The Deal To Buy TikTok Will Kill It Faster Than You Can Say “MySpace”

I keep reading about the proposed deal for a consortium of US companies to buy TikTok, and I can’t see how anyone is going to make out in the deal. No one gets what they want or need, especially the poor users of the platform.

The proposed deal has U.S. companies Oracle, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, private equity company Silver Lake, and now the Murdoch family, buying the major portion of TikTok. It’s hard to pin down exactly how much money they’ll have to come up with, but it looks like between $30 and 50 billion.

And Bytedance, TikTok’s current owner, will still own 20%.

What They Don’t Tell You

But Bytedance doesn’t want to part with the secret sauce of the platform – the referral algorithm that really makes it so addictive to users. And it’s possible that the Chinese government will step in to block the deal should that be scheduled to happen.

AND, current users will then be expected to migrate to a totally new TikTok platform, likely with a watered down algorithm.

Do these people think that they’ll really retain those 170 million users if that happens?

Oh, and none of the new owners have any experience running a social platform, and they’re going to want to start getting their money out as soon as possible.

That means price hikes, and new ways to nickel and dime users to claw every last cent back.

The Winner?

Bytedance doesn’t win, but comes out ahead because at least a degraded asset in the US is better than having none at all, as per the law that was passed to ban Tiktok last year. And it will have a pile of cash to boot.

For the life of me I can’t see why any of the U.S. companies would want to pour money into this venture, except for the fact that they think they’ll be able to extend their right wing agenda to Gen Z and Gen Alpha users.

Now, it’s true that Oracle has been hosting TikTok’s data since 2020, so at least it has experience in that part of it, but that’s just back-end infrastructure and not the front-facing platform.

The Reason For The Ban

Congress passed the Sell Or Ban bill in March of 2024 for several reasons. One was a national security issue indicating that the TikTok (and therefore the Chinese government) was collecting information on millions of Americans. The second was from pressure from various interest groups concerned with child safety.

The ban was supposed to go into effect in December of 2024, but the deadline has since been extended by executive order a number of times. In fact, it was just extended again until December of 2025 in anticipation of a deal.

The data on Americans that everyone was worried about has been collected by the Chinese by now so that ship has probably sailed. Plus, Bytedance will still remain an owner, so those tentacles only get cut back a little.

If this deal does go through, it’ll likely mean that the platform will die a slow MySpace-like death, which will take care of the child safety issue, although way too late to be effective.

And the poor users of the platform (not to mention artists that depend on it) will end up migrating to a new platform faster than anyone thought possible.

TikTok then becomes just another somewhat useful platform fallen into the internet trash heap.