It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company, and give them a better foothold in Social Networking than Linked-in provides.
I'd have a few concerns about if MS can keep it growing-
For one, I worry that Microsoft may mismanage it, similar to how they treated Skype.
We saw Yahoo buy many reasonable smaller social networks (Flickr, Delicious, Tumblr) and was never able to make it work.
Microsoft has seemed to get better at acquisions lately though, so they may be able to pull it off.
The other concern is that youth-based social networks tend to have a short half-life; Snap isn't exactly taking over the world anymore.
But personally, I absolutely think it'd be worth the gamble.
The price is relatively low (just over 1 quarter of revenue), and if they can keep it going it's a good hedge against FB, if nothing else.
>It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company
it might help for some people
Personally, i'm a little bit concerned that microsoft just received a $10bn DOD contract, and now the US government is essentially forcing a sale of TikTok to Microsoft. I'm not convinced that the company running the hot new social network (as well as all our source code) owing a bunch of favours to the US govermnent is really any better than it being subject to the Chinese government.
I thought we trusted the government to be a good steward over tech? Wasn’t that the entire purpose of the dog and pony show with tech CEOs earlier this week?
IMHO anything with more than 400 million users is very hard to fuck up as a platform. You can fuck up the product in many ways but you will preserve the strong network effects.
Yahoo was also an incompetent operator with almost no solid business criteria or long term strategy. For 15 years or more Yahoo was simply a wannabe Google and never managed to find their business character.
I mean, it’s almost criminal to compare the performance of Microsoft vs Yahoo as operators. They are in different leagues.
It's better as in the US government isn't a model citizen but it's also not disappearing citizens, enslaving ethnic groups, selling organs from political prisoners, or trying to take over the South China Sea.
> It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company
Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives? It’s incredible that Azure, and the rest of the us based cloud providers, have been able to rebrand American severs as the cloud so successfully that they are well known for being secure and safe.
> Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives?
Right now much of Europe considers storing data in the US to be less private than hosting it locally. The US is certainly not in the same category as Russia or China, but it's not great either.
I don't think anyone with knowledge has ever seriously conisdered servers in China more private than US servers. Unless your goal was to keep information private only from the US government.
Every major cloud vendor has zones outside the US. Just because you’re hosted on Azure doesn’t mean you’re hosted in the US or that US law applies to you.
Outlook is one of the few services approved in China (I have a western friend that lives there and is constantly fighting with VPNs/trying to use the services he wants).
Outlook pesters you for a Chinese phone number (internet phone doesn't work), probably so it's easier for the users to be tracked.
I assume they've made whatever CCP requirements are necessary in order to operate there.
That said, they'd at least protect western accounts in the US if they bought TikTok.
Like Github and LinkedIn, I think this would be a smart move. Microsoft has also been a lot better stewards of these companies than they were back in the days of the Skype acquisition (2011, Steve Ballmer time). It's still amazing the turn around they've had after Ballmer left, people underestimate the effect of bad leadership at the top.
Well, Skype the brand was botched, but Skype is basically what powers Microsoft Teams now. Which is widely successful due to it being bundled with Microsoft 365 (also Teams is pretty decent compared to the comp).
Not sure on the underlying technology, but I would bet that the Skype brand definitely helped Lync adoption (Skype for Business), and the pervasiveness of Skype for Business was key to Teams success.
A clever play? Do Americans know a world outside of the US market exist?
What hell of a message is this?
A publicly traded company buying the domestic operations of a foreign company, just because the government deems it a National security risk, with no proof whatsoever? The same government who has spied citizen and high officials of ALLIED countries for years?
Is all this completely lost on all of corporate America?
This is pure international trade insanity.
We’re discussing Microsoft buying TikTok as if it were just another valid course of action, while it’s the most Soviet-Russia style thing that has ever happened in International tech trade in decades.
You want another one? Taiwan’s TSMC and all the shenanigans going on about their Arizona fab plant.
Pure. insanity.
If you don’t get it, pause for a moment, and think what would happen if China would suggest that Huawei should buy a successful Western service operating in China to avoid a national security risk.
Pompeo is right when he says that this is like another Cold War, but with just one big difference: it’s America that’s playing the role of Russia now.
I thought it was crazy at first too, but they aren't forcing them to sell it. They have the option to sell it or have it banned. Look how many American apps are banned in China.
What does Tiktok have to do with linkedin? As far as I am concerned its a high write-off. It may be is worth a billion or two as a private company. It doesn't provide any value.
> Gasparino also reported the White House is "deeply concerned" about Microsoft's potential purchase and whether any Chinese investors would retain a stake in TikTok's US operations, citing unnamed sources.
And there's the lede. Consider this "story in two headlines" from an earlier high-profile Microsoft acquisition:
That's what concerns me. Will that acquisition make MS an appendage of the Chinese government? Will that create conflicts of interest with serving the NSA?
Isn't it just as likely that this is a backhand deal by the NSA to limit Chinese easedropping? I can't really image any other reason for Microsoft at the hight of it's profitability to want to enter such a competative and fickle social media market.
If the warez community, you'd actually be surprised to find that most of Microsoft internal leaks and hacks come from Russia. Russian groups like WZorNET produce unreleased internal builds of Microsoft solutions all the time.
Snowden's leaks showed the government could wiretap Skype calls since at least 2010, when the FBI's Skype wiretaps started being ingested into PRISM. Your conspiracy theory for why Microsoft would buy Skype in 2011 doesn't survive even the most rudimentary investigation.
