Is this a coup by conservative government to gain control of this social network to promote it's ideologies?
first Twitter, now Tiktok, both controlled by conservative interests?
Is this a coup by conservative government to gain control of this social network to promote it's ideologies?
first Twitter, now Tiktok, both controlled by conservative interests?
It's a coup by pro-Israel interests like Larry Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz.
This has been floating around since the end of the first Trump administration, where neither of these interests were accused of being “pro-Israel” but only entrance narrative after the current Palestine debacle:
Therefore I’m only left to conclude this is an entirely unsubstantiated claim, as why wouldn’t it have already been apparent if they were working as shadow brokers of Israeli interests in all this, which the general timeline and verifiable information we know don’t line up with?
Is this an AI comment? They have vast business interest and contracts with Israel.
The people who have been very vocal about forcing US ownership of TikTok have also been very, very open about their Zionism on social media. A16z has been pushing for this hard since the start of the genocide. Zionists blame "TikTok" for their opposition. They even call the younger people who don't support Israel the "TikTok Generation".
This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control, is very much about Israel and attempting to gain a monopoly on the media.
> This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control
Conspiracy theory.
CNN, CBS, TikTok, Zionist bot networks. You can’t argue with facts.
What evidence do you need to see?
Yes. And to enrich their buddies and campaign donors like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
I thought Ben Horowitz supported Kamala during the 2024 presidential election.
He did not.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/16/felicia-ben-horowitz-party...
Man, the sheer transactionality that guides these people's lives is pretty disgusting to me. Granted, you probably don't get to be a billionaire unless you are pretty transactional, but I am kind of thankful that the vapid hollowness of these billionaires (despite always cloaking their rapaciousness in some sort of larger societal purpose) has been laid bare over the past few years.
That's bonus. The real thing is to make tiktok a right-wing ideology machine. I'd rather have the CPC than the GOP at the helm.
I don’t want either of them, but credit where credit is due. China is doing well as a country and the standard of living has increased even if it’s under an authoritarian regime. I wonder how long that will last. Meanwhile, the USA is becoming Russia. Basically a bunch of misinformed morons living in the past and thinking we are on top of the world while we accelerate towards irrelevance on the global stage if not for a massive stockpile of nukes.
Remember that you can't have a democracy and increase the standard of living of your people and don't have USA planning a coup.
>> China is doing well as a country and the standard of living has increased even if it’s under an authoritarian regime.
What do you mean "doing well"?
https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/chinas-economy-on-cusp-of-a-de...
May 2025:
Tariffs are drying up international demand for Chinese goods, and in a bid to keep factories alive, Beijing is urging exporters to turn inward. However, that pivot is compounding the very problem it aims to solve.
Deflation isn’t an abstract threat in China anymore—it’s visible across the economy. After barely holding above zero for much of 2023 and 2024, consumer prices have now dropped for two straight months.
Producer prices have fallen for 29 consecutive months. March’s figures showed the sharpest drop in four months, and forecasts point to an even steeper decline in April.
Look at the past 15 years in the US vs the past 15 years in China, it’s fairly obvious
Are you taking into account the obvious currency manipulation over the same time by the Chinese?
No, the difference in standard of living internally, especially the growth in standard of living
Yes, trade wars suck but overall if you’re a young Chinese citizen today you’re doing better than your parents or grandparents could’ve dreamed:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Yes, I’m fully aware that’s starting so low because of horrible governments in the past and that the current government is far from great, but that’s still moving in the right direction at the time the United States is trying to speed run to a Russian-style oligarchy and most people under 50 think it’s getting worse.
It's really odd how many people on hn are pro china. Why? They are not good guys. At all.
In moral terms they are so far behind the West they are in a different team. (and don't throw in disingenous deflections like gaza and whatever, those are orders of magnitude less bad then China) The West is full of freedom and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. China isn't.
Nobody here is pro Russia or Iran, or even particularly pro India. So why is Communist China different?
It's a strange set of affairs where prices dropping is a terrible thing and prices increasing is good.
What an insane thing to say! But also... how insane is it that I agree with you based on objective reality? Can you imagine seriously saying that 20-30 years ago? 1984's doublethink/doublespeak always seemed over the top, yet we are at a point particularly recently where the anti cancel culture sentiment has lead to... proposals to curb undesirable speech, cancelling people... which in turn is undesirable because it criticises a propagandist's undesirable speech with his own post death quotes in a lot of cases and bristles when accused of sane washing. Or that this won't matter in a few more news cycles as we lurch brokenly into the next phase of dystopia.
I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners. Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.
> wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners
So that’s where the name of that David sylvian / ryuichi sakamoto song came from.
I always thought it was just a throw away from the subject matter.
The CPC is not attacking the US from within. The Party of Trump has carried out a fascist coup and they are now working to ensure they stay in power permanently.
I loath partisanship and am more than willing to point out failures by the Dems, but this is different. Trump and Co have openly stated that they don't believe in democracy.
If you are not able to see this I'm not sure what I could say to open your eyes.
The GOP is still more incompetent than anything I've ever seen.
Bullying, yes. Competency, no.
So incompetent that they control all three branches of the most powerful government on earth. Much of that can be credited to their media ownership strategies.
Underestimate them at your own peril...
The unfortunate thing about democracy is that competency at getting elected doesn't always translate to competency at governing.
They are stupid, but also ruthless and willing to ignore the laws they don't like.
They are also surrounded by billionaires that want them to keep it going. Look at how Larry Ellison is buying up Paramount/CBS and soon, Tiktok. They just took Kimmel off the air.
