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China would rather see TikTok U.S. close than a forced sale
- thewhitetulip 6y agoCan anyone who knows these things please tell me what good does banning an app do to a country? India banned loads of Chinese apps, sure, "to put pressure" but is that "pressure" meaningful enough? Will it work only if all nations decide to do so to counter China? Will that ever happen? Are we heading towards app-diplomacy?
- goalieca 6y agoThere’s other Chinese companies such as Tencent which aren’t banned. India has more serious border and resource disputes so they are using apps as a proxy in the fight. I think the main concern many people in the west have against tik Tok is that is is a form of social media that is directly or indirectly under control of the Chinese government and will be used as a subtle form of information warfare.
- amalfra 6y agoAs far as I understand it's applicable to all platforms be it chineese, western or even indian. These days these internet platforms are a lot used for spreading political propaganda. Simplest example is ones like quora, reddit etc. It's these days filled with right wing(from all nations) accounts spreading propaganda. The amount of reach they have in these platforms and the amount of control they have to suppress opinions is massive. I was astonished that there was an answer justifying european colonisations and when a comment was made how it was not great for colonised and how the colonisers as a whole benefited a lot form these actions immediately the comment was reported and removed. These platforms are all owned for spreading each other's political propoganda in the information warfare that's there. It's not exclusive to chineese but as you said since government control over companies are more there it's thousands times worse; but it's not exclusive to chineese it is for platforms from west too.
- goalieca 6y agoIf anything, reddit is actually overrun by left wing spam accounts and I say this as a liberal leaning person myself. I had to drop that platform outside of reading nintendo and Star Trek episode discussions.
- thewhitetulip 6y agoReddit can get nasty very quickly if you venture out of the few remaining sane subs!
- thewhitetulip 6y agoYes, but how do we know that this is a good strategy? Is it working? How do we be certain that this is a good fight back mechanism?
- CincinnatiMan 6y agoBanning an app reduces another nation’s control over the culture and mindset of your country’s people. Whether this is a concern or not is less clear, but theoretically China could censor content that is critical of China, which India and US may not approve of. Or even more subtly it could nudge people in certain directions. Such as the claim that Russia is stoking the fires of internal strife within the US.
- andrepd 6y agoThat last claim is not so much s claim as proven fact.
- thewhitetulip 6y agoI'm pretty sure we weren't seeing Chinese culture via TikTok. Indian Tiktokers made lot of money via TikTok. But does this work to nudge China? Is Indian lost revenue big enough for China to change their style just because TikTok is banned?
- CincinnatiMan 6y agoThe point isn't to get China to change, but for a country to have control over its own people instead of a different country having that control.
- thewhitetulip 6y agoIs that's the case then I can understand. The way I hear it in Indian Media is that our supreme leader "taught China a lesson by banning apps"
- lowwave 6y agopeople should all just bit bitorrent over i2p for all internet access. So everyone is anonymous at all time. No body should be known who they are unless they want to you.
- sudeepj 6y ago> what good does banning an app do to a country Given the context of recent India-China issues, it is fair that India will take punitive steps. But it will not make China to correct her behaviour. I look at the banning of the apps this way: 1. Sends a message to China that India can take further steps and will stand-up to the bullying of China 2. I really doubt that banning apps is the ultimate card with India. It is a just one of the cards and reserving others when things escalate 3. If banning 100+ apps results into even growth of 10 apps India-made apps, it is a good side effect. 4. Any little trust India policymakers had towards China is gone. See [1] [1] https://theprint.in/defence/china-wanted-no-escalation-on-hotline-call-in-the-day-tried-to-capture-territory-at-night/499341/ https://theprint.in/defence/china-wanted-no-escalation-on-ho... Note: theprint.in is not a right-wing media outlet. I could have cited a more pro-govt sources but theprint is a centrist ones.
- thewhitetulip 6y agoI agree with all your points. So this is just punishing China. Whether it works is yet to be seen Sure, few local apps growing through this will be a happy incidence.
