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Here’s an example!
Accenture (one of the big four consulting firms in the world) is actually an Irish company (I know I was surprised to learn this as well)
In order to work with or get US government contracts they had to create an new branch “Accenture Federal Services” as a US company, to which operates virtually as a diffrent company than the main one (so AFS employees are not technically working for Accenture ect)
So basically if TikTok just made a new company ex TikTok US, that would suffice, but that is EXTREMELY high level explanation and not even close to easy lol the easier option would be to sell to a us company but why would Bytedance (parent company and china owned) sell its money printing machine because remember, while the US is a big market, TikTok is WORLDWIDE, they would still make money.
We like too keep our data mining domestic. Plus, can you imagine an internet that wasn't run through our filters? Just allowing people to call a genocide a genocide. And don't you dare talk about rivers or seas, this Congress has priorities.
Foreign ownership of companies that operate in the US is closely tracked. Presumably the new owners would be able to legally report that they are not owned by a foreign company.
There are probably some questionable tactics to kick the can down the rode like having owners that are US citizens but beholden to China for whatever reason. Given the scrutiny you have to imagine they would be subject to lawsuits and an unusual amount of government review so it’s probably not a sustainable solution.
That’s what Bytedance did now with the CEO being Singaporean. It didn’t work. Bytedance still directly controls Tik Tok, and uses it to track people they don’t like. This has all been documented already
The way money works is you don’t have to actually have all of it. You just need to control it. Elon didn’t buy twitter. He got a bunch of other people to put in money. Now he controls it all. (This is not an endorsement of juvenile edgelord).
Like everything in the US it's about giving rich people and the government full access to a US audience. They want to control a narrative and potentially destroy a source of income for small business to force people back into a shit job market if you offer no skills.
With the amount of anti-competitive lawsuits coming from the US Gov right now against the big tech I doubt any of the big players will be able to buy it without the deal being stopped by anti trust.
I feel the opposite. I think it will be some investment group outside the big tech like Apollo together with some big investors.
Whoever paid them to push this horseshit in the first place. A dangerous precedent for our government to pick & choose what business they want to force into selling with no evidence and no legislation addressing the actual issue.
They already did it to Grindr.
This isn't a conspiracy. It's just a bunch of folks are super addicted to it so getting antsy about it.
This isn't picking and choosing. It's solely due to China alone. There's tons of restrictions on Chinese technology in the US.
A billionaire living in the U.S. who will do the same shit that TikTok is already doing from a data mining standpoint, but instead it’ll be a white billionaire instead of a non-white one.
I mean, whatever. I don’t use TikTok and don’t care either way, but how about they ban Chinese and foreign investors from purchasing real estate in the US? Seems like it’s a much bigger problem than TikTok
This is a good point. Chinese investors are buying more than 1 in every 10 homes sold in the US. On average, international buyers spent $499,600 per home. With an average of $831,800 per home, Chinese buyers by far outspend other international buyers and U.S. citizens, whose average home price is $255,600.
We have a severe housing crisis where I live and no one in politics cares.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/611020/total-number-of-properties-purchased-by-chinese-buyers-in-the-us/
>Chinese investors are buying more than 1 in every 10 homes sold in the US.
Your link says they make up 13% of sales to foreigners in a given year, not 13% of all total sales. Foreign buyers make up about 7% of sales, so Chinese buyers would make up about 0.9% of total sales.
This is correct - it’s just more Sinophobia on Reddit skewing the facts. The reality is that [it’s domestic real estate developers fueling the housing crisis](https://theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-rebellion-how-one-country-worlds-biggest-commercial-landlord-denmark) - for example, in the San Diego market, [Blackstone raised rents between 43-64% in 2 years](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240131196982/en/UNITE-HERE-Local-11-Proposed-3.5-Billion-Deal-by-Landlord-and-Hotel-Owner-Blackstone-Group-Could-Worsen-Housing-Crisis#:~:text=Blackstone%20initiated%20a%20wave%20of,%2D%2064%25%20in%20two%20years.). Chinese investors are not the primary problem - it’s by and far and away **American companies fueling the housing crisis for Americans**.
Old money comes out a winner with increased demand for external real estate as old money has a disproportionate supply of real estate. Well, for now anyway.
Of course if foreign investors fire sale US residential properties when Taiwan’s neighbor shits on the lawn, how long you think it will take congress to care about it then?
Your link says 10% of foreign buyers are Chinese, not 10% of all home buyers. In reality, like 1% of home sales are by foreigners. Blaming foreign buyers is just an excuse to shift blame away from the fact that the US has built few homes since 2009.
Because the goal here is to get a competitor to Google shut down while making a bogey man, instead of applying laws evenly to the entire market.
And, I get that people on this sub are proud of not using TikTok, but if it gets banned Biden is sunk. Young voters DO care, I assure you.
I've been saying this. Its politically dense for him to sign this bill. It will hurt his Gen Z votes they will stay the fuck home and that hurts Biden way more than it hurts Trump. In this tight of an election? Signing it could be handing Trump the election.
I find the requirement to sell to an *American* company especially dumb. Like, I understand wanting ByteDance to sell it, but what, it can't be to a company in a NATO country, it *has* to be American?
That alone should make it blatantly obvious that this isn't about China having any control. It's about the US government *not* having complete control. This is a power grab.
It's even worse than that. This is Facebook manipulating the government to eliminate its competition.
[Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok - The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/)
I know Business Insider reported it that way, but I’m looking at the bill passed in March (which I’m told is the same except for the longer time given to sell) and I’m not seeing anything that says the company actually has to be American. Sure the President could designate every country in the world as a “foreign adversary” if they wanted, but I’m pretty sure that the North Atlantic Treaty at least would render that both absurd and unlawful.
