TikTok To ‘Go Dark’ Tomorrow
We can't fire the popular Chinese spyware, it quits.

NYT (“TikTok to ‘Go Dark’ on Sunday for Its 170 Million American Users“):
TikTok said late Friday that its service would “go dark” for its 170 million American users on Sunday because of a ban in the United States over fears that its Chinese ownership poses a threat to national security.
The company said in a statement that “unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19” unless the Biden administration assures Apple, Google and other companies that they would not be punished for delivering TikTok’s services in the United States.
The statement was TikTok’s latest attempt to pressure the administration to grant it a reprieve from a law, upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, that would effectively ban its service starting Sunday.
The law says that app stores and major cloud computing providers cannot deliver TikTok to U.S. consumers unless the company is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to a non-Chinese owner.
Given that there will be a radically different administration in place Monday, I can’t imagine why anyone would do anything on Sunday based on what the outgoing administration is doing. Why not wait?
Regardless, while TikTok’s demise would be a disappointment to millions of young Americans, including some in my household, I suspect ByteDance will either sell the company (I hear Elon Musk is loaded) or an alternative algorithm-driven meme machine will take its place.
Good riddance. {Old man shakes fist at cloud}
Time reactivate my Twitter and update my myspace page I guess
The only social medium I’m attached to is Facebook, and that because there are some friends and family that are unwilling to change. There’s still the ability to limit what gets shown to me to posts by those friends, family, and two organizations I explicitly follow. I’ll drop it in a minute if that option goes away and I start getting random sh*t chosen by “the algorithm”.
Unless we count blogs, in which case there are several that I follow.
There’s a rumor that this quote is on the wall at the entrance to ByteDance:
Maybe we should be concerned about the Red Menace.
No, no, nooooo! What about all those leggy twenty-something girls doing dance moves Shirley Temple did better by age six? What about all those randos talking out of their asses about health and nutrition? What about all those life hacks that don’t actually work? What will this do to the all-important morons-with-opinions market? And how is Ryan Reynolds supposed to charm us into watching yet another Deadpool movie?
We will be shorn of influencers! Oh the humanity!
If, as the government claims, the real purpose of TikTok is actually collecting intelligence, ByteDance will never sell because that would immediately become obvious to the new owners as soon as they saw the code. Furthermore, if that code contains any sensitive methods, those methods would now be available to US cybersecurity
ByteDance’s real owners would rather lose the equity than allow that to happen
I thought that getting content delivered to places where it had been banned, etc. was what VPNs were for.
@just nutha:
They are, and they’ll anonymize your information. But the TikTok app will no longer be available in the Android and iphone stores. It can be sideloaded on Android, but you would need to break an iphone to load it, which has consequences. If TikTok goes dark in the US, I suspect that other nations will ban it as well.
@Mike:
Did your MySpace home page autoplay crunchy, but heartfelt emo songs upon loading? My Chemical Romance?
I guess to create some level of outrage that Trump can then step in and solve since he has signaled a willingness to do so?
I have no purpose or need for most social media. You aren’t the consumer, you are the product. You are a set of data points that trigger ads and solicitations. You are the target in targeted marketing.
I worked on a project in the early aughts to incorporate purchased data from a big data miner / vendor onto the existing customer base. It was bad and dumb. A mortgage provider.
A mortgage lender interaction is basically a one time deal. They usually sell the servicing (monthly payment processing) off to specialized companies for a portion of the vig.
The big money is in selling mortgage backed securities, MBS, onto the secondary market. Yes, the thingies that cratered the economy in 2007/8.
Some dumb-ass MBA decided that if we had more detailed “customer” info, we could sell ancillary services to new home-owners like lawn service, and … I dunno. Nobody knew. Who would trust unsolicited 15% off offers from your mortgage lender?
I went to my boss (actual, not titular, I was a contractor) and said this is a dumb, unproductive idea that will cost more than it will ever pay off. Greg gave me great life-changing feedback: the money is green. You are getting paid by the hour. You are a contractor. It is your responsibility to deliver.
Yeah, it was a dumb idea, but it was a clean, doable project without much nonsense. Delivered on time. The money was green.
I checked back later with an FTE I knew. Nothing was ever done with the additional customer data that they paid for monthly.
You are the product being sold.
I know I’m going to eventually regret this but …
As long as TikTok isn’t acquired by Elon Musk. In fact, I’d rather it remain with Chinese ownership than be sold to Musk.
@Sleeping Dog: Thanks. I think. I still don’t get how the ban affects people who already use TicTok tho. Are they going to volunteer to not use it, or does the app disappear if Google Play no longer carries it?
@just nutha:
The website will continually be updated and for the app to be useful, it will also need to be updated. Over time users who have an out of date app will find that they can access fewer and fewer of the websites functions. Think of it as still trying to use a Windows 97 computer today. Even if you had a browser, say Netscape or Internet Explorer, you still couldn’t view today’s web content.
@@just nutha: The ban applies to commercial entities in the USA, so strictly speaking, people who have already downloaded the app will still have the app. But after the last TikTok panic, Oracle hosts all of the data, so they can’t provide videos. A lot of CDNs are US based; they can’t cache data. And on and on.