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I cannot understand what executive thinks this is a good idea or that it makes any sense in the broader organizational structure of Microsoft.
It's been so nice to see five years or so of relatively GOOD acquisitions. LinkedIn made sense: it's allowed for a legitimate Salesforce compete, especially when paired with Dynamics. GitHub was incredibly smart and it aligns well with the resurgent dev tools division and the cloud. Even Beam (Mixer), which was an utter failure from an execution standpoint, made sense as a vertical integration play with Xbox. It failed, but the idea behind it was solid. The OpenAI investment and other AI initiatives have all made tons of sense. Buying Xamarin was brilliant.
But this? What about Microsoft has any of the same DNA as TikTok?
Insanity. I really, really hope this is just a bad joke and us being used by TikTok to juice offers from other people.
I actually think it’s a good play, the same way buying Minecraft was a good idea.
You’re talking about a company that made Halo and Minecraft the face of its consumer gaming brand, calls their AI assistant “Cortana”, and their internal windows builds “redstone”.
Tiktok doesn’t make sense if you think of Microsoft as “not a social media company”, but it’s a part of a push to engage the GenZ audience that started with the Minecraft acquisition.
I’m old enough to remember reading jokes on slashdot on wintel, but for the younger GenZ audience, that’s not what Microsoft is known for. The brand value isn’t in the enterprise stuff HN looks at, but in their consumer facing side.
Does microsoft execute well on their consumer side? Results seems mixed, with Xbox doing ok and Mixer crashing and burning. We’ll see how this plays out.
I have absolutely zero faith in our ability to execute on the consumer side with this type of product. We couldn’t even make an also-ran Twitch competitor, despite literally owning one of the major consoles and being the platform for 99.99% of all PC games.
Minecraft was a good acquisition. Xbox, by and large, has made good acquisitions. But the rumor isn’t Xbox is buying TikTok, it’s Microsoft.
I would argue that with the exception of Xbox, Microsoft doesn’t have a strong consumer play and I would further argue it doesn’t need it. The re-emphasis on developer tools (GitHub, WSL2, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio Code) and productivity (Office 365 and M365, Power Platform) has been a boon for the business. Pure consumer pursuits like Cortana or Windows Phone or Groove Music have not worked.
We’re not a company that has social in our DNA. GitHub and LinkedIn are acquisitions that are run with various degrees of autonomy, but even as independent entities, neither was ever social the way Twitter or Facebook are.
When you talk about brand value for Gen Z, I understand what you’re saying, but I fully disagree chasing that potential value has legs. How many times has Microsoft tried to be “cool” over the last 45 years and how many times has it failed at it? Microsoft is at its most successful when it stops trying to chase trends and be cool and just focuses on the stuff it is good at.
Microsoft has way too much money coupled with negative amounts of taste and innovative ideas. They're trying to buy their way into being popular and cool. Microsoft TikTok 10 For Enterprise, Long Term Servicing Channel (Not Responding) absolutely will be a flop just like Teams, Mixer, the new Github UI, and Windows. They produce trash products and are a burden on the world.
I think this would probably one of the better outcomes for this situation, outside of somehow convincing every teenager in the world to stop using garbage spyware apps (good luck with that).
Microsoft and the US government are at least more of a "devil you know" than China I'd say. Obviously far from ideal, but cutting off the CCP's direct access to the personal data and impressionable minds of millions of young people seems a pressing matter to me.
I mean ultimately my hope is that this dumb fad app's relevance just passes in 1 or 2 years. But considering how we've seen similar such abusive, shallow apps have long term success, that may be overly wishful thinking on my part.
Also of all the big tech companies Microsoft is probably the worst at psychological warfare to hack into people’s brains and change their behaviors. As annoying as Microsoft Office is, it’s not trying to manipulate your political beliefs or get you to buy some shoes you don’t need.
Well, I can think of at least a couple examples where Microsoft or a subsidiary tries to do stuff like that. The big difference I think is that they almost always fail at it, due to how out of touch the higher ups are with how people actually think. Everyone pretty much knows that Microsoft is not, nor will they ever be, your friend.
I always suspected that the US government had Microsoft buy Skype so they could centralize it under US authority and monitor the communications. I have a feeling that TikTok is the same scenario - instead of worrying about TikTok spying on Americans, the US will have Microsoft buy it and they it'll move the servers to the US and use it to spy on the Chinese. Google and Facebook will never get broken up as long as Uncle Sam gets access to everyone's communications.
If the US forced ByteDance to sell Tiktok, the US would lose its last bit of moral high ground in China, the spirit of free market and rule by law.
If you are worried about data leakage to China, you set rules and law and enforce them. That is what China is doing. They asked Apple and other cloud service provider to store data in China. The US could setup clear rules and regulations about where to put data of US users and if it is allowed to send the data to third country like China and then enforce them.
And China asked companies to set up jv in some sectors before they entered China market. They didn't do it after they were already here. Microsoft destroyed China's local word and spreadsheet editor software developers and China didn't ask MS to sell its China local business.
This act is pure bullying and imperialism. After that happens, the US wouldn't be able to command any support from Chinese people when it accuses CCP of anything.
You obviously don't have much experience with China. China is an authoritarian state and all companies are subject to secret control by the state, essentially branches of the military. There is no legal recourse or protection from such intervention. The government can mandate spy code be inserted and any data they want.
You're well intended here, but ignorant of how China operates. There is literally no way to enforce what you suggest.
