TikTok will be banned, not sold.

[Celerity]

115. They will pay 5 to 7 billion USD in Chinese taxes alone (as their total revenue will be over 30 billion USD for 2024)

Last edited Thu Apr 25, 2024, 07:36 AM - Edit history (1)

My main concern is the timing of this all. The new law doesn't stop TikTok before the 2024 elections (if one is worried about Facebook style manipulation), AND it also puts Biden's face on the potential ban in a front and centre position BEFORE the elections.

It's a lose-lose.

Being tied to unpopular government actions or outcomes can cause blow back:

A long-forgotten thing that happened right before the 2016 elections (overshadowed of course by the Comey bullshit on October 28, 2016) is that you could see a drop off already across the board in Clinton's polling when the new, and in many cases very substantively-raised/increased Obamacare premium rates were issued right before the damn election. They were leaked on Friday, October 21, 2016 (and officially came out on Monday, October 24, with the RW press and TBF, much of the MSM going wild over the size of the increases), which was a week before the Comey ratfucking and you could already see negative movement in the daily polls, cutting against Clinton for the first time in multiple ones. A bit maddening that the Obama administration changed the open enrollment dates (and thus the release date of those premium increases) so that the increases were released right before the 2016 election. They used to come out around early September, prior to the 2014 open enrollment date for the 2015 effective rate year (as open enrollment before then started Oct 1, not November 1 like it did in 2016, or Nov 15, like it has before, see below). That would have given it time to settle in and not end up being an 'October surprise'. They also could have (even better!) released the increases after the 2016 election, as unlike other times the open enrollment that year was a whopping 3 months, from Nov 1 all the way to Jan 31, 2017. You had open enrollment for 2 months, from Nov 15 to Jan 15 recently. They could have had 2 (or even 2 and half) full months of open enrollment back in 2016/2017 and had a post election release date for the new rates.

I was living in the US at that time, and I so remember my father (investment banker in the City of London who did M&A work globally in the healthcare sector at that time, so he was and is well sussed) saying on a Skype video call with my wife and I that those rate increases would move the dial against Clinton.

now, all that said............


As for user data, China already buys user data on US citizens via data brokers, and TikTok actually captures less data than many American social media firms like FaceBook (Meta).

ByteDance is a privately held firm, but China can veto its sale.

The algorithms are the real crux of the biscuit.

Here is a cut from a March NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/us/politics/tiktok-ban-house-bill.html

snip

Those algorithms, which guide how TikTok watches its users and feeds them more of what they want, are the magic sauce of an app that 170 million Americans now have on their phones. That’s half the country. But TikTok doesn’t own those algorithms; they are developed by engineers who work for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which assembles the code in great secrecy in its software labs, in Beijing, Singapore and Mountain View, Calif. But China has issued regulations that appear designed to require government review before any of ByteDance’s algorithms could be licensed to outsiders. Few expect those licenses to be issued — meaning that selling TikTok to an American owner without the underlying code might be like selling a Ferrari without its famed engine.

The bill would require a new, Western-owned TikTok to be cut off from any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” So the new, American-based company would have to develop its own, made-in-America algorithm. Maybe that would work, or maybe it would flop. But a version of TikTok without its classic algorithm might quickly become useless to users and worthless to investors. And right now, China has no incentive to relent. The House vote “was a nice symbolic gesture,” James A. Lewis, who leads the cyber research program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on Wednesday. “But the Chinese get a vote, too.”

snip

But officials know they cannot wrest it from ordinary users — which is why the threat of banning TikTok, especially in an election year, is faintly ridiculous. In a fit of remarkable candor, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, told Bloomberg last year that if any democracy thinks it can outright ban the app, “the politician in me thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.” The House bill passed on Wednesday holds open the threat of such a ban. But that is probably not its real intent. Rather, it seeks to give the United States leverage to force a sale. And for two years now, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a secretive body that reviews corporate deals that could jeopardize national security, has quietly been trying to work out an arrangement that would avert a true showdown. So far it has failed — one reason that the bill passed.

In the course of those negotiations, TikTok has proposed to continue U.S. operations — while still fully owned by ByteDance — and have its algorithm inspected and dissected in the United States. It is part of a broader plan TikTok calls Project Texas. Under Project Texas, all U.S.-origin user data from TikTok would be stored on domestic servers operated by Oracle, the cloud computing company. To build confidence in the independence of its algorithm, TikTok has also proposed that Oracle and a third party will review its source code to make sure it has not been manipulated. TikTok says much of this plan is already being implemented. But government officials insist that it is hard to know how such inspections would actually work — even for the most experienced experts, reviewing minor changes in code, at high speed, is a complicated proposition. Biden administration officials say it is not like inspecting agricultural goods or counting weapons under an arms treaty. Very subtle changes could alter the news that is delivered, whether it was about a presidential election or Chinese action against Taiwan.

snip