https://www.androidauthority.com/tiktok-ban-bytedance-response-3437786/
If you're hoping that the TikTok ban will result in ByteDance selling the social network to stay in the US, we have some bad news.
Boy I'd love it if that were really true.
Way way way way too many idiots still going there.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/oK9oPk8bsvk?t=39s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You can make a good case for breaking up Facebook. Twitter is just twitter and is slowly eating itself. Eventually, the advertisers will see just how much of the userbase are bots and either pull or negotiate for lower rates.
I found out recently that lots of people here use and defend Meta because of things like the Quest and Facebook. Lots of Lemmy people use Meta and won't admit it. They will quickly ignore anti Meta comments to focus on other social media companies even though Meta is by far the most egregious.
As far as I'm concerned META ruined the Oculus. As soon as they bought them out, I bought a Vive (which has worked great for years).
There will be a rush of US startups to replace it, and they will all be stage 1 enshittification, so they might actually be good for a while, like TikTok once was.
yt doesn't even need tiktok to fail. they have a winning formula going for them rn already. creators make shorts from their longer form content. the shorts are promo for their long form. creators get views for both forms. it's been going really good for them so far afaik.
If they said or implied anything else, they would lose all leverage. The public couldn't care less about who owns tiktok, so they need people to think they'll lose it to have any public support.
Of course you do. You're all just the old man yelling at cloud meme and it's honestly sad.
Oh, eat a Hello Kitty lunchbox full of dicks. There's plenty of reasons to hate on TikTok (and Facebook, insta, YouTube, ad-infinitum/ad-nauseum). They're a damn cancer on society.
Are you being intentionally daft? You realise there is no algorithm behind Lemmy, right? You aren't being shoved controversial polarizing content subliminally here.
The worst of Lemmy is a certain instance... That I have never heard from after defederation.
The worst of Lemmy is a certain instance... That I have never heard from after defederation.
Yeah, defederating from Beehaw was definitely a great decision. I'm so glad I don't have to see those guys' posts anymore.
You realise there is no algorithm behind Lemmy, right?
Of course there is. Even "sort by newest" is an algorithm, and the default view is more complicated than that.
You aren't being shoved controversial polarizing content subliminally here.
Neither are you on TikTok, unless you actively go looking for it
Neither are you on TikTok, unless you actively go looking for it
That's just genuine nonsense. The whole point of platforms like TikTok are the modern recommender systems that (simplified) lead to algorithmic radicalisation. Because these systems heavily optimise towards user engagement, they naturally spread misinformation and controversial content.
And because this kind of content statistically gets more user engagement as people commend on it and spend more time with it, it spreads quicker. This has also e.g. been confirmed by a leaked internal Facebook memo.
And additionally, these systems are personalised, so when you start to interact with it, you get more and more similar content. This leads to a radicalisation pipeline in which the platforms normalises these positions in echo chambers to you.
You're like the old people that yelled about rock music ruining the youth. But for the the internet lmao. What's it feel like to become that? Is it sad? It seems sad.
Yet you celebrate when the government illegally passes legislation targeting only one company to the benefit of meta and YouTube lmao. Hypocrit.
Uhhh, dude - it's not illegal. As others have mentioned, it's a foreign (hostile) actor contributing to election interference efforts in violation of established law. It is essentially enforcing another law that's already on place!
The complication with fb et al is that as US companies, there are other laws that protect their actions (and I'm not going to minimize the effects of powerful lobbyists).
I'd love to see any evidence of TikTok acting on behalf of any country (especially China) as a hostile actor, or even any evidence of legitimate election interference. If anything banning TikTok is a significantly more hostile response from the US since it silences another forum for free speech.
Social media is a cancer, but this ban is such obvious propaganda. The only reason TikTok was banned because the US government doesn't have free reign to spy on its users like it does with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
If the US government truly cared about social media and it's affects they would be regulating all of it. Instead they're trying to ban TikTok while screaming their heads off about China every chance they get. And that's before mentioning the extremely shady way they passed this; attaching it as a rider through a government 'aid' bill.
