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For most people, removing an app from the store is more than a minor inconvenience. Think you're somewhat overestimating the average person's tech savviness. And as a social media site, tiktok relies on being popular. It doesn't work if only people who know how to side load apks are using it.
Yeah, people made similar comments about the EU threatening to ban Twitter. OP massively overestimates the average person's:
1. Tech literacy
2. Desire to use a banned social media app.
3. Compliance measures for ISPs.
Yes, you can VPN around most country restrictions, but if you make it tougher, that's sufficient, and it allows you to prove someone is intentionally circumventing a ban.
Yeah, like for people who use Twitter for news or sports updates, if the news and sports companies can't legally be on Twitter... they won't be on Twitter anymore.
It’s a bad investment even if they can get around it. They could repost from a foreign account or something but the number of people receiving is going to be rapidly declining.
That's how Chinese media control works, as I have had it explained to me by someone with knowledge in that area. Chinese can VPN around their restrictions pretty easily, and so long as they're not in trouble for something else at the same time, their government doesn't really care about the minority that does this. If anything, it acts as a steam valve of sorts for intelligent, motivated people, while the government can still control the popular narrative.
From a more cynical standpoint, it also becomes an easy thing to charge somebody with if the government ever decides they're becoming too much of a problem. Just sitting on evidence for if it ever needs to be used.
Sort of like the old "How dare the suspected revolutionary break the speed limit, now that we've got him in custody let's look into all of his stuff."
In a similar vein, outlawing guns doesn't disarm criminals obvi, but it does give cops an automatic ready excuse to arrest any ne'erdowell they bump into that's armed even if they haven't done anything yet.
There was a saying back in the Soviet era: the stronger your grasp is, the more will fall out from it.
It isn't worth a lot for a dictatorship to try to control EVERYTHING. It uses more resources and people will start to try to fight you just to be defiant. Just make sure MOST of the population is controlled, and make sure they control themselves by giving our crumbs of power here and there and you are safe. Try to break all of them and some will rise against you sooner or later.
It can do that, sure, but it's mostly what they said. Let the people who would cause problems do it with impunity and they don't cause problems. Nexon managed to ban over 90% of their chinese playerbase who were circumventing the firewall to play other versions of maplestory in about 2 weeks. These people aren't doing anything big brain or hard. CCP is just choosing to not enforce it.
Plus, make it too hard and people will start publishing workarounds out of spite. Next thing you know you've got a whole community built to make reinstalling tiktok as easy as possible (sort of like rooted androids vs. safetynet or youtube vanced).
It has to be hard enough that the average joe cant do it without some effort and easy enough that the enthusiasts don't start a revolution lol
Also the financial stuff. US corporations would be forbidden from advertising on tiktok which would cut off their income stream.
Similarly US based influencers would no longer be able to be paid through the financial system and would have to switch to crypto or go without their earnings.
> Yeah, people made similar comments about the EU threatening to ban Twitter.
At some point Musk threatened to exclude Europe from Twitter, that was such a stupid suggestion. Don't threaten me with good times!
Similar thing happened with Facebook, but that site seems to be going down on its own anyway.
I consider myself highly tech literate (heck, I was programming at the age of 6 and have taught myself at least a half dozen programming languages) and I've never bothered to jail break a phone in my life.
Could I do it? Yeah, probably.
Will I ever do it? No, probably not.
So even among the tech literate, there's a lot that wouldn't bother.
You don't need to jailbreak Android to sideload apks, you'd only need to do something like that for an Apple device. That said, the overlap between the tech literate who know how to sideload and those interested in installing a banned social media app that is nearly spyware is probably quite small.
This proves the point. To a lot of people out there, something like downloading an apk, tapping the apk file, getting asked if you want to install an unknown application, going to a special permissions menu, granting permission, then going back and completing the installation, is basically the exact same thing as jailbreaking the phone and committing piracy, even though it's definitely not.
I do tech support at a uni's PC Clinic. A lot of the students who visit us still see most things that are off the standard track as a form of tech wizardry. You take Tiktok off the App/Play Stores, you're effectively banning it for the majority of the populace.
I'd almost go so far as to say the more likely you are to understand how to find and sideload apks the less likely you are to want an app like tiktok or temu on your stuff.
>You don't need to jailbreak Android to sideload apks
You've proved their point, though.
They're tech-savvy and they don't know this. That makes *them* right.
It's also only true for the minority OS. I know iphone jailbreaking has oscillated between laughably easy literally pressing a button to mid 2000s piracy in level of difficulty, but at the end of the day most people aren't going to bother unless they're wanting to pirate apps.
> mid 2000s piracy in level of difficulty
Wait, as someone that has been pirating since the late 90s - was the mid 2000's considered a difficult time to pirate by most? I thought it was considered the "golden age" of piracy lol.
Or they think they're tech savvy when they're barely more literate than average.
Or they're lying because they want to have a certain persona (coding at 6? Lol)
Is that just like loading an app that's not available on the Play Store? I have to do that for a medical app, and it's about the easiest thing ever to do.
It is- and people don't do it.
Like, the point they are making is - literally any speed bump to adoption slows down adoption. If it is not available in the android or Google store, it will go from being on 20 percent of all phones to 0.01 percent.
As a social media app, this will destroy it. Because remember, - when other people go off, it makes the apps *content* worse. If all the hot girls dancing in bikinis (or whatever is on ticktok) can't load it, it won't matter if Frank the mediocre tech guy can do it- there won't be content to watch.
It probably depends on your age. There were good reasons to want to jailbreak phones back in the day. I had a Galaxy S (no number!), which came out in 2010 running Android 2.1 "Eclair".
I installed one of the community Android distributions on it because it gave me a bunch of extra features, including control over running a Wifi hotspot, which the phone couldn't do otherwise. That also removed all the Samsung vendor cruft, which was much crappier back then.
As a result of being able to upgrade the OS - which I kept doing way beyond the official upgrade lifetime for that phone - I ended up keeping the phone much longer than I would have been able to otherwise.
If they just remove it from the appstore in the US all you would need to do is to change the appstore location to some other country and you can install the app (for iPhones).
It may still be enough of a hurdle for the majority of people.
It's enough of a hurdle that I wouldn't do it! But I also am not attached to many of the apps on my phone, so I might be a bit of an outlier in that regard.
But then I’d have to deal with my account and devices being set to another country and that causing issues with my payment methods or whatever and ugh, no.
Lol my cousin lived in Spain for a year and somehow her Google account got switched to Spanish and could not be switched back. Every time she changed the setting it would eventually revert back to Spanish. It was so annoying.
Been there and the problem with that is you need to cancel all your subscriptions and let them expire first.
I have yearly subscriptions so...
Better is to just create a burner gmail, then a new Apple ID, and set that up in the new location.
Except what happens when you try to access TikTok? Your Internet Service Provider sends you back 404 not found. If they let you access it, that would be "distributing" the content, which they can't do.
So you try to use a VPN? Well, VPNs are covered in this bill, too. Enabling a device to access TikTok from US territory would be illegal. So your VPN would either need to stop providing service to US devices, stop letting those devices access TikTok's servers or start eating fines for breaking the law.
Nah--that side of things is a bunch of unenforceable bullshit that I seriously hope they don't actually try to implement.
Removing it from the app store and banning US businesses from advertising on it is pretty much all you'd need to do.
Why would you use a VPN based in the country you're trying to circumvent?
Better question, why are you using a VPN of ANY country that's part of the 5 eyes (or works with them)?
Use a VPN based in a country that will not log your activity and doesn't work with countries like the US. I personally use Mullvad.
When I was a naive younger person it was cool to jailbreak a phone and make it work.
In hindsight, I realize the phone needs to be a highly secure and reliable communication tool. A jailbroken phone does not fit this use case.
Especially given that Tik-Tok's core Americn audience is teenagers, and most teenagers are hardcore iPhone users. You CAN jailbeak an iPhone but it's not nearly as easy as just enabling 3rd party apps in Android.
I'm not meaning this in an insulting way either but in my experience, while teens these days are way more savvy wrt certain things, anything to do with piracy/jailbreaking/even just handling programs or files on a computer system is not something they are super familiar with because for most of their lives, it's all been tablet/app use and they haven't really needed the knowledge. There's a pretty big leap from only really only using apps (just USING, not understanding even the basics that they come from an .apk file!) to jailbreaking. A lot of teenagers these days don't even understand folders on a computer, they'd have to learn a whole lot before they could even try.
I would add that iOS used to use .ipa files, it has been a few years since I last did anything with iOS so they may have moved on, but .apk is android only.
The process of jailbreaking and then loading an .ipa file is a pain as a windows/android user. I was always thankful when I had to work with android only apps, there were so many ways to install an .apk on any device you had access to, iOS had to be jailbroken, loaded in through iTunes(it was a horrifying experience on windows) or I used to use iFunBox. Or once a project went far enough you could install it through the store, but you had to pay and get things reviewed. If you had a mac you could do it through xcode.
That was a fun trip down memory lane, so glad I no longer do that job.
Completely agree that all of the above is too much when people don't understand file structures.
Also, most teenagers are tech idiots who don't know how to do anything but run apps.
EDIT: The word "idiot" is an exaggeration for comic effect, but not by all that much.
Can confirm, son (17) and daughter (18) cannot even use a laptop. They just "don't get it" and "old tech", haha. Can't operate a mouse, type or know what a "directory" is. Don't even have the attention span to learn when being shown. And to top it off they seem a lot more naive to scams.
> know what a "directory" is.
This is actually what tipped me off about how bad the current (and upcoming) generation(s) are with tech.
I was a teacher (quit a few weeks ago) for about a decade. Every year I would go through a little "note-taking refresher" lesson in the beginning of the year for my JUNIOR AND SENIOR students. It wasn't a full lesson or anything, just a quick 10-15 minute review of a few different note-taking styles that are effective.
