Alright what is trump trying to do with this tiktok shit? Is he trying to destroy the company or get them to sell it off to Microsoft on the cheap? Zark Muckernerd also just apparently came out with his own tiktok ripoff a little bit ago. Is this just the lamest battle ever in the new cold war with China and Trump is just trying to score some relative victories well he still can?

Going to copy an earlier post of mine since this sort of question keeps coming up.

People here tend to view US imperialism as this big unified thing where the empire is a single entity trying to execute some grand plan on the behalf of capital, but it’s actually a bunch of different people with different amounts and kinds of power trying to use the machinery of the empire to their own benefit, often in conflict with each other, usually on the behalf of capitalist projects, which are also often in conflict with each other.

And yeah that’s complicated and it’d be nice to wrap it all up in a bow, but it’s particularly important for understanding the anti-China push, because there’s no coherent empire-level strategic end that can be pursued by opposing China, but there are plenty of individuals and groups that can profit from it. Any company that can profit off of moving production or resource extraction to the US or one of its victims has reason to escalate tensions with China (even if total profit declines; total profit isn’t making a decision). And the generals and intelligence departments responsible for maintaining the ability to act against China (“just in case”) also benefit from becoming more relevant, even if that doesn’t benefit the system as a whole.

And... yeah Trump's just in it for the racism, to rile up his base, and to get the approval of whoever he talked to most recently. But the support behind that is going to be from whoever profits and whichever branches of intelligence agencies get promotions.

I would've bet on there being some factory or resource-extraction industry in the mix too, but it's looking more and more like a huge chunk of this is a pissing match between the valley and Tencent.

does anyone over the age of 16 care?

I saw a bunch of older women suddenly start telling everyone around them about how good TikTok is a couple months ago, so I think the demographic has shifted somewhat. Apparently the algorithm is really fucking good and pivots away from teenage girls dancing in a hurry. Never actually got around to trying it though.