Abu Dhabi Royal Family To Take Stake In TikTok US (theguardian.com) 48
Abu Dhabi's MGX (chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan) is set to take a 15% stake in TikTok's U.S. business after Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday night brokering a deal that puts the social media company under U.S. ownership. "Larry Ellison's Oracle, the private equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX will control roughly 45% of TikTok US," adds The Guardian. "Overall, American companies are expected to control just over 65% of the company, with Trump also naming the personal computer pioneer Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch's Fox as other investors." From the report: "[TikTok US] will be majority-owned and controlled by United States persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary," Trump said. "We have American investors taking it over, running it [who are] highly sophisticated, including Larry Ellison. Great investors, the biggest. They don't get bigger. This is going to be American-operated all the way."
TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, will retain a 19.9% stake in the US operation. China has not publicly made clear whether it will approve the deal, although Trump said that he "had a good talk" with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who "gave us the go-ahead."
JD Vance, the US vice-president, said the deal valued TikTok US at $14 billion. "There was some resistance on the Chinese side," Vance said. "But the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating but we wanted to make sure that protected Americans' data privacy as required by law." He added: "This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than in the past. Because their data is going to be secure and it's not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens."
TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, will retain a 19.9% stake in the US operation. China has not publicly made clear whether it will approve the deal, although Trump said that he "had a good talk" with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who "gave us the go-ahead."
JD Vance, the US vice-president, said the deal valued TikTok US at $14 billion. "There was some resistance on the Chinese side," Vance said. "But the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating but we wanted to make sure that protected Americans' data privacy as required by law." He added: "This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than in the past. Because their data is going to be secure and it's not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens."
I thought the idea was for US control... (Score:3)
This makes no sense when you look at it. We are trading one foiegn power for another. Makes me wonder what the REAL reason for this change is.
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Makes me wonder what the REAL reason for this change is.
Like everything else, money. Larry Ellison buddies up with Trump and gets handed a company. The Saudis also own a chunk of twitter. https://www.aljazeera.com/news... [aljazeera.com]
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Wait. The Orange One makes decisions that make no sense? SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!
It makes perfect sense (Score:3)
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Maybe they expect it to become enshittified like Twitter did, becoming a far right hellsite.
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And... those "national security concerns" they talked about? (In /. TFS [slashdot.org] and related TFA [apnews.com]:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that he says will allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States in a way that meets national security concerns.
Didn't realize the Abu Dhabi royal family was in on that.
Makes me wonder what the REAL reason for this change is.
$$$
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Rump thinks that he's royalty, so any other royalty in the world would meet his approval. They were proposing that the son of the Shah come in and take over Iran, because they thought the public would welcome him with open arms. (I'm sure there's no one in this Sadministration who remembers what a horror his father's rule was.)
Re:I thought the idea was for US control... (Score:4, Insightful)
This makes no sense when you look at it. We are trading one foiegn power for another. Makes me wonder what the REAL reason for this change is.
To put a major social media company under the control of right wing political actors.
Closing the town square (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Closing the town square (Score:4, Informative)
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The greatest piece of propaganda Israel does today is the idea that they are good at propaganda.
Every nation has condemned them, young people around the world protest them, every war crime makes worldwide news and their own soldier can't help but film themselves doing stupid shit.
I swear the Israel conspiracists at this point might be the folks paid by Israel to make them seem like this powerful force.
Their only saving grace is that their enemies today, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are even stupider than they
Re:Closing the town square (Score:4, Interesting)
"The greatest piece of propaganda Israel does today is the idea that they are good at propaganda."
With "good at" you are collapsing and ignoring several different categories aside from the fact of their propaganda being a failure.
The propaganda itself is well-funded, mirrored by a majority of US media conglomerates, reinforced by education institutions (by threat of having your research funds frozen and grants denied, as we have seen) and is given the veneer of credibility by way of support from most elected officials. So in terms of volume and influence, they are "good at" propaganda, as their propaganda is inescapable (even here on slashdot).
Now, is the propaganda effective? Obviously not, it struggles to be relatable while alienating everyone down to Mrs. Rachel's followers, it is entirely lacking in ethos, and even Israel's ministers use chatGPT for their statements because it's just empty rhetoric to fill space. It is not a failure for lack of effort, just like Israel's attempts to kill every Palestinian in Gaza.
You can google the phrase "We really have a TikTok problem" and learn for yourself how the ADL felt about Tiktok without needing to hear from me. Maybe you'll even learn how the Tiktok ban bill was dead in the water until the lobby picked it up and forced it over the finish line.
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Well, since the American taxpayers continue to fund the genocide it seems to be effective enough for their purposes.
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Propaganda has to be effective at convincing people of it's message for it to be good, that's it's only purpose.
The fact it's not effective means they are bad at it. If it wasn't for them being able to cash in on their underdog reputation from the 60's and 70's with the American boomer class they'd really have nothing. It just so happens those folks hold the political power in America.
