Many believe the ultimate consequences of this bill will be a ban. Bytedance has said they will not sell. Many of the congresspersons who passed it, did it hoping it would be banned. This was just the latest attempt at banning it. There were more explicit bans that failed.
Yeah, China is *such* a good role model for how a reasonable government should crack down on the individual decisions of its citizens…
Banning apps on government devices is very reasonable. But banning civilians from it is wild. Hell, if a civilian wants to download literal malware, I think they should be fully legally allowed to.
On the one hand, free choice is good, but on the other hand, the government has a responsibility to ensure that the nation doesn’t get fucked with by bad actors, the owners using TikTok to push certain political beliefs could be an issue, as well as it being suspected spyware
TikTok has said they'd rather shut it down than sell. It's not a forced divestment because if TikTok doesn't do anything, they'll be banned. The divestment option is just an alternative they've been given, not something the government can force them to do.
It would seem to me the fact that they’d rather shut down a multi-billion dollar platform than sell it is very interesting, yet I’m not seeing any analysis of what it might mean
I mean, they won't really shut down the platform. They will lose the revenue they get from the US, but TikTok is popular globally, so even if its use is banned in the US, they'll continues their operations in, well, every other country.
What percentage of the company’s users are in the US? How much would they have to grow to make up that money?
How much upside are they losing by keeping the company compared to selling it?
Most of the numbers I have seen suggest that about 15-20% of the users are in the United States. I don't know how that will equate into revenue share.
As far as the keeping vs selling... I don't think selling will be an option for them. I would expect that China would declare the TikTok algorithms to be sensitive and not for export -- the way the US government does the same thing. So even if ByteDance wants to sell, they'd be able to sell everything except the main intellectual property that's worth a damn.
That said, China has a lot of friendly nations around the world. There's a chance they could allow ByteDance to be "sold" to a company hosted in a country with a friendly government to China (though not in the US's "naughty list").
> It would seem to me the fact that they’d rather shut down a multi-billion dollar platform than sell it is very interesting
Billions come in but all of those billions go out too. It's not actually profitable. They hope to one day make it profitable but even divestment would mean only that some *other* company may one day be profitable. If there's no way for ByteDance itself to actually profit from TikTok in the US, there's no reason for it to exist.
My understanding is that a lot of the money is going directly to essentially buying revenue. They're trying to get people to sell stuff through TikTok so they're paying people to sell stuff and then covering the processing fees themselves. Instead of churning through a lot of revenue and skimming off the top with fees, they're subsidizing the sales. Of course there's also the fact that video means much higher storage and bandwidth costs than text or images, and TikTok is *all* video, so the costs of just running the service itself must be hideously expensive. R&D is effectively free though since Douyin is profitable and they're basically just copy/pasting the same app with a different name. They even both use the same logo.
Video streaming is *hard* and *expensive*. Very expensive. This article gives an idea:
https://trembit.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-maintain-tiktok-servers/
Tl;Dr version:
-About $8,000,000 a month in data transfer costs
-Another $8,000,000 a month in system maintenance costs for hardware alone
-Both of the above do not include paying a single employee or any other operations expenses
Again, this response is very american centric which is fundamentally wrong.
There are 8billion people in this world, and only 330 million Americans
America isn't the cash cow your making it out to be. Tik tok was far more popular in Asia before it ever hit the USA. They will be fine doing away with banning it in America and still carrying on with the rest of the world.
Literally at your fingertips on the scrreen right in front of you.
Here's a good breakdown.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/
Sorry to kill your american centric exceptionalism but buddy, we ain't all that. China in itself has 750 million users, twice as many as the USA has just people. While America may be the current second in revenue, it still isn't the all or nothing your making it out to be
China has 750 million users and also the number one revenue stream. That's twice as many users as America just has in population.
America ain't all that worth it to sell off half to America lol.
Heres a good breakdown
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/
I’ll just leave this here, from Reuters, a source that is both very reputable and not American:
[Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail](https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-prefers-tiktok-shutdown-us-if-legal-options-fail-sources-say-2024-04-25/)
No. China doesn't have the same freedom of speech laws as the USA. So banning entertainment apps does go against freedom of speech and first amendment rights of Americans.
