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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

I actually liked the Trump method, which was to force them to sell the US arm to a US company and sever it from the Chinese. I don't know why that never came to fruition; it looked like it was nearly a done deal (Microsoft was the leading bidder.) Making a competitor from scratch would just open up the userbase to another state actor, though it could give a window for a Vine return.

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Except that this story reveals the obvious reason this wouldn't work. How do you reliably keep that US "arm" from being co-opted? How do you make sure that the software isn't phoning home to China regardless of what the US arm does?

Oracle and Walmart reportedly at that time brokered a deal to run the US arm of TikTok. Do you trust them? Walmart certainly isn't politically neutral, by any stretch. Meanwhile, Larry Ellison was a leading figure in the effort to subvert the 2020 election. He was on the Nov. 14 election subversion planning call, along with "Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud." (source: WaPo)

This doesn't seem like a solid plan, to put it rather mildly.

The US Government already trusts Oracle Corp with much more than merely a social media application.

https://www.oracle.com/industries/government/us-defense/

Larry Ellison defecting to China doesn't seem like a likely scenario, I don't think he'd like life as an international fugitive, slave to a host with a history of treating their own native billionaires harshly. Barring such a flight, the US Government can get their hands on him if that becomes necessary, but I doubt it will.

> Oracle and Walmart reportedly at that time brokered a deal to run the US arm of TikTok. Do you trust them?

Well, I trust them more than I trust China. I guess we should have done nothing instead?

Every person and company you just mentioned are infinitely more trustworthy than the CCP, and that's saying a lot.

Activist judge blocked the sanctions on TikTok.

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