Comment by zapzupnz
1 year ago
> For who? UK users?
Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
1 year ago
> For who? UK users?
Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
I think they meant that because content is siloed already by language barriers, the only ecosystem that would be affected by the removal of US users is the English-speaking subsystem.
That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.
2/3 of the global population doesn’t speak English.
TikTok content is mostly visual. My YouTube shorts are frequently foreign language with AI subtitles.
Also, TikTok is banned in India and—ironically—China [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok
A valid point, but I doubt people are going to notice if “clips of people slipping on ice” suddenly exclude Americans post 2024.
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English is literally the most commonly spoken language in the world. No language in the world will fit your criteria if you want more than two thirds of the global population to speak it.
Why would that criteria matter when what we are discussing is the impact when you remove a country’s creators from a platform?
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That doesn't sound accurate. Did you mean as a first language?
A quick search seems to confirm this. A few sites list the number to be around ~1.3 billion people who speak English at all, with around ~360-380 million being native speakers. For example: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-eng....
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-l...
> first language?
1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
US, UK, Canada, Australia is where you find the bulk of native speakers. In say Germany or whatever they may become fluent but it’s relatively rare for German parents to be speaking English to each other in casual conversation next to an infant’s crib.
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As their first language, perhaps
There are only about 400 million native English speakers. You can't just add up the population of English speaking countries, because that excludes immigrants living in these countries, and people born there who did not learn English as their first language.
As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.
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That’s at all, there are only ~380 million native English speakers.
Of that 1/3 (of the global population) a significant percentage have extremely limited skills, though the threshold is above knowing a few random words.
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