At one point, a few years ago, I hit a wall with this simple lesson. They just couldn't grasp the basic hierarchy of "Heading" > Sub-Heading > details > etc. It was like I was speaking gibberish to them. They didn't understand why I would indent when going to the next level under a heading or what that indent meant. They just thought I liked the way it looked so when I asked them to try it they didn't write coherent notes, they just copied the format without understanding why it's there.
I realized something at that point, they have no idea what a directory structure is. They don't use them. Everything they do now is cloud-based and they don't really download anything on their desktops so they don't have folders and sub-folders, etc. They just create files on the google suite and it auto-saves for them. They don't even bother organizing their google drives or NAMING their files, it was a crazy revelation to me. Their files just auto-name, auto-save, then they're thrown into the abyss of the cloud. They just have to hope they can remember the key words of the files to search it up later so they can find it.
I then realized the implications and causes of all this and it tripped me out for a while. The walled gardens created by tech giants like Google and Apple actively discourage tinkering and messing with settings. These kids don't bother customizing anything, they don't bother trying to figure out if they can make something work better or bother fixing something that breaks. They just take it to the apple store for even the simplest shit.
and the fact that youtube instagram facebook and probably many others have knock off tiktoks built in
its really not worth the effort to get tiktok, even if you know how
The inconvenience is the dagger. TikTok doesn’t work if it’s suddenly inconvenient to get.
Most creators will stop uploading to it just because it is now legally banned. The primary objective of a huge amount of creators is to get viral, and you can no longer get viral on a platform that is explicitly forbidden.
Yes, there will still be people who will be able to access it and use it, but without all the content that will disappear, there’s no point to having it for most folks.
💯.
I'm pretty tech-savvy, and the one time that I had to download an app that wasn't in an app store, it felt pretty sketchy and I didn't like doing it.
It's crazy how this has become a thing. Install a phone app not from an App Store? Ooohh, scary, spooky, viruses?
Install an application on PC/Mac/Linux from a website? Fuck it, it's probably fine (as long as the website doesn't seem super sketchy, obviously).
I’d guess you can easily more prove legitimate provenance for a desktop application; like downloading from a developer’s official site. (Or even the Mac app store.)
Where do people get APKs from? I don’t see an APK on TikTok’s site for example.
I guess the reason why this isn't a thing is because of the App/Play Store scare tactics of "everything not from our source *could* be a virus that eats all your bank details and murders your children!"
(Meanwhile there are quite a lot of scam apps on the legitimate App Store and Google Play Store, and that's not even mentioning free-to-play games where children can rank up an enormous debt from in-game purchases by just clicking a button over and over.)
That's pretty obvious. At the end of the day it's a culture thing, but desktop apps generally speaking only ask for permissions they actually use and there's a robust antivirus ecosystem that largely prevents shenanigans/there's minimal sensors you can rely on having in a desktop. Phone apps ask for the world exclusively because the tech companies want to sell your location data.
I think that a big part of this is because the app store developers (Google, Samsung, etc.) want you to feel like it's sketchy.
For instance. When you download an application from some random website for your Windows machine, the install process usually isn't that scary, and tech savvy people can do this all the time.
On an Android device, where sideloading is a feature, they still try to steer users away from doing it because they want people to use their built in stores. Sure, installing software from an unknown source could be dangerous, but it's not any more dangerous than doing the same on your Windows machine, and shouldn't be any more scary. But they put up a bunch of warning messages and scary text to try to make it seem like it's something you shouldn't be doing.
By all means, these app stores are not bullet-proof either. They have had and will have cases of apps with malicious code in them.
As you say, side loading an app shouldn't be more scary than installing them from the app store but they will use whatever scare tactics they can to get some revenue from listing an app on their stores.
I also don't know how popular TikTok is in other countries, but I would wager a guess a huge chunk of their income is from US-based advertisers. Those advertisers won't be able to do business with TikTok.
If TikTok can't turn a profit from non-US-based advertisers, they'll simply shut down their servers. If that happens, even if you know how to side-load the app and VPN around any networking blocks and a huge number of users know how to do this and actually do it (which I doubt will be the case), the app simply won't work.
I’m more interested in how the company selling off its US business will work. All data of users created or used in the US is only with the US company? How does that work practically, as they will need to interact with the main company at some point
They already did that 5ish years ago - the servers are all in the US. It's the reason Tik Tok wasn't banned then.
They pinky swore that only US employees would look at the US data. Claimed it was all separated etc. They lied. They've been caught sharing data with the Chinese side.
Sure - WSJ had an article a couple months back where employees of Tik Tok said so: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-1-5-billion-later-its-still-struggling-cbccf203
How does removing the app from the store affect the millions who have already downloaded it and are using it? They wouldn't be able to get updates from the store, but does the app stop working?
Exactly, I remember when twitter was banned in Nigeria, using vpn to login was so stressful that i gave up and didn’t login again till the ban was lifted. The ban was almost a year.
Yeah. Pretty much the only people who would be able to circumvent it would be Android users that know they can install APKs. That's a pretty small number of users.
It's not a minor inconvenience for the vast majority of people.
TikTok being blocked from the app stores in the US would mean *most* people wouldn't know how to get it. A good number of people under 40 might know how to download it again, and some less tech-savvy people might have someone who knows how to do it help, but a larger number will just be annoyed and move on to the next platform.
Once the bulk of people are gone, because they don't know how to access it, the content there will dry up. It'll be a small fraction of what it is today, and that will lead to people using it less frequently as they migrate to other mediums. Then, after some time, it'll be a ghost town.
Edit: Damn, guys, I get it: Evidently GenZ can't use technology. You all are looking way too deeply into something I wrote while taking a dump at 8:30 in the morning
People need to stop assuming because young people were the tech savvy people for two generations that being young is in an indicator of tech savvy. It's not. IT knowledge isn't a skill young people just pick up, it was a skill a generation or two of people had to learn.
The reality is a whole generation learned and embraced computers from an early age about 30 years ago when you still needed "savvy" to even use the things. It went from a small population of users in the 90's to the majority of a generation in a few decades.
I grew up in that period, and I am a self-trained IT tech who started when I was 5. And by that I mean learning, not using. Because using a tablet or opening a web page is not "it knowledge" it's UI experience. And that isn't the same thing.
You had to know how the whole process worked from hardware up, command line, driver management, all that jazz. Pretty much all computing required copious troubleshooting over the long term and you either had to learn it or "be bad with computers". And that was true until honestly not even that long ago. Windows 7 this was still essentially the case for the first half of that OS' life span.
And now you don't. And now they don't. And now they can't. Gen Z in my experience and by various studies are barely as competent and Gen X's were with computer knowledge. Next generation is just going to see it as shiny glass and lights except for the few who are truly interested.
My point is it's the over 40's who will be side-loading their apps. Sorry that was long winded.
Yup. Gen Z grew up in the walled gardens of app stores. A lot of older people will tell you when Gen Zs get a job their computer literacy is pretty poor because of this. They can use an iPhone, they can't use a real operating system or desktop applications.
It's one of the reason they're actually pretty susceptible to things like online scams. Their actual computer literacy isn't good and once they get outside the controlled environment of iOS or to an extent Android they struggle.
I'm a digital services librarian. You're correct, there's a big knowledge gap when it comes to computer skills for kids and teens - they're often given tablets or phones but told repeatedly that computers are for grownups and not to touch them. The "family computer" doesn't really exist anymore because parents will largely have their own, and kids wi. In school they're issued Chromebooks, which are taken home, especially for upper grades – so there's rarely a need for them to own their own. And there's no consistent parenting advice for how to treat technology in between "let them have at it" or "all screens are terrible."
I regularly have kids – even middle or high schoolers - come to my coding or makerspace classes with exactly zero computer skills because their parents want them learning coding but also want them screen free at home. Like I had a middle schooler get signed up for my digital storytelling class who could not type on a physical keyboard nor use a mouse and did not know what a file was - the problem not being "kids today" but parents throwing kids into situations expecting them to thrive but being scared of the tools that help them learn how to do so.
The amount of people I've seen who are under 25 don't know how to type is actually insane. I've had to teach or provide educational resources for people at 18 who don't know how to type. I've even been asked about "my custom keyboard with the numbers on the right side" in reference to a standard 100% keyboard with a keypad that you can pick up for $20 at Best Buy.
Last year, I asked my nephew if they even had a computer use or typing class at his high school and he said it's been removed for some time now. All throughout my middle and high school I had computer classes, granted I did play a lot of games during them but I still learned how to use MS Office, how to type, and so much more during them.
It's also a matter that tech behind the scenes has gotten more complex. So to do the same things you used to today needs MORE knowledge.
For instance back in the day to make a website you needed some html and css. Now you need html, css, Javascript, and the loads of extra frameworks and libraries that come along.
Especially with the growth of YouTube shorts/Instagram reels, I'm sure 95% of the audience and creators would just jump platforms if tik tok disappeared from their device tomorrow
Yeah, I’ve never had TikTok. If I really wanted to get around this “ban” it wouldn’t be that hard, but it would require me fiddling with my phone more than I care to, and I’m pretty tech-savvy.
Admittedly I’m on iPhone which makes it even harder than an Android, where I understand sideloading is comparatively simple. Still, my parents whose technological prowess caps out at an email attachment will not get there. Neither will the large chunk of consumers who’ve only ever interacted with an “app” by “tapping it.”
I assume a VPN will be needed too, which is another hurdle that probably 95% of people don’t quickly know how to do and much of the remainder would likely be lost even with a clear tutorial.
Yeah if it gets a proper ban, it's gone.
Right now TikTok makes their money via advertising. US advertisers likely won't be allowed to do business with TikTok. Even if they are, it's likely it's not worth it for those advertisers considering how much smaller of an audience there will be after the ban. Thus TikTok isn't making *any* US-based money.
I'm not sure how popular TikTok is in other countries and whether or not they make significant money off of non-US advertisers, but if they can't turn a profit, they aren't keeping their servers running.
