ByteDance CEO Says Trump's Real Goal Is To Kill Off TikTok (bloomberg.com) 167
A U.S. investigation into ByteDance's TikTok is really intended to smother a Chinese-owned app that's become a sensation with Americans, founder Zhang Yiming told employees in China Tuesday. From a report: In his second missive to the troops in as many days, the billionaire entrepreneur said a government probe into the company's 2017 purchase of Musical.ly, -- TikTok's progenitor -- was intended to spur a complete shutout. Escalating U.S.-China tensions had prompted American politicians to warn that the app posed a potential national security threat and call for an investigation into whether U.S. user data was being shared with Beijing, accusations that ByteDance has repeatedly rejected. Beijing-based ByteDance has come under pressure from the White House and U.S. lawmakers to sell off its U.S. TikTok operations and now has until Sept. 15 to hold negotiations with Microsoft over such a deal. President Donald Trump said on Monday any sale of TikTok's American operations would have to include a substantial payment to the U.S., though it wasn't clear under what authority he can extract a payment. While a forced sale of TikTok to U.S. buyer is "unreasonable", it is still part of a legal process and the company has no choice but to abide by the law, Zhang said. "But this is not their goal, or even what they want. Their real objective is to achieve a comprehensive ban," he wrote.
"Substantial payment to the U.S."? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the heck is that all about? Is he looking for other ways to fund that border wall Mexico isn't paying for?
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What the heck is that all about? Is he looking for other ways to fund that border wall Mexico isn't paying for?
He's trying to make a deal, or something.
Re:"Substantial payment to the U.S."? (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't even make sense. Is Trump asking for a one-time sales tax on a specific transaction? The president has no power to do that. Even congress is forbidden to pass any laws that target a specific company or person. Is Trump really saying something like "if you buy tiktok for $100, the you need to give me $20 as well"? Microsoft is not getting money directly in this purchase, it's not like Trump is asking for a cut of the proceeds of the sale, and he's not asking for a share of the profits as they accrue over time (knowing Microsoft it'll fall flat). So it does genuinely feel like he's asking for something that he's not allowed to ask for.
Again, it comes back to the same conclusion about what is going on, and it's a sad conclusion. The president does not know what he's doing, he does not know what is legal or illegal, and he made yet another off-the-cuff announcement without asking any of the highly paid governmental experts or advisors or lawyers about what they think first.
Then add to it the odd coercive part to this. "Do it my way or I'll just ban tik-tok altogether." Yes, this does sound like a threat. Vaguely sounds like a mafia way of doing business ("it'd be a shame if something happened to the product you're trying to buy").
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clout repatriation tax
Re:"Substantial payment to the U.S."? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was wondering about that too. It's bad enough if this article is correct and the U.S. government is trying to force a sale. It's even worse if they're trying to get some tribute from it as well. That's the kind of shit third world African "republics" do.
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Yeah, I remember when TrumpleThinSkin said something about "third-world shitholes" when he was elected. I knew back then that was his goal for the US. He's made a lot of progress with it.
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The ironic thing is that America already had a direct competitor: Vine. Same short video format with attached social media.
In 2015 Vine had over 200 million users. In 2016 Twitter killed it.
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Trump is transactional and he is trying to find a way to profit from this since he felt he was responsible to make this "deal" happen. However, we are (were) a nation of laws and not some low life criminal venture where the boss wants his cut on all transactions. If Trump had his way he would assign the tax bill of each major corporation depending on the degree of how they have helped or praised him during the previous year.
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That's the bizarre part. First of all, he's forcing them into a fire sale. Nice deal for Microsoft - who was looking to buy TikTok anyway - to have them threatened with being put out of business if they don't sell.
But beyond that, he thinks the US Treasury should get a commission on the sale. Either he's doing this for national security reasons or he's not. What he's not allowed to do is broker an acquisition for Microsoft - and demand to be paid for it.
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What the heck is that all about? Is he looking for other ways to fund that border wall Mexico isn't paying for?
He's playing to his base, trying to show that he can negotiate something to benefit taxpayers while solving a problem. There's probably no way it could actually happen, of course.
Alternatively, and perhaps a bit more likely, his original idea was that he, personally, should get a cut but someone pointed out to him that that would not only be illegal but would hand a political nuclear weapon to the Democrats, at a time when GOP support for Trump is already softening.
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What the heck is that all about? Is he looking for other ways to fund that border wall Mexico isn't paying for?
It's a mafia business. And it is nothing new to the USA, Americans did the similar robbery about two hundred years ago [wikipedia.org]. Evilness is really in the DNA of USA.
Yes, and? (Score:2)
Does the concept of a trade war need some explanation? I'm fine with this. I'd like to see Chinese and Chinese-influenced businesses disrupted much more than this.
