- ByteDance pretends to comply, and maintains its current relationship with China's government in secret
- ByteDance calls the US's bluff, doesn't change anything, and US politicians back down because they don't want to anger the large portions of their constituencies addicted to tiktok.
There's only one thing that could end this relationship, and that's an outright ban of TikTok in the US.
And no, not some kind of awkward "US shell company buys it" arrangement like we saw proposed during the Trump admin, but a complete and total ban, akin to what all international tech companies face in China. It seems to me that if Facebook (or heck, even non-US apps like LINE) are unable to operate in China, then TikTok shouldn't be able to operate in the US either.
Not sure about Facebook, but LINE specifically complied with all Chinese censorship laws (there was a bit of an uproar over it) and was still shut down, presumably because it wasn't WeChat.
At the time, BBC wrote https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-28156725 that "In May, some Line users in China complained that the app had started to censor sensitive terms related to the 4 June anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre" but "A Line spokesman told Bloomberg that its users in China had not been able to access all services since 1 July, which was the anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to the mainland. Tens of thousands took to the streets of Hong Kong that day in a major pro-democracy protest. A representative of anti-censorship site GreatFire.org told Reuters news agency this was not a technical malfunction, suggesting the services were blocked because they allowed users to share photos."
Censoring well-known keywords is necessary, but not sufficient to run a social media service in China. You also need a large team of human censors looking for signs of new protests and suppress them as fresh pictures keep getting posted.
I blocked TikTok a little over a year ago. I’ve been recognizing many TikTok-only content creators jumping ship to YouTube shorts. And these creators are also getting clobbered by YouTubers that have figured out the right way to chop up their long form videos into short morsels.
With that said, I think all of this is pointless. I don’t actually think TikTok will be relevant in 5 years. TikTok is just TikTok.. meanwhile YouTube, instagram and twitter have fully encroached on TikTok’s territory and audience
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] thread- ByteDance pretends to comply, and maintains its current relationship with China's government in secret
- ByteDance calls the US's bluff, doesn't change anything, and US politicians back down because they don't want to anger the large portions of their constituencies addicted to tiktok.
And no, not some kind of awkward "US shell company buys it" arrangement like we saw proposed during the Trump admin, but a complete and total ban, akin to what all international tech companies face in China. It seems to me that if Facebook (or heck, even non-US apps like LINE) are unable to operate in China, then TikTok shouldn't be able to operate in the US either.
At the time, BBC wrote https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-28156725 that "In May, some Line users in China complained that the app had started to censor sensitive terms related to the 4 June anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre" but "A Line spokesman told Bloomberg that its users in China had not been able to access all services since 1 July, which was the anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to the mainland. Tens of thousands took to the streets of Hong Kong that day in a major pro-democracy protest. A representative of anti-censorship site GreatFire.org told Reuters news agency this was not a technical malfunction, suggesting the services were blocked because they allowed users to share photos."
Censoring well-known keywords is necessary, but not sufficient to run a social media service in China. You also need a large team of human censors looking for signs of new protests and suppress them as fresh pictures keep getting posted.
None yet. That's what US lawmakers are trying to change.
With that said, I think all of this is pointless. I don’t actually think TikTok will be relevant in 5 years. TikTok is just TikTok.. meanwhile YouTube, instagram and twitter have fully encroached on TikTok’s territory and audience