I find it amusing how people talk about things they read second hand without understanding.
The nominal reason they are banning TikTok is because of the data collection. Nothing to do with election security, but national security. The real reason is that they want to lock down the digital information space in preparation for WW3. TikTok is harder to control and there's a lot of anti-government messaging on it.
It's sort of like the Voter ID laws in GOP states. They pass laws for "election security" by making it so you need an ID to vote. The nominal reason is so that they prevent election fraud. The real reason is they've done statistical analysis and that law reduces black votes by a couple percent, and blacks tend to vote Democrat.
The real reason in both cases would be unconstitutional, so they come up with another.
And the mass of idiots online cheer on the deterioration of whatever legitimacy was left in American democratic institutions.
In other to infringe the right to speech, you need a valid justification. It needs to be a) narrowly tailored and b) actually accomplish the aim of the legislation.
This is the same reason the judge stopped the Montana TikTok ban.
For a) 170 million Americans use TikTok. So the law has to be ironclad legally speaking to be considered narrowly tailored. It needs to be the bare minimum the government can possibly do to alleviate the ill it claims to address.
The fact is, this legislation does not actually result in a scenario where China loses access to data on Americans. They can just buy it - it's an ocean of data out there and there's no real way to stop them accessing it.
Unless you were to make large sweeping changes to the way we handle data, like the EU data laws. But that would affect all social media companies.
What I'm saying is it's not actually for national security. It's just that if they said the real purpose "ban content potentially manipulated by a specific group of people" then they would require a much higher burden of scrutiny which they could not meet.
There's a difference legally speaking between "content-neutral" bans and "content-based". Content neutral for example is national security and requires less scrutiny. You can't just arbritarily ban content because of what it says. Note the specific text in the ban: because of data collection. Not the content itself.
Make sure to pay attention to the upcoming court case on this situation. It will be an important case. The CCP has signaled they will not approve a sale to an American company, so Bytedance essentially only has one option, and that is to fight this in court.
The fact is the federal government is playing games. They're playing loosey goosey with the laws in an attempt to manipulate the digital media environment.
This isn't something a democracy should be doing. It's akin to banning foreign media. Like Israel banning Al Jazeera. Whole world is going nuts and we're pretending it's OK.
Dude, I was there for when Vine was born and for when it died, and Vine didn't even get picked up for mass disinformation, and y'know what? Life moved on. If you think that makes me old and out of touch then fine.
I think it's sad that you're all just ok with this kind of blatant government overreach to protect corporate pockets tbh. You just go along with the disinformation thing without an ounce of critical thought because you didn't like the app lol. I guess I just expected better of this community but I was wrong. I think lemmy just got the reddit boomers that are in denial about being boomers. It seems like it's just an alternative retirement site to facebook for y'all. So have fun with that I guess.
Am I a Reddit boomer when I’m 21 and like (some) Tiktok-esque kind of content?
I’ve never used TikTok, but not because I don’t get the idea of using audio as meme template or because I don’t like short videos. But just because that specific platform itself is so vile.
Not just talking about funding the Chinese government, TikTok e.g. reduces reach of neurodivergent people. Even worse, it censors information against China‘s authoritarianism and much more.
Why can’t I be happy that this awful platform loses reach? The content itself will be kept, there are enough copycats.
Also, Lemmy is full of people that stopped using Reddit for ethical reasons. So it’s not surprising many are against TikTok as well tbh.
Yeah, definitely a boomer in vibes if not in age. Sorry. Everything you said is basically wrong. You're just repeating what others have said without putting a single bit of effort into confirming anything but your own bias.
Ethical reasons lmao. You all just laughed while our government illegally targeted one company with legislation to get rid of competition for big corporations like meta/google. Don't pretend to be doing any of this for any kind of moral high ground when you can't even be bothered to look into something before arguing for it. You're just useful tools happily guzzling their bs excuse of it being for our security because that's what you want to believe.