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I'd just like to see him doing the same thing to Twitter and Facebook.
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Somewhat different problems requiring somewhat different remedies. If our antitrust legislation weren't toothless...
Re:Yes, and? (Score:5, Interesting)
Looking around the room where I'm sitting right now, I don't see anything that wasn't made in China. I like to be able to buy things that I need to live, so I disagree with disrupting all Chinese businesses as much as possible. I think that would be an epic bad idea.
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Gosh, you're right! If only we had factories. But we've never had anything like that, America was built on a service economy. Whatever could we do?
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We'd also have to provide government health care, housing, and education, because Americans wouldn't be able to afford any of those things on a factory worker's pay.
We'd probably have to tear up all environmental laws, as well, in order to be competitive.
It would be quite a challenge to have any sort of large scale manufacturing the US again.
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No, it wouldn't. Factory work isn't intellectually demanding, you just have to follow simple instructions and have a huge appetite for tedium. Public schools were originally designed to fill factories with docile idiots while picking out a few overachievers to get a shot at being middle class. If we're going to have a disgusting system of mass child incarceration, we should at least use it for its intended purpose.
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Well, how else do you get most of the members of a species defined by curiosity, creativity, and emotional complexity to put up with factory work? Until our automation is actually up to the task, apparently demographic-scale dehumanization is a necessary evil.
Here's hoping once we do build the robots, we close the schools and institute UBI instead of just riot controlling all the starving homeless people.
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The correct thing to do about that problem is not doubling down on the service economy again.
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You're missing an important point. It might not take much skill to staff an assembly line once it is up and running, but a lot of the skills needed to *build the assembly line* are much harder to find in the US than they were twenty years ago. It takes four years of education plus five years of apprenticeship to make a master tool and die maker.
Now China bootstrapped a massive manufacturing capacity in about a decade. It did that by both a crash course in training tool and die makers, but also had the ben
Re:Yes, and? (Score:4, Informative)
The picture of the US factories going idle because of competition with China's cheap labor is compelling ... and wrong.
The dollar value of US manufacturing output has actually risen dramatically since 1990 even as the trade deficit to China has rocketed into the thermosphere, fueled by an insatiable American demand for cheap Chinese shit. What caused the loss of manufacturing jobs since 2000 isn't a contraction in US manufacturing; it's automation.
So even if we "win" a trade war with China, the high-paying, low-skill manufacturing jobs that 20th Century Americans saw as almost a birthright are not coming back. Stuff will get more expensive, and American consumers will have to learn to tighten their belts.
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What's still manufactured in the US?
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I'm not saying it didn't happen in certain instances. But the *promise* of trading with China on MFN is that high value manufacturing would replace low value manufacturing, and by in large that promise was fulfilled. But it left some important details out, like the fact that there'd be less jobs even though the dollar value made would be more.
You can't turn back the clock, and you can't try without unintended consequences. For better or worse the last twenty years happened, and if you want to bring back
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Looking around the room where I'm sitting right now, I don't see anything that wasn't made in China.
Maybe you need to consider diversifying your shopping habits, not always just buying the cheapest item available.
(Yes, it's quite possible to buy a great many things that aren't made in China. It just requires a slight bit of effort, and an awareness of the world around you. On the up-side, then you don't have to feel bad about supporting a regime that actively oppresses their own citizens on a large scale.)
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Does the concept of a trade war need some explanation? I'm fine with this. I'd like to see Chinese and Chinese-influenced businesses disrupted much more than this.
It does. For those of us in the cheap seats, what does the forced sale of this app have to do with tariffs again?
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Why would you think tariffs are your only move in a trade war? If that were the case, there wouldn't be a different word for it.
TikTok is state backed CCP spy/malware. (Score:2)
Nothing of value will be lost if it is rightly banned. Google it. [lmgtfy.com] There are tons of news stories
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Yes, most of that has Chinese backdoors in it. How is this some big gotcha? It just means we needed to start doing shit like this much earlier.
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Slowly, awkwardly, and incompletely. Still better than not doing anything.
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Leaving aside that our economy, and hopefully soon our society, is already pretty well in the shitter, no that is not actually what I'm suggesting. What I would like to see is America building what it needs to replace Chinese-made products and infrastructure.
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Not necessary. To fix this particular issue, we just need to start getting serious about chip manufacturing again. American-made electronics would largely eliminate the security threat, put a significant dent in the trade deficit, and create a shitload of decent jobs. It is *obviously* the correct course of action, which is why it won't happen.
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There's no market for American-made stuff. If you think there is, you should really strike out and do it.
I just moved some manufacturing from the US to China because nobody was willing to pay US prices for what we were making in the US.
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That's false.
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That is crackheaded. It is designed from the ground up to allow the Chinese gov't to track users.
