Apple Support: „About availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. apps in the United States“

Einen Link auf diesen sehr einmaligen Support-Artikel kann ich mir nicht verkneifen, obwohl mir die US-politischen Spielchen darum nicht egaler sein könnten.

Der beste Take zur Situation geht an Ryan Broderick.

As I wrote on Monday, almost every major Chinese social app is built around “social shopping”. This is why they all emphasize trends over viral one-offs. They want you to buy a product and make content with it to inspire everyone else to make content with it. This is also why they hyper-target your interests so aggressively. But because Americans have no experience with these kind of apps, the impact of TikTok’s algorithm has been different here. Sure, there’s plenty of shopping — Stanley Cups are probably the best, most recent example of the TikTok e-commerce effect. But, as WIRED recently point out, those systems have, perhaps inadvertently, been mainly used in the US to create genuinely supportive filter bubbles for young people, for different subcultures, strange fandoms, and all kinds of other communities. Something western companies like Meta have not ever been able to crack, possibly because, ironically enough, they aren’t nearly as focused on directly selling you shit, and much more interested in selling you to advertisers. And this irony is even more pronounced now that TikTokers are migrating to RedNote, which is, yes, like Pinterest or Instagram, but could more accurately be compared to QVC. And so, just to summarize, because of how stupid it all is: American lawmakers banned a cravenly capitalistic app for being too communist and ended up sending users to an even more capitalistic app. You simply have to stan.

But the pure stupidity of all of this exposes the actual point. American tech businesses know they’re out of step with China. They know they’re losing ground around the world to apps like TikTok and Temu and Shein and CapCut and AliExpress. And American lawmakers naively believe that the American market, the American audience, is valuable enough to be used as a bargaining chip. And they will busy themselves with games of regulatory whack-a-mole while China continues to conquer the rest of the internet.

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