Legitimate question: Can someone explain to me what would stop ByteDance from selling off the company to someone or some company that’s just going to “sell” the data to the CCP and amplify their propaganda anyway? I’m sure it’ll take all of 5 minutes for the Chinese to find someone willing to agree to those terms.
I imagine the benefit is that China will be on a level playing field if they have to influence an outside company vs just telling subordinates to accomplish an objective like creating dissent amongst a foreign population.
Good. They shouldn’t put up with our culture war bullshit. Though I like the idea another commenter had: if TikTok and Blackrock and other parasites were all dealt with equally, I’d support it.
The big issue other than data collection is the platform’s censorship of topics the CCP doesn’t want discussed (Taiwan/Hong Kong independence, Uighur genocide, CCP corruption, widespread industrial espionage) and the amplification of topics seen as divisive/polarizing/destabilizing to western nations as part of the CCP’s propaganda policy.
Foreign ownership of broadcast media is already restricted (see fcc.gov/…/foreign-ownership-rules-and-policies-co… ), and I am not aware of any other foreign owned social media outlets with significant market penetration into the US. Are you?
Also, “can” is substantially different from “is currently, as supported by evidence, outlined as part of a documented propaganda plan by a known bad-faith strategic opponent”
“US media companies” not foreign-owned. For example Russian propaganda regularly makes it’s way into channels like Fox News, you just need to incentivize 1 host, or 1 politician, or 1 guest. And online influence campaigns can still be driven by bots and fake accounts (e.g. twitter) but there are no laws in place that even begin to try to reign that in.
Fixating on TikTok, is a small and limited check on a much larger and more general problem that nobody in congress actually seems to care about.
It’s so arbitrary and limited that im not gonna assume anyone that worked on this actually cares about achieving any major objective other than banning tiktok.
Pretty much every single social platform has already tried to copy it (e.g. YouTube shorts, Facebook and Instagram reels, I don’t remember what Snapchat calls theirs, etc). The difference is how well TikTok’s algorithm works and the overall user experience, plus the established userbase. Tons of younger people hate Meta and their products, they view them as old people social media, so they’ve mostly failed to recapture the younger demographic at large (except maybe Snapchat, that for some reason has steadily kept a non-insignificant younger userbase).
That being said, I won’t be surprised if a TikTok clone emerges that’s run by some “American” company called LiteStance or something where ByteDance just so happens to be an angel investor.
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