Amazon vs. TikTok – WSJ

Amazon Inc.

is rolling out a TikTok-like feature in its app that will allow customers to buy products from a customized feed of photos and videos.

Amazon launched the feature Thursday for select customers and plans to make it available across the U.S. in the coming months, the company told The Wall Street Journal. The portal, which the company named Inspire, will show users a continuous feed of photos and videos featuring products that customers can purchase through the app. The Journal in August reported that Amazon was testing Inspire with a small number of employees.

And it seems that Inspire might work even for people who are not shopping. Mr. Herrera adds:

Mr. Messenger said that while Inspire is shopping-focused, it has social traits and could expand into features such as options to share content and trending content.

Mr. Herrera notes that there are already other U.S. alternatives to TikTok:

Meta

has been among the companies that moved quickly to launch products similar to TikTok’s addictive, endless stream of short-video content, which has made the Chinese firm one of the most successful and powerful social-media platforms. In February, Meta launched its Reels short-video product globally, after introducing it in 2020. Google last year expanded YouTube Shorts, which shows videos of up to 60 seconds, to the U.S.

As for ByteDance-owned TikTok, the outfit claims that it will resist any orders from China’s communist regime to share information about U.S. users. The company also says that it’s working on a way to give consumers clear disclosure when they’re being fed communist propaganda. But the recent history of ByteDance’s relationship with the dictatorship looks like a story of obedience.

The Journal’s Josh Chin reported in April of 2018 from Beijing:

In China, concerns over a smartphone app trafficking in off-color jokes led to authorities shutting it down — and an abject apology from the site’s operator.

“This entire time we’ve been overemphasizing the value of technology without realizing that technology must be guided by socialist core values,” Zhang Yiming, founder of Beijing Bytedance Technology Co., said in a statement.

Jiayang Fan added in the New Yorker:

Bytedance published a statement on

Weibo

thanking the state for its supervision and expressing remorse for its negligence: “We are guilty, and the platform has an unshirkable responsibility for this.”

… Zhang has now pledged that Bytedance will increase its team of censors from six thousand to ten thousand, create a blacklist of banned users, and develop better technology to monitor and screen content.

A

New York Times

dispatch from China noted:

‘’As a start-up developing rapidly in the wake of the 18th National Congress, we understand deeply that our rapid development was an opportunity afforded to us by this great era,’’ Mr. Zhang wrote, referring to the 2012 Communist Party confab at which President

Xi Jinping

took office.

Even a report in the South China Morning Post revealed what was happening:

“Bytdance [sic] is a rock star. It went from nothing to an operator of multiple, very successful content products in a very short period of time,” said

Jeffrey Towson,

a Peking University professor.

“Once you become very significant in news or in social media in China, you are going to work with the government, because those are areas of government concerns,” he said…

It seems beyond naive to think that ByteDance will now learn to become disobedient, or even that it can and still operate in Xi Jinping’s China.

As for Amazon’s founder

Jeff Bezos,

he owns a U.S. newspaper that sometimes embarrasses itself with stories that would likely earn the approval of Chairman Xi.

But Mr. Bezos has made it clear that he believes in the U.S. model of liberty, not the communist model of subjugation. In a 2020 congressional hearing the Amazon founder explained:

My mom, Jackie, had me when she was a 17-year-old high school student in Albuquerque, New Mexico… Determined to keep up with her education, she enrolled in night school, picking classes led by professors who would let her bring an infant to class. She would show up with two duffel bags—one full of textbooks, and one packed with diapers, bottles, and anything that would keep me interested and quiet for a few minutes.

My dad’s name is Miguel. He adopted me when I was four years old. He was 16 when he came to the United States from Cuba as part of Operation Pedro Pan, shortly after Castro took over. My dad arrived in America alone. His parents felt he’d be safer here. His mom imagined America would be cold, so she made him a jacket sewn entirely out of cleaning cloths, the only material they had on hand. We still have that jacket; it hangs in my parents’ dining room. My dad spent two weeks at Camp Matecumbe, a refugee center in Florida, before being moved to a Catholic mission in Wilmington, Delaware. He was lucky to get to the mission, but even so, he didn’t speak English and didn’t have an easy path. What he did have was a lot of grit and determination. He received a scholarship to college in Albuquerque, which is where he met my mom…

The initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, who invested a large fraction of their life savings in something they didn’t understand. They weren’t making a bet on Amazon or the concept of a bookstore on the internet. They were making a bet on their son. I told them that I thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment, and they did it anyway.

… the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the U.S. Immigrants like my dad see what a treasure this country is—they have perspective and can often see it even more clearly than those of us who were lucky enough to be born here… even in the face of today’s humbling challenges, I have never been more optimistic about our future.

Let’s hope technologists at Amazon and other companies that don’t have to live under the bosses of Beijing will create compelling alternatives for consumers of social media. And even though Apple and Google may hesitate before dropping TikTok from their app stores, U.S. parents can simply decide not to let their kids interact with any companies guided by socialist core values.

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The Coming Debt Disaster
Director of the Congressional Budget Office Phill Swagel published a helpful reminder on Wednesday about the financial iceberg lying dead ahead:

In CBO’s May 2022 baseline projections, which reflect the assumption that current laws governing taxes and spending generally remain unchanged, federal debt held by the public rises from 98 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022 to 110 percent of GDP in 2032 and 185 percent of GDP by 2052. The cost of interest on the debt doubles as a share of GDP over the next 10 years and continues to increase thereafter.

To put the federal budget on a sustainable long-term path, lawmakers would need to make significant policy changes…

And they need to start making them now.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Lisa Rossi helps compile Best of the Web.)

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