Facebook Tried to Acquire Musical.ly For Six Months In 2016 – Digital Music News

Sources speaking with Bloomberg and Buzzfeed report that Facebook hoped to acquire Musical.ly to break into the Chinese market. According to those sources, the talks in the second half of 2016 were serious but nothing ever came to fruition.

ByteDance eventually acquired Musical.ly in 2017 merging the app with Douyin to create TikTok.

Bloomberg reporting adds an additional angle to the reason why the deal never went through. Facebook walked away from the deal over concerns of the apps young userbase and Chinese ownership.

Thats a concern that landed TikTok in hot water over child safety concerns. Lawmakers in India briefly banned the app prompting a look at how TikTok moderates itself. The U.S. Treasury Department is currently investigating ByteDances acquisition of Musical.ly.

Leaked audio from a meeting this summer revealed that Zuckerberg plans to move fast and copy things when it comes to TikTok. That strategy worked once before when Instagram cloned the Stories feature from Snapchat so why wouldnt the plan work again?

In true copycat form, Instagram recently unveiled a new feature called Reels in Brazil. Reels is a TikTok clone with fewer video editing features, but Instagram is huge in Brazil. Last year, Facebook launched a separate TikTok clone app called Lasso but it hasnt caught on anywhere but Mexico.

Facebook has never been shy about cloning apps if they cant acquire them. Zuckerberg offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion before Facebook and Instagram cloned its most popular features.

But when it comes to TikTok, it looks like Facebooks copy-to-complete game plan isnt quite panning out at least not yet. Sources speaking to BuzzFeed say TikTok has become a personal bugbear for Zuckerberg. One former high-ranking Facebook official said:

Facebook is so pissed that TikTok is the one thing they cant beat that theyve turned to geopolitical arguments and lawmakers in Washington to fight their fight.

Just recently, Zuckerberg excoriated TikTok for censorship and other political abuses. While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the China-based app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these same protests are censored, even here in the US, Zuckerberg told an audience last month at Georgetown University.

Of course, Facebook itself has been accused of destroying democracy in realtime and radicalizing users en-masse. All of which probably makes TikTok a pleasant distraction for Zuckerberg.

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Facebook Tried to Acquire Musical.ly For Six Months In 2016 - Digital Music News