Again, I know this sounds like histrionics on my part but what is happening now is not normal -- the fact that all "old school" republicans have left the GOP and it is now literally the Party of Trump. And they have millions of cult members who are itching to use their second amendment rights against "non-Americans".
I desperately want to be wrong, and would love credible evidence that could demonstrate this.
The firehose of falsehoods is a very successful propaganda technique, rediscovered ( or teached to ) by a guy that needed a fake public image ( see: you're fired) to hide all his public bankruptcies/failures.
Eg. they are very stupid at winning lawsuitts, but he had 4 years of training on who and what to bully and another 4 years to prepare.
A lot of stupid people turned a democracy into an autocracy ( Orban, ... ). It's easy if no one protests and you can give money to the rich and powerful.
It's amazing that this guy/administration grifts so publicly and a lot of people in the US just keep following him blindly.
It takes a lot of competence to defeat the concept of an objective fact.
Really? They are following Putin’s playbook and getting away with it. Controlling media and sharing the spoils with the oligarchs. Together, they are robbing us blind. What about what they are doing makes them incompetent? Evil, yes. But incompetent? They are winning! You think this ends with the next election or when ol’ Agent Orange kicks the bucket? Things are going to be very different here for a very long time unless we collectively get our shit together in a big way and take it back.
They put loyal, useful idiots on the public stage. The real leaders are not on TV, you dont even know their names.
Suppress the "enemies" and bolster "allies". Oh and mindfukc the children to fall in line.
Russia Today American Edition
I mean why not unban them too?
It's a page in the conservative playbook going back a long time, from consolidating newspapers to talk radio to TV stations and now a new type of media...
And now we see them getting main stream networks on a leash.
Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.
This law passed during the Biden administration, but its implementation has been delayed repeatedly by the Trump administration.
> but it has been broken repeatedly by the Trump administration
fixed that for you
The bill itself outlines specifically how and why it can be delayed. That was violated in the very first "delay".
Turns out not having any penalty for the executive failing to apply the law is a mistake.
Who could have predicted this.
There is a penalty just congress has to enforce it.
The only penalty congress can enforce on the executive is cutting the budget of things the executive wants funded.
Also this only matters if the Fed is independent. If it’s not, the President can direct it to purchase unlimited treasury bonds, effectively printing unlimited money to fund any program it wants.
Paired with this administration’s assertion of impoundment powers and the pocket rescission, the Congress’s power of the purse is completely neutered in both directions. The executive can decline to spend whatever it doesn’t want to, and it can fund anything it does want.
Recklessly funding the government off of the Fed’s balance sheet will of course cause all sorts of nasty economic effects, but that’s exactly why you need to print money! So your massive immigration enforcement apparatus (newly full of ideological minions thanks to the current hiring surge) can go and assert powers of process-free expedited removal throughout the entire country (per DOJ memo from week 1).
So the economic consequences hardly matter: you simply deport whoever complains.
It turns out that if you won't impeach an executive on any principle whatsoever, you may as well grab the boot and put it on your own neck.
Maybe the best solution is to adopt a parliamentary system of government? With the executive formally subordinated to the legislature, it can’t spend money against the legislative majority’s wishes, because if it upsets the legislature, the legislature votes it out of power (commonly with no supermajority required, just a simple majority vote in the more numerous legislative house)
Absolutely. There's a reason the US didn't replicate its own structure when it set up governments in Europe and Japan.
or impeachment?
I mean I’m as anti-Trump as the next, but didn’t the bill say it could be delayed to finalize a sale to American owners?
You could make the case that this sale means the Trump admin actually didn’t break the rules here.
It said it could be delayed with some pretty specific parameters. Quoting the Congressional Research Service report on the bill:
"The President can grant a one-time extension of up to 90 additional days when a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, there is evidence of 'significant' progress toward executing the divestiture, and there are legally binding agreements in place to enable the divestiture."
One could argue all day about whether or not there was an identified path or evidence of significant progress, but certainly there weren't legally binding agreements in place at any point, and the deadline has been extended far more than once.
Trump is ignoring the law. The DoJ has asserted that Trump can ignore the law because it would interfere with his duty to "take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States." It is unclear what, if any law, could not be ignored under this doctrine.
Only one extension was allowed.
Seems like it. It seemed kind of inevitable. Biden made a mistake going down this road - of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term, but Biden should've just left it alone because it wasn't hard to see that this was the likely outcome.
Biden? You do realize Trump attempted to “ban” TikTok in his first term when the original Oracle “deal” happened, right? Pinning this in Biden takes some serious mental gymnastics.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/914032065/tiktok-ban-averted-...
Yeah, I do realize that and in fact mention it in the comment above: of course, Trump started the ball rolling during his first term. Not "pinning" it on Biden, per se, but he is the one who signed the bill. It would have been much better to leave it alone. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-what...
Do you suspect Biden had a little plaque on his desk saying "The buck stops somewhere else"? He signed the bill. If he didn't want to own it, he doesn't have to put his name on it.
No one can seem to remember who was president in 2020...
Biden signed the bill.
With very large and rare bipartisan support
That's how I knew it was a direct attack on the American people.
Biden was on board with the TikTok takeover, and it had support from both left and right wing pro-Israel groups.
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I’m not sure what you are saying… Are you suggesting that US Conservative viewpoints are aligned with those of China’s government?
Well we’re clearly in the “don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake” territory.
Allied, not aligned.
Sounds like you preferred it when it was controlled by liberal interests.
Next time Dems win elections (if that's ever), it will be. Politicians on both sides are happy about this.
It's only a problem for the GOP if Dems do win elections again. Judging by how things are progressing, it may not happen anymore. They have complete control over everything.
Liberal interests ≠ Democrat government