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TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

reuters.com

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Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#881

Post by TeaBrain »

somenameforme wrote: post #599
cvoss wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it. The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.

I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill. I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in t…

Acts of congress can only be blocked by the supreme court's power of judicial review. The supreme court held a 2.5 hour hearing this past week and the only two justices who voiced skepticism of the law were Gorsuch and Thomas.

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#882

Post by glurblur »

seryoiupfurds wrote: post #558
metacritic12 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language: The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was inf…

However, for any Chinese people who also know English, the association is obvious. I asked an actual Chinese person about 小红书 and they assumed I was talking about Mao's book until I clarified.

I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about. I've never associated 小红书 with whatever Mao did back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made that connection. I only get that idea after watching a video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#883

Post by sudosysgen »

TMWNN wrote: post #847
sudosysgen wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning. Tiktok has over a billion users, and about 150 million of those are American. It would be downright stupid to sell all of it just for the US market and it would set an absolutely disastrous precedent.

A social media site is not like a company that makes widgets. The latter's profits scale linearly with the number of widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale linearly (at least, not in the same way) with the number of users; much of the infrastructure cost is the same whether 500 million or one billion users are on the site. It's entirely possible that a TikTok without US users is unprofitable. Especially given t…

Tiktok is an offshoot of Douyin, I don't think Douyin needs the US to be profitable, and software has a low marginal cost.

> PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles the mind.

I never said so, I said I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number did. Having grown up in this environment I've seen people literally buy 4 year old iPhones just for iMessage. American teenagers are very weird about social media and this kind of behavior wouldn't be out of character.

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#884

Post by winternett »

bearjaws wrote: post #490
jdlyga wrote: post #115

"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels" I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone…

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.

As someone who's been on TikTok for years now, it's extremely fake, the algorithm is a total ruse, as most of what trends is based on seeing news stories repeated hundreds of times, and most other content has the same repetitive music behind it... Far too much repetition and subtle seminaries in trending content, down to the way videos are color graded to be honestly real & organic... I've had a few videos go viral, but most things that do go viral are memes, the minute you want to push out anything remotely serious or related to business, they want money to let it pass the visibility gate.

I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that deserve better.

That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content creators mind you.

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#885

Post by TulliusCicero »

tzs wrote: post #829
0x5f3759df-i wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly it. If China allowed fully uncensored American social media to operate in China I’d had zero issue letting them do the same in the US. But the CCP wants to have their cake and eat it too. Fully repressive social media lock downs and censorship for their citizens but exploiting the west’s values of free speech and debate.

China doesn't allow uncensored Chinese social media to operate in China either, so it doesn't really make much sense to say that they should have to allow uncensored American social media in order for Chinese social media companies to operate in the US. That would be like saying that an Israeli publisher should not be allowed to publish in the US because US publishers cannot publish holocaust denial books in Israel.…

Ah, so because China severely represses their own people, that means outright banning foreign web platforms even when they're hosted on foreign soil isn't really a ban for some reason.

The logic of PRC defenders never ceases to amaze.

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#886

Post by whateveracct »

bearjaws wrote: post #490
jdlyga wrote: post #115

"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels" I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone…

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.

TikTok has a lot of true believers.

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#887

Post by whateveracct »

mhh__ wrote: post #562
bearjaws wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.

The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it. It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop. I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...

It's a proper Skinner box. Very well made. And in millions of people's pockets too.

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#888

Post by Sebguer »

mrtransient wrote: post #802

Why can't the decentralized social media be made? What are the technical obstacles for this? Why cant it run in your browser, users could store their content on their own devices and share it P2P. Noone knows whats being shared, no problems with censorships, regulations, laws...

What kind of content do you think's going to end up filling a platform like that?

Re: TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

#889

Post by 1970-01-01 »

I don't believe the super addictive, antidemocratic backdoor into US citizens lives is actually getting TKO'd. Crisis is their (misquoted) word for new opportunities[1], and the value of the spy tool is too damn high for it to simply go dark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis

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