TikTok being forced under his thumb has apparently long been a wish of Trump’s, at least since app users first ground his gears back in 2020 by registering to attend his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with no intention of showing up, causing his delicate ego embarrassment when the yuge surging crowd he was expecting turned out to be a mere trickle. He raged for TikTok to be BANNED, because something something Chinese spies, and Congress passed an act that banned the app unless its algorithm was put under the control of a US company. And Joe Biden signed it!
Remember that extra-stupid hearing with TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew, with Tom Cotton refusing to accept that he is from Singapore, which is a whole different country than China, and how embarrassingly pig-ignorant the senators were about the basics of how the Internet even works?
But, the Chinese government doesn’t and has never owned TikTok. A Chinese man founded it and is still 20 percent of the board, but the company was never incorporated in China. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government ever had access to user data, much less that they were using it to spy on dissidents or Americans making cucumber salads.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd., which is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, and TikTok Inc. is headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore. And its servers — ORACLE servers, in fact — dish out its secret-sauce algorithm from Virginia. Sixty percent of ByteDance is currently owned by non-Chinese global institutional investors including Susquehanna International Group (majority shareholder Jeff Yass), the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, KKR, BlackRock, and Tiger Global Management; 20 percent of the firm is owned by Beijing-based founder Zhang Yiming, and 20 percent is owned by employees.
But Congress and Biden decided to ban the app anyway, after Trump had said it was a CHINESE SPY EMERGENCY. And then some curious things happened!
Jeff Yass, the managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the company that is also the largest shareholder of TikTok’s parent company, bought two percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, making its share price surge 140 percent, defibrillating Trump’s flatlining company.
And then right before the ‘24 election, the TikTok algorithm underwent a noticeable shift, and Trumpy content began appearing in people’s feeds when it hadn’t before. And TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in January.
And after his win, Trump credited TikTok with helping him win more young voters, so he loved it again and decided to save it, even going to the Supreme Court to try to stop them from enacting the ban he himself had asked Congress to pass. The deadline for a sale has since been extended four times already, and has now been pushed off until December 16.
The Wall Street Journal has more details of the prospective deal: The company’s board would stay the same, except that Zhang Yiming’s stake would be reduced to less than 20 percent, and a consortium of US companies, including Susquehanna International, KKR, General Atlantic Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz would control 80 percent of the company. A new US entity would be created, with a board with one member designated by the US government, which is unheard of. And the US company would license the magic algorithm, putting it into a new US version of the app, so that the Trumpy board would be able to customize it and make it massage everybody’s feed this way and that, promoting the reach of some accounts and limiting access to others.
But Congress and Biden decided to ban the app anyway, after Trump had said it was a CHINESE SPY EMERGENCY. And then some curious things happened!
Jeff Yass, the managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the company that is also the largest shareholder of TikTok’s parent company, bought two percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, making its share price surge 140 percent, defibrillating Trump’s flatlining company.
And then right before the ‘24 election, the TikTok algorithm underwent a noticeable shift, and Trumpy content began appearing in people’s feeds when it hadn’t before. And TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in January.
And after his win, Trump credited TikTok with helping him win more young voters, so he loved it again and decided to save it, even going to the Supreme Court to try to stop them from enacting the ban he himself had asked Congress to pass. The deadline for a sale has since been extended four times already, and has now been pushed off until December 16.
The Wall Street Journal has more details of the prospective deal: The company’s board would stay the same, except that Zhang Yiming’s stake would be reduced to less than 20 percent, and a consortium of US companies, including Susquehanna International, KKR, General Atlantic Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz would control 80 percent of the company. A new US entity would be created, with a board with one member designated by the US government, which is unheard of. And the US company would license the magic algorithm, putting it into a new US version of the app, so that the Trumpy board would be able to customize it and make it massage everybody’s feed this way and that, promoting the reach of some accounts and limiting access to others.
by Marcie Jones, Wonkette | Read more:
Image: YouTube/Guardian
[ed. I try to pay attention but this whole TikTok deal is too convoluted and politicized to make any sense. Is this some kind of sweatheart business deal, budding propaganda platform, rare-earth minerals squeeze...or what? Who knows.]