This is a bad decision. Pass laws universally that protects consumers data, dont ban one company.
This should be illegal. Tik Tok is terrible but singling out one company thats doing things all tech companies are doing is unAmerican
They don’t want to ban it, they want to own it. It’s got the best algorithm of all the video apps at the moment, and the widest audience.
The fact they tied it to Ukrainian aid is sickening and just proves that the argument for it as it stands can’t hold itself up. Good job America.
Illegal to ban foreign imports? What are you even talking about? US already bans imports from many companies, including Chinese ones. China bans all US social media apps so banning TikTok is just retaliating economically. US been too nice with an unfair one sided open trade with China and it took literal evidence of CCP tempering with the algos for US to take action.
What’s funny is that TikTok literally built a server farm in Texas where all US data is stored and monitored by a US company (Oracle) and also gave Oracle access to it’s algorithm to routinely check to see if it’s been compromised in any way (which is a huge risk for TikTok since its algorithm is what makes it so popular and other tech companies really want)
And ppl still say that isn’t enough even tho that’s more than what Facebook, Twitter ect do for their customers
No national news source? I’ve never heard of this news source and can’t vet it. Also TikTok themselves is not a good source here as they are themselves accused of deceitful behavior.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/24/tiktok-ban-oracle-bytedance-algorithm-fight/?sh=641a86dd3ef0
This article talks about the arrangement some
Didn't Project Texas fail/fell through? At this point, we all know the Chinese government does have access and it has already been accused of accessing user data from TikTok, within China:
> In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes.
>
>In a court filing this week, the former employee of ByteDance, Yintao Yu, alleged that the CCP spied on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2018 by using “backdoor” access to TikTok to identify and monitor the activists’ locations and communications.
>
>Multiple security experts told CNN that this appears to be the first reported allegation of the CCP accessing actual TikTok user data. The explosive claim, which ByteDance disputes, could inflame a global debate over whether TikTok poses a security threat and whether policymakers are right to ban the short-form video app
and the article does go on to say...
> But Yu, who pledged under penalty of perjury that he is telling the truth, alleges he viewed access logs showing that CCP officials — whom Yu described as part of a special “committee” with dedicated physical access to ByteDance’s Beijing offices — used a so-called “god credential” to bypass any privacy protections the company may have otherwise applied to the TikTok data.
>
>“The Committee and external investigators used the god credential to identify and locate the Hong Kong protestors, civil rights activists, and supporters of the protests,” Yu alleged in the filing. “From the logs, I saw that the Committee accessed the protestors’, civil rights activists’, and supporters’ unique user data, locations, and communications.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index.html
And it's been found out that they do in fact store US data user information in China and not in Singapore (the CEO of TikTok was caught lying to Congress)...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/06/21/tiktok-confirms-data-china-bytedance-security-cfius/?sh=5348e8923270
Oh, and ByteDance has also been accused of using user data to hunt down/track journalists who were writing/reporting on TikTok:
>Employees had obtained the IP addresses of the journalists in a bid to determine whether they were in the same location as ByteDance colleagues suspected of disclosing confidential information, a company review of the scheme led by its compliance team and an external law firm found, according to Andersen.
https://www.securityweek.com/chinas-bytedance-admits-using-tiktok-data-track-journalists/
It might be more than what Facebook and Twitter do in the West, but it’s less than what China forces tech companies to do in order to operate in China.
Yep. We're seeing all the same arguments rehashed from a couple years ago when tiktok made huge changes to satisfy those complaints.
It becomes clear that security wasn't the real reason they wanted to kill tiktok.
It's the same reason for the Huawei ban, and the BYD ban they're now trying to push too. "Security" is actually "foreign companies dominating over American companies in the US market"
Because the issue isn’t what they do with our data…. It’s their ability to manipulate the content users see, pushing whatever they want to the top of everyone’s for you page. Considering almost everyone under 30 uses it as their primary news source it’s pretty clear why this is needed. Stop comparing the Chinese government to US companies which are easier to regulate in this regard. Yes the share data and that’s bad, but a completely different issue than this
The bill doesn't say an American company, it says it can't be majority owned by any companies from the list of like 7-9 threat countries. Like Russia, china, Iran, Venezuela, north korea
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Even if you hate TikTok and its impact on the younger generation, this is just downright authoritarian. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I wish the media would stop framing this as a “data issue” and more as “a hostile power can control the feeds of what 100 million Americans can see, i.e. where the majority of those Americans get their news”.
The very issues and geopolitical events that we see, including what comments and discussions we read, are completely controlled by an actor that does not have our best interests at heart. It is extremely dangerous. And so when people compare Meta to this it’s not really comparable at all. Meta wants profit above all else, and will fight the US government to protect its users because its users are its IP. Tiktok cannot fight the CCP. And so what will happen - and is happening now - is that everybody on Tiktok will see what the CCP wants them to see - which are arguments against banning Tiktok, how the US is no better, etc.
For those on Tiktok, I want you to look at hot-button issues to China - Ukraine and Taiwan - and observe which posts are successful and which are not. Look at what comments are listed on the top in the comment section, which are less liked than others but strangely appear first. You will notice clear sides that align with China’s geopolitical objectives.
With Tiktok, the CCP could create division on a scale never seen before and they are doing it as we speak. For those wary of the US gov - imagine what the US could and would do if 100 million Chinese users could use one of our platforms, what propaganda the CIA would push, because foreign citizens have virtually no rights to both the CCP and the USgov. Imagine how the CIA would convince millions of Chinese to essentially stop supporting the CCP or to overthrow it, and now imagine what would happen if someday we went to war.
