ByteDance plans TikTok IPO to win U.S. deal as deadline looms
reuters.com
reuters.com
Mass migration to Canada Tiktok.
That was on top of purchasing Musically for $800m, partially for their existing U.S. user base.
Gen Z doesn't even know what vine is. That's the majority of tiktok users. Reels and TikTok already have the brand. Relaunching vine would be dumb. Only millennials would care and it would just be the millennials that used it before, not new users.
what we are seeing from Trump admin is 1. seperate Chinese people from CCP. i think that hit hard to the point that Xi have to come out and said CCP is UN-separable from Chinese people. 2. trying out how to use National security to hit Chinese companies like what we are seeing right now and with Huawei.
it will be interesting to watch geopolitics in coming years if Trump win re-election. if Biden win, then it just back to Obama's era policies.
Now it's just US vs. China instead of the world "vs" China.
The current attempt may be way more visible, but I wouldn't say better. Since China is still expanding and the US ( under Trump) stands alone.
If somehow they do get the apps banned from app stores... I suspect that would constitute a fairly large chunk of the US cut off from tiktok.
On the other hand if you look at it from the POTUS's POV where just saying your doing stuff means you can claim victory... he might feel he already won.
The security angle is theater. Many American corporations gather and abuse much more data than any allegations against TikTok and WeChat. And if people are really worried about foreign monitoring, then there are millions of cameras and microphones embedded in baby monitors, pet feeders, home security cameras, and other smart devices, all foreign made and networked. Some claims of influence could be made in TikTok, but there’s literally nothing stopping that from happening on platforms owned by U.S. companies, where it’s been proven to have happened and is still currently happening. So that argument doesn’t apply. If it does apply, it applies to a much broader app landscape than just TikTok and WeChat.
So in the end, everyone debating this thing as if it is an actual intelligent thing to be discussed is just adding legitimacy to Trump grasping for re-election and another one of his chaotic moves. There are actual problems but those are only plastered onto this whole deal by externals. The president literally tried to treat this thing as if it was an episode of The Apprentice, demanding payment from the sale. It’s ludicrous.
This is exactly what Adam Curtis means by Hypernormalization.
I think it’s dangerous because people are underestimating just how hateful a lot of the U.S. is against foreigners and how whatever Trump is anti at the moment spreads like wildfire. Americans in general do not understand China or even how similar our government can be, and so it is easy to rally people against it.
You're inventing a false premise with that setup. The issue with TikTok isn't primarily data collection unto itself. It's that they're owned by China (ie who is doing the data collecting), and without exception all large corporations in China are directly commanded by the CCP. They have CCP committees that 'advise' the boards and outline what the companies may or may not do at all times; primarily focused on major decisions, sensitive matters for the CCP, or matters of national strategy. The only reason ByteDance isn't selling TikTok for example, is because the CCP said they weren't allowed to because it would make China look weak; that's not a decision that is up to ByteDance, because they're not in control of anything ultimately. In China's dictatorship, all power by default rests with the CCP (and increasingly with future Chairman Xi's new cult of personality, as the purges have begun); that approach means they can do anything at any time for any reason.
They even started hijacking boards in Hong Kong back in 2016:
WSJ 2017: "Since 2016, at least 32 Chinese state-owned companies or units listed in Hong Kong have proposed changes to their corporate structures to install Communist Party committees that advise their boards of directors." [1]
China isn't an ally of the US, they're a blend of enemy and super competitor. They don't freely allow US companies - such as Facebook, Google, Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Amazon AWS, and dozens of others - to operate inside of China. It's entirely reasonable to disallow some China-owned corporations from operating in the US as a matter of trade reciprocation.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-advising-chinas-state-firms...
It's not because the "CCP" said they weren't allowed to. It's because the government of the People's Republic of China issued a new policy against exporting sensitive technology. The government obviously had ByteDance in mind, but this was a government policy issued in the normal way, not anything to do with Communist Party committees advising corporate boards. It's a response by the Chinese government to a measure taken by the American government against a Chinese company.
> They don't freely allow US companies [...] to operate inside of China.