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So what? Google tracks you everywhere you go. So does AT&T. So does Apple. So does Amazon. So does Facebook. So does literally every "app" on your phone.
Is there some reason that we should all be so terrified of the Chinese government?
Re:TikTok is state backed CCP spy/malware. (Score:4, Insightful)
1) As all of those companies have proved, "information is power" isn't a metaphor. It barely seems to matter what kind of data you collect, if you get enough of it, you can find a way to break things.
2) China very likely has more data collection capacity than the rest of the world combined. They are positioned to be the *only* superpower by 2035 without radical intervention. Yes, I'm terrified of them.
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Yeah. Ban it. We should be using American web sites. Like PornHub.
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Yeah. Ban it. We should be using American web sites. Like PornHub.
I thought PH was British (there was a documentary about it on the TV here recently and I thought the people behind it were British, or maybe I misheard).
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Half of what's on pornhub would be illegal in the UK. They're fine with 16 year olds being in their porn, but if somebody gets a spanking it's time to revoke all your licenses.
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I thought PH was British
Canadian. So, stealth Brits.
Wish I could have seen the scramble in the WH... (Score:4, Insightful)
...as the Justice Department and Trumps lawyers pored over laws and rules trying to find a way he could "ban" a website via executive order after he said it. I don't even know how you could effectively do this via actual legislation much less an EO that would withstand a First Amendment challenge, much less accomplish it from a technology point of view. Notice the huge backtrack after it was supposed to be done over the weekend and then once someone finally had to whimper in and tell him it's not actually possible he backed off to Sept 15 and in 6 weeks everyone will have forgotten he said ti at all when nothing happens.
Ironically Trump probably would support a "great firewall" like China has to accomplish this very thing, once again showing he has no knowledge of the law nor any desire to learn or care about it.
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There is literally no federal politician that would sincerely oppose this, it's just that it's one of those things the other side would use to end your career if you suggested it.
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I too was anxiously waiting to see what obscure law would get the creative Trump interpretation.
Spelling error ... (Score:2)
In his second missive to the troops in as many days, the millionaire entrepreneur
TIFTFY, somebody misspellend 'millionaire'.
BTS Army (Score:5, Insightful)
Show of hands: Who here thinks Trump would have made this an issue if those meddling Tik Tok teens hadn't messed up his Tulsa rally?
Also, who believes that Trump had even heard of Tik Tok before his Tulsa Death Rally catastrophe?
Not raising my hand (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't think anyone thinks that. I think people think "fuck China, don't care why."
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TicTok's problem is not just with Trump (Score:5, Interesting)
Trump is not alone in his concern. India is also banning numerous apps because they can't be trusted.
How is banning this app any different than rejecting food from entering the US because of parasites?
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If this was really about "security", we wouldn't be importing any electronic devices or any software at all. Instead, we're continuing to import close to 100% of all electronics, and a good bit of our software from China.
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B. I'm going to take anything that Pompeo says at face value.
If you have some good sources for this information, I'd love to read them.
I'm still wondering why TikTok was singled out. Why not WeChat? Why not any of the thousands of other Chinese made "apps" collecting data and sending it back to China?
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Trump is not alone in his concern. India is also banning numerous apps because they can't be trusted.
How is banning this app any different than rejecting food from entering the US because of parasites?
Precedent.
Because free speech (Score:3)
China is, to the best of my knowledge, allowed to do business in America. We let them buy large swaths of our food supply without batting an eye. They own a massive number of homes (I can't afford a home in my city largely due to Chinese & Canadian investors parking money over here, they're not even renting the things out, they're just letting them sit because
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Trump is not alone in his concern. India is also banning numerous apps because they can't be trusted.
Because India is also turning to a populist state and attacking China is currently the best way to FUD people into believing they're endangered, like what Iraq WMD used to achieve in post-911 times.
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No, India is banning numerous apps for not cooperating with state coerced surveillance.
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What they going to do petition Apple from store? (Score:2)
Whitehouse decrees an edict though shalt not use Tik Tok over unfounded fears.
Whitehouse declare they must sell off their American stake.
Whitehouse tells MS that they need a cut.
What are they going to do if everyone says ummm no thanks?
They are operating legitimately and there is no indication of any data loss despite independent review.
WH can go suck it.
What are they going to do write laws banning out of country apps now and demand Apple remove it from the store? I see that going well.
GTFO.
LMAO.
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The fears aren't unfounded. Before Trump got upset about it, there was a story here just about every week about a new way we caught Tik Tok spying. Also they've been exposed as doing fucked up social engineering, like feeding new accounts fake engagement to establish an addiction, and suppressing the posts of people their moderators deem too ugly or fat.
