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I support the tiktok ban because it’s about economic fairness. American tech companies can’t fairly compete in China. But until now, Chinese tech companies _can
by dannyw 6y ago
I support the tiktok ban because it’s about economic fairness. American tech companies can’t fairly compete in China. But until now, Chinese tech companies _can_. This gives inherent advantages to Chinese tech companies.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoIt's a complicated situation in this case. My comment was more about censoring the internet in general, as that seems to be the more important part, with the individual case being more of an excuse to address this issue yet again. I mostly think the tiktok ban is justified, for one because china has been playing unfair for ages now and because it is a national security problem when the chinese government could, at any moment, give itself access to this much information that could be used to blackmail large numbers of people.
- Normille 6y agoYou're absolutely right. Just think what havok China could wreak, with access to all those millions of duck-pouting orange-faced selfies and stultifyingly illiterate vacuous conversations, conducted entirely through the medium of txt spk and emojis. It doesn't bear thinking about!
- Qwertious 6y agoThe problem is them having access to e.g. location data of everyone with TikTok installed.
- xvector 6y ago> American tech companies can’t fairly compete in China. They absolutely can if they adhere to the law. LinkedIn and GitHub are thriving in China. Google and Facebook voluntarily pulled out.
- jaywalk 6y agoWell, the law in China makes things pretty unfair from the start.
- xvector 6y agoThe point is that there is a law that you can try to adhere to. Not the case here, where Trump is just doing a straight-up ban.
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoChina doesn’t have rule of law. They have rule by law, but that’s quite different: as long as google or Facebook can’t impress the official class, the officials will find a law to keep them out. They can’t actually go to court and dispute the decision (which doesn’t officially exist anyways), and I’m sure Tiktok and Tencent are going to court over this (and they even have a good chance of even winning). Let’s put it this way: the Chinese Constitution makes strong guarantees about freedom of speech and press. But it doesn’t matter since there is no court to enforce any of that, China lacks any checks and balances and officials mostly rule by fiat and hierarchy.
- gorgoiler 6y agoYou could just as well be describing DC, except FAANG have 100x more power Inside The Beltway than inside First Ring Road.
- dangerface 6y agoWhen understanding the government never look at what they say only look at what they do. They say it's about the Chinese invading privacy and giving them selves an unfair advantage. They could act like it and promote American encrypted chat apps like Signal but they fund the NSA to undercut American tech, encryption and privacy apps like Signal and resort to the same tyranny as china, the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent. It was never about the Chinese it was always about justifying their current tyranny.
- karzeem 6y agoThat's what they're saying to justify it. That and the evergreen appeal to "security reasons". But these are the same people who, every few years, try to ban strong encryption. The next time they bring that up — which you'd better believe they will immediately the next time the right news story presents itself — they're going to use this as precedent. "See, we've been banning technology for all these reasons, what's one more little step? It's for national security."
- xxpor 6y agoForget economics or national security in the traditional sense of data privacy or anything like that. We can not have a major social network that is algorithmically driven controlled by a hostile foreign power. Full stop. Imagine if this were 40 years ago and tiktok was owned by the Soviets. Completely absurd.