Greed on Capitol Hill is not new and a huge problem. Big tech does need to get broken up. But are you trying to say TikTok and ByteDance and their backers are small corporations and mom and pop shops??
Scrutiny over ByteDance expanded further after the government took a 1% stake in its local subsidiary Beijing ByteDance Technology in 2019 that awarded the Chinese government a board seat at the subsidiary. https://www.inc.com/reuters/what-you-need-to-know-about-tiktoks-chinese-parent-company-bytedance.html
About 60% of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group,"
Wiki stuff:
Carlyle Group The Carlyle Group Inc. is a multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services corporation based in the United States with $376 billion of assets under management.
General Atlantic General Atlantic, legal main entity General Atlantic Service Company, L.P., is an American growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support for global growth companies, headquartered in New York, United States. The firm was founded in 1980 as the captive investment team for Atlantic Philanthropies, a philanthropic organization founded by Charles F. Feeney, the billionaire co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers Ltd.
Susquehanna International Group The firm invested $5 million into ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, in 2012 when ByteDance was founded. As of 2020, its stake in ByteDance represented 15 percent of its fully-diluted capitalization table and was valued over $15 billion on paper.[9]
I don't get your point. I'm against tech monopolies and I hate Google. I want Facebook to be split up and think that the current tech companies are way to powerful, see this video by Last Week Tonight. I use duckduckgo and try to avoid google services.
Don’t pretend to be doing any of this for any kind of moral high ground when you can’t even be bothered to look into something before arguing for it.
Lmao. How would you get the thought I wouldn't have "looked into this". That sounds like antivax level of arguments.
Everything you said is basically wrong.
And this gives me the feeling I'm much better informed than you tbh.
Because no, what I wrote is factually correct, read for example this, this or this or just so many more articles, outlining detailed how TikTok censors content made by minorities, talking about the Uighur camps or so much more.
I feel like you can't grasp the thought that someone knows how bad many tech companies are and still can see that content behind TikTok is at least as terrible. And what I'm writing isn't any more boomer-like than what you write, you even use the same talking points but are just ignoring any of TikTok's flaws.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
[https://www.piped.video/watch?v=jXf04bhcjbg&pp=ygUPdGVjaCBtb25vcG9saWVz]](https://piped.video/watch?v=jXf04bhcjbg&pp=ygUPdGVjaCBtb25vcG9saWVz%5D)
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Which corporation's profits do you think banning TikTok is intended to protect?
Also, "boomer" is a specific group of people and applying that term to everyone who doesn't agree with you makes it pretty damn silly and meaningless.
YouTube and Instagram have features that are in direct competition with TikTok. YouTube has even been more aggressive in promoting themselves as the TikTok alternative. On top of that the US government has an incentive to keep them (Google and Meta) happy; since the US routinely spies on its own (and other countries) citizens through these companies.
One of the guys that wrote the bill invests heavily in meta and invested even more in March after putting forward the new bill that recently passed to ban it... But I'm sure that's TOTALLY just a coincidence lmao. Mike McCaul. Not to mention google's potential benefit for getting rid of a major competitor but they'd never meddle with our government right?
A boomer is someone that's out of touch and hateful/distrustful of things they don't understand. It's a mentality. If you weren't a boomer you'd know that
I mean they're literally just the guys who read about like, say, 4chan being bad, right, but then never actually use the site itself to see. I mean, yeah, if you go on /pol/ or /r9k/, and then scroll around for like 5 minutes, you can find some content that's going to reinforce your bias that the site is kind of an ontologically evil fascist hellscape, but if you go on /mu/ it's gonna be no more toxic than basically any other forum you could go on. It's just people thoughtlessly parroting the narratives that they've heard from other people.