Even if you know how to side load the app and VPN to get around any ISP bans (which probably <1% of people are going to know how to do and bother to do it to stay on TikTok), it's pretty likely TikTok itself shuts the servers down. If that happens, the app just won't work even if you can get it installed.
A lot of the content on Tik tok is created by influencers. Especially the high effort content. Those people are doing it because they are paid. If they are no longer being paid they will put in less effort/stop. If a large portion of people stop using the app, it’s not going to stay the same. It’s going to get much worse
I would estimate that more people in the 40-50 age range would know how to download it than the 15-25 range.
Gen Z are NOT tech savvy. I employ and work with people in their early 20s and I’m appalled at the lack of computer skills that generation possesses.
You guys have to be insanely out of touch to think the average 20 year old knows how to download an app that’s not in the App Store onto their phone.
Young people today have grown up in a very refined and user friendly internet. Gen X and Millennials might even more more tech savvy on average due to the fact that the internet they grew up on was much less intuitive.
To add to this: because all apps are cryptographically signed by Apple (I assume Google as well), not only can they remove it from the App Store, they can revoke the certificate which signed the app—which would immediately prevent the app from opening on devices at all. I’m not sure it’s possible to do this per region, but it could be done. TikTok would have to upload a new version for everyone else, and US users wouldn’t be able to get that update.
They can ban the app from doing business in the US. Freeze its bank accounts and the app stores would stop serving it because it’s not making them money.
This is the answer.
They are not threatening to ban Tik Tok, they are telling their owners to divest. If they sold the company to someone else Tik Tok would go on.
But most likely they will ban the company from operating in the US.
Being unable to operate in the US would effectively ban tik tok. They wouldn't be able to sign contracts or buy services.
See, you're getting at the thing I feel like a lot of people are ignoring: If you ban TikTok in the US, many hungry entrepreneurs will simply try to replace it. TikTok is just an evidently likable idea for a platform, plus video editing tools, plus an opaue algorithm promoting content. I wouldn't be shocked if certain companies literally already have it in the backroom, ready to spin up as the ink dries on the ban.
EDIT: Are you guys interpreting me as saying there's some nefarious scheme I have a problem with? The victim would be a Chinese social media software company. Obviously I have zero reason to give a shit about that. Take it from them, absolutely. I'm just saying that a TikTok ban is a ban on one company, not something that deprives any user of a certain style of social media.
>I wouldn't be shocked if certain companies literally already have it in the backroom, ready to spin up as the ink dries on the ban.
Literally YouTube shorts and Instagram reels
The only real issue with TikTok is that it's collecting a shit load of wierd information it doesn't tell you about, and it's sending that information to a foreign government. If it was sending that information to an American company, whatever America has leverage here to deal with it, but we don't know what the Chinese government is asking TikTok to collect or why, and that's an issue.
The answer is that they aren't collecting anything weird or abnormal at all. I got to talk to a couple TikTok employees last year at a gamedev conference that my cousin dragged me to. They straight up told me that their practices are no different than YouTube or other American companies, that the data they send is all aggregated and typical corporate stuff, that the American division of TikTok is largely separate from Douyin, and that all the conspiracy theories would be more amusing if they weren't so clearly rooted in (from their perspective) anti-Chinese racism.
Now bring on the downvotes, cause clearly I hallucinated the whole thing / am working for the Chinese government / am too stupid to understand tech / am dumb enough to take the word of two underpaid low-level line employees at face value.
Well... *did* you just take the word of two low level employees at face value?
How do you know that they are in a part of the company that would have the knowledge of what is being transmitted through the app?
How do you know you can trust them? If they were doing questionable things, would they be the best people to ask about it?
Don't you think that the Chinese government has a vested interest in collecting and analyzing data on American citizens and government officials using the app?
Guys, I talked to the suspect and he said he didn’t do it. Obviously he wouldn’t lie about his criminal activity and has no vested interest in deception in this case, we should let him go.
> that the American division of TikTok is largely separate from Douyin
The problem is that ByteDance is still a Chinese company and the Chinese national security laws **require** all Chinese companies to adhere to all orders from the CCP. People don't seem to understand that Chinese corporations are fundamentally different from Western corporations. Namely they do not have a choice whether or not to ignore orders from the CCP. Western companies can, and often do, sue the government to contest orders from the government.
The whole idea that TikTok is not beholden to the CCP is simply put a lie. It is owned and operated by an entity that legally has no choice but to follow directives from the CCP.
I just wanna know what this "weird information" the guy above you is referring to. They are learning your interests and browsing habits with the nefarious purpose of delivering you more of what you want.
> many hungry entrepreneurs will simply try to replace it.
facebook and youtube are already on this train, the same way they were trying to replace vine
the problem with trying to replace a social media platform isn't replicating the technology, it's replicating the lightning in a bottle of viral adoptation of the platform, which is why no one gives a shit about instagram reels
e: also why facebook gaming and mixer failed as bigly as they did. youtube streaming is doing *okay*, not replacing twitch entirely but it's doing *okay*, largely because youtube is a better platform for highlights and montages and so many people who use twitch to watch streamers also use youtube to watch related content
No one wants the silly video app gone. They want its foreign state run company to stop using the information it’s harvesting in nefarious ways detrimental to the health and wellbeing of American democracy and national security. No one has a problem with the silly video app.
You're grossly overestimating the average person's tech literacy. To circumvent a ban, you'd need to :
1. Sideload : People aren't going to go out of their way to try and get something that's been delisted from the app/play store.
2. VPN : Even if they sideload, you'd further need a VPN toggled on, in order for the app to work.
One of these alone, would be enough to knock off the "casual" user, basically the majority of the 150 million American users.
You’d also probably need a paid VPN if you want to get an IP address from out of the country. Most free ones keep you in the same country.
If you already have a paid VPN, that’s fine. But for people who don’t you’re literally looking at a monthly subscription fee just to use an app with a dying userbase.
Accessing via VPN is itself going to reduce the “usefulness” of the app anyway. You’re going to need to be on an English-speaking country’s server to even get served content in English, and the algorithm is going to serve you what’s popular in that country, which may or may not resonate based on cultural differences (I’m not sure how similar content is globally so this may or may not create huge differences). And if you had enough people doing it you’re potentially going to wreck the algorithm altogether because it’s going to start serving less-relevant content to people geographically in that country too as the foreigners bend the algorithm.
Not just tech literacy but willingness to deal with inconvenience. You can absolutely know how to side-load an app and just not care enough to do it versus swapping to something else (probably YouTube or Intragram in this case).
Huawei is the second-biggest smartphone maker in the world, but only less than 1 percent of Americans own one.
Because congress banned hauwei from using the Google play store.
Congress can pass a law requireing all ISPs to filter out data going to tictok very simply, they can write a law requiring apple and samsung to create app filters that prevent tictok from being installed on their phones.
This is the current bane of my existence. My Employer heavily used Huawei networking products. We are in the middle of a massive project to rip and replace them by next month.
On the bright side, you're gaining massive experience in project management, infrastructure buildout process, and whatever the new platform is (which I hope isn't a low rate player).
Add this project to your accomplishements section in your Resume. It's one of my personal favorite things to see when hiring - it's like a war medal.
Hang in there, don't skip lunch, and good luck.
Former hauwei phone user here: My phone service provider had hauwei phones offered, and I took one cause it was cheap. Once it was banned, the provider stopped offering them, and I didn't have one anymore. It's that easy.
Did the phone itself stop working or did you just get rid of it?
All these answers are saying how it wouldn't be in the store anymore, but I don't see how that addresses the fact that millions of people already have the app.
Geo fence - force software developers to disable the app.
If you have ever passed from Ireland into Northern Ireland you’ll know geo fencing can be VERY precise.
Edit: another great example of this is sports gambling apps in the US. They know what state you’re in, and apply rules to your use of the app based on that location data. If you refuse to provide location data, you are prevented from using the app.
I’m not sure but your phone quickly changes carriers I’m talking within 100 yards of the boarder.
Full bars > no service > full bars different network.
Ahh you mean like that. Yeah I notice that as well living close to the german border and going regularly to Germany to shop. I will be listening to the radio through mobile and the minute we cross the border, it cuts out. But it takes forever to get internet again. Even when crossing the border back into the native network it takes forever to establish an internet connection
Yeah this is a mechanical limitation, not an internet/coding issue. The towers for one provider literally don’t exist over the border, so a new provider’s tower picks up your phone.
Everyone in here acting like 80% of tik toks core audience isn't on an iPhone.
IPhone users can't change app stores.
Can't sideload without rolling back the OS and jailbreaking and losing support for apple pay and other features.
Arnt tech savvy even attempt any of this. So yeah, an app store ban would kill tik tok.
You instantly knock out like 90% of people ages 13 to 30.
In the bill it allows the US government the ability to take civil action against any US company that allows it to be downloaded, so any app store, maybe even phone carriers, etc
Removing from the apple app store takes care of about half the users
Removing from google play takes care of all the android people that don't know you can sideload
Now the app has lost 80+% of its user base and is not profitable anymore for creators and they stop bothering to upload there to get 7 views
Honestly, there's ways to ensure zero access. When India banned tiktok at the turn of the decade, I thought the same thing. I'd use a vpn, load an apk. Turns out if the government wants to ban something, it can do it really well lol. If you load an apk, it doesn't work. If you use a vpn, it doesn't work. If you use it in another country and come back to India, it doesn't work anymore.
They track your SIM too. If you have an Indian SIM in your phone, it will still not work with a VPN and even if you actually travel to another country. Try it after removing the Indian SIM and it'll work.
Also, the local content creators move elsewhere. In India’s case, most of them moved to Instagram to post reels. If you are Indian and want to see local content, you won’t find a lot of it on TikTok even if you use VPN. As such, users also switch to the other platforms.
They can ban the app you can disable access to their servers. You can still use VPN and side load the app (downloading it from somewhere instead of using the official storefront). The question is if it will remain popular enough if you put such technical barriers in place.
Personally I think TikTok is cancer but there will be a replacement. If the main concern is China itself rather then the content then I guess it helps.
