U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

https://www.wsj.com/tech/details-emerge-on-u-s-china-tiktok-deal-594e009f

by Mgtyalx • 10 months ago

439 626 10 months ago

wsj.com

https://www.wsj.com/tech/details-emerge-on-u-s-china-tiktok-...

https://archive.ph/g7dTU

elzbardico7• 10 months ago

Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.

polishdude20• 10 months ago

It's like a 100 year old with hardware crypto wallet.

abirch• 10 months ago

Not sure why I thought of Bill Belichick

palmotea9• 10 months ago

Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.

I'm hopeful. With any luck they'll ruin TikTok and it will die, a satisfying result.

elzbardico7• 10 months ago

First they will start launching TikTok Enterprise.

An all-buzzwords compliant subscription based solution for enterprise and professional content creators.

kilroy123• 10 months ago

I immediately had the same thought. One can hope!

scythe• 10 months ago

The "good" news is that they will only own the US operations, with the ROTW continuing to be operated by ByteDance. So if they diverge too far from the original product we can expect to see a discussion about life behind the Great Firewall of America.

jerojero3• 10 months ago

why do people hate TikTok as a product so much?

if TikTok dies then one of the alternatives: instagram reels or youtube shorts would take its place.

the brainrot will be the same. I guess people think tiktok's algorithm is particularly pervasive over Google's or Meta's? But I don't see why.

dessimus• 10 months ago

Users better be running now before they get hit with those new licensing fees.

Oracle: "Your phone has 6-cores and our minimum plan is 64 cores. Additionally, we see you upgraded from an iPhone 16 to the 17. Licenses don't transfer, of course. You owe us 3 kidneys."

1270018080• 10 months ago

I've always been fine with Tiktok dying, surely that will be expedited under their leadership

drewbitt• 10 months ago

Reminds me of Yahoo buying Tumblr. Mismatched. Their best bet is to change little to nothing, but not sure the administration will let them.

jerojero3• 10 months ago

It does seem mismatched but it's also an opportunity for Oracle to become relevant in the space, if they handle it right.

Though yeah, if they go the Yahoo-route it's going to be a huge waste. But it's really up to how the company handles the acquisition.

Yahoo missed big time by just trying to change the culture of the userbase way too quickly. They didn't like that people were posting porn on Tumblr when that was one of the most important aspects of the platform for the users. They bled way too many users and took way too long of a time to do anything about it.

I feel like Tumblr should have done their own patreon/OF type of push within the platform but they didn't have the vision. They literally had all the creators of that type of content at some point and they've now all moved to X/Twitter.

I hope (i mean, idgaf but you know it's a figure of speech) that Oracle has a better perspective about the issue so they don't commit another billion(s) dollar(s) crime.

rs1865• 10 months ago

That never worked.

Google had Google+ which was a massive failure.

Facebook tried releasing a product for workplace communication named Workplace/Facebook at Work and that is almost dead.

Microsoft has been eyeing a social media platform for years, and the only relevant product that I am aware of is Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) that is not very good in my opinion.

Oracle has never ever had any product that targets mainstream consumers. They always focused on enterprise products and don't understand consumers. Just like Microsoft never released a hardware product that matches iPhone's success, or Apple never has any enterprise product that remotely competes with Office. It's not in their gene. They'll be lucky enough if they don't run it into the ground.

hollerith3• 10 months ago

A new company will be created to operate TikTok, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the report said.

It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).

acheron• 10 months ago

The good news is, I can’t see “being owned by Oracle” as anything other than a death sentence.

miohtama• 10 months ago

LawyerTok

SilverElfin3• 10 months ago

I doubt it. Oracle has a booming datacenter and cloud business right now. Their role is to host the data in a US jurisdiction, which they can do. It won’t affect the success or failure of TikTok. And frankly it won’t give TikTok users privacy since the data can still be accessed by software written by Chinese employees.

SilverElfin3• 10 months ago

What does this “stake” get America at all? Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok? The point of the ban was to avoid national security issues from having an adversarial state (China) controlling speech in America. Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.

As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:

https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...

Fade_Dance• 10 months ago

Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.

Too popular to ban. Political constraints.

Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?

"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."

________________

I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.

The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.

nemothekid• 10 months ago

(which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework)

The ban wasn't executed on digital privacy concerns. The intent of the original ban was on digital privacy concerns, and that was shot down.

The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.

The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout. But the reason the ban passed the second time around was because China would not censor content about the Gaza genocide. The ban had no legs until October 7th and TikTok frustrated the US/Israel message that Hamas was homicidal terrorist group that spawned from no where.

What seems obvious is that, yes, the new TikTok, will fall in line with other US owned social media companies when it comes to spreading US propoganda.

So while Chinese social networks have "What happened in tiananmen square?", US social networks will have "Is Israel committing a genocide?".

dragonwriter2• 10 months ago

What does this “stake” get America at all?

“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.

HackerThemAll• 10 months ago

Oracle is then going to mandate license fees from every user, together with 22% support fees with 8% increase every year.

They'll then rewrite TikTok in Java, and migrate to Oracle Database.

1970-01-01• 10 months ago

The Android .APK files are already Java.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 10 months ago

To be fair, that doesn't mean they can't be re-written in Java.

palmotea9• 10 months ago

IIRC, but I read the TikTok app is mostly WebViews, which was a design choice to help keep it functioning in the face of an App Store ban.

lupusreal• 10 months ago

They're going to send thugs into businesses demanding to see if any of their employees are secretly using TikTok on company time, then demand the business buy a million dollar corporate license.

cosmicgadget3• 10 months ago

The Enoracleification of Tiktok.

Tarsul• 10 months ago

so US users will be cut off from the rest of the world? Wow. Thats crazy.

TranquilMarmot• 10 months ago

TikTok in China is already cut off from the rest of the world. The US is just copying China's homework.

lukewrites• 10 months ago

We are doing state capitalism without China’s “serve the people” bit. Hm, maybe there’s a name for that type of government, idk.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 10 months ago

This. I think people in general misunderstand the allure of power and the means to maintain it. Power centers in US are drooling at the opportunity to do what China has done in terms of controlling discourse and language. The interesting thing is that they all assume that this particular measure of control would never be turned against them.

edit: Adjusted weapon to 'measure of control'. I accept people are a little too happy to overreact lately.

pier252• 10 months ago

Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of global users ended up using the US app instead of TikTok.

20after4• 10 months ago

Why would anyone want to use OracleTok?

kelipso• 10 months ago

You won’t get the option to do it through the app stores, so pretty much no one’s going to do it.

basisword5• 10 months ago

Nope. I get a lot localised content. The local food reviewers etc. won't miss out on US views. The people creating content in local languages won't notice a difference either. 15 years ago I think things would have went differently but now I think people will want the non-US version. And I wouldn't be surprised if US users grab themselves a VPN and a pirated APK and use it too.

TMWNN3• 10 months ago

More like the other way around.

US users are today 21 of the 49 TikTok accounts with the most followers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...> (not including TikTok itself). When the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020,[1] Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue.

[1] And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move

basisword5• 10 months ago

This is just the first step (and a big one given TikTok's reach) to a US great firewall.

tensorlibb• 10 months ago

I think this is a massively good step forward.

However, TikTok is still a brain rot slop machine and we would be right to question Ellison's motivations.

slg11• 10 months ago

Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759336

TillE• 10 months ago

Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!

