ByteDance would rather close down TikTok in the US than sell it if it fails to fight potential US ban in court

[jgmiller]

15. It's really fascinating how many different takes there on this even on DU

I personally agree that this is all overblown however there are people I respect who really feel this is a serious national security risk and it shocks me that they are very liberal and never jump on the "China is coming for us" bandwagon.

Someone on this thread commented that they don't get why Google or Meta couldn't come up with the same algorithm. I don't doubt they could, I've read quite a few detailed analysis and most people think it's a very, very simple engagement algorithm. The problem is not duplicating it, the problem is duplicating the viral nature of it.

Look at Twitter, even though Musk has destroyed it, it still gets an enormous amount of use yet there are better alternatives. Meta released Threads which is pretty much a clone, nobody uses it. BlueSky just became public a few months ago and it is a clone of Twitter written by engineers that escaped Twitter and nobody uses it. Its very hard to force people to move to something else in the social media world, these things have their own gravity and gain momentum naturally.