They could divest and make a very substantial amount of money doing so.
The fact that they won’t, when any business focused on making profit and delivering for investors would, is all the proof you need that it’s a Chinese government operation first and a business second (if at all).
I feel like it's more, sell me your car or you can't drive on my roads and just choosing to stay on the roads that you're allowed on. I do wonder if they would just split the company and only sell off an American "branch" and keep the rest.
Shut down? What makes you think that TikTok would shut down if they were no longer allowed to operate in the USA? US citizens make up less than 20% of their users. This is why people say it’s a ban in America, because nothing is going to happen to TikTok, they’re not going to divest, nor will they shut down.
Not shut down, just banned in the US. Tik Tok has 1+ billion users, the US market is 170 million that's only a maximum of 17% of the market.
Tik Tok will lose more users from other countries restricting it if sold to a US buyer than the 170 million US users.
It means that tiktok is run by the CCP for propaganda purposes, not for profit. Selling it would be giving up the propaganda,and they're not going to do that
Because… what they were doing is exactly what Congress and Intel agencies say they are doing. They may lose the US market but they still have other Democratic nations to fuck with and gather intel from.
Bytedance will still make a lot of money without the US. I think the US base is like 15% of their users and US revenue from tiktok was $16B last year with overall revenue of $120B. It’s obviously a good chunk of change, but it’s not like it will kill the company if they just don’t do business in the US.
... What's your point exactly? The fact that they're keeping the international assets regardless of whether they divest or shut down has nothing to do the choice to divest or shut down.
My point was that of course they would rather shut down US operations instead of sell - the company made $104B outside the US. It’s a market they would love to have, but it isn’t necessary for them to have access to. They still would pull in over $100B in revenue without operating in the US.
They would *only* be selling US operations if they chose that route. Regardless of whether they sell or shut down, they would STILL retain ALL of their international operations. I still don't understand what you mean. No matter what they're going to retain international operations and revenue, **that is not in question**. The only question is whether they sell their US operations or shut them down.
>The only question is whether they sell their US operations or shut them down
Yeah, I’m saying they shut them down because they don’t need the US operations to make a ton of money.
In my mind, a business person would just sell it to an American company.
The reason for shutting it down is to make symbolic statement.
Either that or it is actually an elaborate spy thing and they can’t sell it.
"Forced divestment" is many levels beyond the average person's consumer's comprehension level. "Ban" is easy to understand, and people sometimes just don't care if they are being inaccurate or misleading.
No, I promise. Most people will have no response whatsoever to the idea that tiktok is going to have a "forced divestment." Most people will, in fact, need that explained to them.
The extra steps exist and are not irrelevant.
The owners of TikTok have agency. If they are deciding to set tens of billions of dollars on fire, that says something interesting
TikTok isn't making that money currently though and the US is barely 10% of their user base.
They won't divest. They'll just leave the US.
So they aren't setting anything on fire. They have a lot of other markets to operate in.
What percentage of their revenue is from the US?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1299807/number-of-monthly-unique-tiktok-users/
What do you notice about the other countries on this list?
They’re poor.
I don’t know too much of their particular situation but I’ve seen many similar ones in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars range, when it sole majority owners a-lot of them would rather see things burn to stick it to the government then to create their own competitor and get some money. If what I’ve heard is true and the company isn’t making money and they don’t have any intention to sell, then yeah, maybe watching it burn to cause problems for the government is the choice they made.
Depends on the ownership structure. All the ones I know have majority sole ownership, so shareholders are absolutely irrelevant. If I remember correctly there was talk of golden shares. I don’t know their voting structure so I couldn’t offer any insight into it.
China still needs the US to buy its stuff. Xi has overplayed his hand, and combined with post-Covid deglobalization of supply chains, etc., China needs us more than we need them, and the West knows it. They’ll sacrifice TikTok for the greater good and come back with some other nefarious AI app down the road.
“Divestment” is also a bigger word that not everyone will be familiar with, while ban is a widely-used term.
