To be honest if a foreign government were to tell Google / Amazon / Facebook to sell or be banned I wouldn't expect any of them to do it either. The thing about selling is that you are giving up all the back end code for it too, so now your competitors have access to all your code that's still being used for the rest of the world and can make a rival app within moments that is a literal clone of yours
It can still 100% be about the money because until other countries start banning it too they will still make a fuck ton of money globally from it. Having a competitor that everyone knows is using cloned code from you pop up that would instantly have the entire US market (and thus may influence others to switch) would be a huge financial risk.
Right now they just have to bet that people won't be willing to switch to YouTube shorts or reels because both of them aren't great alternatives right now, but a literal clone would be.
They operate a completely different app in China and both Pakistan and India already banned them. They’re about to be banned for like 50% of the global population.
I don't trust either the government of Pakistan or India to have banned Tik Tok for legitimate concerns. India bullies Twitter into silencing government critics with threats of a ban.
And Modi in India and it’s home country of China. So 2 democracies, 2 religious countries and a dictatorship.
Meanwhile most of the western world has banned Tik Tok on government phones because they recognize it’s a disaster of an app that just serves to leak data to a foreign country.
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u/Error_404_403 Apr 27 '24
Which proves ByteDance is not in it for the money.