Some congressperson is going to be assassinated by a Gen Z terrorist cell and I’ll be like
I hope China calls the bluff and lets TikTok be banned, leading to the Gen Z Uprising
They’re not even trying to hide the fact they just want TikTok to be Westoid-owned.
Purely just a question of capital flow, they don’t care about surveillance.
The context is a chef’s kiss.
The US House of Representatives agreed to reauthorize a controversial spying law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last Friday without any meaningful reforms, dashing hopes that Congress might finally put a stop to intelligence agencies’ warrantless surveillance of Americans’ emails, text messages and phone calls.
The vote not only reauthorized the act, though; it also vastly expanded the surveillance law enforcement can conduct. In a move that Senator Ron Wyden condemned as “terrifying”, the House also doubled down on a surveillance authority that has been used against American protesters, journalists and political donors in a chilling assault on free speech.
They care about surveillance alright. They just need to be the ones surveilling and reality inventing.
I’m wondering is if the driving interest is to ensure American companies own most of the social media that Americans use because they don’t want to lose the means to surveil large portions of the population. They very much act like there’s a threat to state power, and this is the only angle that makes sense.
The alternative is that the state is now dominated by racist boomers that actually believe the red scare propaganda their predecessors made up.
There are two requirements the US ruling class has for internet connected tech: surveillance opportunities and content distribution and censorship capabilities.
That’s why we saw the fuss about Huawei five years ago, and that’s why there’s been a fuss about TikTok over the last five years as well. Huawei isn’t a US military or intelligence adjacent or contracted company, so the NSA and Co can’t roll in and mandate backdoors into Huawei’s networking products. The TikTok available in the imperial core, while already being somewhat controlled by the US military-intelligence apparatus already, still doesn’t allow for enough surveillance and equally importantly doesn’t allow for enough content control. The US ruling class knows it’s losing the narrative war, and is trying everything it can to reign that in.
What politicians actually believe doesn’t really matter. Some have bathed in the kool-aid, others know it’s just theater. What really matters is what the capitalists believe, and they are pretty clear on what they have to do to maintain power.
Nobody has ever explained to me why any person in the US should care about a government with no jurisdiction over them might conduct surveillance on them. The government that worries me is the one that has power over me. Maybe I’m stupid, though.
One reason could be because that other government may not be bound to rules regarding surveillance on people who are not citizens of their country, thus can’t be held accountable, and then that government could share that information with anyone they want including that government where the person is a citizen.
But then I’m just describing Five Eyes and US surveillance again anyway.
I can see TikTok calling their bluff and then Gen Z just using VPNs to get around it so now all the ad dollars flow exclusively to Chinese companies instead of American ones
That is what will happen
over 1.7 billion users as of 2023
TikTok has 150 million active monthly users in the United States.
I’m guessing that 1.7 billion number is prolly off due to bots and defunct accounts, but still, you don’t sell your platform for 10% of your market lmao. I’m not sure if the US thought they would honestly back down just because they’re America, if they wanted to ban it because they honestly think it’s spying on Americans, or what exactly the play here was, but the obvious one (force them to sell to Americans) was laughably stupid and unlikely to happen for obvious reasons.
tbh that 10% of the market probably contributes about ~30-40% of the revenue
Western users typical contribute >10x more revenue than all other users for adtech platforms, and just ~20-30% of users will contribute to 90% of the revenue (my source is my employers’ internal analytics dashboard)
Here is Google’s (note that rest of world includes all other developed countries too like Canada, Europe, Oceania, East Asia)
79% of revenue comes from China
8% of revenue comes from the US
Article is more current than the last one too, and that seems to track with what other sources say
ByteDance should simply take TikTok down and replace it a few days later with a new app called “Tik tok 2”