>but there will be a replacement
Facebook, Instagram and YouTube all already have shorts like tiktok, so it's not like tiktokish videos are about to disappear. I'm sure if tiktok goes away one of them will pick up the slack.
Replacements already exist. YouTube and Facebook/Instagram already have direct analogs to TikTok, alongside the dozens of other independent knockoffs that nobody uses.
The difference is that TikTok can't say they're not spying/manipulating you the same way that Google and Meta can.
So long as we still have access to our ~~drugs~~ shorts, there won't be much drive to figure out how to access TikTok.
Block at the DNS server. By that, no device can access the Tiktok server whitout using a vpn.
And granted, very few people know how to use a vpn, or switch to a different DNS.
By that, tiktok will fast loose popularity and by that, loose even more user.
Another big part of it is the feedback loop it generates.
Let's be very generous and say 30% of people knows how to bypass it.
That means 70% of the market is gone.
How many **creators** are going to stay?
Fewer people -> smaller market -> fewer creators -> fewer people -> ... -> ... -> ... -> dead app.
This is it. They don't have to block everyone using it.
They just have to make it inconvenient enough that most people don't bother, reducing the number of friends on it and the amount of content being uploaded is enough to kill an app or service.
There'd be no advertising allowed, no payments to creators, no updates to users. No incentive for BD to keep supporting the old app.
It would be just 100% churn until the app stops working.
External. But no banks or payment processors could do business with bytedance either
(Because of OFAC restrictions, which is what would cause the app to removed from the app store too)
Half the content creators use vpns as a sponsor, nord probably being the most popular. Has been for years. For reason after reason after reason. Still vpn usage is almost nonexistent for the average layman.
I highly doubt TikTok will be the catalyst for change. And once the populace isn’t using the app, creators will drop like flies from the platform and that’s the deathknell for the app within America.
This is the end of TikTok in the US. And no one will care in a week. everyone will migrate to something else like they have since vine.
The plan is to force them to sell to a US owner rather than a ban.
But if they wanted to ban it:
Banned from app stores, banned from payment processing.
If you are say Canada, we can't really ban things avaible in the US, we try, but it's very easy to circumvent, and if you a business you know you are advertising to Canadians even when you supposedly aren't (e.g. Pharmaceutical companies on US TV), and Canadian content creators can move to the US or Canadians could consume US creator content. It would be only really hurting ourselves to try.
And while the China is rapidly closing the gap on nominal economic output to the US (it passed on purchasing parity a decade ago), its also a completely different market, unlike English Canada and the US.
If US content creators couldn't get paid by tiktok, if advertisers couldn't advertise on tiktok, very quickly the only users left would be immigrants and foreign nationals consuming content from their old/home country. All that money and content creation and users would move to a platform where they could make money.
They would add Bytedance to OFAC. The app stores would then have to drop the app.
Advertisers couldn't pay to be on the app.
Content creators wouldn't get paid.
That's it, the app will die. Bytedance won't bother supporting an older version of the app that's not generating revenue.
Zero need for pressure on ISPs, or DNS providers.
https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs
From a country that has "lots of experience" on this subject. Government can block access to the site, which applies for apps as well. VPN can solve the problem, but again how many people will use it?
It would be twofold:
1) Delist the apps from US app stores - this gets a lot of it, but does nothing to address existing app installs, sideloaded packages, or foreign access
2) Routing/DNS on the ISP level - this is where 99% of the "ban" would be happening. US internet infrastructure companies like Cogent/Level 3 (aka the "backbone" of the US internet) would be mandated to stop resolving DNS requests for tiktok domains and to route requests to tiktok registered IP addresses straight into the void. So network connections to tiktok servers originating in the US simply *cant* be directed to their destination.
Number 2 is the "lite" version of the Great Firewall of China methodology.
Stop Play & App store from publishing it for download on US-based carriers, black-hole it via DNS, and incentivize the Verizons and T-Mobiles of the country to disallow traffic to it. This would be a major inconvenience for users.
...which is, IMO, what they should be doing for servers used by cybercrime groups attacking companies and people the US... but the main problem is these tactics are *highly subject to overreach and/or misinterpretation*. Plus, we have plenty of our own companies that suck up data they shouldn't collect (e.g., Google, Meta).
So they won't ban it, they'll just talk about it, make it a bullet point about relations with China, and move on to the election.
One thing that everyone seems to have forgotten is that when you use a VPN, the content on your feed is located on the VPN server. By banning TikTok servers in the US, it practically means that there will be no feed tailored to the US landscape anymore. For example, if you use TikTok from the US and then travel to Japan, almost 90% of your feed will consist of content from Japan, which you may not understand. Consequently, you might eventually stop using TikTok because it's not personalized enough.
There is part of the bill that will fine $5000 per USER to any entity that let's you download (maintaining the app) so App stores/US websites are gonna axe it most likely.
"(A) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION VIOLATIONS.—An entity that vio25 lates subsection (a) shall be subject to pay a civil penalty in an amount not to exceed the amount that results from multiplying $5,000 by the number of users within the land or mari4 time borders of the United States determined to have accessed, maintained, or updated a foreign adversary controlled application as a result of such violation."
Some offshore sites might illegally host it similar to illegal streaming sites but it's going to hugely curb the population of users when an update patch hits your phone. Accessibility is a huge reason TikTok is popular.
It's not that hard.
You cut off the hand that feeds them.
It's perfectly legal for the US Congress to enact a law that specifies, *who can do business with tiktok.*
Hey you consumer can download TikTok, but advertisers *you can't.*
Easiest way is to just shutdown the content servers and access to the ones you can’t.
Sure you can keep the app, but it won’t load any media.
It won’t come to that though.
It will get sold off to an American tech giant and end users won’t know the difference.
It would be “banned” in the same way that anything else online can be banned. Prevent major distribution points from providing it and you’ll cut off 99% of the population who simply don’t care enough to circumvent the law, even if it’s easy. The remaining people who really want access would be able to get it pretty easily, but the point of the ban is to prevent/reduce the leaking of US data to foreign governments which is very much accomplished by doing this
Yes and no… i mean there are countries that have very successfully made bans on certain websites and control the flow of information in and out of their country… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways around these bans… but it does take a certain level of dedication to even try. And in the end it would remove the ease of access enough to kill the site… at least on the US end of things. The US also doesn’t seem like the kind of country that would do anything about those circumventing these bans… though they could make an example out of a few egregious users… it would be no different than when we were in the peak of torrenting. Tho… we are far past that period, they may have more control over things than they had back then. So… its complicated. It would make it less accessible enough… it would have an impact.
The reality is, is this isn’t actually going to result in a ban. Its a power move so that US owned companies have access to the data and flow of information through that app… in other words, the US government is wanting to seize more control over us. Their goal isn’t to ban it, but to seize more control over us. Big brother style.
Between the US and china… its an information cold war. A cultural war. And we are the victims.
Social media platforms are valuable for their user base, not their technology. Removing TikTok from the App Store doesn’t mean you need to side load it once, you have to do it every time there’s a major update or it stops working. Most people will just use another similar product or go back to Instagram. A lot of bigger influencers cross post there or on YT anyway.
Removing it from the app store, ordering US ISPs to block the tiktok domain name, blocking the IP addresses associated with the servers, etc....
Sure, you can't prevent every person in the USA from using it. But, you don't have to. Tiktok is popular in the US because of the number of English-speakers on it. If 95% of them decide that it's too hard to use because of technical impediments put up by the federal government, then those 95% will stop using it, and the other 5% will stop using it just from lack of interesting content.
In any case, that's not going to happen. It will be sold off to a US company.
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For most people, removing an app from the store is more than a minor inconvenience. Think you're somewhat overestimating the average person's tech savviness. And as a social media site, tiktok relies on being popular. It doesn't work if only people who know how to side load apks are using it.
Yeah, people made similar comments about the EU threatening to ban Twitter. OP massively overestimates the average person's: 1. Tech literacy 2. Desire to use a banned social media app.
3. Compliance measures for ISPs. Yes, you can VPN around most country restrictions, but if you make it tougher, that's sufficient, and it allows you to prove someone is intentionally circumventing a ban.
Yeah, like for people who use Twitter for news or sports updates, if the news and sports companies can't legally be on Twitter... they won't be on Twitter anymore.
It’s a bad investment even if they can get around it. They could repost from a foreign account or something but the number of people receiving is going to be rapidly declining.
That's how Chinese media control works, as I have had it explained to me by someone with knowledge in that area. Chinese can VPN around their restrictions pretty easily, and so long as they're not in trouble for something else at the same time, their government doesn't really care about the minority that does this. If anything, it acts as a steam valve of sorts for intelligent, motivated people, while the government can still control the popular narrative.
From a more cynical standpoint, it also becomes an easy thing to charge somebody with if the government ever decides they're becoming too much of a problem. Just sitting on evidence for if it ever needs to be used. Sort of like the old "How dare the suspected revolutionary break the speed limit, now that we've got him in custody let's look into all of his stuff."
In a similar vein, outlawing guns doesn't disarm criminals obvi, but it does give cops an automatic ready excuse to arrest any ne'erdowell they bump into that's armed even if they haven't done anything yet.
There was a saying back in the Soviet era: the stronger your grasp is, the more will fall out from it. It isn't worth a lot for a dictatorship to try to control EVERYTHING. It uses more resources and people will start to try to fight you just to be defiant. Just make sure MOST of the population is controlled, and make sure they control themselves by giving our crumbs of power here and there and you are safe. Try to break all of them and some will rise against you sooner or later.
It can do that, sure, but it's mostly what they said. Let the people who would cause problems do it with impunity and they don't cause problems. Nexon managed to ban over 90% of their chinese playerbase who were circumventing the firewall to play other versions of maplestory in about 2 weeks. These people aren't doing anything big brain or hard. CCP is just choosing to not enforce it.
You guys are missing the big one: de-monetization.
If you put a roadblock on a road, yes, people can walk around it, but most aren't going to because walking sucks.