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Funny how you essentially took the common phrase "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist", but completely inverted it so that you can insist Israel (the devil?) has no influence at all to convince the world of anything.
Now you want to act surprised that one of the most well-funded and institutionally supported propaganda efforts in the history of the world would target a social media company..... after the same lobby said out loud they need to do something about th
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You are having a conversation with yourself.
TikTok or no TikTok Israel is not good at propaganda and the more money the spend the results are only getting worse and their reputation as such is unfounded and silly antisemitic ZOG conspiracists do more work to help then expose anything. That's my point.
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Propaganda has to be effective at convincing people of it's message for it to be good, that's it's only purpose.
That's not entirely true. With enough propaganda - and arguably, Israel has achieved that - the truth just gets lost in the noise. The propaganda doesn't have to be believed to be effective. It only has to displace the truth by being damned-near the only story available to most people, if only because it's the easiest one to find.
Many people won't take on the inconvenience of digging for the truth when an attractive, easy lie is on offer - even if the lie is fairly obvious. Propaganda flooding the zone is l
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That is true but I don't think it's true for Israel and I think it shows that it has big diminishing returns on people already primed with an opinion on the topic, like if we presume they've been doing it as much as possible since Oct 7 and the opinion of them has probably never been lower. People calling it a genocide probably can be propagandized off that position.
I think about like that South Park where Bush was the one pushing 9/11 conspiracies to make it seem like they had the power to do such a thing
TikTok will be replaced soon anyway (Score:2)
Re: TikTok will be replaced soon anyway (Score:3)
Or just talk to real people.
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Re: TikTok will be replaced soon anyway (Score:2)
l worked with a number of interns this summer and they were all happy to work with the groups. Not sure if it is engineering students, or just that our company is better at finding students excited to work with us.
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Have you attempted talking to a young person recently? The ones currently entering the workforce appear to abhor direct verbal communication with real living beings around them quite a lot. As in "groups sitting around a table, but typing into their smartphones rather than talking to each other". Eerie...
In my extended family, it seems like the older adults are the ones most constantly glued to their phones for long stretches of time. The young people seem adept at frequently jumping back and forth between in-person interactions and electronic ones.
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We probably should have a different set of terms to describe websites that have comment sections and differentiate them from actual social media that involves IRL interactions.
Re: TikTok will be replaced soon anyway (Score:2)
I agree the term social media has been rather diluted.
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That used to be one of the more popular ones, but everyone's boycotting it now, until reality shapes up.
Doesn't work like that (Score:2)
After the buyout the young people who tried to escape are funneled back into the main platform whether they like it or not using a wide variety of dark patterns.
If we could enforce antitrust law yeah you'd be right but well, Jesus fucking Christ that ain't going to happen for at least 4 years probably longer.
With friends like these... (Score:4, Insightful)
Private equity group Silver Lake
Abu Dhabi's MGX
Michael Dell
Rupert Murdoch's Fox
Shit, man, I'd almost rather it were the Chinese controlling the data.
(I'm not actually on TikTok, or any social media, really, but there's my two cents.)
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Shit, man, I'd almost rather it were the Chinese controlling the data.
For me, there's no "almost" about it. The Chinese might be morally worse and theoretically more dangerous than the robber barons you listed. But China's a lot farther away from us than Larry Ellison and those other vicious fuckers.
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It would be hard to find any 2500 year old book that doesn't have holes in it.
Re:How the Left Fell in Love with Islam (Score:4, Informative)
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The Mormon gods were clever enough to put their scripture on gold plates.
That reminds me of my near-inability to speak the word "Mormon" without making it rhyme with "moron".
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It would be hard to find any 2500 year old book that doesn't have holes in it.
Yes - both literally and figuratively!
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Euclid's Elements is 2300+ years old, with the contents of books I and II traced to Pythagoras and therefore 2500+ y.o.
Can someone please read the article (Score:3)
All I got was Ellison bla bla UAE bla bla Murdoch bla bla $$$ bla bla
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The Chinese were acquiring data without paying a multinational megacorp for it!! The horrors!!! I'm having vapors just imagining it, where is the fainting couch?
The amount of data TicTok sends back to the mothership is only the tiniest fragment of what Farcebook or YouTube collect, and they don't resell their data. How very evil!
Same Data pie, new slices. (Score:2)
A real win would have been an outright ban and shutdown.
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I still haven't seen a convincing legal argument for shutting the service down, do you have one? If it's not illegal then it's legal and they're not supposed bother them. Being offended that they're not handing over the baksheesh to your party's congresscritters is not a legitimate reason.
this is a joke (Score:1)
Cart before the horse? (Score:1)
"There was some resistance on the Chinese side,"
Unless Larry is madly vibe-coding a knock off and the US-Executive plan to do a bit of DNS tomfoolery to slot it into place, maybe we should wait a little longer before thinking it's a done deal?
It may well happen of course, but those two statements make me wonder if it's bilaterally inked.
wow (Score:2)
There couldn't be a finer set of gentlemen running it.
Good luck with that honeypot (Score:2)
pulling the wool (Score:1)