There’s actually a problem here, which the ban doesn’t address. The Chinese Government doesn’t need TikTok to spy on Americans; they can buy it from data brokers, who are completely unregulated and unaccountable, as the bankruptcy of a comically small and insecure data broker last year showed. So clearly the US Government believes that the needs of commercial data brokers outweighs national security. As the intrusion of all of the domestic phone companies is showing, in the modern age, you can’t selectively protect privacy. You either protect everyone’s privacy, or entities who want the data will target the weakest link, whoever that is.
Also, I have to hand it to Democrats for doing this in the absolute stupidest, ineffectual way possible.
Oh no the Chinese spyware is banned now they have to rely on American spyware….
Not all algorithms are created equal. There’s a reason that Instagram isn’t able to compete with TikTok even as they add all the features — the Instagram algorithm sucks.
TikTok’s algorithm is leaps and bounds better at connecting people with content they want to see than anything else out there.
This is probably why Mark Zuckerberg has been in favor of a TikTok ban — get rid of competition. (Other people have other reasons, but Zuckerberg’s is obvious)
@Stormy Dragon:
Maybe. Or maybe selling the US assets just wouldn’t be worth it.
A sale of US assets would mean losing exclusive control of that algorithm, effectively worldwide as they wouldn’t be able to control where MuskMok (or whatever) uses it.
ByteDance is a global company. The US market is just part of it. A big part, but part. Why risk the value of the entire global company as opposed to just losing the US market?
There could just be an accountant running the numbers.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Are they manipulating what they are showing to Americans to alter attitudes and political behavior? Have we caught them red handed? Were the government’s assertions correct?
——
Overall, I oppose the ban on First Amendment grounds, and on creeping authoritarianism grounds. There’s a balance of First Amendment and national security, but if TikTok (or any other platform for speech) is a threat, I think the government has to show that rather than simply asserting it.
To me, this looks like our emerging oligarchy using government power to attack and limit their competitors, and exploiting a red scare as a tool to do this. And the TikTok CEO Shou Chew responding by maneuvering to become a favored rich dude and join that emerging oligarchy.
Shou will be attending the Trump inauguration as a guest of Trump, along with Musk and Zuckerberg. And Bezos, who has swiftly remade the Washington Post into something else to welcome Trump.
At this point, it’s just a shake down. Was it always a shake down? No idea.
I have seen no evidence that TikTok is doing anything more nefarious than Facebook or Twitter, other than the nefarious act of not being controlled by Zuckerberg or Musk.
ETA: this emerging oligarchy was a problem under Biden — see Musk’s transformation in the past few years. Biden didn’t oppose the oligarchs, at least not effectively. Trump welcomes the oligarchs.
ETA2: That ETA reads very leftist conspiracy theory. We live in a world where Progresso Soup is making soup flavored candies, though, so I can no longer tell what is and isn’t real. I should see if the coffee shop still has maple bars — maple bars are real.
@Sleeping Dog, @Kevin: Again, thank you both. I don’t use any social networking at all (OtB is as close to a social network as I participate in), so it’s difficult for me to even care about the nuts and bolts of the process. But interesting to know all the same.
ETA: @Matt: Yes, but they’ll have to buy American spyware data, correct? You may have inadvertently stumbled onto the real problem.
AETA: @Gustopher: Can’t speak for the coffee shop, but 7/11 stores in my area sell French Vanilla Creme bars (chocolate topped). Those are real and 7/11 coffee is much better than it used to be. I don’t recall seeing maple bars though.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: They could buy the data, but they could also just steal it, as they’re currently doing in our phone networks. The only safe private data is data that doesn’t exist, period.
American users comprise as little as 10% and certainly no more than 20% of TikTok’s global userbase (figures reported online by various tech traffic sites are all over the place but that’s the range). Therefore it’s hard to see why ByteDance would sell its entire operation to an American buyer. Presumably it would prefer simply to cease operating in the US.
Hand such a valuable asset over to America, complete with a billion or more subscribers in South America, South East Asia and (to a lesser extent) the rest of the world? If it were to sell, it would make a mockery of the claim the app is an important propaganda/espionage tool of the Chinese government.
@Kevin: The “privacy” horse jumped the fence decades ago. We (collectively) have been the “product” most all of our online lives.
@de stijl:
Most data driven projects undertaken by big companies do not meet their future profit goals. Smart people high up in an organization want more information in order to drive strategy.
More data doesn’t give insights and open new market opportunities. You need smarter people in decision-making positions. Google cracked it. The gold is in selling ads. So basic and dumb, it’s brilliant. Create a feed-back loop where you feed consumers to advertisers.
Google’s AdSense is the quintessential data-driven marketing project. It is both glorious and abominable. Certainly not perfect, but good enough.
(I have huge ethical issues and implementation critiques. AdSense can’t geolocate me properly. I get ads for local businesses in Houston or Minneapolis or Chicago. Randomly. Pick a city. It rotates. I don’t get that level of incompetence. Any competent algorithm could discern very easily where I live based on easily available data. I’m glad they don’t. It amuses me greatly.)
Frankly, big corporations need more psychologists and less data folks. Most customer information is just unusable dross.
Same people calling for the ban of TikTok call Edward Snowden a traitor for exposing the NSA/DOJ mass surveillance and spying on Americans using a open ended secret FISA warrant.