Worth noting that companies in the United States are subject to secret and forced surveillance by the US government (NSLs), and enforcing that surveillance also requires a degree of forced control as well. There is legal recourse for NSLs but it's ineffective and basically never works.
>The government can mandate spy code be inserted and any data they want.
Essentially true for US government with US companies too
> China is an authoritarian state and all companies are subject to secret control by the state, essentially branches of the military.
Jumping from authoritarian state, to "all companies are subject to secrete control by the state", that is already a quantum leap. If you believe what Soviet Union's state controlled economy collapsed, because it's impossible for state to control that much of details of the economy, then you must be having a great faith in Mr. Xijinping being a literal Super human, who can control "all companies".
Then to "branches of the military"?! Now you are saying that Mr. Xi Jingping is just a puppet of the military?! And Chinese military is so brilliant that they not even developed a powerful military force second only to US & Russian, and meanwhile, they actually runs "all companies"?!
I just cannot see any logic in this short statement...
> the US would lose its last bit of moral high ground in China, the spirit of free market and rule by law
The US will continue to shed international credibility so long as we Americans continue to engage and enable mainstream discussion of conspiracy theories and populist applesauce. This Trabant quality excuse of an administration is just a symptom of that.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if the sole reason that this executive order is being banded about is because of TikTok users claiming they helped overinflate turnout expectations for that flameout of a rally in Tulsa.
> would lose its last bit of moral high ground in China
I mean it is no different than the EU requiring US companies to host data in EU data centers.
China has banned so many US companies - why is it unfair to retaliate?
The use of economic power shouldn’t only be acceptable when done by corporations. Governments with a backbone should use it too (like the EU has done when appropriate)
Banning something unless they/it has provabley broken US laws, merely out of spite and retaliatory motives isn't something that is acceptable in a democracy like the US.
Also it appears the 'national security' threat of tik-tok seem way overhyped, it is like a country speaking of Instagram as a national security threat.
Neither apple not Google has found TikTok problematic enough to pull it from their app stores.
Such claims of threat to 'national security', needs to be viewed with a certain skepticism, as these seems to get easily accepted by US lawmakers without sufficient, dispassionate analysis.
Also in general banning apps/services should not be the purview of the government under any reason. Why should the government dictate which apps an individual can use on their own phones/computers?
I think it's wholly different to have data sovereignty laws on citizens (IE; keeping data within your regulatory/legislative area) vs the _forced sale_ of a public company.
It is fair to retaliate. But it's a sort of whataboutism. The problem is the direction the competition is heading.
You see, China built the Great Fire Wall. A bizarre thing is more and more countries are considering to do the same seriously.
So what's next? There are also a lot of reports about the concentration camps. I don't know how accurate are those horrible reports, but you definitely don't want your country competing on building more concentration camps.
> US would lose its last bit of moral high ground in China, the spirit of free market and rule by law.
No it won't change a thing. And to be fair, forcing a sell (which is just forcing it to exit all stakes in the US market) is a far cleaner move than trying to end the company globally like it's doing for Huawei.
> This act is pure bullying and imperialism.
This is nothing compared to overthrowing Iran's democratic government to instate a puppet monarchy, helping the despot build 23 nuclear power plants, losing the puppet to revolution because the CIA assisted secret police killed too many people, claiming the built power plants are evidence of nuclear ambitions, sanctioning the country against UN resolutions, then using the economic aggression as justification to chain imperialize against other people such as Meng Wanzhou who was arrested unlike the CFOs of Banco do Brasil, Bank of America, Bank of Guam, Bank of Moscow, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Clearstream Banking, Commerzbank, Compass, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JP Morgan Chase, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, National Bank of Pakistan, PayPal, RBS, Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Trans-Pacific National Bank, Standard Chartered, Wells Fargo, Ericsson, Nokia who all transact with Iran.
And this is an arrest based on the accusation that she did not disclose (she did, on page 6 of her HSBC powerpoint) Huawei's transactions with Iran in her HSBC loan. The same HSBC with a non-arrested CFO who transacted with Iran and whose drug trafficking heat from the US magically disappeared after snitching their client.
The world will sleep through this like the world slept through the same round of tariffs, executive arrests, banning suppliers and technologies like we did to Japan in the 80s.
The accusations against China is that they do not follow the rules. Stealing IP is very illegal in the US but that didn't (allegedly) stop Waweii. So just saying "make more rules" is not a valid solution if the accusations are true. Byte dance already does store data in the US, but the only way to 100% prove they aren't sending data to China is to regularly audit ISP logs.
Are you talking about Huawei? If there is IP and IP infringement why not sue the company? I thought there is tons of cases of IP lawsuits each year? Huawei has operations in many markets like Europe with strong rule of law, sue Huawei in Europe. There are two law suits against Huawei from Cisco and T-Mobile. The first case both parties settled out of court. Second case is about a phone test arm, and already settled after ruling by courts. Huawei's main technology, and where U.S. gov has a problem with is with 5G. Huawei actually has a lot of patients in 5G. Many companies licences their technology. If there is a legitimate case of IP theft, then sue the company.
TikTok is operated by the TikTok office in the U.S. ByteDance is incorporated in Cayman islands so Chinese laws do not have any jurisdiction over TikTok office. There is no way for Chinese government to force their censorship rules and steal data from TikTok data stored in the US. Unless tiktok employees in the US office hands the data to China. But TikTok employees in the US office are all American. The CEO of TikTok is Kevin Mayer. The content regulation team is staffed with American employees. Data is stored in US servers and backed up in Singapore. TikTok is hiring more in the US office to develop TikTok going forward. TikTok also plans to experts can observe our moderation policies in real-time, as well as examine the actual code that drives our algorithms. Source: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/fair-competition-and-trans...