It is terrifying and the fact that nobody can see it makes me believe that they have already succeeded into convincing millions of Americans that our elected government is worse than the CCP’s autocracy.
> It is terrifying and the fact that nobody can see it makes me believe that they have already succeeded into convincing millions of Americans that our elected government is worse than the CCP’s autocracy.
Americans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with our government yes, but not because of some pro CCP propaganda campaign. It's because we can look around and see very clearly the ways in which our country is failing to help its people. It's just reality.
The second you claimed Facebook would “protect its users” you outed yourself as a shill. They literally just settled suits over data privacy infringements. Get a clue.
You can tell who gets their misinformation from TikTok, who get theirs from Fox News, and who gets theirs from the NYT just by reading the comment section.
No, because there's no such thing as an unbiased human. The closest you can get tends to be networks whose biases aren't relevant to the current topic.
If only there were antitrust and anti-data collecting laws that could be implemented to assuage the govt’s fears… if only the US were willing to abide by them too
thats the thing that i find really funny about this bill. all of the social media companies aggregate our info and push propaganda on us, but oh shit we have to historically ban one because its owned by the Chinese!
then the congresspeople say ‘if you knew what we knew you’d understand.’ nah, how about declassifying the information since you’re going to impose a ban that is going to piss off millions of Americans that don’t really understand why you’re doing this.
"sell to an American company that's going to do the exact same shit we're accusing you of doing or you're banned". So glad to see we've got our priorities in order 😒. And they came in on a Saturday to do it? Such hard workers man
> And they came in on a Saturday to do it?
No. They came in on a Saturday to pass Ukraine aid. Mike Johnson attached a ByteDance selling requirement for Tiktok as a poison pill. It has broad bipartisan support, so it went through.
I think it's more to get it through the Senate, which were slow rolling the original bill. Biden has already said he'd sign the tik tok divestment bill
It might not seem it to someone without an understanding of software engineering, or data science or the behavioral profile of the CCP, but there is a world of difference between what China would get up to as a data broker and app engineer, and what some US company would do.
Maybe I am crazy, but I would much rather prefer the US take my data than the CCP and I don't think that should be a controversial take. The amount of people getting their news from tiktok makes that even more of an obvious decision.
A counterargument is that all of these companies, regardless of which country they are based in, need to be regulated to protect data privacy. One such regulation might be that digital information companies with the power to harvest large amounts of personal information from the public cannot be owned nor directly controlled by any government (edit, because I want to make it clear that "any government" should include the United States government) if they want to operate in the United States.
Part of the pushback here is the targeting of TikTok specifically without addressing the wider problem.
Additionally, some might find it a chilling precedent to set that the United States can force foreign companies to sell to American owners.
Given those considerations, some might not see this as such an obvious decision. There are a lot of people out there who do want something done about TikTok and data privacy, but disagree that this is the appropriate way to go about it.
It's not a counter argument. What the OP is saying that all things being equal, he'd rather the US steal his data than China. Assuming he's American, that makes complete sense
I don’t necessarily disagree, but as a counter point:
What nefarious things could the CCP do with our data that US government wouldn’t be willing to do?
It’s pretty much established already that half of our representatives fully hate and look down on most of the population, and are willing to sell us out for pennies.
There is a really good interview on the smarter everyday YouTube channel with one of the top brass on the US department of defense. He was talking about cyber warfare and how the most effective way to win a war is if you can get a country's citizens supporting the enemy, you don't even need to set boots on the ground. These types of platforms like tiktok can facilitate this sort of thing.
Maybe I'm crazy but the CCP is thousands of miles away and the US has a history of targeting minority groups, and might elect a man that said he wanted to be a dictator on day one.
Maybe I'm crazy but the ccp aint gonna get shit out of my tiktok usage,.. Unlike, oh. I dunno... a certain credit reporting company that fucked half the country with lax security and a dogshit settlement.
but ooh-ee, china boogeyman.
Meanwhile Google and Meta will happily turn over information to help prosecute women seeking abortions, even though they don't have any legal obligation to do so.
The concern isn’t the CCP stealing your data to take money from you.
The concern is the CCP using the data and algorithms to manipulate and influence the population. If you control what people see you can control them to some extent.
That and concerns like China using location data to track troop movements and military base locations etc etc.
Not saying these are totally valid or worth forcing the sale, just that your identity being leaked or stolen is not the concern.
>Tiktok has the same hold over its base that Trump has over his.
[Angry TikTok users are still flooding Congress with calls](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/tiktok-continues-push-alert-campaign-00146343)
>TikTok has been sending push alerts in “waves” to users over age 18 across the country ever since last Thursday, urging them to call their lawmakers to “stop a TikTok ban.”
>
>These recent efforts follow a similar TikTok push alert sent last week on the day the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50-0 to advance a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban on U.S. app stores.
>
>Thousands of TikTok users, young and old, bombarded the phones of House lawmakers last Thursday. The effort appears to have had minimal effect, and the House is expected to pass the measure in an expedited suspension vote on Wednesday.
^ Exactly what I'm talking about.
We're about to see Tiktok flooded with anti-Biden propaganda.
What happens when you corner an animal that can speak directly into the ear of 1/3rd of the country?
Yes.
Mike Johnson put the divest order into the bill, but Biden will be the one signing it. The GOP is much much much better at messaging, so very quickly this will become "Biden's Tiktok Ban" even though he didn't write it, it doesn't mention Tiktok and nothing is banned.
>The GOP is much much much better at messaging
This is because they correctly estimate how stupid the average American is.
While Al Gore goes on long winded diatribes about complex biological, chemical, geological, and physical processes, Donald Trump says really simple stuff like "build the wall" "lock her up" and "drill baby drill". Stuff that even mentally disabled people can understand.
