China Discusses Sale of TikTok US to Musk as One Possible Option

Another example of "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer"

Corporate social media is population-scale brainwashing in a candy wrapper. Far worse than TV ever was.

Nobody is going to care about the invasion of Taiwan when Musk puts his finger on the algorithm’s scale as a quid pro quo to sell more Teslas abroad.

Too much money chasing too few goods in the market causes Inflation

Too much Content chasing limited human Attention is causing very very similar issues.

It took centuries to connect the fact that increasing or decreasing the money supply at a faster or slower rate than goods arriving in the market causes all kinds of chaos. The chaos made it hard to see the connection.

Central banks finally emerged to manage money supply and target a healthy inflation rate.

Handing Attention management off to the platforms is very similar to the state of affair when Kings and individual Banks printed their own money. That provided funding for wars. And created panics, bubbles, bank failures all the time which lead to the reluctant handing over of money printing to Central Banks world wide.

Today thanks to similar dynamics in the Attention Economy we are probably in a hyperinflationary state. As content keeps exploding, it gets harder and harder to be seen or heard unless you "buy more ads", win ad bidding wars, or "pay for visibility".

And guess what?

China can easily "buy more ads", win ad bidding wars, or "pay for visibility" to make things worse. They can/will also just flood the platforms with content via GenAI. Business will be pushed to spend more, Politicians have to raise more and individuals will struggle to focus on anything. Everyone will get exhausted or loose their minds. China or whoever won't have to fire a single shot to trigger collapse.

It doesn't matter who owns platforms if the way platforms manage Attention does not change.

We either need a Central Attention Bank that measures and targets healthy Attention extraction/consumption rates across different content types or Regulation placed on platforms on how Attention is managed (time limits, limits on ads volume, limits on marketing budgets all broken down by different content types (long term value/short term value/no value ie entertainment with individuals deciding the breakup just like they do with money - investments/savings/current etc etc).

Look, when you do business in a country, you obey that countries law. If you think the law is backwards and incompatible with your business, you don’t operate there, this is what google, fb did. They CHOOSE to not operate in china because they are not able to meet the requirements.

TikTok has met all requirements to operate based on the us law. It still got banned.

That’s a big difference. If data security is a concern the country should have rules regulate how foreign companies handle its citizens data, and it should apply to all companies.

This is the devil's endorsement.

Seriously, as an enjoyer of democracy and freedom, how is this not a complete horror story?

Musk is so anti-democratic that the CCP trusts him? Is that what I am seeing here? Please, someone talk me down.