Comment on ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say
Womble@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Isnt that pretty damn suspicious? We’d rather just shut down than sell it as a going concern?
I think it’s a gamble… Too many people love tiktok (don’t ask me why) that they know the pressure on the gov would be terrible
I think they are calling their bluff
And before anyone comes at me with some stupid fallacy, no I don’t love the Chinese government or I’m trying to imply tiktok has nothing to hide and it’s the source of rainbows and warm sweet buns
They love tiktok because the algorithm works extremely well.
No other social media actually targets you as well as tiktok does. Instagram is constantly trying to shove you in the direction of whatever makes them the most money even if it’s entirely unrelated to your interests. YouTube is clueless to what you like with shorts. Tiktok surfaces new content that is basically unseen anywhere else (thousands of views not millions) that perfectly fits your interests.
Could other platforms do the same thing? Probably: but they’re too short sighted to do so.
Good to know … I have honestly kept away from most social media after a stint in Reddit that pushed me here
I have never had a Facebook, insta, Google whatever social, tiktok, etc so I don’t really get what people like there
Yeah I’ve deleted Facebook and affiliated products since 2017.
Google social never made sense to me but even just for content YouTube does a terrible job showing me what I want to see.
Tiktok had honed in on things I found funny or interesting within an hour of picking it up. And I’m not talking mainstream sports or TV type content, I’m talking niche sub communities and creators with less than 1k followers.
Idk how they’re doing it (besides the obvious data collection) but they’ve got a well tuned algo.
YouTube was going down that route but whole terriost pipeline deal durning the hight of the war on terror put big breaks on it. TikTok doesn’t. Its actually wild how vastly different friends of mines tiktoks could be. Just all the most extreme version of anything their into. Had them all asking completely nuts things thinking it was everywhere. Like no sis I don’t about the witches that are supposed to be doing something tonight, that was just an old qanon thread with new dates, wth is boy love anime?
I don’t think “shortsightedness” is the difference. The sheer amount of privileges TikTok requires on your device speaks to Cambridge analytica levels of personal profile knowledge.
Couple that with the endless scroll, hot people doing thirst traps, flashy idiocy, flashing icons hugging the full screen image, no discernible window with controls tempting you to back out or log off…it’s the “perfect” tech product. One that’s endlessly addictive. That’s what makes tech good. They know you better than you know yourself, and they will shamelessly serve you exactly what you didn’t realize you wanted to see.
The sheer amount of privileges TikTok requires on your device
The fuck are you on about?
Tiktok has a total of 0 granted permissions from me.
By default it has the same perms as other similar apps: Google Advertising ID.
That’s it.
You can’t opt out of that: it’s Google.
If you give it a fuck load of perms that’s your fault. By default it has less access than Discord.
You’re just parroting bullshit you’ve heard elsewhere.
I’m a professional Android developer: Tiktok isn’t requesting anything strange. It asks for camera, audio, and storage access when you record a video. That’s exactly what you’d need to ask for: nothing more or less.
No?
The way you are speaking it’s as if they mean to close down the whole thing. There is a whole rest of the world for them to operate in. Sure losing the US market be a huge detriment, but the owners still might rather have it everywhere else, than keep it running in the US in someone else’s hands.
They aren’t being forced to sell their operations in the entire world, just the US. So, doesn’t it make better financial sense, if all legal options to keep control fail, that they sell their US operation to another company, and at least get billions of dollars before exit, than to just lose the market and get not billions?
They don’t want to seed a competitor with their tech.
They are going to get one when a western tech company copies them to fill the vacuum they left. Their only real advantage is their leg-up with their earlier footing. There is nothing particularly interesting in their software, it’s easy to copy, and someone likely will. If they do not that get a copycat, their crowd will move on to some other thing and, being in the same industry, will still be a competitor.
A thing never mentioned in these debates is that noone in the world is buying tiktok without buying the underlying algorithm, the same algorithm the app runs on worldwide, the algorithm is the special sauce. They are not going to sell the basis for their app just for a single payday in the US market, which after buying it, they could rebrand and then once successful in the US, compete in the global market against tiktok but with the income of the most lucrative app market in the world behind them. It’s an extremely stupid business move.
But what if the US version becomes a different version than the rest of the world’s? What if the rest of the world wants that version and demands it?
They have a leg up, they would have to use their early footing to compete. If they go, the vacuum of their loss of presence will open a spot for an american tech company to copy them. Either way, they are going to get competition from an american tech company. Nothing they are doing is esoteric in a way that would make them hard to copy. There really is no secret sauce, so to speak, in the software. If they are doing it to hide something then then it lends credence to the US’s accusations, at least it leaves a grey area for that speculation. This gives the US a big avenue to push that they are right and everyone should be cautious of their media business.
