TikTok doesn't need America

Americans Still Don’t Realize What TikTok Is

On Friday, the US Supreme Court heard what was likely the last challenge to the fast-approaching TikTok ban. And it didn’t go very well.

You can read a good back and forth from the hearing here. But the TL;DR is that TikTok’s defense argued their free speech is being violated and the justices wanted to know how and didn’t get particularly good answers. One maddening back and forth came after Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked TikTok’s legal team to explain what free speech was being violated by the ban exactly, asking, "Am I right that the algorithm is the speech here?" To which TikTok’s lawyer Noel Francisco responded that TikTok’s algorithm is, “basically how we predict what our customers want to see.” To which Barrett responds, "I'm trying to figure out what content, if any, discrimination is going on here.”

The reason all of this has been so annoying and confusing is that the entire divestment-or-ban plan was built on top of a pile of false assumptions about both what TikTok is, philosophically, and what their business model is, practically. Which culminated in last week’s hearing, where both TikTok’s legal team and our Supreme Court justices could literally not communicate.

On the American side, our lawmakers believe that TikTok is a social platform. This is why they are so nervous about Chinese governmental interference and the app’s algorithmic influence. They assume it’s doing to us what American companies like Meta and Google have done to other countries. Which is why they can’t actually admit that none of this is about free speech or national security. It’s primarily about measuring — and defining — Chinese soft power. Our politicians want to prove that TikTok’s owner ByteDance needs America more than America needs TikTok. A game of geopolitical chicken played out over vertical videos of teenagers dancing.

But not only is America not TikTok’s biggest audience, it’s not even the largest amount of users they’ve lost to a country-level ban. Right now, TikTok’s biggest user base is Indonesia, where it has about 160 million monthly active users. Coming in second behind Indonesia, is the US and Brazil, both with around 100 million users. And when the Indian government banned TikTok in 2020, there were around 200 million Indian users on the app, double the amount they currently have in the US.

Because America doesn’t have the same social shopping ecosystem as China, we’ve never fully wrapped our heads around what TikTok has been trying to build here. Or who they’re actually competing with. As it stands, ByteDance has until January 19th — one day before President-elect Donald Trump takes office — to either sell TikTok to a US owner or face a ban in the US. There are plenty of would-be domestic buyers for TikTok, including a group calling itself Project Liberty (lol), led by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary and Frank McCourt, former owner of Los Angeles Dodgers. But so far ByteDance has been firm that they won’t sell the app, because, well, why would they? If ByteDance can’t access American shoppers through TikTok, why would give an American business any kind of leg up against the other Chinese apps flooding the market, who have always been ByteDance’s true competition.

In fact, this week, amid the TikTok ban panic, Americans started downloading Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, another TikTok-like Chinese app. It’s unlikely it’ll actually catch on in the US, but it’s currently at the top of the iOS App Store charts. And there are plenty of other Chinese apps, like Shein and Temu, all with their own social shopping features, waiting to conquer US smartphones. Our little viral videos don’t really matter amid the Chinese social shopping arms race.

American users, like our politicians, incorrectly believe that TikTok needs them. They spent the weekend posting and sharing furious videos about their favorite social platform getting banned while scrambling to move over their audiences over Instagram and YouTube or newsletter platforms like Beehiiv and Substack. Which I sympathize with, though, only to a point. Because if you’re an American that’s been relying on TikTok as a publishing or communication tool it means that you fundamentally do not understand what the app is. Sure, America’s advertising market is one of the biggest and most lucrative in the world. But ByteDance doesn’t need it, since advertising has never been TikTok’s main focus. Like most Chinese platforms, TikTok’s advertising network has always been an intermediary step towards building out an international e-commerce business. It has never been the Instagram competitor we see it as. It’s an Amazon competitor. And our videos have never been anything more than filler. And you can always find more filler.

A Really Good Crazy Taxi Video

And, yes, the band would stop and start over every time the player lost.

The Race To Build A New Internet

A group called Free Our Feeds is currently raising money to build what they’re calling a “new public interest foundation” that would build an “independent infrastructure” on top of Bluesky’s AT Protocol. The group is completely independent from Bluesky, but wants to use AT Protocol to build an ecosystem of apps that would work with it. They’re trying to raise $30 million over the next three years.

The piece of this that interests me the most is that the program is centered around AT Protocol, rather than ActivityPub. For those who aren’t in the know, ActivityPub is the federated social protocol that runs platforms like Mastodon. AT Protocol is similar, but different. Which, more than anything, I think, really speaks to how quickly Bluesky has captured people’s imaginations in the last few months.

But I’m also curious whether Bluesky will actually work with the nine custodians that Free Our Feeds want to put in charge of their protocol. Bluesky has expressed interest in building a “billionaire proof” social network. But I guess it’s time to see if they actually mean it.

A Story Of One Crappy AI Image

The Fake History Hunter X account dug into an AI-generated image that went viral on Instagram recently. It was shared last week by a Spanish-language boomer engagement farming account for “rock music culture”.

Fake History Hunter was able to trace the image back to an AI “artist” going by C-GasmX-arT. But it’s now all over Google Image search results, mixed in with real images from Woodstock. Which exposes a serious issue with how Facebook is currently interacting with Google.

While most images on Instagram are largely locked off from Google Image Search results, Facebook is not. So now millions of AI slop images from Facebook are impacting normal searches.

It’s All Kicking Off On Minecraft YouTube

Members of the the still surprisingly popular Dream SMP, a YouTuber collective of Minecraft players, are beefing right now. It all started after livestreamer Félix Lengyel, better known as xQc, started feuding with Thomas “TommyInnit” Simons, a long-time Dream SMP collaborator. Simons was dunking on Lengyel for interviewing President-elect Donald Trump recently.

The two trade barbs back and forth before Dream posted and deleted a meme attacking Simons. He then went live on Twitch and seems to have admitted he’s a Trump supporter. He also went on a unhinged tirade on his subreddit.

What does this all mean for normal people? Not a ton. But these guys are all outrageously popular still and, unfortunately, a lot of children follow their every move online. I assume we’ll start to see the large-scale negative societal effects of all this shortly, when Gen Alpha enters the workforce in about five years.

Don’t Feed Your Dog Gatorade Onions

A user shared a post to r/radiohead over the weekend, writing that they had tried “Colin’s infamous Gatorade onions.” I am not a huge Radiohead person, but I guess the “Colin” in the title is Radiohead bass player Colin Greenwood. I can’t find anything on Google about Greenwood cooking onions in Gatorade, nor did the redditor that shared the post really explain where this came from, only writing, “it’s from an old interview [Greenwood] did.” (I cannot find that interview.)

The redditor said the onions were awful and they fed them to their dog. Which they should not have done! Do not feed your dog onions, cooked in Gatorade or not. Onions are poisonous to dogs!

An Interesting Video About Shadow The Hedgehog

Some Stray Links

• “The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real”

• New York Magazine went long on the Neil Gaiman allegations

• “The ‘Annex Canada’ Stuff Is A Test And You're Failing”

P.S. here’s some good vocal fry.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***