The future of TikTok is looking uncertain after the United States Senate passed a bill giving its Chinese owner ByteDance 270 days to sell the rapidly growing social media app, or be banned in the US market.
President Joe Biden signed the Bill, which passed the House of Representatives, into law after the Senate approved it.
The Chinese company now has 270 days to sell TikTok's American operations, or the app will be withdrawn from US distribution. That deadline can be extended by 90 days by Biden, if a sale is in progress.
ByteDance's Singaporean chief executive Shou Zi Chew expressed his disappointment with the law and said the company would appeal what it calls a US ban on TikTok.
@pmwnews #TikTok #CEO #ShouChew responds to the bill that could ban the app: “Make no mistake, this is a ban, a ban of TikTok and a ban on you and your voice.” “Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere.” #tiktokban ♬ original sound - PMW TV
TikTok and its sister application Douyin for the Chinese market have well over a billion active users, with the social video sharing app having grown at an explosive pace since it started in 2016. An estimated two-thirds of Americans use TikTok currently.
While enormously popular, controversy around TikTok potentially sharing user data with the Chinese authorities has dogged ByteDance for the past six years, with critics saying the app is a national security threat for Western nations.
The law comes after TikTok was banned last year in many parts of the US federal and state administration and armed forces, along with similar government moves in the European Union, Norway and Canada.
TikTok has continued to deny that it provides data to the Chinese authorities, American users' data being stored in the US and Singapore only.
In 2020, the Trump administration ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok, or wind down its US operations. The order was extended into an outright ban later. ByteDance initially agreed to sell TikTok, with Microsoft and enterprise software vendor Oracle expressing interest in buying the social video sharing app.
TikTok was successful in obtaining an injunction against the Trump administration's ban in September 2020.
The Biden administration's move against ByteDance and TikTok was folded into a larger bill of appropriations that includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
In the law, TikTok is called a "foreign adversary controlled application".
8 Comments
I know I'm going to manifest a no-context-added, Zerohedge-ish link from Audaxes here by writing the following, but having been active on social media since Myspace and Bebo, and growing up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the rest (not to mention having built what I'd consider a fairly successful career and business out of social media and keeping up with the playbook across platforms) I can say unequivocally that TikTok is the most damaging social media platform ever, by far - and it's not even close.
It has all the worst aspects of every other social media platform dialed up to 11, particularly because its algorithm is so tightly focused on delivering you "more of the same" to keep you hooked.
At least when I use Facebook, or Twitter/X, or LinkedIn I mostly see content from my connections (friends/family/colleagues) interspersed with boomer clickbait and fake news.
TikTok is just built to skip the foreplay and beam never-ending, ever-more-extreme-and-myopic content to you. It is fun, in the way that the first pull of a fruit machine at the casino is fun, but it's all downhill from there. Based off the data I have seen, and even anecdotal observation (e.g. what my teacher friends notice in their students) it is particularly addictive and damaging for younger users, especially in terms of the nature of lots of the content e.g. the algorithm forcing negative body image content onto impressionable young women.
And at the end of the day, if China won't allow Facebook etc why should America allow TikTok without putting at least some conditions on it? Seems only fair to me.
Yes, the US seeking to "ban" TikTok is probably as much about trying to protect the likes of Meta investors as it is protecting the average American (so the reasoning behind the bill is at least somewhat dishonest) and it's another exchange of blows in an increasingly heated battle between East & West but at the same time the world would be a better place without TikTok. At least with Facebook I can message my grandma more easily, and LinkedIn might help me find a job.
The use of persuasive psychology in these apps and social media sites has been terrible for society, indeed. I saw a few people spiral down during COVID times, now going all in on QAnon, chemtrails etc after starting off pretty ...normal. And the rise in anxiety and depression among teens and young adults that paralleled the rise of Facebook and Insta etc has been tragic.
Walked through the games machine part of two different cinema complexes recently, too. Thirteen machines in one complex were gambling machines for kids (variants of The Claw), enticing them to spend money on the chance of a prize. In recent years, we've also seen the rise of loot boxes in kids PC / console games, another targeting of children with gambling tech.
The fact we have so many companies applying persuasive psychology to all and targeting kids with gambling is abhorrent. The mad ranting you now see on the likes of Facebook and X has been one result, while we're probably only starting to see the negative results of addicting kids to tech/gambling while making them the most advertised-to generations in history.
The gaming part fascinates me.
As a young kid growing up, I had a Playstation. You would buy the Playstation game, and that was it - you got the game, and anything you wanted to get out of the game in terms of unlocking content or whatever was included on the disc (and you either had to "earn" it through playing, or use a cheat code).
Now most games - at least multiplayer ones - have these aggressive gambling loot box mechanics, as you describe. You've got 12 year olds (playing games they shouldn't be playing in many cases) taking mum and dad's credit card to gamble to win stupid accessories or power ups.
TikTok is just built to skip the foreplay and beam never-ending, ever-more-extreme-and-myopic content to you.
Got some examples? Is this one?
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