US Politics |OT|

[Shtinamin_]

Ryuu96 said:

Shtinamin_ said:

This may be speculation but lmk what y'all think.

If the TikTok ban passes, what is to stop the US from taking down Temu, X, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook? Especially if the social medias are broadcasting their freedom of speech during an election year.

If the TikTok ban passes, what is to stop this "election interference" (thats on of the reasons the House passes it) from happening when an American buys Tik Tok?

Who decides who buys TikTok from ByteDance? (How can I buy TikTok?)

These were thoughts that I had while this has been going on. Hopefully, these ideas are that, thoughts. But yeah did anyone else think this?

Because they (aside from Temu) are American companies and this bill is about China, why I called it a "ban" is because technically it's not a ban, they want ByteDance to divest, but the odds of them divesting are slim to none so in effect it is a ban, but if we entertain TikTok selling to someone, who would it be? An American company.

I agree that they are also doing this due to China speculations, but what happens if a social media is accused of "election interference".

If we entertain ByteDance selling TikTok, I presume that the US would want a US company to own it as well. (Which seems like a social media monopoly, but that can be discussed later).

Would another social media company buy it? Or would any US company be able to buy it?
Doing a very surface-level dive: There are websites that value TikTok in 2023 at around $80B, though I have also seen ~$180B. Elon Musk spent around ~20% of his net worth to buy Twitter. I dont have many other sources of huge social media companies being bought by another, so I assume that a US company won't spend more than 20-25% of their net worth for TikTok (but we can see a higher percentage if they believe they can gain profit?). I'll be using the $80B estimation for simplicity. Here are some US companies that could make the purchase.

Company, Market Cap, % of market cap to buy TikTok

Walmart	$493.7B	16%
Amazon	$1.82T	4%
Microsoft	$3.09T	2.5%
Apple	$2.77T	2.8%
Alphabet	$1.72T	4.6%
Meta	$1.28T	6.3%
Disney	$206.36B	38%
Netflix	$265.28B	30%

There aren't too many companies that have more than $200B as a market cap that are US owned.