Source: Bytedance corporate structure https://www.bytedance.com/en
But the US gov is not giving TikTok any opportunity to explain themselves. Whatever Bytedance management can do, there is no way for them to shake off the belief that TikTok sends data to the US government.
As for ByteDance, the founder of Bytedance is a Chinese national. But the board member also includes non Chinese people. Chinese people do not all agree with the government. And Chinese people definitely do not want to work for or help the government unless absolutely required under Chinese law. Chinese people enjoy freedom and distance from Chinese government as well. A lot of Chinese people admire the US for its rule of law, its innovation and the general classiness when doing things. This is especially true in the entrepreneur and technology scene in China, where the US is often looked up to. People want to be friendly. No one wants to undermine the U.S. No one wants to be associated with the government or work as a spy to steal data.
I have been following the creation and growth of tiktok and douyin since the beginning. There are many interviews and news story about the company and the founders. The creation of tiktok is to spread happiness, creativity, raw human ingenuity through music, dances and user generated video. And all the founder wanted to do is develop a business from that and earn money from that. They worked really hard to develop the product, the marketing and the user base. The least they wanted is to be tied with politics, ideology wars, fake news, disinformation, political propaganda. The founder, zhang yiming, is a technologists and software engineer, not a politician, not a ccp ideologist. He has always displayed a general likeness and admiration towards the US since the beginning. I mean, why won't he? He studied C++, Javascript, big data, coding for IOS and Android. All of that comes from the U.S. And he has collaborated with US business people since the beginning. I guess his friendliness and admiration to US is why he entered the US market, step up office in the US and hired US employees.
But now they are caught between politics in China, ideology battle, and geopolitics.They are seeing their hard work going down the drain, and asking themselves "Probably my biggest crime is born in mainland China". No matter what they do, they cant shake off people's belief that they work for the Chinese government. Its a profound feeling of hopelessness.
It is fair to accuse China of anything. It is the actions the government or law makers take that matter.
I think Trump administration is them problem. It is amazing to see how much a single term of an irrational president could damage a country in almost every aspects.
Quote: Eventually what happened was that, as China’s domestic copyright industries found themselves competing with cheap knock-offs of foreign goods, they pressed the Chinese government to fortify the IP enforcement process on its own. (To put this in perspective, this is also what happened a century earlier in the US, which until 1890 failed to protect foreign works, and then waited yet another century before joining the major international copyright treaty.)
Let's just not pretend that IP theft was not prosecuted, and IP was not protected in China. That's simply not possible in such a fast-growing economy, which we can all agree that can only be sustained through innovation.
Honestly, you have some valid points and this bullying by forcing it to be sold is bad.
I think the fear is the manipulation that social media platforms can easily do of discourse and emotions. This is not as simple as just selling word processing software.
We have seen manipulation on US's own social media platforms by actors not even inside the company. Imagine a government which has supreme control on the companies on its own soil, imagine what it can do. I would say the fear is well founded, the solution to is not.
In case of the companies under free governments and justice systems, this becomes hard as any FB employee can go out and use the free press to expose if any manipulation like this is ordered.
I am not exaggerating about the US losing it credibility in China.
The US was really the shining city on the hill before 2008 financial crisis. I personally was huge admirer of the US system. I even spent about 1 year in DC just to study the political system of the US.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, China tried to copy everything from the US, from finanical market regulations to education system and to some degree, political system reform. There was a period when academics and even some very senior CCP members called for small government, separation of party and administrative system, and they even used the term 'put power into cages'.
The 2008 financial crisis that started in the US made China's elites within the party and outside of the party think hard if the US system is really the answer. Trump administration, the handling of covid-19 and the BLM protests further changed the view towards the US and made it impossible for those friendly with the US to promote the US value system in China now.
Tiktok is considered a national pride because it thrives by open competition in the US and the world. This act of forced selling without a due process for Tiktok to defend itself from accusation of spying for China would absolutely be another huge blow to the credibility of the US in China.
> you set rules and law and enforce them. That is what China is doing.
Except the law is essentially "whatever CCP wants to do" since the only political entity which can affect its legislation process is CCP. And yes, it's intentionally vague so it can allow CCP to exercise its power in an arbitrary way.
It's extraordinary to see an once open and welcoming governement to become xenophobic and ruleless. In the last 10 years, when things like this happen in other country, you would hear POTUS or media condemn this kind of action by referring to an once sacred word like "law" and "due process".
Just like the double standard on delaying the election, it's ok to delay election due to COVID in US, but it's perfectly fine to condemn other places for doing the same.
It would be very interesting to see how how ppl or historian view this 10 years later.
The Chinese have their firewall, censoring anything that the regime doesn't like. This not only muffle the criticism of your citizens, but also criticisms of the American people and the rest of the world.
This is for tit for tat. The United States is an open society. Why should we let an authoritarian regime gains influence over my country?
China has actively banned major US companies like Google for a long time now. It's clear that they've never been interested in 'playing fair' and this is the first time the US is actually standing up for its own companies and security concerns. I'm no Trump admin fan, but I do support taking a stand against the asymmetry that's happened for a long time now.
I vehemently disagree. The duplicitous play would be to create a competitor and cheat by throttling TT, spreading falsehoods about TT, and banning TT to get Americans to use it instead of TT. Paying China fair market price for their company is the cleanest play there is.