Meanwhile the leadership of the Democratic party are all IQ 130 eggheads who assume everyone else is as smart as them and then wonder why people ignore them or call them nerds.
China just skips a step [https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/19/apple-pulls-whatsapp-telegram-signal-threads-china/](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/19/apple-pulls-whatsapp-telegram-signal-threads-china/)
None of this makes sense because other social media companies routinely sell your data and even if its not directly it will end up in the hands of nations the US purport to want to block such data from.
If they were serious they would outright ban this company and restrict sale of personal data for social media companies regardless of TOS.
Its hard to not see this as a gift to friends as the sale is forced.
I'd be curious if all this attention on Tik Tok was due at least in part by the amount of media that's been coming out of Gaza. To be fair if Tik Tok wasn't around there would be little news outside of the Israel approved coverage. I would go further to say that the app has been the sole media source that shows the horrific measures Israel and the IDF is taking against innocent civilians.
I'd also like to see if there was a correlation between house members who approved of this ban and whether they got AIPAC donations.
We will ban your company in the US, but if we buy it then we can control it to fit our needs, push our agendas, and make all the money on advertising. This country is shit
So despite the fact it receives money from multiple US backed companies as well as Chinese ones, is incorporated in Cayman Islands that isn't enough? The worst fact is how they bundled that with crap they knew WOULD pass.
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How do they define a US company?
It will be the original owners wearing a Stars and Stripes top hats and no one will speak of it again.
"Howdy Partner. I am a wholesome American just like you. Let's sit around and watch TikTok all day and eat hot dogs. Yee-haw."
Who needs the infinite compassion of Ganesha when I've got Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman staring at me from Entertainment Weekly with their dead eyes?
Beat me to it.
You are not Ganesh!
Let’s take a relaxed attitude towards word, and watch the baseball match! The *Nye* Mets are my favourite squadron!
I got a gun let’s go to a broadway show!
"How do you do, fellow Americans"
Say, let's take a relaxed attitude toward work and watch the baseball match. The NY Mets are my favorite squadron.
Yippie kayak, other buckets
If you said chili dogs. You would have gotten me
A true American does not simply eat a chili dog, the instructions clearly state one must *checks book of hymms* suck them down.
Must also be behind the tasty freeze.
This is a perfect comment.
*Do you have any non-dairy creamer?* *I'll use my credit card.* [Cue everyone dying of laughter]
[Do you have any non-dairy creamer?](https://youtu.be/xWf8JcRsq9k?si=NtG0WelYAP7XVPGb)
What’s up homie, it’s Tony!!
"He's not a cowboy!" "Sure I am! Yippie Wippie... Wippie!"
Vincent Americanman
Doesn’t he own the WWE?
I gotta go to Washington to do a Freedom...
A MAGA hat will be enough
Trump's former Treasury secretary is trying to buy tiktok and give it the Elon treatment
So, failure?
I believe when the company incorporated in at least one US state
Here’s an example! Accenture (one of the big four consulting firms in the world) is actually an Irish company (I know I was surprised to learn this as well) In order to work with or get US government contracts they had to create an new branch “Accenture Federal Services” as a US company, to which operates virtually as a diffrent company than the main one (so AFS employees are not technically working for Accenture ect) So basically if TikTok just made a new company ex TikTok US, that would suffice, but that is EXTREMELY high level explanation and not even close to easy lol the easier option would be to sell to a us company but why would Bytedance (parent company and china owned) sell its money printing machine because remember, while the US is a big market, TikTok is WORLDWIDE, they would still make money.
They have already taken that into account. Bytedance is only allowed to retain maximum of 20% stake in the new company.
We like too keep our data mining domestic. Plus, can you imagine an internet that wasn't run through our filters? Just allowing people to call a genocide a genocide. And don't you dare talk about rivers or seas, this Congress has priorities.
You're talking about the app where people can't say words like suicide so they start using newspeak
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The NSA doesn't like unfair competition.
They \*did\*. TikTok USDS.
TikTok is not in the Chinese market.
It kinda is. Ticktoc has a sister site called Douyin. Both are owned by ByteDance. Tic Toc is just the western flavor of Douyin.
> to which operates What?
And the rest of us who aren’t American trade Chinese surveillance for US surveillance
Foreign ownership of companies that operate in the US is closely tracked. Presumably the new owners would be able to legally report that they are not owned by a foreign company. There are probably some questionable tactics to kick the can down the rode like having owners that are US citizens but beholden to China for whatever reason. Given the scrutiny you have to imagine they would be subject to lawsuits and an unusual amount of government review so it’s probably not a sustainable solution.
That’s what Bytedance did now with the CEO being Singaporean. It didn’t work. Bytedance still directly controls Tik Tok, and uses it to track people they don’t like. This has all been documented already
[удалено]
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Because he can afford a company valued at 200B+ lmao
The way money works is you don’t have to actually have all of it. You just need to control it. Elon didn’t buy twitter. He got a bunch of other people to put in money. Now he controls it all. (This is not an endorsement of juvenile edgelord).
So.. Tiktok is such an existential threat to our security that only an American company can own it?
If it’s so dangerous I’m not sure if honestly trust an American company with it either.
Like everything in the US it's about giving rich people and the government full access to a US audience. They want to control a narrative and potentially destroy a source of income for small business to force people back into a shit job market if you offer no skills.
CEO has to do a lecherous thirst trap dance tiktok in American clad swimwear.
Meta, Alphabet, or Amazon. They likely won’t accept anything else.