I don't like tiktok, I don't like lemmy, I kind of hate social media even though it's like infested my life because I have no self control, but I'm not gonna be like. This is such an epic pog moment! I'm so pegged outta my gourd! when it gets banned. Because I've used it, thoroughly, not just first glance, and I actually understand the pros and cons of the platform. These guys don't have that, they only have like, the white stale wonderbread and wood chips of social media usage, they only have reddit, and even more libbed up privacy reddit, i.e. the most obvious and in your face social media platforms of all time that give you (ostensibly, in practice, it's the opposite) a very high amount of control over what they're seeing. Of course they hate tiktok. On top of the brainrot privacy concerns they all probably have, they're gonna discard it on the basis that they don't have the self-control to use its platform, and project that onto everyone else. It's like a puritan hating coffee, or cocaine, without understanding that it's a great morning drink, or without understanding that it makes pro wrestling promos wayyyyy fucking better.
if you go on /mu/ it's gonna be no more toxic than basically any other forum you could go on.
I used to go on /mu/, and yes, it's unbelievably toxic. I'm glad I don't use 4chan anymore.
And this was long before all the QAnon shit happened.
Really? I went on it like I wanna say two or three months ago and it wasn't that bad. You had a couple troll threads, obviously, because (you)s and getting your thread bumped are what the platform incentivizes over anything else, but it didn't seem that bad.
Nah. I was wrong to come here though. Lemmy isn't the next step forward. It's the retirement site for people that got mad at reddit lmao.
I mean, you are disagreeing (even mocking), but not providing any argument. What did you expect?
It's probably not a bluff. They've pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there's not much room left to grow here. It would make more sense to focus their efforts on growing in other regions where they have plenty of headroom to increase their userbase and monetization. Depending on how things play out, they could match their current revenue in a matter of years and still have room left to grow. There's also the potential to re-enter the U.S. market down the line. Why would they throw that all away and essentially create their own competitor by selling their core technology and diluting/confusing their brand with whatever U.S. company they sell to?
I'd think the fact they've saturated the US market is exactly why it'd be too valuable to give up. They'd lose a ton of revenue, tanking their valuation. They may be better off selling. From there they could prob just clone it and promote a competing service in those unclaimed markets using a portion of the extra sale price they get for maintaining (and selling a product with) US market dominance
They’ve pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there’s not much room left to grow here
That... doesn't make sense to me. So because there's no room to grow, they pull out of the U.S. and lose the likely ~$1 bil spent on digital stickers for live streamers?
they use the same algorithm across all of their companies so selling it would create a strong competitor and the chinese government is likely to block the sale anyways. tiktok revenue is a small slice of bytedance's income, so it makes sense to swallow the relatively small loss to keep their product intact when it's crystal clear that it's far superior to anything else atm.
Is it good or do they just have a massive network and data advantage. If tik tok left and everyone switched over to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and they had the same amount of data tik tok has I think the experience would converge to whatever was on tik tok in a month or so.
There's no secret sauce to tik tok, they're throwing massive amounts of data at a recommendation AI and telling it to optimize for watch time, any sufficiently scaled company can do that nowadays. It's more a matter of getting and maintaining an audience to create that data and content creators, both of which due to the network effect, and without federation, are drawn to the biggest service, not necessarily to the best.
I love how the media has thrown around the word algorithm. They don’t need to sell their algorithm for a competitor to compete. An algorithm produces some result output. So you could easily clone an algorithm without knowing its exact implementation.
Maybe I know quicksort, but you know mergesort. The customer doesn’t give a fuck which algorithm was used, so long as it’s sorted.
This is a bad take. Yes, “algorithm” is a vague term, but it’s incorrect to suggest that they’re easily cloned. These algorithms are what makes social media companies. Without them, they wouldn’t have the same kind of user engagement. It’s why, outside of the fediverse, social media companies try to hide or demote linear timelines. It’s why they pour most of the R&D money into the recommendation algorithms.
algorithm is a word employed here to help dumb down the concept of the IP that people will want to buy from tiktok; no one means a literal algorithm.
That was my original point. The media and hence business / management use this term (incorrectly)
They could just say IP, or platform, or service, or implementation. But I guess saying algorithm makes everyone sound smart.