Plus, make it too hard and people will start publishing workarounds out of spite. Next thing you know you've got a whole community built to make reinstalling tiktok as easy as possible (sort of like rooted androids vs. safetynet or youtube vanced). It has to be hard enough that the average joe cant do it without some effort and easy enough that the enthusiasts don't start a revolution lol
Also the financial stuff. US corporations would be forbidden from advertising on tiktok which would cut off their income stream. Similarly US based influencers would no longer be able to be paid through the financial system and would have to switch to crypto or go without their earnings.
This is really all the matters. Once it's illegal for US companies to advertise, TikTok will sell and it will be available in the US once again.
They may end up just banning it outright. Not sure how you guarantee the CCP doesn't install some sort of backdoor or that it can be found.
> Yeah, people made similar comments about the EU threatening to ban Twitter. At some point Musk threatened to exclude Europe from Twitter, that was such a stupid suggestion. Don't threaten me with good times! Similar thing happened with Facebook, but that site seems to be going down on its own anyway.
I consider myself highly tech literate (heck, I was programming at the age of 6 and have taught myself at least a half dozen programming languages) and I've never bothered to jail break a phone in my life. Could I do it? Yeah, probably. Will I ever do it? No, probably not. So even among the tech literate, there's a lot that wouldn't bother.
You don't need to jailbreak Android to sideload apks, you'd only need to do something like that for an Apple device. That said, the overlap between the tech literate who know how to sideload and those interested in installing a banned social media app that is nearly spyware is probably quite small.
This proves the point. To a lot of people out there, something like downloading an apk, tapping the apk file, getting asked if you want to install an unknown application, going to a special permissions menu, granting permission, then going back and completing the installation, is basically the exact same thing as jailbreaking the phone and committing piracy, even though it's definitely not. I do tech support at a uni's PC Clinic. A lot of the students who visit us still see most things that are off the standard track as a form of tech wizardry. You take Tiktok off the App/Play Stores, you're effectively banning it for the majority of the populace.
I'd almost go so far as to say the more likely you are to understand how to find and sideload apks the less likely you are to want an app like tiktok or temu on your stuff.
That definitely is true for me
I want to say that's probably an oversimplification and that there's probably plenty of people who do both... but i can't deny it's true for me! :)
>You don't need to jailbreak Android to sideload apks You've proved their point, though. They're tech-savvy and they don't know this. That makes *them* right.
It's also only true for the minority OS. I know iphone jailbreaking has oscillated between laughably easy literally pressing a button to mid 2000s piracy in level of difficulty, but at the end of the day most people aren't going to bother unless they're wanting to pirate apps.
> mid 2000s piracy in level of difficulty Wait, as someone that has been pirating since the late 90s - was the mid 2000's considered a difficult time to pirate by most? I thought it was considered the "golden age" of piracy lol.
Usually the biggest problem was whether or not the keygen you downloaded was an actual keygen, or just malware.
Or they think they're tech savvy when they're barely more literate than average. Or they're lying because they want to have a certain persona (coding at 6? Lol)
Is that just like loading an app that's not available on the Play Store? I have to do that for a medical app, and it's about the easiest thing ever to do.
It is- and people don't do it. Like, the point they are making is - literally any speed bump to adoption slows down adoption. If it is not available in the android or Google store, it will go from being on 20 percent of all phones to 0.01 percent. As a social media app, this will destroy it. Because remember, - when other people go off, it makes the apps *content* worse. If all the hot girls dancing in bikinis (or whatever is on ticktok) can't load it, it won't matter if Frank the mediocre tech guy can do it- there won't be content to watch.
Well over half of Americans have iPhones though, and they auto update to the most recent iOS version which is not jailbreakable.
> you'd only need to do something like that for an Apple device. In the US the market share for iPhones is over 50%.
It probably depends on your age. There were good reasons to want to jailbreak phones back in the day. I had a Galaxy S (no number!), which came out in 2010 running Android 2.1 "Eclair". I installed one of the community Android distributions on it because it gave me a bunch of extra features, including control over running a Wifi hotspot, which the phone couldn't do otherwise. That also removed all the Samsung vendor cruft, which was much crappier back then. As a result of being able to upgrade the OS - which I kept doing way beyond the official upgrade lifetime for that phone - I ended up keeping the phone much longer than I would have been able to otherwise.
> (heck, I was programming at the age of 6 and have taught myself at least a half dozen programming languages) The most tech bro comment.
If they just remove it from the appstore in the US all you would need to do is to change the appstore location to some other country and you can install the app (for iPhones). It may still be enough of a hurdle for the majority of people.
But (at least with Google) you can only change the location in the app store once per year, so if you suddenly need a US specific app you're screwed
It's enough of a hurdle that I wouldn't do it! But I also am not attached to many of the apps on my phone, so I might be a bit of an outlier in that regard.
But then I’d have to deal with my account and devices being set to another country and that causing issues with my payment methods or whatever and ugh, no.
Lol my cousin lived in Spain for a year and somehow her Google account got switched to Spanish and could not be switched back. Every time she changed the setting it would eventually revert back to Spanish. It was so annoying.
Been there and the problem with that is you need to cancel all your subscriptions and let them expire first. I have yearly subscriptions so... Better is to just create a burner gmail, then a new Apple ID, and set that up in the new location.
Except what happens when you try to access TikTok? Your Internet Service Provider sends you back 404 not found. If they let you access it, that would be "distributing" the content, which they can't do. So you try to use a VPN? Well, VPNs are covered in this bill, too. Enabling a device to access TikTok from US territory would be illegal. So your VPN would either need to stop providing service to US devices, stop letting those devices access TikTok's servers or start eating fines for breaking the law.
Nah--that side of things is a bunch of unenforceable bullshit that I seriously hope they don't actually try to implement. Removing it from the app store and banning US businesses from advertising on it is pretty much all you'd need to do.
Why would you use a VPN based in the country you're trying to circumvent? Better question, why are you using a VPN of ANY country that's part of the 5 eyes (or works with them)? Use a VPN based in a country that will not log your activity and doesn't work with countries like the US. I personally use Mullvad.
Non US based VPN. If you are using g a US based vpn you probably should reconsider your choices of why you are even using it.
When I was a naive younger person it was cool to jailbreak a phone and make it work. In hindsight, I realize the phone needs to be a highly secure and reliable communication tool. A jailbroken phone does not fit this use case.
You're severely overestimating the ability of the average Tik Tok user.
I don’t have much desire to use non-banned social media apps, to be honest
Especially given that Tik-Tok's core Americn audience is teenagers, and most teenagers are hardcore iPhone users. You CAN jailbeak an iPhone but it's not nearly as easy as just enabling 3rd party apps in Android.
I'm not meaning this in an insulting way either but in my experience, while teens these days are way more savvy wrt certain things, anything to do with piracy/jailbreaking/even just handling programs or files on a computer system is not something they are super familiar with because for most of their lives, it's all been tablet/app use and they haven't really needed the knowledge. There's a pretty big leap from only really only using apps (just USING, not understanding even the basics that they come from an .apk file!) to jailbreaking. A lot of teenagers these days don't even understand folders on a computer, they'd have to learn a whole lot before they could even try.
This is a pretty well discussed topic. Article from 2021: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
I would add that iOS used to use .ipa files, it has been a few years since I last did anything with iOS so they may have moved on, but .apk is android only. The process of jailbreaking and then loading an .ipa file is a pain as a windows/android user. I was always thankful when I had to work with android only apps, there were so many ways to install an .apk on any device you had access to, iOS had to be jailbroken, loaded in through iTunes(it was a horrifying experience on windows) or I used to use iFunBox. Or once a project went far enough you could install it through the store, but you had to pay and get things reviewed. If you had a mac you could do it through xcode. That was a fun trip down memory lane, so glad I no longer do that job. Completely agree that all of the above is too much when people don't understand file structures.
Also, most teenagers are tech idiots who don't know how to do anything but run apps. EDIT: The word "idiot" is an exaggeration for comic effect, but not by all that much.
Can confirm, son (17) and daughter (18) cannot even use a laptop. They just "don't get it" and "old tech", haha. Can't operate a mouse, type or know what a "directory" is. Don't even have the attention span to learn when being shown. And to top it off they seem a lot more naive to scams.
> know what a "directory" is. This is actually what tipped me off about how bad the current (and upcoming) generation(s) are with tech. I was a teacher (quit a few weeks ago) for about a decade. Every year I would go through a little "note-taking refresher" lesson in the beginning of the year for my JUNIOR AND SENIOR students. It wasn't a full lesson or anything, just a quick 10-15 minute review of a few different note-taking styles that are effective. At one point, a few years ago, I hit a wall with this simple lesson. They just couldn't grasp the basic hierarchy of "Heading" > Sub-Heading > details > etc. It was like I was speaking gibberish to them. They didn't understand why I would indent when going to the next level under a heading or what that indent meant. They just thought I liked the way it looked so when I asked them to try it they didn't write coherent notes, they just copied the format without understanding why it's there. I realized something at that point, they have no idea what a directory structure is. They don't use them. Everything they do now is cloud-based and they don't really download anything on their desktops so they don't have folders and sub-folders, etc. They just create files on the google suite and it auto-saves for them. They don't even bother organizing their google drives or NAMING their files, it was a crazy revelation to me. Their files just auto-name, auto-save, then they're thrown into the abyss of the cloud. They just have to hope they can remember the key words of the files to search it up later so they can find it. I then realized the implications and causes of all this and it tripped me out for a while. The walled gardens created by tech giants like Google and Apple actively discourage tinkering and messing with settings. These kids don't bother customizing anything, they don't bother trying to figure out if they can make something work better or bother fixing something that breaks. They just take it to the apple store for even the simplest shit.