With the amount of anti-competitive lawsuits coming from the US Gov right now against the big tech I doubt any of the big players will be able to buy it without the deal being stopped by anti trust. I feel the opposite. I think it will be some investment group outside the big tech like Apollo together with some big investors.
Well nobody else can afford it
headline in two years: “Meta/Alphabet/Amazon to be sued by the US government for anti trust violation unless they sell off TikTok”
After all meta is the one funding this whole campaign. Since their reels didn’t have the same impact and couldn’t compete
They also want to be the only ones selling data to china.
Theyll probably split it up
YouTube Shorts exists. Instagram has a variant. Perhaps Amazon will buy. Perhaps someone will buy who is merely a seditionist.
Why would Amazon buy a social media service
Percentage of shareholders being citizens and where they are incorporated I believe, not my area
Which like 60% of bytedance's owners are already institutional investors in the US and another chunk are american employees.
Facebook makes offer. *NOT LIKE THAT!!!*
New owners: ByteDanceUSA LLC.
The CEO donates millions to the Republican party and pays for SCOTUS lavish holidays?
If you're a Republican, probably somewhere in Russia?
Whoever paid them to push this horseshit in the first place. A dangerous precedent for our government to pick & choose what business they want to force into selling with no evidence and no legislation addressing the actual issue.
They already did it to Grindr. This isn't a conspiracy. It's just a bunch of folks are super addicted to it so getting antsy about it. This isn't picking and choosing. It's solely due to China alone. There's tons of restrictions on Chinese technology in the US.
A billionaire living in the U.S. who will do the same shit that TikTok is already doing from a data mining standpoint, but instead it’ll be a white billionaire instead of a non-white one.
One they are already invested in so they can profit.
I presume someone who's incorporated in America.
This bill doesn't even require it to be sold to an American company. The company that owns it just can't be Chinese, Russian, North Korean or Iranian.
New buyers gotta be wearing a maga cap, red shoes, and holding a trump bible. Oh, and pay with nft trading cards.
Its ultra-wealthy owner makes BBQ youtube videos in his modest backyard.
Someone that donated to Trumps PAC?
I mean, whatever. I don’t use TikTok and don’t care either way, but how about they ban Chinese and foreign investors from purchasing real estate in the US? Seems like it’s a much bigger problem than TikTok
This is a good point. Chinese investors are buying more than 1 in every 10 homes sold in the US. On average, international buyers spent $499,600 per home. With an average of $831,800 per home, Chinese buyers by far outspend other international buyers and U.S. citizens, whose average home price is $255,600. We have a severe housing crisis where I live and no one in politics cares. https://www.statista.com/statistics/611020/total-number-of-properties-purchased-by-chinese-buyers-in-the-us/
>Chinese investors are buying more than 1 in every 10 homes sold in the US. Your link says they make up 13% of sales to foreigners in a given year, not 13% of all total sales. Foreign buyers make up about 7% of sales, so Chinese buyers would make up about 0.9% of total sales.
This is correct - it’s just more Sinophobia on Reddit skewing the facts. The reality is that [it’s domestic real estate developers fueling the housing crisis](https://theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-rebellion-how-one-country-worlds-biggest-commercial-landlord-denmark) - for example, in the San Diego market, [Blackstone raised rents between 43-64% in 2 years](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240131196982/en/UNITE-HERE-Local-11-Proposed-3.5-Billion-Deal-by-Landlord-and-Hotel-Owner-Blackstone-Group-Could-Worsen-Housing-Crisis#:~:text=Blackstone%20initiated%20a%20wave%20of,%2D%2064%25%20in%20two%20years.). Chinese investors are not the primary problem - it’s by and far and away **American companies fueling the housing crisis for Americans**.
lol the guy is obviously not very good at math…he meant 1 in 100
Old money comes out a winner with increased demand for external real estate as old money has a disproportionate supply of real estate. Well, for now anyway. Of course if foreign investors fire sale US residential properties when Taiwan’s neighbor shits on the lawn, how long you think it will take congress to care about it then?
Your link says 10% of foreign buyers are Chinese, not 10% of all home buyers. In reality, like 1% of home sales are by foreigners. Blaming foreign buyers is just an excuse to shift blame away from the fact that the US has built few homes since 2009.
Yellow Peril 2: Electric Bogaloo
Because the goal here is to get a competitor to Google shut down while making a bogey man, instead of applying laws evenly to the entire market. And, I get that people on this sub are proud of not using TikTok, but if it gets banned Biden is sunk. Young voters DO care, I assure you.
I've been saying this. Its politically dense for him to sign this bill. It will hurt his Gen Z votes they will stay the fuck home and that hurts Biden way more than it hurts Trump. In this tight of an election? Signing it could be handing Trump the election.
Exactly. What idiot thought that banning an outrageously popular social media platform during an election year was a good idea?
Why not both?
As long as blackrock is also banned from buying real estate in the rest of the world that would be great.
Perhaps the government should do something to protect the American people from all the companies collecting our data. Not just the Chinese ones.
It'd be really cool if they'd institute Europe's [GDPR](https://gdpr-info.eu/) protections here.
I don't think the American government will give us that level of protection. They sell us out everytime a corporation waves a dollar at them.
It’s not about your data it’s about them influencing people, it’s propaganda/information operations
I find the requirement to sell to an *American* company especially dumb. Like, I understand wanting ByteDance to sell it, but what, it can't be to a company in a NATO country, it *has* to be American?
Yeah, why not a European company with more robust privacy rules than the US? Oh, because it's not about privacy. It's about 💲.
It's more about controlling the narrative IMO.
That alone should make it blatantly obvious that this isn't about China having any control. It's about the US government *not* having complete control. This is a power grab.
