TikTok Spin Off Deal
TikTok has signed the deal backed by President Donald Trump to spin off its US assets to create a new entity with a group of mostly American investors, CEO Shou Chew told employees in a memo Thursday.
Although the transaction is not yet complete, the move brings TikTok one step closer to securing its long-term future in the United States. It comes after a law passed last year required that the US version of the app be spun off from its parent company, ByteDance, or be banned in the United States.
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Under the agreement, the US TikTok app will be controlled by a new joint venture, 50% of which will be owned by a consortium of investors comprised of tech company Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati-backed investment firm MGX. Just over 30% of the joint venture will be held by “affiliates of certain existing investors in ByteDance” and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, according to Chew’s memo.
The craziest aspect of this whole saga is that TikTok has been operating illegally since Trump took office.
Oracle is among the companies illegally supporting TikTok for the past year, along with Apple and Google. Instead of facing stiff legal penalties, Oracle will get to own a 15% piece of TikTok.
The deal purportedly involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” but given you can’t trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what’s left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be “overseeing data protection,” but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
Also, this seems to ignore that three years ago, during the Biden administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s algorithms and data protection. It’s kinda weird that everyone seems to have forgotten that. This is all, more or less, what was already agreed to years ago.
There is a kind of implied for now which should be tacked onto the end of its impact on Canadians. This U.S.-specific version lays the groundwork for a political wedge issue in Canada and elsewhere: should people use the version of the app run by a company headquartered in Beijing and mostly owned by a mix of American, Chinese, and Emirati investors, or should they use the app run by a company based in the U.S and mostly owned by a mix of American, Chinese, and Emirati investors? Or, to frame it in more politically expedient terms, should people be allowed to use the “Chinese” app or should they be pushed into the “American” app? Under that framing, I would not be surprised to see the U.S. version become the dominant client for TikTok worldwide.
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I figured TikTok wasn't going to go away because enough politicians still have a few lingering morsels of competency left to know that they need to keep the circus part of "bread and circuses" going.
"Under that framing, I would not be surprised to see the U.S. version become the dominant client for TikTok worldwide."
That is assuming the rest of the world has more trust in US than in Chinese, which is not the case since Trump is president.
In Trump’s first term, the corruption wore a suit, tie and sunglasses in a feeble attempt to hide from the law. Now it no longer need wear anything, because after the mass handwringing of 2021-24, no one fears any repercussion once the other side retakes power.
Gonna have to disagree with Nick Heer this time. Why would anyone want to use the American version, owned and operated by the Trump regime and its cronies?
You know the goal is to turn it into another Twitter.
It’s just ridiculous democrats fell for the moral panic and handed Republicans this new propaganda arm. Fools.
"no one fears any repercussion once the other side retakes power."
They do not believe that the other side will ever again retake power.
>Or, to frame it in more politically expedient terms, should people be allowed to use the “Chinese” app or should they be pushed into the “American” app? Under that framing, I would not be surprised to see the U.S. version become the dominant client for TikTok worldwide.
Except the choice is really between
a) a largely Chinese company that _plausibly_ has some meddling from an authoritarian government that doesn't share some "Western" values, or
b) a largely American company that _definitely_ has strong ties to the current authoritarian government that _definitely_ has some unacceptable values.
And perhaps in public discourse, people have conflated what they _wish_ the TikTok story were about with what the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (do… do I have to stand up and salute while saying this law's name?) _actually_ does, which thankfully is kind of in the name. Given some of the US state department's recent comments, is the EU now a "foreign adversary"? Should the EU do its own fork of TikTok? Heck, given the US president's comments on _Canada_ earlier in the year (seems so long ago), should _Canada_ do its own TikTok, too? Just so it doesn't, like, become a 51st state?
But really, are those the things people _think_ are troubling about TikTok? Or is it rather aspects such as
- privacy abuses
- an algorithmic timeline that sucks you in, and manipulates what you're interested in
- virtually no quality control
In which case… surely getting bought by a US private corporation with a history of privacy issues makes both of those _worse_, not better. But also, wouldn't that have been the _real_ issue to tackle? Sure, you'd never find a 60% majority for it in the US senate. But ask a tech-savvy parent about what their kid's been watching on YouTube and watch them die a little inside, because YouTube, too, does not have a legal solution to the problem of "it's lucrative to social media companies to abuse privacy, and to boost engagement numbers, content quality be damned". A law that reigns _that_ in, such as by forming an independent commission to look into how social media is doing, would've _actually_ helped consumers. But it doesn't come with the easy legislative majority of "what if we make it a foreign policy topic by blaming the Chinese".
It seems like we've largely skipped over the part of "huh, mass media isn't as popular any more; instead, we now have more diversified media thanks in part to social media, but there's a lot less journalistic integrity to it; what effect could that possibly have on a population?" and went straight to "oh well, nothing we can do!"