Well, probably because that's not what is happening.
The US has the right to ban companies from the country (as do other countries). What the US is saying is that the parent company (Bytedance) bust divest Tik Tok or they'll lose access to the US market. Microsoft is interested in it, but it could be a different company buying it. This is different than "you must sell this company to this other company" because the US can't force a foreign entity to do that (as long as that foreign government doesn't also cooperate due to politics of soft power reasons). In the case of China, Bytedance can absolutely refuse to sell Tik Tok, it'll just get banned from operating in the United States. Surely they'd rather take a few billion dollars instead, which is why they are going to sell it.
Actions like this or ones that are similar in spirit happen quite often. And naturally if you look at China, well, frankly, they are getting a taste of their own medicine in some sense.
Is there any precedence where the executive branch just ban a foreign company without citing the violation of law and going through court or WTO, in the last century?
It is not odd at all when the foreign company is one of the largest espionage threats to United States, which is one of the largest markets in the world.
Yes, the US government is mulling over the idea of banning TikTok but that is only one of the problems. The immediate problem is that US companies have seriously assessed the security risk. TikTok and China have a credibility problem in the business world.
TikTok shareholders sees the same risk and they want to protect their investment. Not odd or surprising.
OFAC is a result of political and economic realism. Not many people will do business in Venezuela, Iran and North Korea because (among other good reasons) the governments of these countries have shown a propensity of nationalize foreign firms.
Foreign companies are free to not do business with the United States if they feel their company is likely to be expropriated. In practice 300m of the world's richest consumers make the US irresistible. Thus, OFAC is tolerated.
Is it that odd? Some countries force you to partner with a local firm to enter their market. A great many use import taxes to give their home businesses a leg up in the industry. It's not fair, but it's not odd either.
Domestic ownership requirements are common throughout the world. In comparison to many other countries (look at the UAE, at least till last year) the US has traditionally been open to foreign ownership.
The thing that is notable is that the US has traditionally advocated for open markets and cross border ownership, but now is jumping on board with tactics it once campaigned against.
Is it any more odd than China strong-arming the NBA, lest they are barred from operating there?
If TikTok wants the American/European market and they’d sell the company in order to so, that’s just the reality of working within the current geopolitical landscape.
Wouldn't the logical equivalency be for China to strong-arm the NBA to sell ownership to a Chinese company if they want the NBA to continue to be watched by Chinese audience?
business as usual. US bullying others for economic gain. sometimes with war, sometimes with sanctions. for now they threaten to ban tiktok in the US but I'm sure it wouldn't stop at that. same as with huawei. they will go door to door to bully other countries to ban tiktok as well.
I never really understood the panic over TikTok. Is the fear about security, or is the fear that China might actually have successful social media product in the US?
Speaking personally, here's why TikTok concerns me: TikTok is a Chinese business, and China has shown no limit to how much it will meddle in the affairs of and even take control of Chinese businesses for the furthering of the Chinese state's agenda.
Simultaneously, TikTok has captured the daily attention spans of millions of Americans, many of them especially young and impressionable. They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.
These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
> These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
Ironically this idea is one of the rationale behind the GFW. Dont want any Spring/colour revolution over there.
"Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US."
our president is doing a fine job of that now with his twitter account.
Does China really identify as "a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically)" or is that just a projection of how the US feels about China?
> Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US.
I mean, Youtube[1] and Facebook[2] already do this, and nobody has a problem with it. Do foreign-owned businesses not have first amendment rights?
I should also point out that honest journalistic reporting of the reality in the US is more than sufficient to create outrage and civil unrest in the US.
> Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US.
Restricting foreign media based on "propaganda" fears is not a behavior that free societies engage in.
> They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.
Ugh no. TikTok's recommendation algorithm works the way it does because of its userbase's preference. TikTok is NOT free to change it willy-nilly. At best TikTok can "steer" the algorithm.
There have also been reports that the Chinese use all the behavioral data reaped from TikTok as input for training their own surveillance and censorship ML. The international user base is involuntarily turned into fuel for the totalitarian Chinese oppression machinery.
The fear is that any large Chinese project holding the personal data of Americans is inherently a security concern. It wouldn't be a big issue if Tiktok were French or Korean or something.
This is exactly it. There's widespread fear that China is buying its way into the personal data of billions through its state-sponsored businesses like Huawei and ByteDance.
TikTok has been caught violating COPPA. One of my kids recently signed up for TikTok without any age verification using their Android Google account, which then shares their email address with TikTok which is clear violation of COPPA. Nothing is being done to prevent this. TikTok actively caters to underage youth and most of the community is about producing provocative dance videos. In the end, TikTok is full of underage kids being provocative and is a cesspool and playground for pedophiles.
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It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company, and give them a better foothold in Social Networking than Linked-in provides.
I'd have a few concerns about if MS can keep it growing-
For one, I worry that Microsoft may mismanage it, similar to how they treated Skype. We saw Yahoo buy many reasonable smaller social networks (Flickr, Delicious, Tumblr) and was never able to make it work. Microsoft has seemed to get better at acquisions lately though, so they may be able to pull it off.
The other concern is that youth-based social networks tend to have a short half-life; Snap isn't exactly taking over the world anymore.