ChrisArchitect2• 10 months ago

Not really news in this state. Because other than a few more details here it's not any different than the story from last week (which we knew Oracle was in the mix etc). The deal isn't final.

slg11• 10 months ago

It is funny to say this as if there was some past story on here that everyone saw. In the last month, the story about a potential TikTok deal with the most engagement maxed out at 3 comments and 17 points[1]. This is probably the most important news in the social media sphere since Musk bought Twitter and the HN audience doesn't care about it until contracts are signed? That's pretty unbelievable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249430

metalman• 10 months ago

details, NO algorythm, Trumpy, China, Money, Twitteresque user base revolt....or worse so it's very much as you state, non final

aurareturn4• 10 months ago

My theory is that it highly depends on the few random people who view New posts and if they upvote/comment.

The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.

morkalork3• 10 months ago

Exactly. Depending on the traffic in newest, stories can slip in disappear in the flow

dang3• 10 months ago

There's too much randomness to expect any consistency.

Sometimes we re-up things for that reason (basically the second-chance pool mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). I've done that with this one.

bix6• 10 months ago

one member designated by the US government.

Why does the board of TikTok need a gov member? Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too? And Oracle surely needs one as well.

Is the gov putting out a call for board member civil servants? Like where does this person even come from?

duxup3• 10 months ago

Same reason they put a guy at CBS as a "bias monitor":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fcc-cbs-ne...

They want their guy to make sure things go their way / people say the "right" things.

piva00• 10 months ago

Didn't expect to see the USA employing press censors in my lifetime but here we are.

In Brazil during the dictatorship it was common for newspapers to print cooking recipes in place of censored articles, now I'm waiting to see if media in the USA has the balls to play the malicious compliance game... I guess I won't see it since money is basically God in America.

throw310822• 10 months ago

a guy at CBS as a "bias monitor"

Kenneth Weinstein.

"Mr. Weinstein has had a long career in right-leaning and neoconservative public policy circles. He is a firm and vocal champion of Israel." (NyTimes)

phs318u• 10 months ago

Oracle doesn’t need one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32596903

coffeebeqn• 10 months ago

What do you mean - the CCP has always had someone sit on the board of major companies… oh wait which country was this again?

thrance3• 10 months ago

It's the political komissar, here to make sure nothing too critical of the current administration is allowed on the platform.

hopelite6• 10 months ago

This goes way beyond this current administration and has nothing to do with China, besides being the foil for the real reason of controlling what people can see and hear because the cabal that controls the USA does not like it.

overfeed2• 10 months ago

Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too?

I believe the technical name is "Political Commissar."

Edit: Dana White, of MMA fame, now sits on Meta's board, though it is at Zuckerberg's request.

rhetocj232• 10 months ago

At his request lol. Strong corporate governance structure.

mandeepj2• 10 months ago

Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too?

They already got quite a few, post 2024 election.

https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/dana-white-john-elkann-cha...

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/tech/robby-starbuck-meta-ai-a...

Cornbilly• 10 months ago

Ha. I hadn’t seen the news in the latter link.

Washed-up music video director to professional Twitter poster to advisor at Facebook. What a display of the American meritocracy.

bamboozled• 10 months ago

The whole country is turning into a joke, that's why.

ChrisArchitect2• 10 months ago

Source: https://www.wsj.com/tech/details-emerge-on-u-s-china-tiktok-...

(which has a clearer title that's not that much different than days ago news: U.S. Investors, Trump Close In on TikTok Deal With China)

dang3• 10 months ago

We changed the URL from https://www.reuters.com/world/china/oracle-silver-lake-conso... to the article that it points to.

anon13953• 10 months ago

dang why can't I downvote comments

k310• 10 months ago

The party of laissez-faire capitalism is now into "let's interfere", with government ownership, presence within companies and of course, dropping the hammer on "unpatriotic" speech, a kind of Amended First Amendment.

10 Small Steps: Executing the Fascist Playbook [0]

The Fascists’ Playbook [1]

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/10-small-steps-executing-the-...

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/08/the-fascists-playboo...

Vegenoid2• 10 months ago

You can’t call them fascists - that’s dangerous, illegal rhetoric that incites violence.

sun_fresh• 10 months ago

So finally all that pesky people saying that their own government is funding a brutal genocide with their tax dollars will be banned.

American media is one of the most thightly controlled and censored in the world. They need to carefully control the media to maintain the ilusion of "moral superiority" that is used to justify foreign interventions.

Justsignedup• 10 months ago

The most terrifying thing is there will be a trump-government representative in the governing body.

We are truly looking at 1984 as a blueprint not a warning.

adastra22• 10 months ago

You can just not use TikTok.

OKRainbowKid• 10 months ago

That doesn't diminish the impact it has on the rest of humanity, and by proxy, on me.

cookiengineer• 10 months ago

The problem with that rhetoric is that at some point you need social media to prove legitimacy of your identity.

It already happens at border controls and TSA checks.

Guess when that "you can just not use TikTok" argument will expand to "you can just not use the internet" and effectively be punished monetarily or socially for not wanting to use it.

ta1243• 10 months ago

Political officers on ships was quite normal in the cold war, makes sense to have political officers in companies too.

greekrich92• 10 months ago

Current users of the app will be asked to shift to a new app

So it's just going to fade into obscurity then huh

reaperducer2• 10 months ago

So it's just going to fade into obscurity then huh

We won't be so lucky.

cjbgkagh• 10 months ago

What's to stop ByteDance from waiting a while and making a new TikTok app under a different name? The network effect moats do not seem insurmountable. I'm sure once the US starts meddling with the algorithm people will start looking for alternatives.

tw043• 10 months ago

I hope this is sounding alarm bells for everyone else as much as me.

Larry's son buys Paramount (CBS) and promptly fires Stephen Colbert, a money making machine who was leading his timeslot as what was, in hindsight, a clear message to everyone that nobody is safe if they don't fall in line.

Larry now gets TikTok, which like it or not is the most influential social media platform among today's youth.

Both are Trump fanatics. This is the next stage in the Ailes playbook that has already gone too far in ruining the American experiment.

otterley• 10 months ago

Stephen Colbert, a money making machine

Unfortunately not: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/business/media/stephen-co...

tw043• 10 months ago

Yes, as with all well-run businesses, it's common to terminate your flagship products due to one down year without any attempts to fix cost overruns. There's a reason the people at CBS keep leaking that it lost $50m last year but don't tell you how much it lost or made the previous 5 years, they just say "viewership was down since COVID".

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/07/20/wsj-late-night-...

firesteelrain• 10 months ago

Stephen Colbert shutting down was explained otherwise when it happened.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-colbert-got-canceled

conductr2• 10 months ago

Conjecture. But, since the article says Colbert has 10 months left, I think this would be a awesome turn of events if they canceled his show for political reasons (to get Trump's FCC approval) only to ultimately keep the show now that the FCC has approved the deal. That would be the purest form of beating Trump at his own game.

1234letshaveatw• 10 months ago

Colbert a money making machine? Did the hackernews admins merge two threads from alternate universes?

volleyball3• 10 months ago

So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.

Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]

This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...

[2] https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...

throwawayqqq112• 10 months ago

Thank you for providing the media take over angle. I wish the people down voting you would explain why.

vincnetas• 10 months ago

how do you know if anyone is downvoting a comment?

Retric3• 10 months ago

He’s got the wrong guy on the paramount deal. It’s David Ellison though they’re related:

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramount-warner-bros-disco...

spacechild1• 10 months ago

This is just crazy. No single person should have this amount of power, in particular if they have the moral integrity of Larry Ellison...

Retric3• 10 months ago

It is two people here. David Ellison who took over Paramount is the son of Larry Ellison of Oracle.

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison

seemaze• 10 months ago

moral integrity of Larry Ellison...

Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

seizethecheese• 10 months ago

Genuine question: what do you think the alternative is? Ultimately someone will have the power. I don’t know what’s particularly questionable about Larry Ellison. An entrepreneur controlling media seems better than the state or a foreign government.

palmotea9• 10 months ago

So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN.

