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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

This is why any sale of Tiktok without the algorithm will fail. The Chinese will just stand up another app with the TT algo and just incentivize a ton of creators with big paycheques. The eyeballs will follow, TT will die and we'll move onto the next Chinese surveillance app. Hence why the US should have been more broad in their law rather than target TT specifically.

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> the US should have been more broad in their law rather than target TT specifically

This is already the case; the law doesn’t just target TT, it is applicable to other platforms too.

“It would ban social networking services within 270 days if they are determined by the president of the United States and relevant provisions to be a "foreign adversary controlled application"”[1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fo...

edit: Parent comment previously stated simply that the law didn't target TikTok specifically.

Yes, it does.

https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/PLAW/118/public/PLAW-118pub...

> (i) ByteDance, Ltd.;

> (ii) TikTok;

> (iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or

> (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or

It can be applied to others, but there's a process.

(iii) would be easy to show for any new Chinese app that gets anywhere near as big as TT

No, not unless it has shared ownership/assets/employees etc. with ByteDance/TikTok. A new Chinese app falls under the later part of the law; there's more process (Presidential assessment, declaration, and report to Congress). ByteDance/TikTok specifically are deemed already problematic in the law.

I didn't say there wouldn't be any process, but it's easy to show since all media corporations in China are subject to control by the CCP -- it's not a secret or difficult to detect, and it doesn't necessarily involve identifying shareholders.

OK, but that's not this part of the law; this part is entirely specific to ByteDance and its TikTok subsidiary. Non-ByteDance Chinese companies would fall under the separate extra-process bit here:

> (B) a covered company that (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of a public notice proposing such determination; and (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.

right, good point

Isn't the algorithm publicly known? Any video show it to at least one person, if they watch it show it to more.

Which people on TikTok early on called the most fair algorithm. However, I suspect Youtube initially had the same or a very similar one.

And in both cases I suspect once the app becomes very popular the algorithm is updated to be more profitable, whatever that requires.

In other words, enshittification affects everything.

> In other words, enshittification affects everything.

The presence of this comment in every HN thread is a meta-example.

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