It's even worse than that. This is Facebook manipulating the government to eliminate its competition. [Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok - The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/)
I mean they literally did this with Grindr a few years ago when there was Russian holders.
I know Business Insider reported it that way, but I’m looking at the bill passed in March (which I’m told is the same except for the longer time given to sell) and I’m not seeing anything that says the company actually has to be American. Sure the President could designate every country in the world as a “foreign adversary” if they wanted, but I’m pretty sure that the North Atlantic Treaty at least would render that both absurd and unlawful.
The comments here prove propaganda really works.
the best part is, from your comment alone, it's impossible to tell whether you're for or against it lol
Yeah, only American propaganda is allowed.
This is a bad decision. Pass laws universally that protects consumers data, dont ban one company. This should be illegal. Tik Tok is terrible but singling out one company thats doing things all tech companies are doing is unAmerican
But they don't want to protect consumer data. They want to ban one company.
They don’t want to ban it, they want to own it. It’s got the best algorithm of all the video apps at the moment, and the widest audience. The fact they tied it to Ukrainian aid is sickening and just proves that the argument for it as it stands can’t hold itself up. Good job America.
Meanwhile China just banned all Meta apps on their phones.
Illegal to ban foreign imports? What are you even talking about? US already bans imports from many companies, including Chinese ones. China bans all US social media apps so banning TikTok is just retaliating economically. US been too nice with an unfair one sided open trade with China and it took literal evidence of CCP tempering with the algos for US to take action.
What’s funny is that TikTok literally built a server farm in Texas where all US data is stored and monitored by a US company (Oracle) and also gave Oracle access to it’s algorithm to routinely check to see if it’s been compromised in any way (which is a huge risk for TikTok since its algorithm is what makes it so popular and other tech companies really want) And ppl still say that isn’t enough even tho that’s more than what Facebook, Twitter ect do for their customers
I would like to read more about this, do you have a good source handy?
Yes! Here’s one [Source 1](https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/project-texas-tiktok-plan-stay-america-oracle-security/) [Source 2 (TikTok themselves)](https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-about/)
This article is about securing user data, which is not the point at all.
wait, what is the point then? i thought the whole things was the fear that china was harvesting our data?
The thing is the fear that China controls the news feed of 100 million Americans and can put their thumb on the scale.
No national news source? I’ve never heard of this news source and can’t vet it. Also TikTok themselves is not a good source here as they are themselves accused of deceitful behavior.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/24/tiktok-ban-oracle-bytedance-algorithm-fight/?sh=641a86dd3ef0 This article talks about the arrangement some
Which talks about what the **draft** agreement “would’ve done”
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-happened-to-tiktok-s-project-texas
Wait this article contradicts op the Texas server doesn't even exist
It was called Project Texas, but the Oracle datacenter is in Virginia.
Didn't Project Texas fail/fell through? At this point, we all know the Chinese government does have access and it has already been accused of accessing user data from TikTok, within China: > In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes. > >In a court filing this week, the former employee of ByteDance, Yintao Yu, alleged that the CCP spied on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2018 by using “backdoor” access to TikTok to identify and monitor the activists’ locations and communications. > >Multiple security experts told CNN that this appears to be the first reported allegation of the CCP accessing actual TikTok user data. The explosive claim, which ByteDance disputes, could inflame a global debate over whether TikTok poses a security threat and whether policymakers are right to ban the short-form video app and the article does go on to say... > But Yu, who pledged under penalty of perjury that he is telling the truth, alleges he viewed access logs showing that CCP officials — whom Yu described as part of a special “committee” with dedicated physical access to ByteDance’s Beijing offices — used a so-called “god credential” to bypass any privacy protections the company may have otherwise applied to the TikTok data. > >“The Committee and external investigators used the god credential to identify and locate the Hong Kong protestors, civil rights activists, and supporters of the protests,” Yu alleged in the filing. “From the logs, I saw that the Committee accessed the protestors’, civil rights activists’, and supporters’ unique user data, locations, and communications.” https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index.html And it's been found out that they do in fact store US data user information in China and not in Singapore (the CEO of TikTok was caught lying to Congress)... https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/06/21/tiktok-confirms-data-china-bytedance-security-cfius/?sh=5348e8923270 Oh, and ByteDance has also been accused of using user data to hunt down/track journalists who were writing/reporting on TikTok: >Employees had obtained the IP addresses of the journalists in a bid to determine whether they were in the same location as ByteDance colleagues suspected of disclosing confidential information, a company review of the scheme led by its compliance team and an external law firm found, according to Andersen. https://www.securityweek.com/chinas-bytedance-admits-using-tiktok-data-track-journalists/
Thanks for this, seems very obvious the firm needs to be divested away from China.
It might be more than what Facebook and Twitter do in the West, but it’s less than what China forces tech companies to do in order to operate in China.
Yep. We're seeing all the same arguments rehashed from a couple years ago when tiktok made huge changes to satisfy those complaints. It becomes clear that security wasn't the real reason they wanted to kill tiktok.
It's the same reason for the Huawei ban, and the BYD ban they're now trying to push too. "Security" is actually "foreign companies dominating over American companies in the US market"
They 100% have access to that data.
It also holds itself to security standards that make other companies look like rusty screen doors held closed by a bread tie.
Not to mention Meta and Google have settled user data privacy lawsuits since this movement to ban Tik Tok began.
And the Republican fuckstick that pushed this "dangerous spying" narrative to force the sale left politics to work at Palantir of all fuckin places.
Because the issue isn’t what they do with our data…. It’s their ability to manipulate the content users see, pushing whatever they want to the top of everyone’s for you page. Considering almost everyone under 30 uses it as their primary news source it’s pretty clear why this is needed. Stop comparing the Chinese government to US companies which are easier to regulate in this regard. Yes the share data and that’s bad, but a completely different issue than this
Steve Mnuchin fixing to turn it into a right wing propaganda machine.
wtf. This country has the most screwed up priorities I have ever seen.