That's not Larry Ellison, it's his nepo baby David Ellison.

nineplay• 10 months ago

This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.

Again? People should be talking about the hostile take-over currently in progress and how it is getting exponentially worse. But the billionaire mouthpieces gave everyone a shiny new inconsequential talking point and no one cares about anything that matters.

Imustaskforhelp4• 10 months ago

No one cares about anything that matters.

Maybe that's what they wanted all along.

Why fight a war against class, against oppression when we can sit on a chair and write a comment either defending or arguing against something as petty as religion.

It would be maybe the 3rd point worth discussing definitely after concentration of power & how they can influence our opinion of the masses.

But people made it the first.

There is no such thing as a moral billionaire imo, I saw a video like this and I sorta agree.

I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone owning this much amount of control.

Religion seems so petty to me yet it seems that the world is coming back to it. Fighting us vs them.

We have all forgotten what the people in 1970's esque dreamed of 2025 etc. (I am a genz but I have seen such videos of people thinking what)

And the funny thing is, is that we ourselves have forgotten how to dream of what will happen in 2100

Do we really want to grow old in society where even after 70-80 years, one of our children or grandchildren sees yet again some comment like this and writes something like this that I am writing?

I feel a little frustrated.

paxys• 10 months ago

Nothing hostile about it. This is what the American people voted for.

slg11• 10 months ago

In 2020, 22.4% of the US population voted for Trump. In 2024, 22.7% of the population voted for Trump. I hate how people draw drastic conclusions regarding what the American people want based off the shift of less than half a percentage point of the population.

JumpCrisscross2• 10 months ago

hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man

Ellison read and responded to the political situation more skilfully than Elon.

He used Stargate to cement himself as a power broker in AI. He used that influence to provide antitrust assurances that gave his son a leg up for Paramount. Meanwhile he used that proximity to media to get a foot in the door with TikTok.

The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy. This is a project all the major Trump donors and high-level supporters contributed to. That Ellison is coming up as one of the new aristocrats is closer to a dice roll; that we have oligarchs, now, is very much by design.

wnc31412• 10 months ago

In authoritarian regimes the industrial capacity of an economy is appropriated by the state, where the fruits of the industry are enjoyed by party loyalists.

In this case using the state to choose which business is viable, no doubt being businesses that play ball with the party.

-its why sectarian conflicts and power delegation is so high stakes in many parts of the world.

andrekandre• 10 months ago

  > The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy.

well, tbf in the old days, it was literally called ‘political economy’ for a reason… maybe the name should make a comeback.

thesmtsolver• 10 months ago

Trying to be neutral. Did we consider China's relationship with Palestine? Were we ok with American minds being swayed by a foreign country?

farseer• 10 months ago

That is one of the prime reasons congress banned TikTok.

netsharc• 10 months ago

If we want neutral, how about a fair arena for opinions and ideas.. at the moment "The Right" yells and screams "Anti-Semite! Terrorist!" if someone protests against the starvation and slaughter of children... So having them control the medium doesn't feel right for me.

Ok someone's going to come and say that "The Left" controlled the medium and disallowed "non-mainstream" messaging about Covid... I admit my bias and consider such messaging lunacy too..

volleyball3• 10 months ago

I would argue that on this matter and all matters relating to the middle-east, American minds are still being swayed by a foreign country and have been for the last 50 to 80 years. At least, with Chinese Tiktok, Elon's twitter and competition between the various social media platforms, Americans for the first time were exposed to voices from the other side. And between the two sides, were able to make up a more informed decision. This is a desperate attempt to reverse that. I doubt it will work in the long-term and i don't think it is expected to. But I think in near-term this is a measure to control the narrative to prepare for American misadventures in the region over the next couple of years. Which almost certainly includes a second war with Iran, Israeli annexation of the West Bank and even possibly a partial American occupation of Gaza.

spookie• 10 months ago

To be completly frank, its better to focus on the media consolidation part. That's the real problem.

hvb22• 10 months ago

For a large share of the population social media is the only media they consume, so this is part of your real problem

usefulcat• 10 months ago

Actually it's the opposite. Pre-internet, there were a handful of news sources in any given city (mostly newspapers and TV), so they couldn't afford to alienate half of their potential viewers/readers by leaning hard left or right.

Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' online. So many that the net effect is that most of those sources lean one way or the other, and by and large people choose to listen mostly or only to those sources they agree with.

No wonder political opinions are so highly divided today. Almost no one ever hears anything from the other side.

tinyhouse2• 10 months ago

What's the problem with being pro-israel? Everyone needs to be pro-whatever-you-prefer? I'm pro-israel too.

Imustaskforhelp4• 10 months ago

The problem is that the pro stands from problem.

Whenever we take a stance, We identify our ego with that stance. We shall die but die a pro X or pro Y

As such many debates happen in bad faith as well.

Of course everyone has their agenda but one has to understand that agenda is just a framework for understanding the world.

And we need to understand the world because it has no inherent meaning.

So like, if we really have to deduce meaning, if we really have to be pro something that we can die on a hill towards, I'd rather have it be a humanitarian thing.

I am not saying that palestine is good either but rather that in genocide/wars, the people fighting the war/military/families displaced suffer, not the old man causing the war.

I feel like I am a humanist. Wishing to understand the world, yet I feel like some people in this world have hurt me so much that sometimes I just wish the world to burn.

I am sure that people are gonna comment on something like "oh do you support a genocide etc."

But I am trying to make the point that the world should really be just anti suffering,accepting. Yes I am naive but surely with all of this technological improvements, we can improve the structure of society to not be fucking brewing with hate and bullying and resentment.

We can do so much better as a society without even trying much. Just small acts of kindness and basically creating a environment that rewards it and punishes bullying/hate speech etc. might be really nice if I am being honest.

Not sure why we can't be pro this instead of defining ourselves with the confict of two other foreign nations

JumpCrisscross2• 10 months ago

What's the problem with being pro-israel?

There are tiny pockets of this country that assume this is the singular issue that animates everybody, every day, and that it is impossible to believe in both Israel's right to exist and defend itself and the Palestinians' right to not be bombed because the Israeli PM doesn't want to go to jail.

lmm2• 10 months ago

Did you miss the news that they're conducting a genocide?

hn_throw_250915• 10 months ago

Larry the lawnmower Ellison?

volleyball3• 10 months ago

The lawnmower in question is a big-time donor to the Israel state and the IDF. Regarding the IDF the lawnmover seems to have caught some feelings:

  Through all of the perilous times since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home. In my mind, there is no greater honor than supporting some of the bravest people in the world, and I thank Friends of the IDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.

When Oracle opened a data-center in Jerusalem, his colleague and CEO Safra Katz had this to say :

  ...when you connect with Oracle you understand that we are committed to the U.S. and Israel. We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none. This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don't agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren't the right company for them. Larry (Ellison, co-founder of Oracle) and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country and no one should be surprised by that.

"our commitment to Israel is second to none". Does America fall under [none] here? Something to consider when looking at these acquisitions.

ulfw2• 10 months ago

Why would any company want to operate in America, sell to Americans or onboard American users anymore?

If you're not successful you just wasted a ton of time and money.

If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.

Doesn't sound like a country worth investing in anymore.

bluecalm• 10 months ago

Because it's the biggest market. Half of my customers are American. I have never even marketed anything to them. It's the biggest, best market with the most people willing to spend the most money.

TMWNN3• 10 months ago

Similarly, when the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020, Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue. Of the top 50 most-followed accounts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>, 21 of 49 (not including TikTok itself) are American.

TMWNN3• 10 months ago

If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.

