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by nostromo 520 days ago
The goal was always to get TikTok divested of Chinese ownership, not to ban it.

The ban was the stick and selling it for a lot of money was the carrot. ByteDance surprised almost everyone in choosing the stick.

2 comments

> The goal was always to get TikTok divested of Chinese ownership, not to ban it.

Seems like the goal pivoted recently - the goal is to keep TikTok Chinese and have them supporting the corrupt regime taking over the US, similar to other foreign adversaries have in the past

> ByteDance surprised almost everyone in choosing the stick.

shortly after Trump tried to force bytedance to sell its shares during his first term, the Chinese government passed laws to include the recommendation systems used in social media into the export control list. bytedance thus won't be able to sell tiktok without approval from the chinese government.

Does anyone have a citation for this? Probably higher quality if it's in Chinese even if I have to machine translate it. Because that would be a clear pointer of suspicion.
2020 report by nyt, paywalled of coursed

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/technology/china-tiktok-e...

the official export control list in Chinese

https://www.most.gov.cn/tztg/202312/W020231221620858841394.p...

it is on the 29th page, with export control number 086501X, item 18.

OK, that's pretty convincing. And it's interesting how much other stuff is in there like OCR for Hanzi!