I’m not defending it, simply acknowledging that headlines are frequently written for simplicity. People will click on a story about a ban; many will think divestment is some complicated financial concept that only matters to the pencil-pushers and just gloss past it.
>“Divestment” is also a bigger word that not everyone will be familiar with, while ban is a widely-used term.
We're talking about journalists. Their job is to write and explain. There are lots of ways to succinctly say "divest" that are much more accurate than "ban."
Because TikTok is not just a product for American consumption. The total number of non-US users is larger. Why divest when you could just drop the US market?
Why would they sell because one of the hundreds of countries in the world is going to ban them if they don't? Tiktok is a global company with almost 700 million users. 150 million of those users are in the US. 22% of their users is a lot but it's not all of their users. Why would they sell to mollify one country's insane congress? Bans can be negotiated against and undone. They will be taking the case up through probably the Supreme Court as well and even some conservative think tanks don't think the bill passes constitutional muster. Especially because it's particularly difficult in the US to target a single company with a ban. Plus, Biden signed the law and republicans love a chance to embarrass democrats so the conservative court may very well strike down the law for that reason.
It's a ban because they haven't been given a reasonable alternative option.
TLDR: They are probably confident they can win in court. Reverse the ban in the long term if not. And in the worst case, they continue to serve the rest of the world.
It’s a headline that grabs more attention. Those articles (most of them) explain the details that it isn’t exactly a ban, but if people only read a headline and not the full article you could argue that they deserve to be misinformed.
Even before the age of clickbait, headlines were made to reel you in and even contradict the article itself.
Because selling a company to America will eventually ruined it's brand name, they learned their lesson of Twitter. And Bytedance does not lack money they don't need America users in order to survive.
Forced divestment is worse than a ban in my opinion. It shows that the US will not allow their citizens to use any software unless the US owns it. This shows that it is about control.
Lol you don't understand what this bill is doing. They are not allowing any foreign software to be used by Americans it's not just for TikTok it's for any country that the USA is competing with. Data is also not any safer with this, because China will continue buying data from Meta.
Because the propaganda machines are alive and well in this country and you have people who are incredibly mediA illiterate. You have an entire generation who are still living 50 years ago when you could trust a singular broadcast news source for reliable information.
These days if you’re not checking everything you’re reading you’re going to be ingesting some level of propaganda. It’s difficult but we can make it through this just like we made it through previous golden age of yellow journalism and the like.
Step one is turning off the tap, and that means pulling the broadcast license for entities like Fox News that only run opinion and little to no un-spun information. They should not be allowed to call themselves a news outlet. You can have your opinion, but you’re not news.
Death to infotainment.
Because the role of news today is to generate clicks and views instead of telling the truth. “Ban” is an easy, short word that’s going to get people riled up.
Same reason they called it a “Muslim ban” when the feds issued travel restrictions for people from certain countries. It’s more inflammatory. Grabs more attention. Gets people worked up. Sounds more controversial.
Because media nowadays is about shock value. Since a lot of people don’t read beyond headlines, those shock values work. 70% of the media is owned by conservatives and they are hoping this turns off gen Z from voting from voting for dems if it’s described as a ban.
I think left leaning outlets want to give the impression that Biden is being “tough” on China and I think right leaning outlets want to frame it as Biden limiting your freedom of speech. Either way, the term ban fits their preferred narrative.
Turns out if you make a catchy headline for an article people won't bother reading the rest. Remember the "Don't say Gay bill"? Every article propped it up as if "Gay" was the new swear word you couldnt ever utter around anyone in FL.
Lol. Imaging think the Don't Say Gay bill was banning the word Gay.
It was so much worse than that and has been proven accurate since then given that Florida has added more and more restrictions.
I'd probably not want to be defending their fascist laws right now.
Many believe the ultimate consequences of this bill will be a ban. Bytedance has said they will not sell. Many of the congresspersons who passed it, did it hoping it would be banned. This was just the latest attempt at banning it. There were more explicit bans that failed.
China banning Google, WhatsApp, YouTube, X/twitter, Instagram and Facebook for the exact same reason should make this easy.
