alt Hacker NewsU.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China
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> one member designated by the US government.
Why does the board of TikTok need a gov member? Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too? And Oracle surely needs one as well.
Is the gov putting out a call for board member civil servants? Like where does this person even come from?
TikTok dealt a serious blow to the Western consensus manufacturing apparatus. We saw that with Gaza especially. This deal is a step towards taking back control.
I'm not an expert but this makes me think that it might time to turn off the screens and stop letting half-trillionaires decide what we look at.
Is this a coup by conservative government to gain control of this social network to promote it's ideologies?
first Twitter, now Tiktok, both controlled by conservative interests?
I fully expect a decent number of people in favor of this to, without a shred of irony, whine about wanting a free market whenever environmental regulations are in the news again.
Useful additional context
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-trump-ally-may-soon...
Reminds me of Yahoo buying Tumblr. Mismatched. Their best bet is to change little to nothing, but not sure the administration will let them.
So basically devalues TikTok worldwide and TikTok US, presumably a UK/EU user won’t be seen in the US and vice versa? The EU is already preparing a fine I’m sure… such an incredibly strange deal IMO, I can’t work out why anyone would do it?
>Current users of the app will be asked to shift to a new app
So it's just going to fade into obscurity then huh
TikTok is going to be dead in US either way whether it's banned or sell to Oracle. Snap to the moon.
If anyone want's to save stuff off tiktok just incase this doesn't go through, just remove the "OK" from the URL, ending up at https://tikt.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283876
so US users will be cut off from the rest of the world? Wow. Thats crazy.
I am ashamed to be an American. We are going to have so much healing to do.
With, apparently, a board member appointed by the Trump administration.
The U.S Steel deal included three board seats, but the Intel deal did not include any.
This is starting to look like the way China does things, with the central government having a financial stake in important companies.
One thing I’m looking for in all of this is how trump will get a piece of this deal.
Between this and the US government taking ownership in Intel the "small government is good" and "socialism is bad" crowd have been very very quiet.
I think it's bad news if the US government owns Tiktok data rather than the Chinese government.
Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
The State Department also said it would crack down on non-citizens who have made posts making light of the shooting.
“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country. I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on Thursday. “Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.” [0][0]https://time.com/7316628/charlie-kirk-death-celebrations-soc...
basically seizing a foreign product/service. should do wonders for the 'free market'
Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.
I'm curious how bad the misinformation type stuff will be.
It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.
Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.
Lol is that why the Oracle stock jumped. Probably someone timed it with the other announcement to make it look innocent.
Oracle is then going to mandate license fees from every user, together with 22% support fees with 8% increase every year.
They'll then rewrite TikTok in Java, and migrate to Oracle Database.
The USA forcibly nationalized TikTok so they can install their own surveillance and censorship apparatus along with skimming from TikTok's profits. All while decrying China for... the same thing.
Why would any company want to operate in America, sell to Americans or onboard American users anymore?
If you're not successful you just wasted a ton of time and money.
If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
Doesn't sound like a country worth investing in anymore.
I've built a 12k follower audience for TikTok's on product management and project management. Time to migrate to YouTube.
So finally all that pesky people saying that their own government is funding a brutal genocide with their tax dollars will be banned.
American media is one of the most thightly controlled and censored in the world. They need to carefully control the media to maintain the ilusion of "moral superiority" that is used to justify foreign interventions.
This would just make them go in a situationship.
Both are not compatible with each other in any way, but they are in a great deal, one they can't say no to.
This is where either one fails or sometimes both.
Sorry for the silly question: is the US geofenced from the global tiktok?
Are there any other examples of something like this happening? A successful (foreign) app is forced to be sold to a US company just because of its country of origin? What happened to the free market? It's remarkable that privacy is even in the conversation when FAANG is just as bad
Not to mention that this is all just a distraction from the very real destruction Trump 2.0 is doing to peoples' lives, safety, financial outlooks, rights, etc and flushing our country and planet down to the toilet for his benefit
*edited for clarity and fixed typos
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
[2] - https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...
Questions regarding the US government-appointed director (CCP style?)...
IIUC, Oracle has strong connections to the CIA, and Andreessen the person lately seems right-wing activist.
1. Under the current administration, maybe it doesn't much matter that there's a government monitor?
2. But if a more left-wing administration comes back into power, then a government appointee there could help moderate the other influences?
Oracle is just really going wild to get into the media and social media spaces.
The party of laissez-faire capitalism is now into "let's interfere", with government ownership, presence within companies and of course, dropping the hammer on "unpatriotic" speech, a kind of Amended First Amendment.
10 Small Steps: Executing the Fascist Playbook [0]
The Fascists’ Playbook [1]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/10-small-steps-executing-the-...
[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/08/the-fascists-playboo...
Just don't use it.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.
Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.
This seems like a premature reaction. The Trump administration has been known to anchor to extreme positions as a negotiation tactic.
Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.
Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.
I swear I saw all these exact comments yesterday - why are they showing that they were posted 10 minutes ago?
>A new company will be created to operate TikTok, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the report said.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
if the algorthm server isn't in the US, it's pretty useless.
So now we will split American TikTok users from those of the rest of the world? Madness.
One of the biggest grifts in history ...
There are so many comically evil villains in ths one deal.
Example: Silver Lake. Many younger HNers may not be that familira with the story of Skype. To summarize, Skype was a big deal, the first real mass market caller-to-caller Internet voice messaging services. It was founded in 2003, bought by eBay (of all people) in 2005 for several billion dollars. There were plans to spin it out on an IPO but Silver Lake led a buyout for less than eBay paid for it I believe in 2009 (~$2.75 billion).
Now in 2011, Microsoft bought it for ~$8.5 billion. That was great for the employees, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I believe the new company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to make it difficult to sue, a bunch of executives were fired before the buyout to avoid paying them out and, most controversially, the options had a clawback option that allowed Silver Lake to forcibly purchase options at the original rather than the buyout price [1].
Larry Ellison is more well known in HN circles as comically evil. Pretty much everything he touches leaves a Grand Moff Tarkin level of stench of evil from his attack on public access to Carbon Beach through his massive property portfolio to his more well known attacks on open source (originally as a threat to Oracle's dominance).
He is a Trump loyalist and true Putinesque oligarch who will probably amass levels of media control well beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest dreams. You can bet your bottom dollar that every media property he touches will serve the administration and I'd be shocked if one or more of these deals doesn't directly enrich Trump and/or his family.
Welcome to the tleptocracy.
I'm still trying to figure out if putting off the shutdown until they had a deal was even legal.
The Constitution has the worth of toilet paper if the executive can just keep saying "I don't want to enforce this law because my buddy here has a financial interest in that not happening as its supposed to", which is exactly what is happening given how close Larry and Trump are.
Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.
The most terrifying thing is there will be a trump-government representative in the governing body.
We are truly looking at 1984 as a blueprint not a warning.
Key details:
1. New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.
2. 80% owned by a U.S. investor consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz, 20% by Bytedance.
3. Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
4. All U.S. user data would sit on Oracle infrastructure in the US.
5. Algorithm will be initially licensed, but has to be reengineered to comply with the law.
Not discussed - whether the US tiktok app is allowed to compete with TikTok outside of the US. My guess is NO.