The article talks about why they’d prefer to shut down if you take their word it. Essentially the US is such a tiny portion of ByteDances it would be more optimal to shut down then to risk the sale of their algorithm, which is their primary revenue driver, as a whole. Assuming they’re using relatively similar algorithms on Douyin, and they don’t want this to turn around and be sold to their Chinese competition, which is where the real money is being made for ByteDance.
Bullshit. Average revenue per user is a pretty common industry benchmark, and the US absolutely slaughters the rest of the world. We’re the fat, dumb, brainwashed cows the advertisers can’t get enough of.
Is that really justified, or an example of selection bias?
Does it matter?
Not really. It depends on what it is. There are entire games and items that aren’t available in the US, but make a killing in Asia.
Like, here’s Genshin Impact numbers from 2023.
On that game, the US comes in at 7th, is less than half of the top country (Japan) and is notably behind Switzerland.
For Tik Tok specifically, we can look at their annual reports.
Let’s look at average annual users per region. 682M in Asia Pacific, which does not include China. 192M in North America.
China’s numbers are 750M daily.
I don’t think most of their money comes from the US.
There’s a reason you couldn’t actually talk about the ARPU, and that’s because an American user is worth literally 7x more than a Chinese user on average. Which is why TikTok had a revenue of 16.1b in 2023, with a growing user base, and ByteDance’s total revenue was 40.8b.
Maybe the CCP is paying the difference?
Makes the children screaming we are taking their toy away seem even more oblivious when the billion dollar corporation gives absolutely zero shits about losing the business.
We? Are you in congress being lobbied by Alphabet and Meta?
It’s a scare tactic. You as a customer won’t care if the business gets a new owner but if they threaten to shut down all the kids they have will start kicking and screaming to make the government dial back the decision.
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 6 months ago
It’s obviously pretty valuable. How would we feel if say, China decided Microsoft/Google/AWS/Oracle had to sell to a Chinese company on the grounds of national security? They’d rather pull out too, despite China being a very large market too. Or what happens if other countries starts demanding the same?
Pretty sure ByteDance would rather keep their IP.
And if they sell, do they keep the rights for the other countries or it belongs to the US now?
Truth_Hurts@lemmus.org 6 months ago
They don’t let our stuff operate there. It’s only fair we treat them the same.
ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today 6 months ago
But we aren’t them… right?
Kalothar@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Paradox of tolerance, blah blah
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
To me this is the biggest thing.
I’m under no illusions that the US is pursuing this for altruistic reasons, but fundamentally I do think it’s ridiculous that China bans western competition, yet the west rolls over and allows Chinese companies, or even the Chinese government, to buy out western companies, to enter the market and compete, and to compete using massive state subsidies or slave labour that kill domestic competition.
IMO it’s entirely fair for a country to say “you’re banning our companies? Ok then we’re banning yours.”
And I do also agree that China uses the data they collect for nefarious purposes. Be it training language models so they can better track and shut down dissenting voices at home, or spreading misinformation amongst other nations. I just wish the US would also clamp down on the privacy policies of domestic companies too.
Yaztromo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
AWS already had to effectively do this. AWS only exists in two regions in China because they licensed much of the AWS software to be run by a pair of Chinese-government affiliated ISPs inside China (that is, Amazon doesn’t run AWS in either of its China zones — it’s run by a pair of Chinese companies who license AWS’s software).
This is why the China AWS regions are often quite far behind in terms of functionality from every other region (they either haven’t licensed all the functionality, they don’t keep up-to-date at the same cadence as Amazon, or Amazon is holding certain functions back), and why you can’t really access them from the standard AWS console.
So in effect, Amazon did have to give their software to Chinese-government affiliated companies in order to continue operating in China.
vinniep@lemmy.world 6 months ago
But no one is saying that ByteDance has to sell TikTok to a US company. Just divest it to an owner that is not beholden to the Chinese government and obligated to share any and all data upon request. Compared to the legal requirements that China puts on US companies operating in China, this is a pretty tame ask.
yaaaaayPancakes@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah but the 5 Eyes and their friends are everywhere outside of the CCPs borders. So if they really don’t want to let the US have that algorithm, and probe the interfaces the CCP propaganda arm used to access the TikTok backend, there’s few places overall that have a reason to buy it, and can also afford it.
assembly@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Except that is what China already does. Cloud providers with regions in China have to utilize a local partner company which gives access to the whole tech stack. It’s a reason that AWS China regions were always so far behind in service offerings to the rest of the AWS regions.
Womble@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They wouldnt have to sell their IP even just the userbase and videos would be valuable enough to let someone else plug in an algorithm. Then again, i suppose this could all just be bluster.