- libertine 6y agoIt could be something as "simple" as shifting public opinion. And these days, it's a lot - because it's not just Indian public opinion and Chinese public opinion, it has global reach. It also undermines China enterprises, when a big part of tech business models is economies of scale, such actions basically cut massive slices of the global market. Even if all of this is a nudge, it's still a nudge in a certain direction. Because the reality is that India is struggling dealing with China, and all the help they can get in the direction of slowing down China is good for them. You see news about the conflicts in the Himalayas for small "patches of land", but a lot of the advents in the Indian Ocean are going unnoticed - China is literally expanding their territory aggressively and India doesn't have enough navy resources to stop it.
- loraa 6y agoYou do know that China filters what the Chinese can see. How is this any different? If China doesn't trust it's people using US sites and apps, why do you commies cry when the US does it?
- Dahoon 6y agoSwap China with USA and Tiktok with Google and see how insane it is. I hope China doesn't back down to US aggression. This is like a child throwing a tantrum. It needs to be put in its place by a grown-up.
- hugh4life 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
- ipiz0618 6y agoThe Chinese government and the people they control is really putting doublethink to use. Just look at the huge list of websites not accessible in China, and movies, and news, and books...the list goes on. When nations start doing the same to Chinese infiltration, it's suddenly unfair.
- cultus 6y agoI really don't understand the panic about Chinese surveillance with TikTok when we have Facebook, which is far worse in the depth of what they collect. This just erodes the confidence in American rule of law for no particular reason.
- bogwog 6y agoThe difference is that China is an enemy of democracy. Whether you hate or love the US, I’m sure you’d rather live in a free world.
- arcticbull 6y agoJohn Adams and George Washington believed a two-party system was also an enemy of democracy. It's not really so black and white. Free vs. non-free. Both sides really do have mass surveillance, China's being a bit further along and a bit more omniscient. I don't think TikTok, a collection of six-second clips of teens messing around represents a real, material, meaningful threat to freedom and democracy. Even if they collected all the footage and ran it all through their national security apparatus. The signal to noise ratio on this content is incomprehensibly low. This is grandstanding and showmanship on the part of two strongmen leaders, one totalitarian overlord and one wannabe, and really, I don't think there's a clear right side and wrong side here.
- jacknews 6y agoI don't see how tiktok is worth billions. USA could perhaps play China's game; ban tiktok, and support a 'local champion' to create an identical US version, let's call it, toktik - it at least sounds more like the poison it is. Then again, we need to find ways to stop China gaming the world open trade system, forcing the rest of the world to follow Chinese values and become more like China - ie less free.
- extremeMath 6y agoThe network effect is a billion dollar value.
- sthnblllII 6y agoI guess if the Chinese gov sold their stakes in Chinese tech companies to politically connected businessmen then the censorship would be ok because free speech doesn’t apply to “private” companies with ties to US intelligence like Cisco and Microsoft? The US is the one going out of its way to attack countries that don't bend the knee like Iraq and Venezuela. China pays its partners in Africa for their resources. US overthrows governments to steal them and “spread democracy”. Why does US spread democracy to Iraq but not Saudi Arabia, a literal monarchy? (Because US only care about power) The projection of US sins onto China is unreal and lays bare US meddling and hypocrisy.
- jacknews 6y agoUSA is certainly no saint, eg Banana Republics, not to mention war crimes in the middle-east. But IMHO a world 'under' USA's insistence on openness, human-rights, democracy, (and free-flowing oil, etc, of course), is preferable to China's opaque mercantilism and spiteful sensitivity. My point is that USA is aping those attributes. We need to stop being dragged into a less-free world.
- sthnblllII 6y agoBut the US doesn't promote openness, human rights, or democracy. It promotes its own mercantilism and spiteful sensitivity while accusing others of doing so. How many human rights do Palestinians have in USA’s greatest ally, Israel? (40% are denied citizenship) How much market openness is Tiktok seeing in US? Why is US #2 mid east ally a monarchy? These are all baldfaced lies and only uninformed Americans living in the US media bubble believe them. The people in charge of the US are hell bent on destroying those things when they come into conflict with their own power. Therefore they should have no role in enforcing any international orders.