But personally, I absolutely think it'd be worth the gamble. The price is relatively low (just over 1 quarter of revenue), and if they can keep it going it's a good hedge against FB, if nothing else.
it might help for some people
Personally, i'm a little bit concerned that microsoft just received a $10bn DOD contract, and now the US government is essentially forcing a sale of TikTok to Microsoft. I'm not convinced that the company running the hot new social network (as well as all our source code) owing a bunch of favours to the US govermnent is really any better than it being subject to the Chinese government.
Yahoo was also an incompetent operator with almost no solid business criteria or long term strategy. For 15 years or more Yahoo was simply a wannabe Google and never managed to find their business character.
I mean, it’s almost criminal to compare the performance of Microsoft vs Yahoo as operators. They are in different leagues.
Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives? It’s incredible that Azure, and the rest of the us based cloud providers, have been able to rebrand American severs as the cloud so successfully that they are well known for being secure and safe.
Right now much of Europe considers storing data in the US to be less private than hosting it locally. The US is certainly not in the same category as Russia or China, but it's not great either.
Outlook pesters you for a Chinese phone number (internet phone doesn't work), probably so it's easier for the users to be tracked.
I assume they've made whatever CCP requirements are necessary in order to operate there.
That said, they'd at least protect western accounts in the US if they bought TikTok.
Like Github and LinkedIn, I think this would be a smart move. Microsoft has also been a lot better stewards of these companies than they were back in the days of the Skype acquisition (2011, Steve Ballmer time). It's still amazing the turn around they've had after Ballmer left, people underestimate the effect of bad leadership at the top.
If you don’t get it, pause for a moment, and think what would happen if China would suggest that Huawei should buy a successful Western service operating in China to avoid a national security risk.
Pompeo is right when he says that this is like another Cold War, but with just one big difference: it’s America that’s playing the role of Russia now.
For the US government, whose only concern is who does and doesn't get to harvest the data from any spyware, yes.
For everyone else, I'm not sure how that resolves any spyware concern.
So you're saying that GitHub isn't a social network for coding?
> 41 percent of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24.
That seems rather youth-heavy when compared to Facebook (Timeline), Twitter, YouTube, Instagram.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does come with risks.
And there's the lede. Consider this "story in two headlines" from an earlier high-profile Microsoft acquisition:
"NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution" https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f...
"Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?" https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
It's been so nice to see five years or so of relatively GOOD acquisitions. LinkedIn made sense: it's allowed for a legitimate Salesforce compete, especially when paired with Dynamics. GitHub was incredibly smart and it aligns well with the resurgent dev tools division and the cloud. Even Beam (Mixer), which was an utter failure from an execution standpoint, made sense as a vertical integration play with Xbox. It failed, but the idea behind it was solid. The OpenAI investment and other AI initiatives have all made tons of sense. Buying Xamarin was brilliant.
But this? What about Microsoft has any of the same DNA as TikTok?
Insanity. I really, really hope this is just a bad joke and us being used by TikTok to juice offers from other people.
You’re talking about a company that made Halo and Minecraft the face of its consumer gaming brand, calls their AI assistant “Cortana”, and their internal windows builds “redstone”.
Tiktok doesn’t make sense if you think of Microsoft as “not a social media company”, but it’s a part of a push to engage the GenZ audience that started with the Minecraft acquisition.
I’m old enough to remember reading jokes on slashdot on wintel, but for the younger GenZ audience, that’s not what Microsoft is known for. The brand value isn’t in the enterprise stuff HN looks at, but in their consumer facing side.
Does microsoft execute well on their consumer side? Results seems mixed, with Xbox doing ok and Mixer crashing and burning. We’ll see how this plays out.
Minecraft was a good acquisition. Xbox, by and large, has made good acquisitions. But the rumor isn’t Xbox is buying TikTok, it’s Microsoft.
I would argue that with the exception of Xbox, Microsoft doesn’t have a strong consumer play and I would further argue it doesn’t need it. The re-emphasis on developer tools (GitHub, WSL2, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio Code) and productivity (Office 365 and M365, Power Platform) has been a boon for the business. Pure consumer pursuits like Cortana or Windows Phone or Groove Music have not worked.
We’re not a company that has social in our DNA. GitHub and LinkedIn are acquisitions that are run with various degrees of autonomy, but even as independent entities, neither was ever social the way Twitter or Facebook are.
When you talk about brand value for Gen Z, I understand what you’re saying, but I fully disagree chasing that potential value has legs. How many times has Microsoft tried to be “cool” over the last 45 years and how many times has it failed at it? Microsoft is at its most successful when it stops trying to chase trends and be cool and just focuses on the stuff it is good at.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22596382
Microsoft and the US government are at least more of a "devil you know" than China I'd say. Obviously far from ideal, but cutting off the CCP's direct access to the personal data and impressionable minds of millions of young people seems a pressing matter to me.
I mean ultimately my hope is that this dumb fad app's relevance just passes in 1 or 2 years. But considering how we've seen similar such abusive, shallow apps have long term success, that may be overly wishful thinking on my part.
How? Are you suggesting that Douyin will be included in the purchase?
If you are worried about data leakage to China, you set rules and law and enforce them. That is what China is doing. They asked Apple and other cloud service provider to store data in China. The US could setup clear rules and regulations about where to put data of US users and if it is allowed to send the data to third country like China and then enforce them.
And China asked companies to set up jv in some sectors before they entered China market. They didn't do it after they were already here. Microsoft destroyed China's local word and spreadsheet editor software developers and China didn't ask MS to sell its China local business.
This act is pure bullying and imperialism. After that happens, the US wouldn't be able to command any support from Chinese people when it accuses CCP of anything.