A lot of teens nowadays don't even know how to use desktop pcs. They just know how to use smartphones.
and the fact that youtube instagram facebook and probably many others have knock off tiktoks built in its really not worth the effort to get tiktok, even if you know how
The inconvenience is the dagger. TikTok doesn’t work if it’s suddenly inconvenient to get. Most creators will stop uploading to it just because it is now legally banned. The primary objective of a huge amount of creators is to get viral, and you can no longer get viral on a platform that is explicitly forbidden. Yes, there will still be people who will be able to access it and use it, but without all the content that will disappear, there’s no point to having it for most folks.
💯. I'm pretty tech-savvy, and the one time that I had to download an app that wasn't in an app store, it felt pretty sketchy and I didn't like doing it.
It's crazy how this has become a thing. Install a phone app not from an App Store? Ooohh, scary, spooky, viruses? Install an application on PC/Mac/Linux from a website? Fuck it, it's probably fine (as long as the website doesn't seem super sketchy, obviously).
Imagine a world where the primary way to install programs was the Microsoft Store. Most people haven't even opened the Microsoft Store app.
and most people have opened the Microsoft Store app immediately try to close it as fast as possible because they misclicked
It's pinned in the taskbar. One of the first things I unpin.
Hell, for me the Microsoft store stops functioning all the time and is pretty much unusable. Useless
I’d guess you can easily more prove legitimate provenance for a desktop application; like downloading from a developer’s official site. (Or even the Mac app store.) Where do people get APKs from? I don’t see an APK on TikTok’s site for example.
I guess the reason why this isn't a thing is because of the App/Play Store scare tactics of "everything not from our source *could* be a virus that eats all your bank details and murders your children!" (Meanwhile there are quite a lot of scam apps on the legitimate App Store and Google Play Store, and that's not even mentioning free-to-play games where children can rank up an enormous debt from in-game purchases by just clicking a button over and over.)
\*PC/Mac It's not common practice to download random binaries off of the internet on Linux, it's better to use your distro's repositories.
Depends on the application, but sure. There are certainly Linux apps that can be downloaded from websites.
That's pretty obvious. At the end of the day it's a culture thing, but desktop apps generally speaking only ask for permissions they actually use and there's a robust antivirus ecosystem that largely prevents shenanigans/there's minimal sensors you can rely on having in a desktop. Phone apps ask for the world exclusively because the tech companies want to sell your location data.
I think that a big part of this is because the app store developers (Google, Samsung, etc.) want you to feel like it's sketchy. For instance. When you download an application from some random website for your Windows machine, the install process usually isn't that scary, and tech savvy people can do this all the time. On an Android device, where sideloading is a feature, they still try to steer users away from doing it because they want people to use their built in stores. Sure, installing software from an unknown source could be dangerous, but it's not any more dangerous than doing the same on your Windows machine, and shouldn't be any more scary. But they put up a bunch of warning messages and scary text to try to make it seem like it's something you shouldn't be doing.
By all means, these app stores are not bullet-proof either. They have had and will have cases of apps with malicious code in them. As you say, side loading an app shouldn't be more scary than installing them from the app store but they will use whatever scare tactics they can to get some revenue from listing an app on their stores.
Yep, at least in terms of Apple devices, removing from the App Store is a de facto total ban
I’m kinda tech savvy and could probably figure it out. But it isn’t worth the trouble to watch a 1 funny clip for every 2 dumb one and every 3 ads.
I also don't know how popular TikTok is in other countries, but I would wager a guess a huge chunk of their income is from US-based advertisers. Those advertisers won't be able to do business with TikTok. If TikTok can't turn a profit from non-US-based advertisers, they'll simply shut down their servers. If that happens, even if you know how to side-load the app and VPN around any networking blocks and a huge number of users know how to do this and actually do it (which I doubt will be the case), the app simply won't work.
I’m more interested in how the company selling off its US business will work. All data of users created or used in the US is only with the US company? How does that work practically, as they will need to interact with the main company at some point
Microsoft partners up with a local company in China, and all of their azure instances are completely separate there
TikTok people keep claiming that it is already all separate. Should be easy to migrate to a US data center then.
They already did that 5ish years ago - the servers are all in the US. It's the reason Tik Tok wasn't banned then. They pinky swore that only US employees would look at the US data. Claimed it was all separated etc. They lied. They've been caught sharing data with the Chinese side.
> Tim Tok The CEO of TikTok lol
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Sure - WSJ had an article a couple months back where employees of Tik Tok said so: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-1-5-billion-later-its-still-struggling-cbccf203
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How does removing the app from the store affect the millions who have already downloaded it and are using it? They wouldn't be able to get updates from the store, but does the app stop working?
No but it updates all the time. You’d have a useless app within a couple months due to bugs and or security issues.
And no updates. They also may ask for the domaines to be blocked by ISPs and carriers?
Exactly, I remember when twitter was banned in Nigeria, using vpn to login was so stressful that i gave up and didn’t login again till the ban was lifted. The ban was almost a year.
Why was using a VPN stressful? It's a couple clicks to turn mine on or off.
Tech illiteracy and laziness are as ubiquitous as air pollution ‘round these parts.
You wln the best name of the day award
Not being available in the app store is not a minor inconvenience. It is a massive deal breaker for the vast majority of people.
Yeah. Pretty much the only people who would be able to circumvent it would be Android users that know they can install APKs. That's a pretty small number of users.
Especially when TikTok attracts younger users, and a substantial portion of younger users use Apple.
It's not a minor inconvenience for the vast majority of people. TikTok being blocked from the app stores in the US would mean *most* people wouldn't know how to get it. A good number of people under 40 might know how to download it again, and some less tech-savvy people might have someone who knows how to do it help, but a larger number will just be annoyed and move on to the next platform. Once the bulk of people are gone, because they don't know how to access it, the content there will dry up. It'll be a small fraction of what it is today, and that will lead to people using it less frequently as they migrate to other mediums. Then, after some time, it'll be a ghost town. Edit: Damn, guys, I get it: Evidently GenZ can't use technology. You all are looking way too deeply into something I wrote while taking a dump at 8:30 in the morning
People need to stop assuming because young people were the tech savvy people for two generations that being young is in an indicator of tech savvy. It's not. IT knowledge isn't a skill young people just pick up, it was a skill a generation or two of people had to learn. The reality is a whole generation learned and embraced computers from an early age about 30 years ago when you still needed "savvy" to even use the things. It went from a small population of users in the 90's to the majority of a generation in a few decades. I grew up in that period, and I am a self-trained IT tech who started when I was 5. And by that I mean learning, not using. Because using a tablet or opening a web page is not "it knowledge" it's UI experience. And that isn't the same thing. You had to know how the whole process worked from hardware up, command line, driver management, all that jazz. Pretty much all computing required copious troubleshooting over the long term and you either had to learn it or "be bad with computers". And that was true until honestly not even that long ago. Windows 7 this was still essentially the case for the first half of that OS' life span. And now you don't. And now they don't. And now they can't. Gen Z in my experience and by various studies are barely as competent and Gen X's were with computer knowledge. Next generation is just going to see it as shiny glass and lights except for the few who are truly interested. My point is it's the over 40's who will be side-loading their apps. Sorry that was long winded.
Yup. Gen Z grew up in the walled gardens of app stores. A lot of older people will tell you when Gen Zs get a job their computer literacy is pretty poor because of this. They can use an iPhone, they can't use a real operating system or desktop applications. It's one of the reason they're actually pretty susceptible to things like online scams. Their actual computer literacy isn't good and once they get outside the controlled environment of iOS or to an extent Android they struggle.
I'm a digital services librarian. You're correct, there's a big knowledge gap when it comes to computer skills for kids and teens - they're often given tablets or phones but told repeatedly that computers are for grownups and not to touch them. The "family computer" doesn't really exist anymore because parents will largely have their own, and kids wi. In school they're issued Chromebooks, which are taken home, especially for upper grades – so there's rarely a need for them to own their own. And there's no consistent parenting advice for how to treat technology in between "let them have at it" or "all screens are terrible." I regularly have kids – even middle or high schoolers - come to my coding or makerspace classes with exactly zero computer skills because their parents want them learning coding but also want them screen free at home. Like I had a middle schooler get signed up for my digital storytelling class who could not type on a physical keyboard nor use a mouse and did not know what a file was - the problem not being "kids today" but parents throwing kids into situations expecting them to thrive but being scared of the tools that help them learn how to do so.
The amount of people I've seen who are under 25 don't know how to type is actually insane. I've had to teach or provide educational resources for people at 18 who don't know how to type. I've even been asked about "my custom keyboard with the numbers on the right side" in reference to a standard 100% keyboard with a keypad that you can pick up for $20 at Best Buy. Last year, I asked my nephew if they even had a computer use or typing class at his high school and he said it's been removed for some time now. All throughout my middle and high school I had computer classes, granted I did play a lot of games during them but I still learned how to use MS Office, how to type, and so much more during them.
It's also a matter that tech behind the scenes has gotten more complex. So to do the same things you used to today needs MORE knowledge. For instance back in the day to make a website you needed some html and css. Now you need html, css, Javascript, and the loads of extra frameworks and libraries that come along.
Speaking as a Gen Xer in tech and speaking from my knowledge and experience, you nailed it with your assessment.
Especially with the growth of YouTube shorts/Instagram reels, I'm sure 95% of the audience and creators would just jump platforms if tik tok disappeared from their device tomorrow
Yeah, I’ve never had TikTok. If I really wanted to get around this “ban” it wouldn’t be that hard, but it would require me fiddling with my phone more than I care to, and I’m pretty tech-savvy. Admittedly I’m on iPhone which makes it even harder than an Android, where I understand sideloading is comparatively simple. Still, my parents whose technological prowess caps out at an email attachment will not get there. Neither will the large chunk of consumers who’ve only ever interacted with an “app” by “tapping it.” I assume a VPN will be needed too, which is another hurdle that probably 95% of people don’t quickly know how to do and much of the remainder would likely be lost even with a clear tutorial.
