TikTok’s daily active users in the U.S. is also just about 5% of ByteDance’s DAUs worldwide, said one of the sources.
So much drama in the US over this but it’s apparently merely a money-losing afterthought for its owner.
It’s almost like making money is not the primary purpose of this website 🤔
Or … maybe the US isn’t the only country in the world?
Lmao yeah OK 👍. Name any other country.
I have a Geography degree lmao, but also, you’re an asshole. I don’t even know what you’re trying to accomplish with this comment.
he’s being sarcastic (im pretty sure)
This means absolutely nothing.
How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US. They have shopping, I’ll bet the US buys the most.
China already has livestream shopping, it’s still relatively novel in the US. Bytedance has to compete with other local competitors in China, hating a nice external source of revenue in the US fuelling these Chinese battle is a huge boon.
I know the article says loss making app, but I bet a lot of money goes back to R&D creating the loss. They pay massive sums to get merchants to sell on their app for example.
This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.
To quote the article again, “The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge.” Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn’t in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It’s likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven’t been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn’t bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it’s still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it’s just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.
You’re assuming its a profit-focused endeavor rather than a propaganda arm of the Chinese government.
I think it’s a privately-owned, profit-focused endeavor that is nevertheless beholden to the Chinese government and which the government wants to take as much advantage of as possible. Deep down, I’m certain that their sole goal is to make as much money for themselves as they possibly can. If they also need to exfiltrate some data and send it to the CCP, that’s just a necessary business expense.
If TikTok’s purpose is to spread Chinese propaganda, can’t they just find a US Citizen that can run the website for them?
“Yeah, it’s my personal website where I exercise my 1st Amendment rights, also it has 100 million daily users and I happen to agree with China on a lot of things.” If a US Citizen were to say this, there would be nothing illegal about it I think?
Well China is refusing to divest, i.e. sell it to a US owner so clearly that’s not an option for them. If it was about the money they would have.
Bro, Facebook facilitated a genocide, and this is who we want to buy TikTok? What action was taken against fb?
“US coRpOrAtiOn goOd!”
Not US corporation good, just US corporation = US controlled. This isn’t a morality play, it’s a national security play.
This is obviously a negotiation tactic.
If ByteDance doesn’t want to sell their stupid algorithm, they could simply rip it out of TikTok, replace it with a random number generator or any other off-the-shelf recommendation engine, and proceed with the sale.
Find their lowest paid summer intern from the university computer science department, tell him to write some sort of recommendation algorithm and he has two weeks to do it, then whatever he comes up with make it live and that’s all the new owner gets.
It’s going to be to their advantage to claim that they’re shutting down, even if they actually want that $50B buyout. If they say they’re going to sell, they’re going to lose what little leverage they have left. The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
Has their user base mobilized at all? Maybe it’s just because I don’t use TikTok but I haven’t really heard much from their users about the ban. Which has been kind of unexpected.
Apparently TikTok sent out push notifications telling users to call their representatives. Minors were being provided instructions with their representatives’ phone numbers and contact info, but didn’t even know who they were calling and were asking basic questions like “What is Congress?”
Kind of shows the amount of power TikTok has over American youth.
I love how they demonstrated they aren’t influencing people by sending out a mass message telling people what to do. It doesn’t get any more comical than that.
And facebook tells its users to vote. Encouraging people to make their voices heard and engage in the democratic process is a good thing.
“Vote to participate in democracy! Here’s some local voting resources”
vs
“Vote to protect our interests! Tell your representative that they are killing free speech if they don’t listen to me”
Do it.
Oh no! Anyway…
I dislike TikTok but should you really be banning platforms you don’t like?
Sanction them if they misbehave, yes. Prevent most of the population from communicating using it? Absolutely not.
Americans have weird priorities when it comes to freedom. The mental gymnastics I’ve been seeing trying to justify a ban of a platform to a massive population of people is nuts.
No, it isn’t “actually upholding” freedom of speech to ban TikTok.
should you really be banning platforms you don’t like?
Yes, but only if that platform is Twitter
So be it. The vaccuum it will leave will get filled by another platform.
The whole point of this bill is for mark zuckerberg’s lobbying money to finally get people to use Reels
They didn’t lobby this bill. Google, oracle, did
Makes sense from a business point of view. Why sell to create a new competitor with the same technology and an impregnable market base in the USA?
Better to force US competition to start from scratch.
YouTube/IG are hardly starting from scratch.
But they don’t have the international reach of TikTok.
If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.
But if TikTok is a Chinese psyop, they’ll just use any of the many legal tricks we allow to change the “owner” while China still retains control. Companies do this all the time, look at shell companies and such. It’s super easy for China to mask the true owner if they decide to.
This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.
If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.
If the sale is forced, the value of the property will be depressed. Why would they take pennies on the dollar to liquidate IP rather than fight it out in court and try to get the provision overturned?
This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.
The law is not specific to TikTok. It is any company owned by a subsidiary of an “enemy” state, of which China is listed as such.
And selling the company to a non-Chinese holding company wouldn’t work, because the dispute is over Chinese IP law affecting how ByteDance does business. Move the company overseas and it would no longer be covered by the IP provisions (something the Chinese investors don’t want, because they benefit from the IP provisions).