You're well intended here, but ignorant of how China operates. There is literally no way to enforce what you suggest.
>The government can mandate spy code be inserted and any data they want.
Essentially true for US government with US companies too
Jumping from authoritarian state, to "all companies are subject to secrete control by the state", that is already a quantum leap. If you believe what Soviet Union's state controlled economy collapsed, because it's impossible for state to control that much of details of the economy, then you must be having a great faith in Mr. Xijinping being a literal Super human, who can control "all companies".
Then to "branches of the military"?! Now you are saying that Mr. Xi Jingping is just a puppet of the military?! And Chinese military is so brilliant that they not even developed a powerful military force second only to US & Russian, and meanwhile, they actually runs "all companies"?!
I just cannot see any logic in this short statement...
The US will continue to shed international credibility so long as we Americans continue to engage and enable mainstream discussion of conspiracy theories and populist applesauce. This Trabant quality excuse of an administration is just a symptom of that.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if the sole reason that this executive order is being banded about is because of TikTok users claiming they helped overinflate turnout expectations for that flameout of a rally in Tulsa.
I mean it is no different than the EU requiring US companies to host data in EU data centers.
China has banned so many US companies - why is it unfair to retaliate?
The use of economic power shouldn’t only be acceptable when done by corporations. Governments with a backbone should use it too (like the EU has done when appropriate)
Also it appears the 'national security' threat of tik-tok seem way overhyped, it is like a country speaking of Instagram as a national security threat.
Neither apple not Google has found TikTok problematic enough to pull it from their app stores.
Such claims of threat to 'national security', needs to be viewed with a certain skepticism, as these seems to get easily accepted by US lawmakers without sufficient, dispassionate analysis.
Also in general banning apps/services should not be the purview of the government under any reason. Why should the government dictate which apps an individual can use on their own phones/computers?
You see, China built the Great Fire Wall. A bizarre thing is more and more countries are considering to do the same seriously.
So what's next? There are also a lot of reports about the concentration camps. I don't know how accurate are those horrible reports, but you definitely don't want your country competing on building more concentration camps.
No it won't change a thing. And to be fair, forcing a sell (which is just forcing it to exit all stakes in the US market) is a far cleaner move than trying to end the company globally like it's doing for Huawei.
> This act is pure bullying and imperialism.
This is nothing compared to overthrowing Iran's democratic government to instate a puppet monarchy, helping the despot build 23 nuclear power plants, losing the puppet to revolution because the CIA assisted secret police killed too many people, claiming the built power plants are evidence of nuclear ambitions, sanctioning the country against UN resolutions, then using the economic aggression as justification to chain imperialize against other people such as Meng Wanzhou who was arrested unlike the CFOs of Banco do Brasil, Bank of America, Bank of Guam, Bank of Moscow, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Clearstream Banking, Commerzbank, Compass, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JP Morgan Chase, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, National Bank of Pakistan, PayPal, RBS, Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Trans-Pacific National Bank, Standard Chartered, Wells Fargo, Ericsson, Nokia who all transact with Iran.
And this is an arrest based on the accusation that she did not disclose (she did, on page 6 of her HSBC powerpoint) Huawei's transactions with Iran in her HSBC loan. The same HSBC with a non-arrested CFO who transacted with Iran and whose drug trafficking heat from the US magically disappeared after snitching their client.
The world will sleep through this like the world slept through the same round of tariffs, executive arrests, banning suppliers and technologies like we did to Japan in the 80s.
Iran has one nuclear power plant, and it opened in 2011. It was built mostly by the Russians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushehr_Nuclear_Power_Plant
TikTok is operated by the TikTok office in the U.S. ByteDance is incorporated in Cayman islands so Chinese laws do not have any jurisdiction over TikTok office. There is no way for Chinese government to force their censorship rules and steal data from TikTok data stored in the US. Unless tiktok employees in the US office hands the data to China. But TikTok employees in the US office are all American. The CEO of TikTok is Kevin Mayer. The content regulation team is staffed with American employees. Data is stored in US servers and backed up in Singapore. TikTok is hiring more in the US office to develop TikTok going forward. TikTok also plans to experts can observe our moderation policies in real-time, as well as examine the actual code that drives our algorithms. Source: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/fair-competition-and-trans... Source: Bytedance corporate structure https://www.bytedance.com/en
But the US gov is not giving TikTok any opportunity to explain themselves. Whatever Bytedance management can do, there is no way for them to shake off the belief that TikTok sends data to the US government.
As for ByteDance, the founder of Bytedance is a Chinese national. But the board member also includes non Chinese people. Chinese people do not all agree with the government. And Chinese people definitely do not want to work for or help the government unless absolutely required under Chinese law. Chinese people enjoy freedom and distance from Chinese government as well. A lot of Chinese people admire the US for its rule of law, its innovation and the general classiness when doing things. This is especially true in the entrepreneur and technology scene in China, where the US is often looked up to. People want to be friendly. No one wants to undermine the U.S. No one wants to be associated with the government or work as a spy to steal data.
I have been following the creation and growth of tiktok and douyin since the beginning. There are many interviews and news story about the company and the founders. The creation of tiktok is to spread happiness, creativity, raw human ingenuity through music, dances and user generated video. And all the founder wanted to do is develop a business from that and earn money from that. They worked really hard to develop the product, the marketing and the user base. The least they wanted is to be tied with politics, ideology wars, fake news, disinformation, political propaganda. The founder, zhang yiming, is a technologists and software engineer, not a politician, not a ccp ideologist. He has always displayed a general likeness and admiration towards the US since the beginning. I mean, why won't he? He studied C++, Javascript, big data, coding for IOS and Android. All of that comes from the U.S. And he has collaborated with US business people since the beginning. I guess his friendliness and admiration to US is why he entered the US market, step up office in the US and hired US employees.
