Frankly at this point I think I would rather have China have control over the data and algorithm than Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz.

Ars Technica's comment section is getting radicalized.

Basically they bought 70% of the shares but they aren't even the good ones.

I very much prefer China keep the algorithm instead of this crooked government. We've already seen what happened with Twitter when our Nazi overlords start smearing their shit all over people's feeds

IMO, the algorithm is overhyped, and the secret to tik toks success is its scale. If you gave metas algorithm the same amount of data to train on and the same amount of content to recommend, it would be equally as addictive. It might suck at first but give it a couple months and people won't be able to tell the difference between the old algorithm and whatever oracle creates.

It's just like chatgpt, given the same set of public data any company with sufficient engineering and compute resources can make there own model that performs very similarly.

In an ideal world we'd have algorithmic choice, like in bluesky sort of, and we could actually compare different ones, but that would cut into the profits of the data monoplies.

China or Russia do not move their red lines. US concerns about TikTok were always exclusively the lack of Zionazi supremacist control over the messaging. This is what is getting "fixed" by buyer group. China will also receive other unrelated trade concessions, though falling short of "normal", they will do better than "allies" who have no red lines on bending over.

What‽ Trump sucks at making deals? Nooooooo way, that's a complete surprise...

US to make its own version of the app

DickDock incoming

Without algorithmic transparency how can you ensure it's not a propaganda machine?

That said tilting the algorithm isn't exclusively a TikTok problem, I would love to know how active the bots have been the last week on all the US owned social media platforms. Is there a push for division? How would we know?

Art of the deal.

TikTok letting go of their algorithm would be foolish no matter what they need to give up to keep it. In this world of information warfare that’s like giving up the bomb