Besides what bluecalm said, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.

Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile Chinese government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.

ulfw2• 10 months ago

Hostile in what way exactly? What have the actions of hostility been to warrant theft?

f33d5173• 10 months ago

If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.

You still make money in that case. It isn't a bad deal for the chinese. The americans who now have yet another censored app controlled by the american government are the only losers here.

kcb• 10 months ago

Americans are good at spending money.

asdff6• 10 months ago

Anything to get a suckle at the teet that is the fed money printing machine.

aurareturn4• 10 months ago

I think it's bad news if the US government owns Tiktok data rather than the Chinese government.

Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.

  The State Department also said it would crack down on non-citizens who have made posts making light of the shooting.

  “In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country. I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on Thursday. “Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.” [0]

Americans prefer that Tiktok data lives within the jurisdiction of the US government, why? If you don't think Palantir is putting together a centralized database to survey individual Americans for the US government, you are crazy. There will be real consequences where if they don't like what you're saying or doing, they will come after you some how. I'd much rather have my data based in China.

[0]https://time.com/7316628/charlie-kirk-death-celebrations-soc...

jcarrano• 10 months ago

When you reach the point of choosing the lesser evil, you might just as well uninstall TikTok.

aurareturn4• 10 months ago

If you're a Chinese citizen, use all American services and hardware if you can.

mothballed• 10 months ago

I've come across at least one businessman who refuses to use anything but a Chinese phone he bought in china, with chinese sim card and chinese apps, for that exact reason.

hereme888• 10 months ago

That's strange. It wasn't because China mandates government spyware on phones?

rchaud2• 10 months ago

It's not about owning the data, it's about controlling the message.

corimaith2• 10 months ago

Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.

It's arguments like this that reminds of the critique of libertarians as akin to house cats that seek to undermine the very systems that allow them to exist in the first place that wouldn't survive outside for minute. Or maybe it's just agitprop right here.

737282251819• 10 months ago

One more reason to despise Oracle.

andsoitis3• 10 months ago

So now we will split American TikTok users from those of the rest of the world? Madness.

pelorat• 10 months ago

Madness for the USA, but a win for Europe if our kids are shielded from right wing American content. I wish Europe could do this with X. Force Elon to create a wall between US and EU users.

brianmurphy• 10 months ago

Why do you want to exist in an echo chamber? Suppressing ideas doesn't make them go away.

duxup3• 10 months ago

I'm curious how bad the misinformation type stuff will be.

It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.

Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.

quickthrowman• 10 months ago

Short form video is basically worthless outside of comedy and cute animal videos. The format does not allow enough information to determine whether the information provided is accurate or not, for videos that have facts in them. Every time I watch a short form video I feel an overwhelming urge not to trust what I saw and verify it elsewhere, now I just don’t want short form videos at all.

vkou• 10 months ago

The modern propaganda machine does not run on meaningful facts, nor does it give a shit about not being able to convince you.

It cares about convincing people in general.

emddudley• 10 months ago

Short form video is tailored for the fast, instinctive, emotional brain. Not the slower, deliberative, logical brain.

Workaccount2• 10 months ago

I don't know about tik-tok, but Instagram is totally unhinged. Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuff.

YouTube shorts gets all the hate, but I find the content to consistently be the most sophisticated? PG rated? educational?

duxup3• 10 months ago

I agree, YouTube shorts tends to be noticeably better.

jghn3• 10 months ago

Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuf

I don't understand how other people have this experience and I don't. I see targeted ads of course. And every once in a while it starts showing me content for things I don't follow, at which point I start mashing the button they provide to make it go away, and after a handful it pops up something asking if I want to remove all suggested content for a while. I always select yes.

Do other people actually *want* suggested comment? that's bizarre.

just_human• 10 months ago

This seems like a premature reaction. The Trump administration has been known to anchor to extreme positions as a negotiation tactic.

Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.

Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.

wbl2• 10 months ago

The thing is there is a law directing that TikTok be sold or shut down. Trump has already illegally given extensions several times.

g8oz• 10 months ago

TikTok dealt a serious blow to the Western consensus manufacturing apparatus. We saw that with Gaza especially. This deal is a step towards taking back control.

fullshark3• 10 months ago

Maybe these crypto-zealots who scream about decentralization will actually try and build a thriving decentralized media instead of pumping and dumping shitcoins?

cogman10• 10 months ago

The problem is that it's hard to make these things popular.

There are several ActivityPub services that are pretty good and even have decent UXes, but they aren't super active.

A major issue is it's confusing and the funds are limited.

zer00eyz• 10 months ago

try and build a thriving decentralized media

This exists today, it has always existed, and you never needed technology to find the solution to it.

Im a huge fan of the film Rope, because it is just done well. Its also got a ton of coding in it for "homosexual" themes that were very much banned at the time of filming. Understanding these paints the film in a whole new way...

Shakespeare has a ton of contemporary satire coded into it. Unless you're aware of history or reading a version that illuminates the meta-context you would very much be unaware of its existence.

It happens in modern film: Paul Verhoeven is a master of it.

If you dont think there are coded communities on existing social platforms sharing information among in members I have news for you.

bootsmann2• 10 months ago

Taking back control by _checks notes_ handing the Chinese propaganda tool to supporters of the current administration?

paganel• 10 months ago

Yes, indeed. As the current administration, any US administration in the last 30-40 or years in fact, is for a fact very pro-Israel, so a move like this can only cement that stance.

fullshark3• 10 months ago

You wrote this as a snarky rebuttal but you seem to be agreeing with OP? Confusing post.

yibg5• 10 months ago

Yes exactly. The US government likes propaganda. They just don't like it when other countries do it.

hopelite6• 10 months ago

I’m not a big TikTok user. Can you characterize the nature of the Chinese propaganda everyone keeps citing in reference to TikTok?

SilverbeardUnix5• 10 months ago

Oracle owned Tiktok with right-wing and Trump friend Larry Ellison at the helm is a step in the right direction? That's crazy.

corimaith2• 10 months ago

More like walking straight into another form of "consensus manufacturing". You are not more informed than people a decade ago.

fullshark3• 10 months ago

It's not a matter of more or less it's a matter of what information you receive and in what order.

alephnerd• 10 months ago

I swear I saw all these exact comments yesterday - why are they showing that they were posted 10 minutes ago?

TSiege• 10 months ago

I believe the HN team is intentionally consolidating the thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270431#45277295

ImPrajyoth• 10 months ago

This would just make them go in a situationship.

Both are not compatible with each other in any way, but they are in a great deal, one they can't say no to.

This is where either one fails or sometimes both.

barbazoo2• 10 months ago

I'm not an expert but this makes me think that it might time to turn off the screens and stop letting half-trillionaires decide what we look at.

amatecha8• 10 months ago

Use Fediverse/ActivityPub, XMPP (maybe matrix), IRC. Use protocols, not "apps"/"platforms". Stop using corporate-owned centralized services. Well, unless you like being the subject of exploitation and manipulation of course.

deadbabe• 10 months ago

The nuance of protocols vs apps though is lost on the masses. Most people just want to stare at reels or be stared at in reels.

This means that the only people you will encounter in protocols will be privacy freak type nerds and “normal” people you might actually feel better interacting with or watching are on popular apps.

t0lo3• 10 months ago

Protocols are good- but respectfully at this point fediverse is basically a transgender support group.

johnecheck2• 10 months ago

No mention of atproto. Obviously Bluesky is nothing to write home about, but do you see some reason why the atproto couldn't be the foundation for something more interesting?

fogzen4• 10 months ago

It's time to go take the half-trillion from them.

prawn2• 10 months ago

Without screens, how do you get the scale needed to organise and influence the direction of your country?

barbazoo2• 10 months ago

I don't and I'm ok with that. Let's go out and organize and influence the direction of our _communities_ first. No screen needed. That's the level you can impact as an ordinary person.