Yeah, China is *such* a good role model for how a reasonable government should crack down on the individual decisions of its citizens… Banning apps on government devices is very reasonable. But banning civilians from it is wild. Hell, if a civilian wants to download literal malware, I think they should be fully legally allowed to.
On the one hand, free choice is good, but on the other hand, the government has a responsibility to ensure that the nation doesn’t get fucked with by bad actors, the owners using TikTok to push certain political beliefs could be an issue, as well as it being suspected spyware
Yeah, like Meta and Google aren’t American companies also pushing political beliefs and spying on us
While American companies doing it absolutely isn’t ideal, foreign governments doing it is a tad bit worse
Then they should make the case to prove that’s what’s happening. All I’ve seen is conjecture and “what-ifs”
China banning things has no relevance to what we as a country should be doing. We aren't China nor should we be copying them.
China now has 9 months to find a way to sell it back to themselves or other shady shit.
TikTok has said they'd rather shut it down than sell. It's not a forced divestment because if TikTok doesn't do anything, they'll be banned. The divestment option is just an alternative they've been given, not something the government can force them to do.
It would seem to me the fact that they’d rather shut down a multi-billion dollar platform than sell it is very interesting, yet I’m not seeing any analysis of what it might mean
I mean, they won't really shut down the platform. They will lose the revenue they get from the US, but TikTok is popular globally, so even if its use is banned in the US, they'll continues their operations in, well, every other country.
What percentage of the company’s users are in the US? How much would they have to grow to make up that money? How much upside are they losing by keeping the company compared to selling it?
Most of the numbers I have seen suggest that about 15-20% of the users are in the United States. I don't know how that will equate into revenue share. As far as the keeping vs selling... I don't think selling will be an option for them. I would expect that China would declare the TikTok algorithms to be sensitive and not for export -- the way the US government does the same thing. So even if ByteDance wants to sell, they'd be able to sell everything except the main intellectual property that's worth a damn. That said, China has a lot of friendly nations around the world. There's a chance they could allow ByteDance to be "sold" to a company hosted in a country with a friendly government to China (though not in the US's "naughty list").
Users users users Tell me about revenue. What part of TikTok’s revenue is from the us?
If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t have ended my first paragraph the way I did.
Their other biggest markets are Indonesia and Brazil so I’m gonna go out on a limb and say the us is pretty important to them
I don’t think anyone disagrees.
> It would seem to me the fact that they’d rather shut down a multi-billion dollar platform than sell it is very interesting Billions come in but all of those billions go out too. It's not actually profitable. They hope to one day make it profitable but even divestment would mean only that some *other* company may one day be profitable. If there's no way for ByteDance itself to actually profit from TikTok in the US, there's no reason for it to exist.
What are the billions going "into" exactly? How much input does a social media platform cost to operate?
My understanding is that a lot of the money is going directly to essentially buying revenue. They're trying to get people to sell stuff through TikTok so they're paying people to sell stuff and then covering the processing fees themselves. Instead of churning through a lot of revenue and skimming off the top with fees, they're subsidizing the sales. Of course there's also the fact that video means much higher storage and bandwidth costs than text or images, and TikTok is *all* video, so the costs of just running the service itself must be hideously expensive. R&D is effectively free though since Douyin is profitable and they're basically just copy/pasting the same app with a different name. They even both use the same logo.
Video streaming is *hard* and *expensive*. Very expensive. This article gives an idea: https://trembit.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-maintain-tiktok-servers/ Tl;Dr version: -About $8,000,000 a month in data transfer costs -Another $8,000,000 a month in system maintenance costs for hardware alone -Both of the above do not include paying a single employee or any other operations expenses
Delivering video costs an insane amount. Youtube have the same issue.
If ByteDance can sell it for a lot of money, and they are choosing to shut it down instead, ByteDance is choosing zero dollars over lots of dollars
Again, this response is very american centric which is fundamentally wrong. There are 8billion people in this world, and only 330 million Americans America isn't the cash cow your making it out to be. Tik tok was far more popular in Asia before it ever hit the USA. They will be fine doing away with banning it in America and still carrying on with the rest of the world.