A great many US companies freely operate inside China - many more than vice versa. China's economic development was largely driven by the "Reform and Opening-Up Policy." As the name suggests, a major part of that policy was allowing foreign companies to invest in China. Foreign companies did invest massively in China, gaining market access and taking advantage of Chinese labor. If you walk around any major Chinese city nowadays, you'll see the result: foreign companies are everywhere. Volkswagens, Hondas and Toyotas fill the streets. There's a Starbucks, McDonald's or KFC on every other corner. Everyone walks around with smartphones filled with American electronics. Chinese airlines fly fleets of Boeing and Airbus planes. The computers all run Windows or OS X. The idea that US companies can't operate in China is just very far from the reality, which is that US companies have a massive presence in China.
Bytedance will try to resist fire sales.
What's the best compromise? Have an IPO in the US and have a lot of US investors in the deal, diluting Bytedance.
Maybe that's not outright corruption, but it would raise eyebrows in any Western democracy.
1. People who are ambivalent i.e. don't care or aren't familiar with the app
2. People who are strongly against it for a variety of reasons
3. People who are in favour because it's a blow scored against the Chinese
4. People who are in favour due to their feelings about the app specifically
It seems likely to me that the second grouping will be the largest. I don't think much will come of it but it will take much, much more than this to neuter China. It's not quite as vacuous "Build the wall" but it's not far off - if you want to battle china economically, get trading with their competitors (i.e. vote for centrists - Bernie is almost as protectionist as Trump)
But I don't like this tit-for-tat action by the US. Cutting off Tiktok will only further accelerate the balkanization of the internet. Keeping US companies from kataoing to the Chinese regime with special concessions (e.g. Dragonfly) and making services too important to easily firewall off (e.g. GitHub) seems like a better strategy. At least I hope so.
Foreign companies benefited enormously from the opening up of the Chinese market, and China is not nearly as protectionist as it's made out to be. Western media has trouble entering China because of political censorship, but Western businesses in general have very good market access. China is a very significant market for most major US tech companies.
The revenues that Western companies generate in China speak for themselves. The image that many Westerners have, that China bars foreign businesses from entering its market, is so opposite from reality that it's difficult to even begin to respond. Just go to China and see for yourself how omnipresent foreign companies are. China's economic development was based on opening its markets to foreign investment.
> they don’t own the subsidiary in china
This is a common misconception. Foreign companies can own their subsidiaries in most sectors of the Chinese economy.
> those brands can’t easily get the money they make out of china
China has capital flow controls. Foreign companies are still able to expatriate their profits. Apple takes in about $45 billion in revenue per year in China, and there must be a hefty profit associated with that revenue. Do you think Apple's profits get trapped in China?
Nonsense. WFOEs are common in China. The acronym exists for a reason.
> You can’t just take money out of china.
There are several channels that companies can use to expatriate profits.
> Apple is a giant company with an insane amount of money to pay off whoever they need to.
They don't have to pay people off. There are completely legal methods for them to expatriate their profits.
If the CCP had allowed the United Nations to visit the prisons/concentration camps to interview prisoners (etc) then this could have all quickly gone away, assuming the CCP was being honest about what was happening at these concentration camps and the UN could confirm that on the ground.
The data isn't the most valuable part. Which videos someone likes to watch could be worth something, but given how much easily available information there is already online this isn't a particularly valuable (or sensitive) thing.
The much bigger issue is the algorithm that decides what content to show people. The CCP could decide to leverage that black box to push content that influences users in the ways they desire. That's why the CCP passed a new law to allow them to ban the sale of the algorithm (and they've expressed their willingness to use that to actually block the sale of the TikTok algorithm). Their goal is to either keep control of that so they can influence international users or to keep their potential involvement opaque so that anyone who engages with the algorithm continues to be unaware of the fact that the CCP can push content to any user they want.
I do agree with your second point however.
Wow, CCP will be able to slide into 17 year olds' DMs. Massive security threat.
So much of the TikTok hysteria has been built on "CCP will have X". Is there any verifiable proof at all that CCP is actively and illegally accessing user data through TikTok?
In March and April, all I saw were Trump's worst moments- his blunders, his viciousness, his arrogance. My distaste for Trump heightened; I became more reactive and further triggered by his incompetence. Then, back in early June, every last thing I saw on TikTok was insane forms of rioting and the worst police brutality there was. TikTok effectively increases national attention to things like this.
The algorithm, of course, is reacting to my behavior- behavior which surely suggests that this is the type of content I "want" to see. If I go searching for basketball videos, I can teach the algorithm to populate my feed with them quite easily. But I never used the search bar.