It makes me immediately suspicious when someone wants to reach _everbody_, that's never good and we shouldn't let them. Ideas will grow if they're good, if you have to spend money to make people listen, they're not.

BatteryMountain3• 10 months ago

If you have kids, get them off the internet asap. No access. These people thrive because they have illegal contracts with kids. They control the hearts & minds of so many households. Reject the whole system. Cut the cord from all bots, propaganda farms, intelligence agencies that runs a direct line into your child's mind. They are teaching your children to think a specific way. Its gross.

jeffwask• 10 months ago

Oracle is just really going wild to get into the media and social media spaces.

gtk40• 10 months ago

Reminds me of when Cisco bought Flip Video

ferguess_k4• 10 months ago

Just don't use it.

Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.

Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.

estearum9• 10 months ago

Obviously someone not using it themselves mitigates only a fraction of the harm of these things.

If everyone around your kids is brainrotted or subject to destructive propaganda, your kids suffer too.

amatecha8• 10 months ago

So, same old, basically. When I was a kid it was the same thing, kids spending all evening watching sitcoms and otherwise-trash TV. I was online on my computer learning programming, audio production, trying different operating systems, playing every game I could get my hands on, as well as chatting with people all over the world & making friends who I'm still friends with today, ingesting media from all over the world as well, completely free of corp/govt propaganda. Kids can still do so, if they choose to skip past the pop culture garbage that is shoved in everyone's faces, just as I did 20-30 years ago.

Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>

ferguess_k4• 10 months ago

Yeah, you are 100% correct. I need to find him a few good hobbies before I release him to the wolf packs.

I don't know. I myself never sticked to a hobby even after trying a lot of them. Genetically speaking he is a lot like me -- lack of discipline, difficult to cool down, impatient, throw tantrums frequently, etc. The list is pretty long :/ Not many good things from this genetic pool TBH.

thrance3• 10 months ago

Just "not using it" doesn't ward off from the deleterious societal consequences of such a powerful propaganda tool simply existing.

ferguess_k4• 10 months ago

It's the best I can do honestly. As another commentater mentioned, what can I do if my son's friends use it extensively? I don't know TBH -- the best I can do is to not give him a smart phone too early and try to grow him some other hobbies before brainrot reaches him.

reaperducer2• 10 months ago

Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted.

But… but… TokTok put full-page ads in all the big newspapers telling us that thanks to them, a yoga mom in Montana can now take her free-range artisanal oat milk candle-making side-hustle and turn it into a full-time job, paying just a little over minimum wage!

Isn't that worth destroying the minds of millions of American children?

conductr2• 10 months ago

I feel like short form video is inherently addictive, what special sauce are these smartest minds in the world using that adds to that?

I've never used it, but since YouTube introduced Shorts I've become victim to the addiction and subsequently blocked any trace of Shorts with a browser extension.

ferguess_k4• 10 months ago

I think the way they make recommendations are pretty good (looking over my wife's shoulder sometimes). But that's just my guess, I mean, it could just be pushing the next best viewed video from the same tag.

LetsGetTechnicl2• 10 months ago

Are there any other examples of something like this happening? A successful (foreign) app is forced to be sold to a US company just because of its country of origin? What happened to the free market? It's remarkable that privacy is even in the conversation when FAANG is just as bad

Not to mention that this is all just a distraction from the very real destruction Trump 2.0 is doing to peoples' lives, safety, financial outlooks, rights, etc and flushing our country and planet down to the toilet for his benefit

*edited for clarity and fixed typos

smegma22• 10 months ago

Yes, in 2020 Grindr was forced to sell for similar reasons.

LetsGetTechnicl2• 10 months ago

Today I learned! I remember it being sold to a Chinese company a few years ago, didn’t know it went back to US ownership. Ironically just deleted it because even with an Adblocker it’s still unusable with all the bots

Jensson6• 10 months ago

And why didn't people get up in arms over that?

Animats• 10 months ago

With, apparently, a board member appointed by the Trump administration.

The U.S Steel deal included three board seats, but the Intel deal did not include any.

This is starting to look like the way China does things, with the central government having a financial stake in important companies.

SilverbeardUnix5• 10 months ago

I'm not a fan of the administration by any means but a lot of democracies do this. Public/Private partnerships are commonplace in Europe.

jay_kyburz• 10 months ago

Yeah, I don't mind the public profiting if public money and or concessions were made to set up the business. And especially for bailouts!

kelnos2• 10 months ago

Is it common for this sort of company, though? I can see public-private partnerships making sense for infrastructure, for example, but a social media company? That just sounds like a way for a country to censor and push propaganda.

rs1865• 10 months ago

That's irrelevant. Did this happen frequently in the US history? The US does not simply adopt France's laws but makes their own for a reason.

thinkcontext• 10 months ago

With, apparently, a board member appointed by the Trump administration.

Trump has essentially selected all of the board members. Its not a coincidence that Larry Ellison and Andreessen are big Trump supporters. The amazing corruption continues.

delichon• 10 months ago

The amazing corruption continues.

Also known as industrial policy. They are inseparable.

harrisi• 10 months ago

I'm really surprised that there hasn't been more discussion of the (effective) nationalization of US Steel, so thank you for bringing it up. It's not only that he gets to pick board members, he gets final say on basically any decisions the company makes.

gpt52• 10 months ago

Key details:

1. New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.

2. 80% owned by a U.S. investor consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz, 20% by Bytedance.

3. Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.

4. All U.S. user data would sit on Oracle infrastructure in the US.

5. Algorithm will be initially licensed, but has to be reengineered to comply with the law.

Not discussed - whether the US tiktok app is allowed to compete with TikTok outside of the US. My guess is NO.

hvb22• 10 months ago

All U.S. user data would sit on Oracle infrastructure in the US.

Legally required to use the services of a specific company, that's a sweet deal right there.

rtehfm• 10 months ago

As part of Project Texas[1], they've already been using Oracle's infrastructure.

The central feature of Project Texas is our work with Oracle to isolate the TikTok services serving U.S. users within Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment as an additional safeguard. Although gateways to the storage infrastructure are strictly monitored and controlled, U.S. users of the TikTok platform can still communicate and interact with global users for a cohesive global experience.

[1]https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-about

hamburglar• 10 months ago

TikTok has been on Oracle cloud for years. One of its biggest customers.

justapassenger• 10 months ago

Vendor lock-in, with a heavy legal implications, is Oracle's bread and butter of operation.

foota• 10 months ago

I suspect the legal requirement is for it to be in the US, the Oracle part is probably just because they're the ones investing.

fluidcruft• 10 months ago

Key details:

1. DOA app nobody wants

2. whocares

3. see 2

Good luck to the administration while trying to roll this out.

jfengel3• 10 months ago

Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.

Why?

The nominal reason for all this is that we didn't want a Chinese company controlling an important social media outlet. I don't love that reasoning, but fine, whatever.

So they're forcibly selling it to an American company. Which should solve the problem, right?

Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies? Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?

Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?

yibg5• 10 months ago

Remember though, it's only bad when the other guy does it. We don't want Chinese government involvement in TikTok, but we do want US government involvement. /s

zamadatix8• 10 months ago

It's an interesting question, but the information we have so far doesn't seem to be enough to give a meaningful answer yet. E.g. is it something like "one person appointed to oversee the full terms of the transition are kept" or "one person appointed always to make sure TikTok aligns with the government".