Americans have a hard time seeing over their fat guts.
I'm American and I'm not at all offended by this comment. Because it's fucking true lol.
Again, tell me what percentage of TikTok’s revenue comes from the US, given that the other biggest markets are Indonesia and Brazil?
Literally at your fingertips on the scrreen right in front of you. Here's a good breakdown. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/ Sorry to kill your american centric exceptionalism but buddy, we ain't all that. China in itself has 750 million users, twice as many as the USA has just people. While America may be the current second in revenue, it still isn't the all or nothing your making it out to be
But the app in China is different than the one is the USA. They wouldn’t be losing it.
There’s no business reason not to sell 51%, make a bundle of money, and retain 150 million users. . . unless they’re not really a business.
China has 750 million users and also the number one revenue stream. That's twice as many users as America just has in population. America ain't all that worth it to sell off half to America lol. Heres a good breakdown https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/
I’ll just leave this here, from Reuters, a source that is both very reputable and not American: [Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail](https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-prefers-tiktok-shutdown-us-if-legal-options-fail-sources-say-2024-04-25/)
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Well after America bans them Americans will have the cousin Amouyin
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No. China doesn't have the same freedom of speech laws as the USA. So banning entertainment apps does go against freedom of speech and first amendment rights of Americans.
Except the last I heard there aren't any buyers floating around looking to buy an unprofitable business like that. Maybe Musk would be interested.
They could divest and make a very substantial amount of money doing so. The fact that they won’t, when any business focused on making profit and delivering for investors would, is all the proof you need that it’s a Chinese government operation first and a business second (if at all).
What is the monetary value of TikTok without its vaunted algorithm? Very little, I suspect.
The world is bigger than the US. Sure losing the US will hurt them, but it's not fatal.
“Sell me this car or I’ll cut off your leg.” “Eh I don’t need my leg, I won’t die without it”
Nope. Not at all lol. More like "sell me this car or i'll put a magic spell on it and render it useless!" Ya. Whatevs
I feel like it's more, sell me your car or you can't drive on my roads and just choosing to stay on the roads that you're allowed on. I do wonder if they would just split the company and only sell off an American "branch" and keep the rest.
Shut down? What makes you think that TikTok would shut down if they were no longer allowed to operate in the USA? US citizens make up less than 20% of their users. This is why people say it’s a ban in America, because nothing is going to happen to TikTok, they’re not going to divest, nor will they shut down.
Probaly put out an advert for a VPN service in the week before they shut down.
You believe the multibillion is solely because of America. That is where you are completely absolutely wrong.
Honestly the value of tik tok isn’t profit. The propaganda value is staggering. This is one reason why Musk took over Twitter.
well if they sold they would loose all the users this way they only loose the USA customers. There are many more countries around the world.
Not shut down, just banned in the US. Tik Tok has 1+ billion users, the US market is 170 million that's only a maximum of 17% of the market. Tik Tok will lose more users from other countries restricting it if sold to a US buyer than the 170 million US users.
It means that tiktok is run by the CCP for propaganda purposes, not for profit. Selling it would be giving up the propaganda,and they're not going to do that
Kind of like Facebook?
I love that analysis.
Because… what they were doing is exactly what Congress and Intel agencies say they are doing. They may lose the US market but they still have other Democratic nations to fuck with and gather intel from.
Bytedance will still make a lot of money without the US. I think the US base is like 15% of their users and US revenue from tiktok was $16B last year with overall revenue of $120B. It’s obviously a good chunk of change, but it’s not like it will kill the company if they just don’t do business in the US.
The US is only asking Bytedance to divest its US operations, they could retain the international brand regardless.
I know, that was my point.
... What's your point exactly? The fact that they're keeping the international assets regardless of whether they divest or shut down has nothing to do the choice to divest or shut down.
They aren't shutting down. They will still operate everywhere else. Only Americans get shut down lol. Land of the free my ass
My point was that of course they would rather shut down US operations instead of sell - the company made $104B outside the US. It’s a market they would love to have, but it isn’t necessary for them to have access to. They still would pull in over $100B in revenue without operating in the US.
