Elon Musk may be adding another very strong player to its social media portfolio alongside X, the former Twitter. According to the agency, the Chinese owners of TikTok Bloomberg Due to the threat of a ban on this social network in the US, they are considering selling its American branch to Elon Musk. He has previously stated that he believes TikTok should not be banned in the US, which may have earned him some positive points with TikTok's owners.
TikTok has long been under threat of a ban in the US due to regulators there fearing espionage from China, from which ByteDance that operates TikTok comes from and to whose government it has (unsurprisingly) ties. According to some regulatory authorities, the collection of TikTok user data could be a big problem, as the data obtained in this way could be used by the Chinese government as intelligence information in a possible fight against the West. At the same time, TikTok is allegedly used to spread disinformation and subsequently influence users through it. Of course, the state of China is behind the spread of this disinformation.
If TikTok were to come under the wing of Elon Musk and thus its American part would become a truly American company instead of the current solution, TikTok's operation in the US should still be possible. However, it is a big question to what extent the American branch of TikTok would actually be independent and secure, as information is already leaking that the Chinese would continue to want to control it in a certain way, albeit under the supervision of Elon Musk. However, he has not yet commented on the whole matter and it is a question of whether he will comment at all, or how trustworthy his words will be. After all, X is sometimes full of jokes and is not afraid to make up stories here.
Well, I don't know, when I see the word "allegedly", it somehow gets lost in the text and one gets the feeling of the word "definitely", it's also wordplay, everyone is spying on everyone and using information to fight against them...
well, when I see titkok, the Chinese comrades don't even have to use information from the USA to fight against the USA and therefore espionage, they just need to enjoy how things are going in the USA and everywhere in the world down the line, they just have to wait 😀
so if someone's bare ass, price or cats threaten the security of the landscape based on the metadata from the videos, then they should probably think better
the problem is, as always, that you are looking for money behind everything, then these frog wars will show much more meaningful details, so I would rather put the question like this:
"Who's going to profit from this?"
And the talk about security is just a marketing "reason"... nothing more.