I'm not necessarily a fan of either... but to vastly different levels.

kelnos2• 10 months ago

Because Trump wants a proxy so he can continue to influence the direction TikTok takes. He wants easier access to data so he can go after his political opponents, as well as get things censored he doesn't like. Of course, this would all be possible without someone on the board, but it can't hurt, and likely will help.

staticautomatic• 10 months ago

Seems obvious to me that this is so the government can force the platform to silence users who are critical of the government.

glenstein7• 10 months ago

Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?

Well, yes, for starters. I think there's a pretty strong consensus from people on all sides that there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.

It's the beneficiary of powerful network effects, it created those effects for itself with a superior app, but nevertheless it is a distinguishing feature. I also would say it's culturally positioned perhaps the best of any major social media app over the present and near term.

And in its current ownership it's required by statute to comply with Chinese national security data requests. And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.

nujabe• 10 months ago

That is a seat reserved for AIPAC.

ivape2• 10 months ago

They don’t want you scrolling through insert_controversial_topic at break neck pace. The bandwidth on TikTok in terms of getting a visual out is extremely wide and fast.

Bombthecat• 10 months ago

You know the answer lol

palmotea9• 10 months ago

Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies?

That wouldn't be a bad thing. How good has unchecked Zuckerberg been for us, really?

Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?

Or the one where there's some level to force on them, like here. If Zuckerberg starts needing government cash to keep Facebook going, I'd expect a similar deal.

Yeul2• 10 months ago

Pushing trad wife and Christ is king content to young people is worth it. Propaganda works.

doctoboggan2• 10 months ago

1. New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.

IMO this significantly impacts the value I would get from TikTok, as much of the content I consume on the app is from outside the US

I guess they are hoping the US market will be big enough so self sustain and even entice some foreigners to join the US only app?

morkalork3• 10 months ago

Wait, so for everyone else this means American content will be off the main app and be contained? If this stems the tide of MAGA brain rot seeping north into Canada it's an absolute win.

UncleOxidant4• 10 months ago

Will people just stay with the old app out due to inertia? Or will there be annoying "blocked in your country" type messages until you switch? (at which point you won't know what's been blocked in your country)

mrtksn• 10 months ago

That’s very interesting, I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.

Also, I see creators, trying to create US based TikTok accounts because they believe that this way their content will be shown to Americans, which are better monetized. If that’s the case, I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.

It the international creators stay with the international TikTok IMHO that will be a huge win for China, practically displacing American culture for the younger demographic in the rest of the world.

basisword5• 10 months ago

> I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.

If I were China I would do this deal and then ensure that the payout is better outside the US. Try to sway US content creators to use VPN's and post outside the US and essentially limit the impact of the deal.

imiric2• 10 months ago

I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.

Huh? Are you not aware of US social media companies?

Everything that's happening on TikTok is also happening on X, Facebook, Friendster, or whatever the kids are using these days. The only difference is that the TikTok algorithm promotes Chinese propaganda and ideology, and enriches the Chinese government and ByteDance. The US can't have that, hence this deal.

This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota. That would require strong regulation of social media companies and adtech in general, and there would be a nationwide revolt if that were even proposed. This is far from being considered anyway, now that Big Tech is deeply entrenched in the government.

LeafItAlone2• 10 months ago

I wonder if the toxicity of the American culture wars can be contained this way.

Look at recent events: American government officials want to maintain the same level of toxic culture wars that foreign governments want. They just want to control them, not contain them.

vehemenz3• 10 months ago

Giving power to the radicals that want division wouldn't have that effect, and it's bizarre to even suggest that it would.

basisword5• 10 months ago

> US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users

Very interesting! The separate "in content" bit in particular. Sounds like US TikTok will now be one giant echo chamber. Users outside the US will miss some US content but tbh, I find TikTok content is actually quite localised anyway. Big benefits for users outside the US are:

1. US doesn't get my data.

2. Hopefully less US political BS to swipe past.

3. I am much less concerned with the sway China has on Western Europe than the sway the US has and am therefore much happier using a China-backed version of the app sans US content/users/control/propaganda. The extreme brain rot causing people outside the US to care about 'MAGA' or that recently assassinated man will hopefully start to recede. That can only be a good thing. We have plenty of our own polarising issues without importing irrelevant ones.

roughly2• 10 months ago

5. Algorithm will be initially licensed, but has to be reengineered to comply with the law.

The government board director is one thing, but what exactly does this mean?

doctoboggan2• 10 months ago

"Hey Claude, please re-write this algorithm"

cvoss• 10 months ago

The law simply requires that the content recommendation algorithm not be shared between the two apps. [0] Thus, it must be rebuilt by the new team, and not maintained or controlled by the old team.

The licensing approach is a temporary solution to keep the app working from day 1. One of ByteDance's complaints during the lawsuit earlier this year was that is was going to be technically infeasible for engineers to rebuild something as complex and essential as the content algorithm in the short window of time they had before the law went into effect.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...

"The term “qualified divestiture” means a divestiture or similar transaction that ... would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary; and ... precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between [the two apps/teams], including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing."

downrightmike2• 10 months ago

10% of intel 80% of TikTok ??% Meta ??% Google ??% Amazon ??% S&P500

vehemenz3• 10 months ago

Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.

In other words, one's data will now be under the scrutiny of amoral radicals who have decided to target people for political speech.

delfinom• 10 months ago

We are slowly becoming Communist China.

Won't be long until all companies will be required to have a party office.

sharadov• 10 months ago

Of all the tech companies, Oracle seems to be making the most and a killing due to Larry's cosy relations with Trump.

Last week's announcement that they have a 500 B deal with Open AI, and now this.

Elon really fucked up!

the_gipsy2• 10 months ago

Who would have thunk, that a favor would evaporate soon! Isn't this like negotiating 101?

rs1865• 10 months ago

In other words, TikTok US becomes TruthSocial Reels?

I wonder where all the liberal content will go.

mullingitover4• 10 months ago

This seems like the microwaved corpse of the original 2020 deal. Bytedance keeps all the IP, sells Oracle the nearly worthless right to operate the US infra. They can't even call their franken-app Tiktok. The US user data already sits in the US but they'll expect everyone to forget about that so they can brag about this token win.

They'll probably get what they really want, which is an admin console for the algorithm that has a 'political slant' slider that they can slide as far to the reich as they wish.

ivape2• 10 months ago

This shit is crazy that it’s really happening. The double whammy is that the youth is not prepared intellectually and will continue contributing their data to this platform.

throwoutway• 10 months ago

So Bytedance can still access user data going forward?

gexla• 10 months ago

It will be interesting to see how this plays out though. People follow the money. Investors wouldn't be interested if they didn't see the value. If the new app can snag the network effects, then it will win. What is TikTok worth without the US audience?

BlackjackCF• 10 months ago

Wait the US version can’t even be called TikTok?

gorgoiler3• 10 months ago

Is the US data accessible to non-US entities? The point right now, as I understood it, is to cut off PRC access to the data completely.

Before: we’re spying on you, but here’s a copy!

After: we’ve moved the spy machine to Ashburn VA, here are the keys.

brikym3• 10 months ago

Reich? You need to check the background of those involved in the deal.

jodacola• 10 months ago

Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of TikTok and have many critical opinions of Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but…

This gives me vibes of a weird company takeover, a la the kinds of things that happened in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: government-driven benefits to large corporations and investors with friends in the right places, government involvement, forced licensure of a core aspect of the product (Rearden Metal?).

I’d like to learn more about: what are some other similar instances of such a thing?

Spooky23• 10 months ago

Cool. Chuck Schumer will clutch something and say “this may be a sign of something not good.”

8note3• 10 months ago

id like to see a similiar setup done in canada for each of the US big tech companies.

owned by canadian oligarchs, with one CBC appointed director

herbst8• 10 months ago

I could see local variants of American data dealers for Europe as well. Facebook without all the privacy issues would be borderline useable, maybe.