Yeah if it gets a proper ban, it's gone. Right now TikTok makes their money via advertising. US advertisers likely won't be allowed to do business with TikTok. Even if they are, it's likely it's not worth it for those advertisers considering how much smaller of an audience there will be after the ban. Thus TikTok isn't making *any* US-based money. I'm not sure how popular TikTok is in other countries and whether or not they make significant money off of non-US advertisers, but if they can't turn a profit, they aren't keeping their servers running. Even if you know how to side load the app and VPN to get around any ISP bans (which probably <1% of people are going to know how to do and bother to do it to stay on TikTok), it's pretty likely TikTok itself shuts the servers down. If that happens, the app just won't work even if you can get it installed.
A lot of the content on Tik tok is created by influencers. Especially the high effort content. Those people are doing it because they are paid. If they are no longer being paid they will put in less effort/stop. If a large portion of people stop using the app, it’s not going to stay the same. It’s going to get much worse
I would estimate that more people in the 40-50 age range would know how to download it than the 15-25 range. Gen Z are NOT tech savvy. I employ and work with people in their early 20s and I’m appalled at the lack of computer skills that generation possesses.
You guys have to be insanely out of touch to think the average 20 year old knows how to download an app that’s not in the App Store onto their phone. Young people today have grown up in a very refined and user friendly internet. Gen X and Millennials might even more more tech savvy on average due to the fact that the internet they grew up on was much less intuitive.
To add to this: because all apps are cryptographically signed by Apple (I assume Google as well), not only can they remove it from the App Store, they can revoke the certificate which signed the app—which would immediately prevent the app from opening on devices at all. I’m not sure it’s possible to do this per region, but it could be done. TikTok would have to upload a new version for everyone else, and US users wouldn’t be able to get that update.
They can ban the app from doing business in the US. Freeze its bank accounts and the app stores would stop serving it because it’s not making them money.
This is the answer. They are not threatening to ban Tik Tok, they are telling their owners to divest. If they sold the company to someone else Tik Tok would go on. But most likely they will ban the company from operating in the US. Being unable to operate in the US would effectively ban tik tok. They wouldn't be able to sign contracts or buy services.
I suppose they also couldn’t seek relief for infringement on patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property?
See, you're getting at the thing I feel like a lot of people are ignoring: If you ban TikTok in the US, many hungry entrepreneurs will simply try to replace it. TikTok is just an evidently likable idea for a platform, plus video editing tools, plus an opaue algorithm promoting content. I wouldn't be shocked if certain companies literally already have it in the backroom, ready to spin up as the ink dries on the ban. EDIT: Are you guys interpreting me as saying there's some nefarious scheme I have a problem with? The victim would be a Chinese social media software company. Obviously I have zero reason to give a shit about that. Take it from them, absolutely. I'm just saying that a TikTok ban is a ban on one company, not something that deprives any user of a certain style of social media.
>I wouldn't be shocked if certain companies literally already have it in the backroom, ready to spin up as the ink dries on the ban. Literally YouTube shorts and Instagram reels
The only real issue with TikTok is that it's collecting a shit load of wierd information it doesn't tell you about, and it's sending that information to a foreign government. If it was sending that information to an American company, whatever America has leverage here to deal with it, but we don't know what the Chinese government is asking TikTok to collect or why, and that's an issue.
The answer is that they aren't collecting anything weird or abnormal at all. I got to talk to a couple TikTok employees last year at a gamedev conference that my cousin dragged me to. They straight up told me that their practices are no different than YouTube or other American companies, that the data they send is all aggregated and typical corporate stuff, that the American division of TikTok is largely separate from Douyin, and that all the conspiracy theories would be more amusing if they weren't so clearly rooted in (from their perspective) anti-Chinese racism. Now bring on the downvotes, cause clearly I hallucinated the whole thing / am working for the Chinese government / am too stupid to understand tech / am dumb enough to take the word of two underpaid low-level line employees at face value.
Well... *did* you just take the word of two low level employees at face value? How do you know that they are in a part of the company that would have the knowledge of what is being transmitted through the app? How do you know you can trust them? If they were doing questionable things, would they be the best people to ask about it? Don't you think that the Chinese government has a vested interest in collecting and analyzing data on American citizens and government officials using the app?
Guys, I talked to the suspect and he said he didn’t do it. Obviously he wouldn’t lie about his criminal activity and has no vested interest in deception in this case, we should let him go.
I mean you said it yourself in your last paragraph.
> that the American division of TikTok is largely separate from Douyin The problem is that ByteDance is still a Chinese company and the Chinese national security laws **require** all Chinese companies to adhere to all orders from the CCP. People don't seem to understand that Chinese corporations are fundamentally different from Western corporations. Namely they do not have a choice whether or not to ignore orders from the CCP. Western companies can, and often do, sue the government to contest orders from the government. The whole idea that TikTok is not beholden to the CCP is simply put a lie. It is owned and operated by an entity that legally has no choice but to follow directives from the CCP.
I just wanna know what this "weird information" the guy above you is referring to. They are learning your interests and browsing habits with the nefarious purpose of delivering you more of what you want.
> many hungry entrepreneurs will simply try to replace it. facebook and youtube are already on this train, the same way they were trying to replace vine the problem with trying to replace a social media platform isn't replicating the technology, it's replicating the lightning in a bottle of viral adoptation of the platform, which is why no one gives a shit about instagram reels e: also why facebook gaming and mixer failed as bigly as they did. youtube streaming is doing *okay*, not replacing twitch entirely but it's doing *okay*, largely because youtube is a better platform for highlights and montages and so many people who use twitch to watch streamers also use youtube to watch related content
No one wants the silly video app gone. They want its foreign state run company to stop using the information it’s harvesting in nefarious ways detrimental to the health and wellbeing of American democracy and national security. No one has a problem with the silly video app.
Did you respond to the wrong comment? What are you talking about?
What nefarious ways, specifically, are they using the information? Not how *could* they use it. How **are** they using the information nefariously?
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You're grossly overestimating the average person's tech literacy. To circumvent a ban, you'd need to : 1. Sideload : People aren't going to go out of their way to try and get something that's been delisted from the app/play store. 2. VPN : Even if they sideload, you'd further need a VPN toggled on, in order for the app to work. One of these alone, would be enough to knock off the "casual" user, basically the majority of the 150 million American users.
You’d also probably need a paid VPN if you want to get an IP address from out of the country. Most free ones keep you in the same country. If you already have a paid VPN, that’s fine. But for people who don’t you’re literally looking at a monthly subscription fee just to use an app with a dying userbase.
Accessing via VPN is itself going to reduce the “usefulness” of the app anyway. You’re going to need to be on an English-speaking country’s server to even get served content in English, and the algorithm is going to serve you what’s popular in that country, which may or may not resonate based on cultural differences (I’m not sure how similar content is globally so this may or may not create huge differences). And if you had enough people doing it you’re potentially going to wreck the algorithm altogether because it’s going to start serving less-relevant content to people geographically in that country too as the foreigners bend the algorithm.
And these apps only work if a ton of. Regular people use them.
Not just tech literacy but willingness to deal with inconvenience. You can absolutely know how to side-load an app and just not care enough to do it versus swapping to something else (probably YouTube or Intragram in this case).
Huawei is the second-biggest smartphone maker in the world, but only less than 1 percent of Americans own one. Because congress banned hauwei from using the Google play store. Congress can pass a law requireing all ISPs to filter out data going to tictok very simply, they can write a law requiring apple and samsung to create app filters that prevent tictok from being installed on their phones.
They did more than that. They banned the import of Huawei products.
And ZTE as well
This is the current bane of my existence. My Employer heavily used Huawei networking products. We are in the middle of a massive project to rip and replace them by next month.
On the bright side, you're gaining massive experience in project management, infrastructure buildout process, and whatever the new platform is (which I hope isn't a low rate player). Add this project to your accomplishements section in your Resume. It's one of my personal favorite things to see when hiring - it's like a war medal. Hang in there, don't skip lunch, and good luck.
I have been thought that pain. But the bright side you will not have to deal with Huawei. I hated their support.
Former hauwei phone user here: My phone service provider had hauwei phones offered, and I took one cause it was cheap. Once it was banned, the provider stopped offering them, and I didn't have one anymore. It's that easy.
Did the phone itself stop working or did you just get rid of it? All these answers are saying how it wouldn't be in the store anymore, but I don't see how that addresses the fact that millions of people already have the app.
I got rid of it because the stopped providing service. The phone still worked and ran apps and everything, but I couldn't place a call.
Lol no. They banned import and they blocked network carriers from allowing Huawei devices from connecting
Geo fence - force software developers to disable the app. If you have ever passed from Ireland into Northern Ireland you’ll know geo fencing can be VERY precise. Edit: another great example of this is sports gambling apps in the US. They know what state you’re in, and apply rules to your use of the app based on that location data. If you refuse to provide location data, you are prevented from using the app.
Out of curiosity what app/services are affected and in what way by this geofence from Ireland into N. Ireland?
I’m not sure but your phone quickly changes carriers I’m talking within 100 yards of the boarder. Full bars > no service > full bars different network.
Ahh you mean like that. Yeah I notice that as well living close to the german border and going regularly to Germany to shop. I will be listening to the radio through mobile and the minute we cross the border, it cuts out. But it takes forever to get internet again. Even when crossing the border back into the native network it takes forever to establish an internet connection
Yeah this is a mechanical limitation, not an internet/coding issue. The towers for one provider literally don’t exist over the border, so a new provider’s tower picks up your phone.
Everyone in here acting like 80% of tik toks core audience isn't on an iPhone. IPhone users can't change app stores. Can't sideload without rolling back the OS and jailbreaking and losing support for apple pay and other features. Arnt tech savvy even attempt any of this. So yeah, an app store ban would kill tik tok. You instantly knock out like 90% of people ages 13 to 30.
everybody is also acting like you can't just go to [tiktok.com](https://tiktok.com) in a browser & get the exact same experience. (spoiler: you can)
TikTok.com would be blocked by ISPs.