- oxymoran 6y agoOf course, that’s the whole point. It’s of no use to the CCP if they can’t control it.
- sthnblllII 6y agoIf China required Apple sell itself to Huawei to continue selling iPhones, US government would outright forbid the sale, even if China payed a fair price.
- TMWNN 6y agoPeople, including Chinese, buy iPhones because they're from Apple. No one, including Chinese, would buy Huawei "iPhones" because a) everyone would know that they're not from Apple, and b) if they wanted to buy a Huawei phone, they'd buy a Huawei phone.
- sthnblllII 6y agoSounds plausible. That’s completely irrelevant to my point however.
- TMWNN 6y agoNot at all. It's my way of saying that the US government would not bother forbidding the transaction. Further, did the US protest when China ordered Google out of the country in 2008? (And Facebook, but it wasn't nearly as large then.) No.
- sthnblllII 6y agoOk I see what you mean now. Google left voluntarily because China refused to let Google be a backdoor for US propaganda and surveillance. (exactly what tiktoc is accused of) and yes, the US protested loudly at the time.
- jeswin 6y agoAnother possibility is that a forced sale could uncover links to Chinese government surveillance in technical assets, and that's a risk they don't want to take.
- emteycz 6y agoDo you think they have API calls to the communist party's surveillance backoffice?
- arcticbull 6y agoLots of cheap Android smartphones do, why wouldn't TikTok? I just don't think they get anything material out of the integration due to the unbelievably low signal to noise ratio.
- charliemil4 6y agoI’d venture to say it’s filtered to knowing who influences culture. Then pinpointing what those accounts respond to. Then designing content to shift said culture through this channel.
- inglor_cz 6y agoWho knows. People being people, the backdoors that are likely there might be easily visible from the source code. And they may be identical to backdoors used elsewhere. Devs do not like to reinvent the wheel. And scrubbing them out without trace prior to ownership transfer is not easy. One forgotten backup copy of the Git database is enough to leak the info.
- andrepd 6y agoYes? It's neither technically impossible nor beyond a totalitarian state to do so. So why would you presume otherwise?
- lowwave 6y agoOf course. It is CCP, they are scanning QR code to determine if someone can go some where. It is like a video game in real life over there.
- mikece 6y agoLet’s assume for a second that TikTok really is a surveillance app designed by the PLA cyber command as some in the Trump administration allege. How, then, is a forced sale not a form of aggression or even warfare?
- extremeMath 6y agoDefinition of war has changed since nukes and the cold war.
- duxup 6y agoIsn't this similar to other trade rules that China has already? Who can do business as far as social media is concerned is already a situation where the government picks and chooses.
- learc83 6y agoSo in your scenario, kicking out a spy and confiscating their US based property is a form of warfare?
- icegreentea2 6y agoBecause dismantling other countries surveillance apparatus operating in your own soil is not aggression. It's just like breaking up spy rings, and destroying bugs. It's certainly an aggressive posture, but it's not really aggression.
- quantaum_dot 6y agoYes,right, every country other than US should ban Facebook
- icegreentea2 6y agoChina literally did ban Facebook.
- ourmandave 6y agoSeriously? Shutting down foreign spy ware is called national self defense. If they weren't so big they would have just been shut down.
- 317070 6y agoIt's also a precedent. Now it would be TikTok, which company would be next? Especially since the border between state and company is less clear in China, I could see why China would not allow this to happen and strengthen the US economy with a loss on their side.
- reminddit 6y agoIt's still a probability between no deal and unfavorable deal. Any country would do the same when confronted with this situation.
- libertine 6y agoChina is proud of TikTok being a Chinese company - in their eyes it's their turn to have the next big social media platform. It represents strength, progress of China and CCP, and maybe a glimpse of change for the perception of China being the global tech powerhouse. Probably Chinese people are proud of it as well. So it really doesn't impress me to see their intentions to burn it down and keep their pride/save face, instead of turning the the public perception of "losing to the US"/"being the underdog" once again.
- xnx 6y agoI really hope Internet Archive (or someone similar) is furiously downloading all the videos and comments it can.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]