
Larry's son buys Paramount (CBS) and promptly fires Stephen Colbert, a money making machine who was leading his timeslot as what was, in hindsight, a clear message to everyone that nobody is safe if they don't fall in line.
Larry now gets TikTok, which like it or not is the most influential social media platform among today's youth.
Both are Trump fanatics. This is the next stage in the Ailes playbook that has already gone too far in ruining the American experiment.
> Stephen Colbert, a money making machine
Unfortunately not: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/business/media/stephen-co...
Stephen Colbert shutting down was explained otherwise when it happened.
[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-colbert-got-canceled
Conjecture. But, since the article says Colbert has 10 months left, I think this would be a awesome turn of events if they canceled his show for political reasons (to get Trump's FCC approval) only to ultimately keep the show now that the FCC has approved the deal. That would be the purest form of beating Trump at his own game.
Colbert a money making machine? Did the hackernews admins merge two threads from alternate universes?
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One more reason to despise Oracle.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/tech/details-emerge-on-u-s-china-tiktok-...
(which has a clearer title that's not that much different than days ago news: U.S. Investors, Trump Close In on TikTok Deal With China)
We changed the URL from https://www.reuters.com/world/china/oracle-silver-lake-conso... to the article that it points to.
dang why can't I downvote comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
what is this threshold?
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hackernews going full reddit lol
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Why is it that for nearly every story involving a Jewish name, someone has to come in and complain about Israel? Besides, there are plenty of venues to criticize Israeli policy and actions, especially if you do so respectfully.
I think this is a massively good step forward.
However, TikTok is still a brain rot slop machine and we would be right to question Ellison's motivations.
What does this “stake” get America at all? Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok? The point of the ban was to avoid national security issues from having an adversarial state (China) controlling speech in America. Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
>Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
Too popular to ban. Political constraints.
>Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?
"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."
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I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.
The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
>(which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework)
The ban wasn't executed on digital privacy concerns. The intent of the original ban was on digital privacy concerns, and that was shot down.
>The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout. But the reason the ban passed the second time around was because China would not censor content about the Gaza genocide. The ban had no legs until October 7th and TikTok frustrated the US/Israel message that Hamas was homicidal terrorist group that spawned from no where.
What seems obvious is that, yes, the new TikTok, will fall in line with other US owned social media companies when it comes to spreading US propoganda.
So while Chinese social networks have "What happened in tiananmen square?", US social networks will have "Is Israel committing a genocide?".
> The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) was _passed by a Republican House_.
> What does this “stake” get America at all?
“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.