Feeling sorry for fans of TikTok. It seems there’s a deal in the works that involves some of the worst tech folks; it would shift 80 percent ownership to "an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz." I'd never head Silver Lake, but it's a private equity firm.
Also, although China would keep the algorithm, licensing it to the US, it might need to create a new version for the US — and might need to train the US algorithm on only US user data.
And now I'm feeling sorry for all of us in the US, TikTok users or not. Instead of worrying about China using TikTok for influence, now we would get to worry about how the right wing will do that.
As @tchambers wrote, “TikTok’s enshitification with its new right wing owners may accelerate as fast as X’s did.”
But nothing is final yet.