But now they are caught between politics in China, ideology battle, and geopolitics.They are seeing their hard work going down the drain, and asking themselves "Probably my biggest crime is born in mainland China". No matter what they do, they cant shake off people's belief that they work for the Chinese government. Its a profound feeling of hopelessness.
I think Trump administration is them problem. It is amazing to see how much a single term of an irrational president could damage a country in almost every aspects.
Quote: Eventually what happened was that, as China’s domestic copyright industries found themselves competing with cheap knock-offs of foreign goods, they pressed the Chinese government to fortify the IP enforcement process on its own. (To put this in perspective, this is also what happened a century earlier in the US, which until 1890 failed to protect foreign works, and then waited yet another century before joining the major international copyright treaty.)
Let's just not pretend that IP theft was not prosecuted, and IP was not protected in China. That's simply not possible in such a fast-growing economy, which we can all agree that can only be sustained through innovation.
I think the fear is the manipulation that social media platforms can easily do of discourse and emotions. This is not as simple as just selling word processing software.
We have seen manipulation on US's own social media platforms by actors not even inside the company. Imagine a government which has supreme control on the companies on its own soil, imagine what it can do. I would say the fear is well founded, the solution to is not.
In case of the companies under free governments and justice systems, this becomes hard as any FB employee can go out and use the free press to expose if any manipulation like this is ordered.
The US was really the shining city on the hill before 2008 financial crisis. I personally was huge admirer of the US system. I even spent about 1 year in DC just to study the political system of the US.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, China tried to copy everything from the US, from finanical market regulations to education system and to some degree, political system reform. There was a period when academics and even some very senior CCP members called for small government, separation of party and administrative system, and they even used the term 'put power into cages'.
The 2008 financial crisis that started in the US made China's elites within the party and outside of the party think hard if the US system is really the answer. Trump administration, the handling of covid-19 and the BLM protests further changed the view towards the US and made it impossible for those friendly with the US to promote the US value system in China now.
Tiktok is considered a national pride because it thrives by open competition in the US and the world. This act of forced selling without a due process for Tiktok to defend itself from accusation of spying for China would absolutely be another huge blow to the credibility of the US in China.
Except the law is essentially "whatever CCP wants to do" since the only political entity which can affect its legislation process is CCP. And yes, it's intentionally vague so it can allow CCP to exercise its power in an arbitrary way.
Just like the double standard on delaying the election, it's ok to delay election due to COVID in US, but it's perfectly fine to condemn other places for doing the same.
It would be very interesting to see how how ppl or historian view this 10 years later.
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This is for tit for tat. The United States is an open society. Why should we let an authoritarian regime gains influence over my country?
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The US has the right to ban companies from the country (as do other countries). What the US is saying is that the parent company (Bytedance) bust divest Tik Tok or they'll lose access to the US market. Microsoft is interested in it, but it could be a different company buying it. This is different than "you must sell this company to this other company" because the US can't force a foreign entity to do that (as long as that foreign government doesn't also cooperate due to politics of soft power reasons). In the case of China, Bytedance can absolutely refuse to sell Tik Tok, it'll just get banned from operating in the United States. Surely they'd rather take a few billion dollars instead, which is why they are going to sell it.
Actions like this or ones that are similar in spirit happen quite often. And naturally if you look at China, well, frankly, they are getting a taste of their own medicine in some sense.
Worse, it cold be put into entity list, permanently removed from app store and play store.
How is that not extortion ?
https://time.com/5874408/trump-order-bytedance-sell-tiktok-u...
Yes, the US government is mulling over the idea of banning TikTok but that is only one of the problems. The immediate problem is that US companies have seriously assessed the security risk. TikTok and China have a credibility problem in the business world.
TikTok shareholders sees the same risk and they want to protect their investment. Not odd or surprising.
Are you referring to something specific or this is a Bush doctrine sort of thing?
Foreign companies are free to not do business with the United States if they feel their company is likely to be expropriated. In practice 300m of the world's richest consumers make the US irresistible. Thus, OFAC is tolerated.
The thing that is notable is that the US has traditionally advocated for open markets and cross border ownership, but now is jumping on board with tactics it once campaigned against.
If TikTok wants the American/European market and they’d sell the company in order to so, that’s just the reality of working within the current geopolitical landscape.
Simultaneously, TikTok has captured the daily attention spans of millions of Americans, many of them especially young and impressionable. They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.
These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
Ironically this idea is one of the rationale behind the GFW. Dont want any Spring/colour revolution over there.
our president is doing a fine job of that now with his twitter account.
I mean, Youtube[1] and Facebook[2] already do this, and nobody has a problem with it. Do foreign-owned businesses not have first amendment rights?
I should also point out that honest journalistic reporting of the reality in the US is more than sufficient to create outrage and civil unrest in the US.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/28/study-of-youtube-comments-...
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/the-far-r...
Restricting foreign media based on "propaganda" fears is not a behavior that free societies engage in.
Ugh no. TikTok's recommendation algorithm works the way it does because of its userbase's preference. TikTok is NOT free to change it willy-nilly. At best TikTok can "steer" the algorithm.
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