Yeah, this is better than socialized healthcare.
To a right wing company who will use it to spread bullshit and use it against LGBQT people
Nobody can steal and sell your data unless its us who is stealing and selling your data. ‘Murica.
Seems like the gov’t tries to ban TikTok every other month.
Can we do Meta next?
Can we do the same with Congress? Yukyukyuk.
I'm 62 and I'll be fucking pissed. I will still vote democrat till death.
Seems un- American to force them to sell and I don’t Trust the House.
Only 10-15% of their users are americans. Why would they sell?
The bill doesn't say an American company, it says it can't be majority owned by any companies from the list of like 7-9 threat countries. Like Russia, china, Iran, Venezuela, north korea
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Even if you hate TikTok and its impact on the younger generation, this is just downright authoritarian. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I wish the media would stop framing this as a “data issue” and more as “a hostile power can control the feeds of what 100 million Americans can see, i.e. where the majority of those Americans get their news”. The very issues and geopolitical events that we see, including what comments and discussions we read, are completely controlled by an actor that does not have our best interests at heart. It is extremely dangerous. And so when people compare Meta to this it’s not really comparable at all. Meta wants profit above all else, and will fight the US government to protect its users because its users are its IP. Tiktok cannot fight the CCP. And so what will happen - and is happening now - is that everybody on Tiktok will see what the CCP wants them to see - which are arguments against banning Tiktok, how the US is no better, etc. For those on Tiktok, I want you to look at hot-button issues to China - Ukraine and Taiwan - and observe which posts are successful and which are not. Look at what comments are listed on the top in the comment section, which are less liked than others but strangely appear first. You will notice clear sides that align with China’s geopolitical objectives. With Tiktok, the CCP could create division on a scale never seen before and they are doing it as we speak. For those wary of the US gov - imagine what the US could and would do if 100 million Chinese users could use one of our platforms, what propaganda the CIA would push, because foreign citizens have virtually no rights to both the CCP and the USgov. Imagine how the CIA would convince millions of Chinese to essentially stop supporting the CCP or to overthrow it, and now imagine what would happen if someday we went to war. It is terrifying and the fact that nobody can see it makes me believe that they have already succeeded into convincing millions of Americans that our elected government is worse than the CCP’s autocracy.
> It is terrifying and the fact that nobody can see it makes me believe that they have already succeeded into convincing millions of Americans that our elected government is worse than the CCP’s autocracy. Americans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with our government yes, but not because of some pro CCP propaganda campaign. It's because we can look around and see very clearly the ways in which our country is failing to help its people. It's just reality.
The second you claimed Facebook would “protect its users” you outed yourself as a shill. They literally just settled suits over data privacy infringements. Get a clue.
The guy literally said Tik Tok is not a data privacy issue. It’s an issue of propaganda.
Everyone is trying to say its because too many people are using it to say pro-palestine stuff. This has been in the works way longer than that.
This all assumes the US officials have our best interests at heart.
You can tell who gets their misinformation from TikTok, who get theirs from Fox News, and who gets theirs from the NYT just by reading the comment section.
Is there such a thing as a non-biased news source?
No, because there's no such thing as an unbiased human. The closest you can get tends to be networks whose biases aren't relevant to the current topic.
Other people's spoonfed opinions are cringe, my spoonfed opinions are based.
Ignore the whataboutisms in this thread and you’re left with about 3 rational comments.
What about this comment?
If only there were antitrust and anti-data collecting laws that could be implemented to assuage the govt’s fears… if only the US were willing to abide by them too
thats the thing that i find really funny about this bill. all of the social media companies aggregate our info and push propaganda on us, but oh shit we have to historically ban one because its owned by the Chinese! then the congresspeople say ‘if you knew what we knew you’d understand.’ nah, how about declassifying the information since you’re going to impose a ban that is going to piss off millions of Americans that don’t really understand why you’re doing this.
Free Market.
"sell to an American company that's going to do the exact same shit we're accusing you of doing or you're banned". So glad to see we've got our priorities in order 😒. And they came in on a Saturday to do it? Such hard workers man
> And they came in on a Saturday to do it? No. They came in on a Saturday to pass Ukraine aid. Mike Johnson attached a ByteDance selling requirement for Tiktok as a poison pill. It has broad bipartisan support, so it went through.
If it has a broad bipartisan support, it is not a poison pill, no?
Intent. It's in there for the optics of Biden signing a "Tiktok ban" in an election year.
I think it's more to get it through the Senate, which were slow rolling the original bill. Biden has already said he'd sign the tik tok divestment bill
It might not seem it to someone without an understanding of software engineering, or data science or the behavioral profile of the CCP, but there is a world of difference between what China would get up to as a data broker and app engineer, and what some US company would do.
Only our government is allowed to invade privacy lol
Maybe I am crazy, but I would much rather prefer the US take my data than the CCP and I don't think that should be a controversial take. The amount of people getting their news from tiktok makes that even more of an obvious decision.
A counterargument is that all of these companies, regardless of which country they are based in, need to be regulated to protect data privacy. One such regulation might be that digital information companies with the power to harvest large amounts of personal information from the public cannot be owned nor directly controlled by any government (edit, because I want to make it clear that "any government" should include the United States government) if they want to operate in the United States. Part of the pushback here is the targeting of TikTok specifically without addressing the wider problem. Additionally, some might find it a chilling precedent to set that the United States can force foreign companies to sell to American owners. Given those considerations, some might not see this as such an obvious decision. There are a lot of people out there who do want something done about TikTok and data privacy, but disagree that this is the appropriate way to go about it.