They would *only* be selling US operations if they chose that route. Regardless of whether they sell or shut down, they would STILL retain ALL of their international operations. I still don't understand what you mean. No matter what they're going to retain international operations and revenue, **that is not in question**. The only question is whether they sell their US operations or shut them down.
>The only question is whether they sell their US operations or shut them down Yeah, I’m saying they shut them down because they don’t need the US operations to make a ton of money.
In my mind, a business person would just sell it to an American company. The reason for shutting it down is to make symbolic statement. Either that or it is actually an elaborate spy thing and they can’t sell it.
Because it will be banned if they don't divest.
"Forced divestment" is many levels beyond the average person's consumer's comprehension level. "Ban" is easy to understand, and people sometimes just don't care if they are being inaccurate or misleading.
Calling it a ban isn't misleading. It was the intention and will be the result of the forced divestment.
Forced divestment is not complicated. “You have to sell this or shut it down”. That is very simple
No, I promise. Most people will have no response whatsoever to the idea that tiktok is going to have a "forced divestment." Most people will, in fact, need that explained to them.
You underestimate the population's stupidity.
But we know they’re not going to sell, inevitably resulting in the ban. So “forced divestment” is just a ban with extra steps.
Death is just life with extra steps
The extra steps exist and are not irrelevant. The owners of TikTok have agency. If they are deciding to set tens of billions of dollars on fire, that says something interesting
TikTok isn't making that money currently though and the US is barely 10% of their user base. They won't divest. They'll just leave the US. So they aren't setting anything on fire. They have a lot of other markets to operate in.
What percentage of their revenue is from the US? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1299807/number-of-monthly-unique-tiktok-users/ What do you notice about the other countries on this list? They’re poor.
I don’t know too much of their particular situation but I’ve seen many similar ones in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars range, when it sole majority owners a-lot of them would rather see things burn to stick it to the government then to create their own competitor and get some money. If what I’ve heard is true and the company isn’t making money and they don’t have any intention to sell, then yeah, maybe watching it burn to cause problems for the government is the choice they made.
Would the shareholders of an average company accept such a choice? Or is there something unusual about ByteDance?
Depends on the ownership structure. All the ones I know have majority sole ownership, so shareholders are absolutely irrelevant. If I remember correctly there was talk of golden shares. I don’t know their voting structure so I couldn’t offer any insight into it.
China still needs the US to buy its stuff. Xi has overplayed his hand, and combined with post-Covid deglobalization of supply chains, etc., China needs us more than we need them, and the West knows it. They’ll sacrifice TikTok for the greater good and come back with some other nefarious AI app down the road.
Ngl I have a college degree and I've never heard the word divestment before
The word 'Ban' stokes outrage, outrage gets clicks and views.
“Divestment” is also a bigger word that not everyone will be familiar with, while ban is a widely-used term. I’m not defending it, simply acknowledging that headlines are frequently written for simplicity. People will click on a story about a ban; many will think divestment is some complicated financial concept that only matters to the pencil-pushers and just gloss past it.
>“Divestment” is also a bigger word that not everyone will be familiar with, while ban is a widely-used term. We're talking about journalists. Their job is to write and explain. There are lots of ways to succinctly say "divest" that are much more accurate than "ban."
Because TikTok is not just a product for American consumption. The total number of non-US users is larger. Why divest when you could just drop the US market?
What percent of their revenue comes from the US? Look at the countries with highest TikTok user base outside of us. They’re poor
US is not exactly screaming wealth these days when you have poor cities like detroit.
Why would they sell because one of the hundreds of countries in the world is going to ban them if they don't? Tiktok is a global company with almost 700 million users. 150 million of those users are in the US. 22% of their users is a lot but it's not all of their users. Why would they sell to mollify one country's insane congress? Bans can be negotiated against and undone. They will be taking the case up through probably the Supreme Court as well and even some conservative think tanks don't think the bill passes constitutional muster. Especially because it's particularly difficult in the US to target a single company with a ban. Plus, Biden signed the law and republicans love a chance to embarrass democrats so the conservative court may very well strike down the law for that reason. It's a ban because they haven't been given a reasonable alternative option. TLDR: They are probably confident they can win in court. Reverse the ban in the long term if not. And in the worst case, they continue to serve the rest of the world.