The danger of the echo-chamber, rabbit hole aspect of the algorithm combined with TikTok potentially hand-selecting the types of content to push by default to American people to stir political dissension is very much there.
Facebook is not doing what WeChat is doing, not remotely close.
Facebook allows people to communicate, and censors some stuff that is hateful. You can say anything you want 'against America' on FB. The US government does not have access to FB data without jumping through a lot of legal hoops and process, and even then, it's on a case by case basis. The US government has no influence over FB otherwise.
WeChat is an organ of the state, they have internal staff who are CCP members who ensure party loyalty. They censor absolutely anything and everything they want, they can promote systems that are 'pro-China' and ban others. They can use any and all data for purposes of control and suppression (social score etc.). If they have such apps in foreign countries they can access sensitive information, photos, communications, censor and effectuate propaganda.
Those are not very comparable entities.
now try to find some ccp critical content on WeChat or TikTok (eg videos of Hong Kong protest). Especially while being on mainland China.
please let us know how it went
If you say something about Xi that is negative on WeChat there is almost a 100% chance it will be censored.
They have an Army of censors controlling all thoughts, making sure everyone is line with party ideals.
The comparison can't even be made materially - where do people get their information from? It's scary.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Well, yeah, even when the US does violate the overt guarantees in its Constitution to suppress internal dissent, it's not the foreign intelligence service that is the direct vehicle. Mostly, it’s the FBI/Justice Department.
The CCP plays the game unfairly and cheats blatantly.
All Chinese companies have CCP organs within them that the CPP uses to ensure the company adheres to party policy.
They are using the internet and all it's operating entities as a massive surveillance and enforcement machine.
Try posting a TikTok critical of China, or saying something about HK and see what happens.
The data from Chinese apps can be accessed by Xi & Co. whenever, for whatever purposes, including finding out who your friends are so they can be sanctioned/imprisoned as well.
Now - TikTok USA division - that's another story and it's hard to tell how far enforcement goes. Definitely it's censored and definitely there are elements of propaganda (you can tell from the content) but it's not hugely obvious. As far as data mining, I don't have specific information but I don't see any reason why they wouldn't have access to it just like WeChat.
FYI This is why WeChat is 100% banned and there's no option for them while TikTok has an option to cut off from the parent company.
[1] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business...
That's only a small part of what Trump cares about.
Security and trade are much bigger concerns.
Also - this is an election ploy to 'look tough'.
Just like Trump is going after Twitter and FB for being “unfair to conservatives”.
You haven’t kept up on China’s policies on these companies over the past decade have you?
Apple has been allowed in but has had to divest all data hosting to Chinese controlled companies.
But a lot of different players coming and going to see if they want to buy something, that's not unheard of.
It's like the parasitic Cordyceps mushroom.
The $50B is for the 100M users MAUs, 50M of which are active daily[1]. They have a billion downloads as well.
As a comparison, Facebook paid $1B for 30-40M signups on Instagram2[2][3]. Their MAUs and DAUs at the time would've been a small fraction of that.
So if we consider TikTok's downloads to be equivalent to Instagram's signups, the valuation isn't crazy at all (especially since TikTok has revenue).
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/24/tiktok-reveals-us-global-use...
2. https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acq...
3. https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/13/instagrams-user-count-now-...
> ByteDance has had a party committee since 2017 and is headed by CCP secretary and company editor-in-chief Zhang Fuping (張輔評), reported Human Rights Watch. Members of the committee hold regular gatherings at which they study speeches by Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) and "pledge to follow the party in technological innovation."
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/ccp-announces-plan-to-tak...
And I believe the reason they are talking about Microsoft and Oracle is because the intelligence agencies are suggesting that it would actually be a good outcome if they were able to effectively access that userbase. Whereas it is not tolerable otherwise.
Monitoring and controlling millions of people's information streams is a national security issue. And whether people want to believe it or not, all countries have propaganda programs.
What you see in your feed becomes your reality.
And just in case the above isn't enough to get buried, I will throw out an even crazier theory. TikTok is such mindless garbage it's reducing attention spans of kids even more. It may actually be making American children even stupider.
So, to sum up, I think WWIII started with Covid and TikTok is just part two.
Just kidding. Sort of. I hope.
Many governments would, of course, agree, but this is traditionally the domain of governments seen as "authoritarian", such as, e.g., China. (Is it reasonable China does not let its citizens access Facebook?)