#bytedance

(Source)

So my two cents that no one asked for is that a TikTok ban is actually Not A Good Thing. A lot of small businesses and artists (including my own band) rely on TikTok for marketing and growing an audience. TikTok is also a source of community for people from marginalized groups who might not feel safe expressing themselves in real life, especially younger folks. Not to mention the amount of real-time news we get that other sites suppress, such as the raw footage from Gaza or people organizing healthcare protests.

Does TikTok have issues specific to its platform? Undeniably. It's a digital meth house where I got flagged for the using the fuck word in a lyric. But when you find yourself dealing with a meth house, you don't take a wrecking ball to it and evict the residents. Banning Tiktok won't stop the widespread trends that other social media sites have now adopted. We still have short-form content. We still have algorithms tailoring our feed for the maximum dopamine rush while bombarding us with ads. Companies are still harvesting and selling our data. The worst people you can think of still have a Wi-Fi connection.

If you need more proof that the new TikTok will be worse than the old TikTok, consider that the owners on Fox News and the NY Post will have a say in how it is run.

The Trump administration has been talking up a potential TikTok deal this weekend, with President Donald Trump telling Fox News on Sunday that Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are “probably” going to be involved. “A man named Lachlan is involved,” Trump said. “Lachlan Murdoch … Rupert [Murdoch] is probably gonna be in the group, I think they’re going to be in the group.” The president also said that Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell are likely to be involved. While Trump did not specify whether he was talking about personal or company investments, following his comments, Deadline reported that Fox Corp — owner of Fox News, run by CEO Lachlan Murdoch, and long led by chairman emeritus Rupert — is in fact in talks to join the investor group backing TikTok’s U.S. spinoff from owner ByteDance.

The TikTok ban was meant to pull the app and all other apps under the same parent company of ByteDance from major appstores. It was never meant to shut it down entirely, just stop further distribution of it. You cannot download TikTok or CapCut or Lemon8 or ANY of the apps made by ByteDance anymore, because the BAN IS STILL IN PLACE.

The shutdown [which started earlier than the initial ban was supposed to take place, iirc] was NOT supposed to happen. It was performative. And judging by those notifications crediting Trump for "lifting the ban" [aka ceasing a shutdown that was never supposed to happen in the first place], I'm betting money that it was nothing but propaganda to get us to stop hating on him and make us stop caring about the ban.

David Badash at NCRM:

President Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon signed an executive order declaring that the agreement to reduce China’s stake in TikTok to the level mandated by Congress now satisfies congressional requirements — months after the deadline lawmakers had set. The agreement is reportedly a framework that could still face legal and congressional challenges. The deal will allow TikTok, one of the most popular social media apps in the world, which serves 170 million Americans, to continue to operate in the U.S. “Much is still unknown about the actual arrangement, but Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping ‘gave us the go-ahead’ to proceed with the deal. Any major change to the popular video platform could have a huge impact on how Americans — particularly young adults and teenagers — consume information online,” according to the Associated Press. “About 43% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published Thursday.”

The Washington Post reported that the deal “would create an American version of the popular video app owned by some of the president’s wealthiest supporters.” “Under the proposed deal, some of the new TikTok U.S. will be owned by corporate interests linked to men known for their longtime support of Trump and the Republican Party, such as Jeff Yass, a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, and Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, according to two people familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal negotiations.”

On Thursday, Donald Trump signed an executive order to legally allow TikTok to remain in the USA, as an agreement to reduce Chinese ownership of the app has been reached. The US version of the app will be owned by Trump-aligned billionaires, including Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch.

When asked by a reporter, Trump would love to have made TikTok “100% MAGA”, but even he admits that would be impossible.

See Also:

CNBC: Trump approves TikTok deal through executive order, Vance says business valued at $14 billion