It was an executive purposefully brought in for legal compliance with that country's requirements. That he was fired is a huge signal in how seriously aggressive zoom is about protecting data that they would even be willing to go up against national governments. I feel like the firing is a huge part of the story.
If you read the article, it says the numerator grew faster than the denominator, and analysts think progress is good and not meeting the target this year is not a problem.
If you actually read the article we already outspend them on R&D. We spent 2.8% of GDP vs their 2.2% of GDP. They failed to meet their target of 2.5% of GDP despite steadily increasing.
Luckily we don't live in a cyberpunk world where corporations are above the state. TikTok is obedient to the state and is still getting banned, the US has no excuses.
What do you mean wrong? You just supported what I said, both companies decided to leave by themselves, one by not cooperating with authorities after the 9/11 of China, and the other by refusing to censor even though the requirements were very clear for google. They would still have services there if they cooperated like TikTok is cooperating with the US admin. TikTok is clearly a case of protectionism whereas the reverse is not true.
The government telling you not to do something is called blocking if you're not being disingenuous.
No they didn't, both Facebook and Google decided to quit themselves. Remember Dragonfly? Google just tried to get back into China THIS YEAR and was blocked by the US government. It's the US that's closing access to China not the other way around.
The follow mode is secondary as others said. But aside from that it figures out what stuff you like by tracking things like time spent on videos and dozens of other micro creative analytics that I'm sure would piss off privacy advocates. The end result is a very fine tuned recommendations algorithm that's really adept on its task.
As said in some other comments, TikTok does not use a "follow" model, new content is algorithmically recommended to you. Therefore there is no problem with the content creators you're following burning out or your follow list getting stale. For example my highschool friends are no longer that active on facebook, and in 2020 I'm no longer asking random people to add me to FB, therefore facebook is now kind of dead to me. My youtube follows like Ryan Higa etc are burned out, hence youtube is less useful for me. That'll never happen with TikTok because my follows list is irrelevant. I see pretty much only fresh faces with content I'm interested in.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23125450 This comment explains it very well. Biological differences used to explain keeping people in lower status is a traditional idea and long wielded by conservatives. Explaining that lower status with oppression that needs to be changed is a liberal idea.