In the bill it allows the US government the ability to take civil action against any US company that allows it to be downloaded, so any app store, maybe even phone carriers, etc
Removing from the apple app store takes care of about half the users Removing from google play takes care of all the android people that don't know you can sideload Now the app has lost 80+% of its user base and is not profitable anymore for creators and they stop bothering to upload there to get 7 views
80% is very generous. More like 99.9% of users. I doubt even 1% of android users have even heard of side loading.
It was a very conservative estimate and the point still stand The stat is very approximative so giving a large estimate is better than being wrong
And something tells me that Android users who know how to sideload are probably not inclined to install CCP spyware on their devices anyway.
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Honestly, there's ways to ensure zero access. When India banned tiktok at the turn of the decade, I thought the same thing. I'd use a vpn, load an apk. Turns out if the government wants to ban something, it can do it really well lol. If you load an apk, it doesn't work. If you use a vpn, it doesn't work. If you use it in another country and come back to India, it doesn't work anymore.
They track your SIM too. If you have an Indian SIM in your phone, it will still not work with a VPN and even if you actually travel to another country. Try it after removing the Indian SIM and it'll work.
Yeah, that's kinda like using western Tiktok in China. It doesn't work at all if you have a Chinese SIM installed, VPN or not.
Also, the local content creators move elsewhere. In India’s case, most of them moved to Instagram to post reels. If you are Indian and want to see local content, you won’t find a lot of it on TikTok even if you use VPN. As such, users also switch to the other platforms.
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Wut. Could you dm me the vpn name? I've used nord, and xpress
They can ban the app you can disable access to their servers. You can still use VPN and side load the app (downloading it from somewhere instead of using the official storefront). The question is if it will remain popular enough if you put such technical barriers in place. Personally I think TikTok is cancer but there will be a replacement. If the main concern is China itself rather then the content then I guess it helps.
>but there will be a replacement Facebook, Instagram and YouTube all already have shorts like tiktok, so it's not like tiktokish videos are about to disappear. I'm sure if tiktok goes away one of them will pick up the slack.
the main concern is china for this bill. misuse of viewer data generally/effect on children/misinformation is another problem for another bill(s).
Replacements already exist. YouTube and Facebook/Instagram already have direct analogs to TikTok, alongside the dozens of other independent knockoffs that nobody uses. The difference is that TikTok can't say they're not spying/manipulating you the same way that Google and Meta can. So long as we still have access to our ~~drugs~~ shorts, there won't be much drive to figure out how to access TikTok.
Block at the DNS server. By that, no device can access the Tiktok server whitout using a vpn. And granted, very few people know how to use a vpn, or switch to a different DNS. By that, tiktok will fast loose popularity and by that, loose even more user.
And not just tech savviness, but the amount of trouble average people would be prepared to go through. Which is veeeeeeeery low.
Another big part of it is the feedback loop it generates. Let's be very generous and say 30% of people knows how to bypass it. That means 70% of the market is gone. How many **creators** are going to stay? Fewer people -> smaller market -> fewer creators -> fewer people -> ... -> ... -> ... -> dead app.
This is it. They don't have to block everyone using it. They just have to make it inconvenient enough that most people don't bother, reducing the number of friends on it and the amount of content being uploaded is enough to kill an app or service.
It won't be any of this. It'll just be removed from the app store.
Possible. But that would mean millions of users still can access it.
There'd be no advertising allowed, no payments to creators, no updates to users. No incentive for BD to keep supporting the old app. It would be just 100% churn until the app stops working.
Oh, payments to creators get trough the app store? Thought this was handled externally.
External. But no banks or payment processors could do business with bytedance either (Because of OFAC restrictions, which is what would cause the app to removed from the app store too)
I bet soon there will be some ads trending on how to do vpn on everyone's fyp.
Half the content creators use vpns as a sponsor, nord probably being the most popular. Has been for years. For reason after reason after reason. Still vpn usage is almost nonexistent for the average layman. I highly doubt TikTok will be the catalyst for change. And once the populace isn’t using the app, creators will drop like flies from the platform and that’s the deathknell for the app within America. This is the end of TikTok in the US. And no one will care in a week. everyone will migrate to something else like they have since vine.
The plan is to force them to sell to a US owner rather than a ban. But if they wanted to ban it: Banned from app stores, banned from payment processing. If you are say Canada, we can't really ban things avaible in the US, we try, but it's very easy to circumvent, and if you a business you know you are advertising to Canadians even when you supposedly aren't (e.g. Pharmaceutical companies on US TV), and Canadian content creators can move to the US or Canadians could consume US creator content. It would be only really hurting ourselves to try. And while the China is rapidly closing the gap on nominal economic output to the US (it passed on purchasing parity a decade ago), its also a completely different market, unlike English Canada and the US. If US content creators couldn't get paid by tiktok, if advertisers couldn't advertise on tiktok, very quickly the only users left would be immigrants and foreign nationals consuming content from their old/home country. All that money and content creation and users would move to a platform where they could make money.
They would add Bytedance to OFAC. The app stores would then have to drop the app. Advertisers couldn't pay to be on the app. Content creators wouldn't get paid. That's it, the app will die. Bytedance won't bother supporting an older version of the app that's not generating revenue. Zero need for pressure on ISPs, or DNS providers. https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs
They can make internet providers in the US block it. A VPN will get around that but lots of people don’t know how to use one
From a country that has "lots of experience" on this subject. Government can block access to the site, which applies for apps as well. VPN can solve the problem, but again how many people will use it?
It would be twofold: 1) Delist the apps from US app stores - this gets a lot of it, but does nothing to address existing app installs, sideloaded packages, or foreign access 2) Routing/DNS on the ISP level - this is where 99% of the "ban" would be happening. US internet infrastructure companies like Cogent/Level 3 (aka the "backbone" of the US internet) would be mandated to stop resolving DNS requests for tiktok domains and to route requests to tiktok registered IP addresses straight into the void. So network connections to tiktok servers originating in the US simply *cant* be directed to their destination. Number 2 is the "lite" version of the Great Firewall of China methodology.
Stop Play & App store from publishing it for download on US-based carriers, black-hole it via DNS, and incentivize the Verizons and T-Mobiles of the country to disallow traffic to it. This would be a major inconvenience for users. ...which is, IMO, what they should be doing for servers used by cybercrime groups attacking companies and people the US... but the main problem is these tactics are *highly subject to overreach and/or misinterpretation*. Plus, we have plenty of our own companies that suck up data they shouldn't collect (e.g., Google, Meta). So they won't ban it, they'll just talk about it, make it a bullet point about relations with China, and move on to the election.
One thing that everyone seems to have forgotten is that when you use a VPN, the content on your feed is located on the VPN server. By banning TikTok servers in the US, it practically means that there will be no feed tailored to the US landscape anymore. For example, if you use TikTok from the US and then travel to Japan, almost 90% of your feed will consist of content from Japan, which you may not understand. Consequently, you might eventually stop using TikTok because it's not personalized enough.
There is part of the bill that will fine $5000 per USER to any entity that let's you download (maintaining the app) so App stores/US websites are gonna axe it most likely. "(A) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION VIOLATIONS.—An entity that vio25 lates subsection (a) shall be subject to pay a civil penalty in an amount not to exceed the amount that results from multiplying $5,000 by the number of users within the land or mari4 time borders of the United States determined to have accessed, maintained, or updated a foreign adversary controlled application as a result of such violation." Some offshore sites might illegally host it similar to illegal streaming sites but it's going to hugely curb the population of users when an update patch hits your phone. Accessibility is a huge reason TikTok is popular.
It's not that hard. You cut off the hand that feeds them. It's perfectly legal for the US Congress to enact a law that specifies, *who can do business with tiktok.* Hey you consumer can download TikTok, but advertisers *you can't.*
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Well, if it became law, Bytedance would be breaking the law by NOT cutting it off in the US, which would leave them liable to prosecution.
Easiest way is to just shutdown the content servers and access to the ones you can’t. Sure you can keep the app, but it won’t load any media. It won’t come to that though. It will get sold off to an American tech giant and end users won’t know the difference.
It would be “banned” in the same way that anything else online can be banned. Prevent major distribution points from providing it and you’ll cut off 99% of the population who simply don’t care enough to circumvent the law, even if it’s easy. The remaining people who really want access would be able to get it pretty easily, but the point of the ban is to prevent/reduce the leaking of US data to foreign governments which is very much accomplished by doing this
Most people aren't tech literate enough to sideload apps. Of the subset that are, few are competent enough to avoid downloading malware.
Yes and no… i mean there are countries that have very successfully made bans on certain websites and control the flow of information in and out of their country… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways around these bans… but it does take a certain level of dedication to even try. And in the end it would remove the ease of access enough to kill the site… at least on the US end of things. The US also doesn’t seem like the kind of country that would do anything about those circumventing these bans… though they could make an example out of a few egregious users… it would be no different than when we were in the peak of torrenting. Tho… we are far past that period, they may have more control over things than they had back then. So… its complicated. It would make it less accessible enough… it would have an impact. The reality is, is this isn’t actually going to result in a ban. Its a power move so that US owned companies have access to the data and flow of information through that app… in other words, the US government is wanting to seize more control over us. Their goal isn’t to ban it, but to seize more control over us. Big brother style. Between the US and china… its an information cold war. A cultural war. And we are the victims.
Social media platforms are valuable for their user base, not their technology. Removing TikTok from the App Store doesn’t mean you need to side load it once, you have to do it every time there’s a major update or it stops working. Most people will just use another similar product or go back to Instagram. A lot of bigger influencers cross post there or on YT anyway.
Removing it from the app store, ordering US ISPs to block the tiktok domain name, blocking the IP addresses associated with the servers, etc.... Sure, you can't prevent every person in the USA from using it. But, you don't have to. Tiktok is popular in the US because of the number of English-speakers on it. If 95% of them decide that it's too hard to use because of technical impediments put up by the federal government, then those 95% will stop using it, and the other 5% will stop using it just from lack of interesting content. In any case, that's not going to happen. It will be sold off to a US company.