TikTok Deal Done And It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse
from the mission-accomplished! dept
There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse. Quite an accomplishment.
The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh off his acquisition of CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm), while still somehow having large investment involvement by the Chinese:
“The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent will be owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
There’s also a smattering 5% of investors that may or may not include folks like right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch. It’s worth noting that none of this was really legal; the law technically stated that TikTok shouldn’t have been allowed to exist for much of this year. Everyone just looked the other way while Trump and his cronies repeatedly ignored deadlines and hammered away at the transfer.
The deal purportedly involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” but given you can’t trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what’s left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be “overseeing data protection,” but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
Also, this seems to ignore that three years ago, during the Biden administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s algorithms and data protection. It’s kinda weird that everyone seems to have forgotten that. This is all, more or less, what was already agreed to years ago. Just shifting around the ownership structure to give Trump and his friends a “win.”
It wasn’t subtle that the goal was always for Trump’s buddies to just basically steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short form video company that U.S. tech companies couldn’t out innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at Oracle and Walmart was Trump’s stated goal during the first administration, only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else was decorative.
You might recall that Democrats made a point to join forces with Republicans during election season in support of a ban unless a big chunk of ownership was divested. Now that it’s happened, it’s basically shifting ownership of TikTok to a huge chunk of Trump’s authoritarian allies, while somehow still maintaining the supposed problematic tethers to the Chinese? Impressive. Great job.
You might also recall that folks like Brendan Carr spent literally years whining about the propaganda, privacy, and surveillance threats posed by TikTok. And their solution was ultimately just to shift a small part of ownership over to Trump’s autocratic buddies while still retaining Chinese involvement. Now, with the problem made worse, you can easily assume that Carr will probably never mention the threat again.
Republicans obviously take majority responsibility for this turd of a deal and the corrupt shifting of TikTok ownership to Trump’s buddies. But it can’t be overstated what an own-goal supporting this whole dumb thing was for Democrats, who not only helped Trump’s friends steal partial ownership of TikTok, they saber-rattled over a ban during an election season where they desperately needed young people to vote.
As I’ve spent years arguing, if these folks were all so concerned about U.S. consumer privacy, they should have passed a functional modern internet privacy law applying to all U.S. companies and their executives.
If they cared about propaganda, they could have fought media consolidation, backed creative media literacy reform in schools, or found new ways to fund independent journalism.
If they cared about national security, they wouldn’t have helped elect a New York City real estate conman sex pest President, and they certainly wouldn’t have actively aided his cronyism.
This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security. It was always about the U.S. stealing ownership of one of the most popular and successful short form video apps in history because companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market. Ultimately this bipartisan accomplishment not only makes everything worse, it demonstrates we’re absolutely no better than the countries we criticize.
Filed Under: autocrats, competition, donald trump, larry ellison, national security, own goal, propaganda, security, social media, stupidity
Companies: bytedance, mgx, oracle, silver lake, tiktok
Comments on “TikTok Deal Done And It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse”
“to ensure the content feed is only manipulated from the inside” would be better, since Ellison may want to become the Trum’s best friend forever again.
And has Carr already started an investigation for “social media lying bias” or compiled a list of forbidden subjects into TikTok? Just to ensure US under Trump 2.0 is worse than China.
Re:
I wouldn’t be surprised if “forbidden subjects” includes anything that criticizes the government of Israel.
"Shittiest Possible Outcome"
Did you actually expect anything else, considering who was involved? You can be assured that TRUMP got his cut, one way or another, and because he touched it, it turned to shit. Highly profitable shit, but shit nonetheless.
Now he’s getting involved in nuclear fusion?
Our days are truly numbered.
Hymen Roth
It’s like Hymen Roth in Havana dividing his assets between Michael, his friends in Cleveland and the Rosato brothers.
On the positive side...
There’s a very real chance that Ellison et al. will do a Murdoch-buys-Myspace style butchering of the app and all the kids will have moved onto something else by the end of next year.
There’ll be nothing left but the faint sounds of brands echoing their corporate purpose into the void…
It can’t be overemphasized how much Democratic support of this was driven by fear of antizionist content. Israel’s brutal occupation and war against the Palestinians just got too much attention there and the most Zionist friendly electeds, Republican and Democrat alike, can’t abide it.
Seems like it’s not a done deal yet and could still fall apart.
It’s all about censorship and their ability to do so. It’s hard to win propaganda wars when people are posting videos from the ground on a platform the right have no leverage over. They still bent the knee like all the other tech companies but it wasn’t far enough.
Their oaths require action
“the law technically stated that TikTok shouldn’t have been allowed to exist for much of this year.”
You don’t need the word technically in that sentence. The law simply required this and those who have sworn solemn oaths to uphold the law failed to do so.
I’m wondering if this stuff could lead to an Al Capone moment, where failure to take actions to uphold the law in various minor and not-so-minor respects could lead to impeachment of a variety of officials. After all, their oaths of office don’t include a line saying, “unless Donald Trump objects”.
Congrats Democrats, you somehow got outsmarted by the stupidest fucking people.
companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market… but … but … Threads!
Really gave away the game there
Republicans had no problem with the dreaded Chinese Government ‘spreading propaganda’ to US citizens, they just wanted to make sure that they’d get a cut from the proceeds and be able to post their own propaganda unchecked and unfiltered.
In retrospect, this makes perfect sense. Why shut down the propaganda machine when you can take it over instead? I’m ashamed I didn’t see this coming.
Presumably the rest of the Bytedance ban is still law, so unless farther action is taken a Marvel video game (Marvel Snap) may legally be blocked from the US once the TikTok deal is closed, as it was affected when TikTok was briefly blocking US connections.
Good Grief
TikTok isn’t much better in US Right-wing hands either.
Geez.
I honestly hope that TikTok collapses into nothingness after this. I don’t want people getting their news updates from short-form autoplay video sites/apps that have influencers who say “Well, I asked ChatGPT and…”.