Pxtl3• 10 months ago

Oracle... Horowitz

tl;dr: the entire US media is now controlled by men who've bent the knee to Trump and have demonstrated that theyre willing to take an activist editorial role.

Yeul2• 10 months ago

I was really disappointed by this. Do Americans have no dignity or ego? Are they so conditioned to fall in line with a leader?

BatteryMountain3• 10 months ago

All this to "protect the children"... why are US politicians so interested in kids? Politicians being involved in a kids app? Why? Could it be to curate some naughty list for future exploitation (blackmails anyone?) or to get location data about the kids? Mmm wonder when masked """"law enforcement"""" will disappear the parents and traffic the kids somewhere?

Just ban children from the internet, make it the responsibility of the parents. Its that simple. Make it illegal for kids to have access, especially to user generated content (incl chat), same level as firearms, pharma drugs, voting, entering into contracts etc. Internet is and was never a place for children to begin with.

discordance• 10 months ago

This is a land grab under the guise of "protecting the children"

qingcharles• 10 months ago

Massive win for Meta as it'll push a lot of folks towards Instagram Reels, which won't be siloed from the rest of the world.

herbst8• 10 months ago

The split between the US and the rest of the world maybe never was bigger than today

PHGamer• 10 months ago

government appointed commissars eh. i see were bringing it back eh. bet they will make sure it wont criticize a certain group of people lol

GardenLetter27• 10 months ago

Won't this separate out the US community on TikTok completely? Almost like the GFW ironically.

immibis6• 10 months ago

The name "Great Firewall of America" is already taken (and refers to Cloudflare), so we'll have to call this one something else.

motbus32• 10 months ago

N. 2 and 3 concerns me quite a lot. This looks like a thing people would 'mock' China for

mrkramer• 10 months ago

New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.

I'm from Europe so if I want to follow US content creators, I need to download separate US specific app?! Kinda silly.

elzbardico7• 10 months ago

[flagged]

fooqux• 10 months ago

It's rather amazing. They found one of the few organizations I trust less than the Chinese government to run this.

elzbardico7• 10 months ago

Compared to Larry Ellison, Kim Jong-un strikes me as a supreme humanist, a beacon of goodness and generosity.

mandeepj2• 10 months ago

They found one of the few organizations

Or, the Org found them! It helps to kiss the ring.

cm2187• 10 months ago

I don't think the average braindead tiktok user who watches choreographies all day long knows / cares / can even spell Oracle.

I know what you will tell me: "but these people vote"... Hum, yes.

seanmcdirmid2• 10 months ago

Ya, the only comparably worse choices would have been IBM or Salesforce. Also known as the toxic techs.

tracerbulletx• 10 months ago

Don't worry. His son is also odds on favorite to own half of the US broadcast, film, and streaming media via Paramount, CBS and are in talks to purchase Warner Brothers, HBO, Discovery, and all their other cable brands. Oh wait, maybe we should worry about that a little.

elzbardico7• 10 months ago

The delightful world of democracy and free enterprise!

andsoitis3• 10 months ago

Link?

CityOfThrowaway• 10 months ago

It's sarcasm

jm43• 10 months ago

I wonder if the license fee will be based on the number of followers. I hope it’s based on real engagement. I don’t want to pay just because a bunch of bots are following me. /s

frogperson2• 10 months ago

They clearly have a plan. Ellison gifted his son NBC or ABC or some large network recently, if I recall correctly.

Why do they need to control the media?

peanuty13• 10 months ago

To push a pro-Israel agenda. That's why Larry Ellison put Israeli loyalist Bari Weiss in charge of CBS.

afpx• 10 months ago

It makes me uneasy to let a company that was literally named after a CIA program and given billions of dark money over the years selectively educate our next generation.

Plus, Ellison on surveillance tech: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,”

https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveill...

wnevets• 10 months ago

Between this and the US government taking ownership in Intel the "small government is good" and "socialism is bad" crowd have been very very quiet.

Zigurd3• 10 months ago

But its different. It's national soc... Wait...

yoyohello132• 10 months ago

The Evangelical thought-police republicans seem to have beat the libertarian republicans into submission.

cosmicgadget3• 10 months ago

They have been on a leash since the first term. Look what happened to Paul Ryan, the deficit, money supply, and federal reserve balance sheet.

deepsquirrelnet• 10 months ago

The term has been so abused that it’s no surprise the current administration was going to push in that direction themselves.

All it takes is a minor rebranding and half the country or more would immediately sign up for it. For all intents and purposes, socialism just means “the people we don’t like”. As long as people feel like they’ll get theirs, I seriously doubt they care what economic system they’re living under.

hackable_sand• 10 months ago

I am ashamed to be an American. We are going to have so much healing to do.

tasty_freeze• 10 months ago

I'm 61. I've told my kids I could not have ever imagined we got to the state we are in, with the president trying (and largely succeeding) in advancing the "unitary executive" abetted by the Supreme Court. Hell, I wouldn't have believed it even 10 years ago.

Zigurd3• 10 months ago

I've built a 12k follower audience for TikTok's on product management and project management. Time to migrate to YouTube.

lenerdenator3• 10 months ago

I'm still trying to figure out if putting off the shutdown until they had a deal was even legal.

The Constitution has the worth of toilet paper if the executive can just keep saying "I don't want to enforce this law because my buddy here has a financial interest in that not happening as its supposed to", which is exactly what is happening given how close Larry and Trump are.

jmyeet• 10 months ago

There are so many comically evil villains in ths one deal.

Example: Silver Lake. Many younger HNers may not be that familira with the story of Skype. To summarize, Skype was a big deal, the first real mass market caller-to-caller Internet voice messaging services. It was founded in 2003, bought by eBay (of all people) in 2005 for several billion dollars. There were plans to spin it out on an IPO but Silver Lake led a buyout for less than eBay paid for it I believe in 2009 (~$2.75 billion).

Now in 2011, Microsoft bought it for ~$8.5 billion. That was great for the employees, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I believe the new company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to make it difficult to sue, a bunch of executives were fired before the buyout to avoid paying them out and, most controversially, the options had a clawback option that allowed Silver Lake to forcibly purchase options at the original rather than the buyout price [1].

Larry Ellison is more well known in HN circles as comically evil. Pretty much everything he touches leaves a Grand Moff Tarkin level of stench of evil from his attack on public access to Carbon Beach through his massive property portfolio to his more well known attacks on open source (originally as a threat to Oracle's dominance).

He is a Trump loyalist and true Putinesque oligarch who will probably amass levels of media control well beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest dreams. You can bet your bottom dollar that every media property he touches will serve the administration and I'd be shocked if one or more of these deals doesn't directly enrich Trump and/or his family.

Welcome to the tleptocracy.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/

neilv• 10 months ago

Questions regarding the US government-appointed director (CCP style?)...

IIUC, Oracle has strong connections to the CIA, and Andreessen the person lately seems right-wing activist.

1. Under the current administration, maybe it doesn't much matter that there's a government monitor?

2. But if a more left-wing administration comes back into power, then a government appointee there could help moderate the other influences?

dotnet00• 10 months ago

I fully expect a decent number of people in favor of this to, without a shred of irony, whine about wanting a free market whenever environmental regulations are in the news again.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 10 months ago

What are principles?

an0malous• 10 months ago

Rhetorical devices to get a certain demographic to buy your product.