Shit like this is an excellent case for regulating app stores. In the absence of such regulation, many Chinese apps are bad enough to warrant extraordinary
It's become a place for young, left leaning people (Score:2)
To be fair if he doesn't do it the Chinese or Microsoft probably will. The ruling class takes no chances. Look what they did to Occupy Wall Street. And if you watch coverage of the George Floyd protests they look like one long series of race riots & looting when in fact there were about 3 nights out of 100 where any of that happened, and a lot of it was set off by right wing provocateurs (google "Autozone Umbrella Guy").
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Andy Ngo [twitter.com] is a good source for daily updates on the riots, particularly those in Portland where there's been over twenty million dollars in damage. Check out all those "right wing provocateurs", lol.
Wrong! (Score:2)
One simple fix (Score:2)
I'll bet Trump would keep the app alive if it forced people to use landscape orientation on their phones.
280 characters is enough messaging for the US (Score:2)
Now go play with the dinosaurs.
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Haha, remember how before Trump got angry about it there was another story on slashdot about how Tik Tok was one of the worst dataminers you could put on your phone? Yeah, neither do I.
Re:No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha, remember how before Trump got angry about it there was another story on slashdot about how Tik Tok was one of the worst dataminers you could put on your phone? Yeah, neither do I.
I can believe TikTok is a data mining app and still believe that's not why Trump is doing this. Or if it is because of the data mining, I don't think the right solution is to have Microsoft be in charge of it. Or if Microsoft does buy it, I don't see why the U.S. Treasury should get a cut of the deal.
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I absolutely believe that's why Trump is doing this, I just don't give a fuck. "Right thing for the wrong reason" is the best thing you can ever expect from the government.
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They are far outnumbered by the war mongers. Groupthink moderation will decide the winners
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They are far outnumbered by the war mongers.
I haven't heard anyone call for war with China.
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There are some alt-right-adjacents who want it and won't stop whining about the Uyghur genocide they wouldn't care about if China weren't doing it, but I think they're the only ones, and they're transparently only going that far because the Big Club's standard answer to capitalism failing is a world war.
Re: No way. (Score:2)
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Tim Pool got recommended to me on YouTube because I liked some JRE clips with him. Turns out he's much less reasonable and honest in his own show.
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"How do you even find those people?"
Half of us have an IQ of under 100, so to find one, just flip a coin.
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Name 5 people who want to go to war with China over the Uighurs.
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Tim Pool and presumably most of his audience.
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Prove it. Point to the video clip of him saying we need to go to war with China.
More likely Pool just criticizes the far left and Democrats, and we just can't have that now can we. Time to poison the well.
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Do you care about them at all, as people?
Forget nations for a moment here. They're human beings. More broadly, they're conscious beings. Do you utterly lack empathy?
No, hot war is guaranteed to harm a greater number more to free them. So what do we do for a better solution? Right now, that means a cold war of a sort.
Best of all would be to enable them directly to help themselves. But how? (Asking, seriously taking opinions.)
I am not in a position to directly help them. But I feel that as a conscious being,
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They are far outnumbered by the war mongers.
I haven't heard anyone call for war with China.
We were never "at war" with the USSR but our allies and our troops fought their allies and their troops all over the world. It is called proxy-warfare. The hawkish strategy of pressure and containment on China is likely to lead to the same sort of war.
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As long as the Big Club is running things, our military will be abused for illegal forever wars. This is at least a better choice of target than usual.
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I'm on record as saying all social networks should be abolished due to the insufficient ethical composition of their operations and business goals, and even I can see it's pretty obvious Trump is playing favorites with the social networks that get his agenda done, and would be the first to demand the universal banning of them otherwise.
Re:No way. (Score:5, Interesting)
And to clarify China is still a lot worse. They deserve to be sanctioned by the rest of the world as long as they have that kind of government running things.
But on the other hand I regularly get 'smart' people around here accusing the EU of being unfair when looking into privacy violations and data mining of US corporations like facebook or google sanctioning them. Claiming that the EU does it because they're not capable of producing such a service themselves and still wanting a piece of that pie by taking the money away from those US corporations.
Now it's kind of ironic to see something like that happening in the US with a service that comes from a foreign country. And what does the US government do?
But I suppose simply banning it from your market is somehow morally still superior than fining them.
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Theft? Not exactly... China forces companies operating there to be majority-owned by Chinese. Why not mirror their warm embrace for foreign businesses?
Many US/China "issues" in the past year have consisted of China crying foul about policies that we've been experiencing in the reverse direction for years.
Trump is handling it all poorly, but at some point there needs to be a level playing field.
The "must pay the US government" thing is definitely way out of line, though.
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China forces companies operating there to be majority-owned by Chinese.
Yes, as a precondition to signing a contract.
Vader says, *pray that I doesn't alter it further*