The Chinese government will not allow the sale of the algorithm IP. It’s a ban and nothing but a ban.
The exact same forced sale happened with Grindr, and China did indeed sell it.
Lol ip They only need to sell 20% of shares
It’s a headline that grabs more attention. Those articles (most of them) explain the details that it isn’t exactly a ban, but if people only read a headline and not the full article you could argue that they deserve to be misinformed. Even before the age of clickbait, headlines were made to reel you in and even contradict the article itself.
Because selling a company to America will eventually ruined it's brand name, they learned their lesson of Twitter. And Bytedance does not lack money they don't need America users in order to survive.
This is objectively not true
You sure do have a lot of karma.
Sounds cooler than theft
Forced divestment is worse than a ban in my opinion. It shows that the US will not allow their citizens to use any software unless the US owns it. This shows that it is about control.
Yeah you’re right the US doesn’t allow any software from outside the us, that’s clearly correct
I mean what popular software is from outside the USA. They just want a monopoly.
Yeah I mean I agree you’re saying words
Lol you don't understand what this bill is doing. They are not allowing any foreign software to be used by Americans it's not just for TikTok it's for any country that the USA is competing with. Data is also not any safer with this, because China will continue buying data from Meta.
yep you’re right congress banned all foreign software yep that happened
God damn, you're such a dense mofo
Because the propaganda machines are alive and well in this country and you have people who are incredibly mediA illiterate. You have an entire generation who are still living 50 years ago when you could trust a singular broadcast news source for reliable information. These days if you’re not checking everything you’re reading you’re going to be ingesting some level of propaganda. It’s difficult but we can make it through this just like we made it through previous golden age of yellow journalism and the like. Step one is turning off the tap, and that means pulling the broadcast license for entities like Fox News that only run opinion and little to no un-spun information. They should not be allowed to call themselves a news outlet. You can have your opinion, but you’re not news. Death to infotainment.
Divestment doesn't get views Most people don't know what that even means The news is about getting ad revenue
Because the company is never going to sell tiktok,which means the bill is going to be a ban
Divestment isn't as sexy as a ban
Because clicks.
Count the syllables...
Because they aren’t gonna divest.
"Ban" gets more clicks and eyeballs.
Because the role of news today is to generate clicks and views instead of telling the truth. “Ban” is an easy, short word that’s going to get people riled up.
Same reason they called it a “Muslim ban” when the feds issued travel restrictions for people from certain countries. It’s more inflammatory. Grabs more attention. Gets people worked up. Sounds more controversial.
Sounds cooler.
Because it’s a headline that drives clicks
Because they're not gonna find a buyer, and definitely not in time. So, it is effectively a ban.
Because media nowadays is about shock value. Since a lot of people don’t read beyond headlines, those shock values work. 70% of the media is owned by conservatives and they are hoping this turns off gen Z from voting from voting for dems if it’s described as a ban.
or that federal law prohibits foreign governments from owning our media, for good reason, and significantly predating biden.
How many news people have you met? They aren't the brightest bunch. Those multi syllable words are hard to say sometimes.
I think left leaning outlets want to give the impression that Biden is being “tough” on China and I think right leaning outlets want to frame it as Biden limiting your freedom of speech. Either way, the term ban fits their preferred narrative.
Turns out if you make a catchy headline for an article people won't bother reading the rest. Remember the "Don't say Gay bill"? Every article propped it up as if "Gay" was the new swear word you couldnt ever utter around anyone in FL.
That one was accurate, said so by the legislators, and they blocked amendments to fix it.
Lol. Imaging think the Don't Say Gay bill was banning the word Gay. It was so much worse than that and has been proven accurate since then given that Florida has added more and more restrictions. I'd probably not want to be defending their fascist laws right now.