Open AI, free speech platforms, save the planet, democratize information. At the end of the day, it’s always about power.

jonahbenton• 10 months ago

Useful additional context

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-trump-ally-may-soon...

pyrophane• 10 months ago

One thing I’m looking for in all of this is how trump will get a piece of this deal.

kranke155• 10 months ago

Larry Ellison and A16Z will invest in Truth Social, buy Trump Coin, help his family, (or something) just asynchronously enough that it can’t be directly connected to the TikTok deal.

LeafItAlone2• 10 months ago

Doubt they feel the need to wait. Nobody is going to do anything about it, just like nobody has yet done anything effective about the other blatant corruption. Look at the Saudi “investment” in Trump’s crypto.

ElijahLynn• 10 months ago

Is this a coup by conservative government to gain control of this social network to promote it's ideologies?

first Twitter, now Tiktok, both controlled by conservative interests?

UncleOxidant4• 10 months ago

Seems like it. It seemed kind of inevitable. Biden made a mistake going down this road - of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term, but Biden should've just left it alone because it wasn't hard to see that this was the likely outcome.

tw043• 10 months ago

Biden? You do realize Trump attempted to “ban” TikTok in his first term when the original Oracle “deal” happened, right? Pinning this in Biden takes some serious mental gymnastics.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/914032065/tiktok-ban-averted-...

fogzen4• 10 months ago

Yes. And to enrich their buddies and campaign donors like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

pstuart3• 10 months ago

That's bonus. The real thing is to make tiktok a right-wing ideology machine. I'd rather have the CPC than the GOP at the helm.

peanuty13• 10 months ago

I thought Ben Horowitz supported Kamala during the 2024 presidential election.

zappb• 10 months ago

This law passed during the Biden administration, but its implementation has been delayed repeatedly by the Trump administration.

estearum9• 10 months ago

but it has been broken repeatedly by the Trump administration

fixed that for you

The bill itself outlines specifically how and why it can be delayed. That was violated in the very first "delay".

dfxm123• 10 months ago

It's a page in the conservative playbook going back a long time, from consolidating newspapers to talk radio to TV stations and now a new type of media...

bandyaboot• 10 months ago

And now we see them getting main stream networks on a leash.

Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.

peanuty13• 10 months ago

It's a coup by pro-Israel interests like Larry Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz.

no_wizard• 10 months ago

This has been floating around since the end of the first Trump administration, where neither of these interests were accused of being “pro-Israel” but only entrance narrative after the current Palestine debacle:

Therefore I’m only left to conclude this is an entirely unsubstantiated claim, as why wouldn’t it have already been apparent if they were working as shadow brokers of Israeli interests in all this, which the general timeline and verifiable information we know don’t line up with?

panarchy• 10 months ago

Russia Today American Edition

selimthegrim2• 10 months ago

I mean why not unban them too?

frollogaston4• 10 months ago

Biden was on board with the TikTok takeover, and it had support from both left and right wing pro-Israel groups.

clemailacct12• 10 months ago

Sounds like you preferred it when it was controlled by liberal interests.

rs1865• 10 months ago

Liberal interests ≠ Democrat government

frollogaston4• 10 months ago

Next time Dems win elections (if that's ever), it will be. Politicians on both sides are happy about this.

BatteryMountain3• 10 months ago

Suppress the "enemies" and bolster "allies". Oh and mindfukc the children to fall in line.

fogzen4• 10 months ago

The USA forcibly nationalized TikTok so they can install their own surveillance and censorship apparatus along with skimming from TikTok's profits. All while decrying China for... the same thing.

hollerith3• 10 months ago

The USA forcibly nationalized TikTok

Unlike most nationalizations though in this case the company will be compensated: the new US entity will pay ByteDance licensing fees.

fogzen4• 10 months ago

Isn't that how it works in China? At least since the 80s. The CCP forces companies to insert their state-backed fund and officials into the cap table. Either through golden shares, forced mergers with state-owned enterprises, or forced equity sales.

vehemenz3• 10 months ago

Republicans, not USA

crummy• 10 months ago

Isn't this as bipartisan as it gets? Trump wanted China to divest from Tiktok. Congress passed the bill. Biden signed it. The Supreme Court agreed that, yes, this is legal.

Sure, people didn't vote for Larry Ellison to take control. But something like this is what we wanted, right?

8note3• 10 months ago

USA is correct. Joe Biden signed the law, and Democrats didnt roll it back

nadermx• 10 months ago

If anyone want's to save stuff off tiktok just incase this doesn't go through, just remove the "OK" from the URL, ending up at https://tikt.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283876

mettamage• 10 months ago

Sorry for the silly question: is the US geofenced from the global tiktok?

gpt52• 10 months ago

They will be on the app, and the app will also be removed from the app store/play marketplace.

I don't know whether they'll be blocked on the web.

LightBug1• 10 months ago

One of the biggest grifts in history ...

user1999919• 10 months ago

basically seizing a foreign product/service. should do wonders for the 'free market'

ares623• 10 months ago

Lol is that why the Oracle stock jumped. Probably someone timed it with the other announcement to make it look innocent.

m3kw9• 10 months ago

if the algorthm server isn't in the US, it's pretty useless.

ergocoder• 10 months ago

TikTok is going to be dead in US either way whether it's banned or sell to Oracle. Snap to the moon.

andy_ppp• 10 months ago

So basically devalues TikTok worldwide and TikTok US, presumably a UK/EU user won’t be seen in the US and vice versa? The EU is already preparing a fine I’m sure… such an incredibly strange deal IMO, I can’t work out why anyone would do it?

platevoltage4• 10 months ago

I cant figure out why someone would buy Twitter and completely change the name and branding but here we are.

herbst8• 10 months ago

I am wondering if this is maybe very welcoming for the EU. I don't think the common American creator ads a lot of value to our culture at this point, so maybe nothing of value was lost really.

jamescontrol• 10 months ago

How will this not be used by trump/republicans?

herbst8• 10 months ago

Did anyone say it won't? Welcome to America the land of trump

aucisson_masque• 10 months ago

So much for capitalism and the invisible hand of the free market: forced sellout, TikTok US forbidden to compete with TikTok, board member appointed by the government, infrastructure contract has to be given to a selected company ‘oracle’.

That’s something you see in Russia, not America.

rhetocj232• 10 months ago

This has been going on for decades. Its just more obvious now, especially with an administration who are so open about it.

tw19842• 10 months ago

so there will be three tiktok versions - US tiktok, Chinese douyin, tiktok international.

nice

gorgoiler3• 10 months ago

Is this all a canard to avoid having to implement actual consumer privacy laws?

The question is more about whether it is an intentional decision to go this route or a built-in, institutional decision. When faced with the foe of consumer data harvesting and tracking, right now it seems the US government has concluded the answer is that it is better to have an American company spy on people rather than a Chinese one.

The best answer would be to enact laws to stop the act of spying on people, but that’s anathema to US political culture right now!

outside1234• 10 months ago

Beyond spying, the government wants to be able to actively manipulate the feed to amplify certain voices and suppress other ones is my guess.

phtrivier• 10 months ago

This new company would also have an American-dominated board with one member designated by the U.S. government.

This is the part I'm really curious about : what is the legal framework for mandating a privately-owned company to have a board member designated by the government ?

The closest thing I could imagine is "national" companies (totally or partially owned by the government.) We have plenty of that in France (once in a while the State would nationalize energy utilities, banks, car makers, etc... then make them private again, then buy x% of them, etc, etc...)

In this case I completely understand that the "State" wants their say in the board - they have money in the game.

But here, it does not seem like the US are part of the new ownership (or did I miss that ?)

So, what happens when the next government nominates a board member that Elison dislikes ? On which law would a judge rule ?

junto• 10 months ago

The one good thing to come out of this (since I hate TikTok) is that you can count on the fact that Oracle will ruin it.

U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

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