US should call their bluff. If Tiktok gets banned, people will complain for a little bit until people forget and move on to what's next. Why doesn't an American company make something that's practically identical? People will be all desperate for their 5 second dopamine rush that they will download anything.
As I recall, the guy who makes Pixelfed (dansup?) is also working on a vine clone called loops. It looks like the site is https://loops.video/ Doesn't appear to be operational yet.
It would be his first good instinct. But bringing back the domain is t going to bring back the magic. Vine is dead and nothing Musked is going to be any fun.
India did this and Instagram reels is the main one that benefited. Probably be the same for US if it pulls through on this.
YouTube and Instagram already have identical features. Most US creators who post on Tik Tok also use those platforms already
They can't, the algorithm is the best part about tiktok and none of the competitors come close.
If I remember correctly from my rabbit hole, it tracks your viewing habits by a far wider list of variables and on a micromanaged scale. It can be annoying if you have someone sending you content you don't like because viewing them will slot them into your feed immediately, but it's just as quick to discard those things. I found it very easy to train for my interests in cooking, goblincore, and irrational humor.
Personally I've not tried shorts, I don't have any issues with it but I've only ever used YouTube for long form educational videos or horror fiction so it never has anything to offer me.
If you have to ask that question you definitely don't use Tiktok it's far far superior algorithmically than Reels and YT Shorts which are both absolute garbage.
It's Vine time! What? Just... just bring it back. Call it "Kudzu" or some crap if Elon Musk owns the rights to Vine.
Me, an American, to my German cousin:
"So, yeah, I'm changing email addresses, here's my new one."
"Email? Are you using WhatsApp?"
"Er, no, how about text?"
"We all have WhatsApp."
"Okay, maybe Google Chat?"
"WhatsApp? WhatsApp."
I've had basically the same conversation with my sister who lives in Albania. I just want to use something encrypted like signal but she just refuses and says it's either WhatsApp or Facebook messenger. Cause of that I barely talk to her.
Uh, no? I don't know who told you this lie, but https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
Btw it wouldn't even matter, since the encryption happens in the client app. The server basically just passes around encrypted pieces of data between devices.
Here's the trick (maybe): "Don't you know that WhatsApp is owned by Meta and collecting information on your chat metadata (who you chat to, when, your contacts, their contacts)."
Tell them to get Signal. If there's any country on this planet where convincing people to use Signal is easier, it must be Germany. GMaps streetview was banned there until recently, everyone uses fake names on Facebook, if they even made one in the first place.
Surely they must be amenable to Signal
If the Chinese government is behind this, it's a great play. Having Joe Biden be "the guy who banned tik tok" would severely undermine his election chances.
TikTok or reproductive freedom
Both of those bans have happened during the Biden administration
Lemmy really seems to generally think that TikTok isn't massively overall popular. Lemmy would have someone thinking it's a niche app only being used by teenagers.
If money wasn't the point, then influence was. Congress is right to shut them down.
Foreign owned, FARA-unregistered influence operations have never been a facet of "free speech" in the USA.
It's pretty weird that they'd admit it.
The smart move would have been to sell it and take the L, and use the new money to build the next thing.
I mean, not on the surface. But lobby groups working for foreign governments operate in Washington to this day, and they’re ignored because Congress doesn’t want to shut the money tap off.
First, negotiations are not yet over, so they’re hoping courts overturn the ban.
Second, TikTok is very popular outside the US too, though 40% of ad revenue is in the US. They’d survive.
Even if they do plan to sell they wouldn't say it. If buyers think that a sale is inevitable they can offer less because they "don't have a choice" but to sell. If they act as if their plan is to pull out the buyers need to not just make them an offer that is higher than the others, but also high enough to make them reconsider their whole position.
This is right on. The best PR right now is to say they’ll never sell. Take a hard line while they challenge the law in court. They can always have acquisition meetings in private, and announce it out of nowhere at the last second if they do find a buyer.