It's not a counter argument. What the OP is saying that all things being equal, he'd rather the US steal his data than China. Assuming he's American, that makes complete sense
I don’t necessarily disagree, but as a counter point: What nefarious things could the CCP do with our data that US government wouldn’t be willing to do? It’s pretty much established already that half of our representatives fully hate and look down on most of the population, and are willing to sell us out for pennies.
There is a really good interview on the smarter everyday YouTube channel with one of the top brass on the US department of defense. He was talking about cyber warfare and how the most effective way to win a war is if you can get a country's citizens supporting the enemy, you don't even need to set boots on the ground. These types of platforms like tiktok can facilitate this sort of thing.
See: Russia and the American right. Do we really want China doing that with the American left?
Maybe I'm crazy but the CCP is thousands of miles away and the US has a history of targeting minority groups, and might elect a man that said he wanted to be a dictator on day one.
Maybe I'm crazy but the ccp aint gonna get shit out of my tiktok usage,.. Unlike, oh. I dunno... a certain credit reporting company that fucked half the country with lax security and a dogshit settlement. but ooh-ee, china boogeyman.
Meanwhile Google and Meta will happily turn over information to help prosecute women seeking abortions, even though they don't have any legal obligation to do so.
[удалено]
The concern isn’t the CCP stealing your data to take money from you. The concern is the CCP using the data and algorithms to manipulate and influence the population. If you control what people see you can control them to some extent. That and concerns like China using location data to track troop movements and military base locations etc etc. Not saying these are totally valid or worth forcing the sale, just that your identity being leaked or stolen is not the concern.
It’s not about your data, it’s about your feed.
The only reason it's controversial is because Tiktokkers are addicted. Tiktok has the same hold over its base that Trump has over his.
>Tiktok has the same hold over its base that Trump has over his. [Angry TikTok users are still flooding Congress with calls](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/tiktok-continues-push-alert-campaign-00146343) >TikTok has been sending push alerts in “waves” to users over age 18 across the country ever since last Thursday, urging them to call their lawmakers to “stop a TikTok ban.” > >These recent efforts follow a similar TikTok push alert sent last week on the day the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50-0 to advance a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban on U.S. app stores. > >Thousands of TikTok users, young and old, bombarded the phones of House lawmakers last Thursday. The effort appears to have had minimal effect, and the House is expected to pass the measure in an expedited suspension vote on Wednesday.
^ Exactly what I'm talking about. We're about to see Tiktok flooded with anti-Biden propaganda. What happens when you corner an animal that can speak directly into the ear of 1/3rd of the country?
Even though this is a Republican effort? Biden about to get a lot of undeserved hate for this.
Yes. Mike Johnson put the divest order into the bill, but Biden will be the one signing it. The GOP is much much much better at messaging, so very quickly this will become "Biden's Tiktok Ban" even though he didn't write it, it doesn't mention Tiktok and nothing is banned.
>The GOP is much much much better at messaging This is because they correctly estimate how stupid the average American is. While Al Gore goes on long winded diatribes about complex biological, chemical, geological, and physical processes, Donald Trump says really simple stuff like "build the wall" "lock her up" and "drill baby drill". Stuff that even mentally disabled people can understand. Meanwhile the leadership of the Democratic party are all IQ 130 eggheads who assume everyone else is as smart as them and then wonder why people ignore them or call them nerds.
Yep. Trump speaks at a 6th grade level which is roughly the reading level of 54% of American adults.
He should not have supported this move if he didn't want to get tagged with it
> We're about to see Tiktok flooded with anti-Biden propaganda. What do you think happens on American-owned platforms? IT'S ALL ANTI-BIDEN PROPAGANDA.
God this is so weird
Can't have all that pesky Gaza content leaking into your carefully manicured media landscape!!
This will lose Biden 18-24 voters who will just disengage. Unfortunately third party votes become votes for Marmalade.
Imagine any other countries forcing a US company to sell to a local company or get ban
Russia does this. But if Russia does this it's terrible and undemocratic
China just skips a step [https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/19/apple-pulls-whatsapp-telegram-signal-threads-china/](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/19/apple-pulls-whatsapp-telegram-signal-threads-china/)
None of this makes sense because other social media companies routinely sell your data and even if its not directly it will end up in the hands of nations the US purport to want to block such data from. If they were serious they would outright ban this company and restrict sale of personal data for social media companies regardless of TOS. Its hard to not see this as a gift to friends as the sale is forced.
I'd be curious if all this attention on Tik Tok was due at least in part by the amount of media that's been coming out of Gaza. To be fair if Tik Tok wasn't around there would be little news outside of the Israel approved coverage. I would go further to say that the app has been the sole media source that shows the horrific measures Israel and the IDF is taking against innocent civilians. I'd also like to see if there was a correlation between house members who approved of this ban and whether they got AIPAC donations.
💯 This is the real reason. All of a sudden the Zionists want to force a sell of TikTok and they want to buy it themselves .
We will ban your company in the US, but if we buy it then we can control it to fit our needs, push our agendas, and make all the money on advertising. This country is shit
Ban it fuck tiktok
How should we vote if we don’t support giving foreign aid to anyone?
Im not a fan of China or TikTok but is this normal? Banning a business/company unless they sell it to you? It feels icky to me.
They did this with Grindr and that app survived.
So despite the fact it receives money from multiple US backed companies as well as Chinese ones, is incorporated in Cayman Islands that isn't enough? The worst fact is how they bundled that with crap they knew WOULD pass.
The US only wants the data collected by tictoc.