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...
Now that Oracle owns TikTok, you'll be sued if you cross post your content to other social media after posting on TikTok.
Per "Oracle's Social Media Content User Agreement", by posting in TikTok, you grant Oracle an exclusive unlimited license, including, but not limited to, exclusive redistribution and resale rights. You also grant Oracle all rights on your eternal soul as well as from your descendants, up to the 7th generation. "
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
Yes. And to enrich their buddies and campaign donors like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
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.
The GOP is still more incompetent than anything I've ever seen.
Bullying, yes. Competency, no.
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...
Biden signed the bill.
So nothing will change? It’s just pushing Chinas ideologies at the moment. Oh I think I hit a nerve with the CPC army on HN.
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.
Now that Oracle owns TikTok, you'll be sued if you cross post your content to other social media after posting on TikTok.
Per "Oracle's Social Media Content User Agreement", by posting in TikTok, you grant Oracle an exclusive unlimited license, including, but not limited to, exclusive redistribution and resale rights. You also grant Oracle all rights on your eternal soul as well as from your descendants, up to the 7th generation. "
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.
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.
Compared to Larry Ellison, Kim Jong-un strikes me as a supreme humanist, a beacon of goodness and generosity.
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...
Probably a better neighbor too.
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.
Link?
It's sarcasm
We hope it's not predictive sarcasm.
Idiocracy was too
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
> 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.
10% of intel 80% of TikTok ??% Meta ??% Google ??% Amazon ??% S&P500
>> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You wrote this as a snarky rebuttal but you seem to be agreeing with OP? Confusing post.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's time to go take the half-trillion from them.
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
Useful additional context
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-trump-ally-may-soon...
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.
>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.
Sorry for the silly question: is the US geofenced from the global tiktok?
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 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.
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"
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.
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 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.
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.
Larry will sue those alternatives for 'stealing' tiktok IP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
To be fair, that doesn't mean they can't be re-written in Java.
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.
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...
The Evangelical thought-police republicans seem to have beat the libertarian republicans into submission.
I've built a 12k follower audience for TikTok's on product management and project management. Time to migrate to YouTube.
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?
I am ashamed to be an American. We are going to have so much healing to do.
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.
Oracle is just really going wild to get into the media and social media spaces.
Reminds me of when Cisco bought Flip Video
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...
This is just crazy. No single person should have this amount of power, in particular if they have the moral integrity of Larry Ellison...
>moral integrity of Larry Ellison...
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
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…
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?
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.
"hostile take-over of the American mind"
You mean, to support Israel? Is that what this is about?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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..
Larry the lawnmower Ellison?
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.
What's the problem with being antisemitic? Everyone needs to be anti-whatever-you-prefer?
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
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.
> 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.
Oligarchs be oligarching
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything to get a suckle at the teet that is the fed money printing machine.
> 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.
Americans are good at spending money.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
>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.
LawyerTok
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 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.
So now we will split American TikTok users from those of the rest of the world? Madness.
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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."
________________
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”.