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A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China. You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen. Rupert

A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China. You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen. Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen to buy Fox. I don't know if I agree with this but you can't say there is no precedent for it in the US or in China.

codedokode 3y ago
> You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen Because freedom of speech doesn't work in practice?
- gpt5 3y ago
  Because freedom of speech is less protected (in practice) for foreign entities.
- didjxhxhsvc 3y ago
  Maybe you can expand on what you’re trying to say because freedom of speech is protected afaik.
- sillypuddy 3y ago
  If the ban was based on the context of the speech it would violate the constitution, but ownership of corporations is fair game to regulate. It's not uncommon for countries to have foreign ownership restrictions on other industries like banking, utilities, railroads, etc.
  - chrischen 3y ago
    The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black. If the US has precedent, and this action follows that precedent, then our bitching and whining about Google and Facebook in China previously makes us look really contradictory. We’ll end up validating Chinese policies all these years if we claim this action has precedent. If it doesn’t have precedent, then it’s even worse. It becomes a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them (or their practices).”
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      > The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black. You could say the same thing about China complaining about this. Actually, that's what people would think of first when you mentioned "the teapot calling the kettle back". Frankly, I think people in China are surprised we kept our internet open for so long. Anyways, yes, American is now admitting that they will play by the same rules as China, rather than giving them a pass.
      - chrischen 3y ago
        What does it matter what China does? If they don’t want our stuff then that’s their choice. I mean, we voluntarily use an economic blockade as a weapon against North Korea, Iran, and Russia, and it is not to their benefits. My whole second point about joining them is saying that it shouldn’t matter what China does or says. They are hypocrites so we can be too???
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I mean, if you think like that, then it doesn't really matter at all. Americans aren't so bound to concept of Chinese face that they actually even care about this. Since we don't get face hurt, accusations of hypocrisy are pretty pointless anyways.
        chrischen 3y ago
        Saving face is not just about saving face. There's also your credibility at stake. There's only so many times you can invade a country under false pretenses before the international community, or even your own constituency, starts siding with the opposition. I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles. At which point we don't need thinkers, just people doing what they can to get what they can all the time. No need to argue or make points. Just fight it out and save some time.
        3y ago
  - trimethylpurine 3y ago
    >If the ban was based on the context of the speech it would violate the constitution It still wouldn't violate the Constitution. Rights are reserved for citizens. It's perfectly legal to tell TikTok what they can or can't say. That's not what Congress has done, but it would be legal.
- jrockway 3y ago
  There can only be a finite number of broadcasters because of how radio works, so it makes sense to regulate. (A little bit of sense, not a lot.) There should be no restrictions on who owns a website. There can be an unlimited number of websites, and every website's "reception range" is the entire planet. Today's rulemaking pushes us one step closer to a Great Firewall. If ByteDance moves operations entirely to China, what measures will the government enact to prevent people in the US from using it? (It will probably be strong-arming app stores, but that will fail because they can just make it a web app. So the only option will be to have two Internets, one with everything except TikTok, and one with everything.) It will be interesting if this extends to other apps. Will it be unamerican to play Genshin Impact?
  - qmarchi 3y ago
    In this particular case, the law targets financial interactions with the company in question. So it wouldn't actually ban the company from serving on the internet, but no US company can knowingly facilitate their services on their servers. Ex, ByteDance couldn't go to AWS and ask for capacity, nor could they go to Hurricane Electric and ask for Peering.
- throwawayq3423 3y ago
  No because a US person can be called in to answer questions in a court of law or before congress. If the owner is Chinese living in London, where would you even begin ?
  - heffer 3y ago
    There is always the option to detain them in Canada and maybe, possibly extradite them to the US (or not).
    - throwawayq3423 3y ago
      That was for breaking sanctions law, but you supported my point. It's difficult.
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  Because freedoms apply to US citizens. It works just fine.
  - takeda 3y ago
    That's exactly it. Freedom of speech is my right to be able to bitch about Biden or Trump without having to worry that I'll die in prison. Freedom of speech is not a right of foreign entities sending me memes about them to manipulate who I will vote for in the election. There's a law where foreign entities can't own TV or Radio in US. This might be controversial, but IMO it should be updated to also include social media as this is source where people get news from.
  - Gormo 3y ago
    Well, no, that's not quite right. Even though we nominalize the concept of 'freedoms' as something that we have (making it possible to conceptualize there being people who don't have them), the actual legal framework in place operationalizes these freedoms as restrictions on the exercise of political power, without qualification. In other words "freedom of speech" means that Congress doesn't have the power to pass laws that suppress speech itself, regardless of where it comes from. It's not that the first amendment applies to some people (and certainly not that it doesn't apply to others), but that it applies to Congress and limits what laws they can pass without qualification.
    - trimethylpurine 3y ago
      Your interpretation might have been right before. But now you're looking at a vast majority bipartisan vote that makes something inarguably clear; China doesn't have those rights as of the most recent interpretation. That's now true, regardless of previous interpretations.
      - Gormo 3y ago
        That's not the way it works. Bipartisan votes in Congress don't alter the constitution, or expand Congress's own power under the constitution, unless the vote is for a constitutional amendment, which must subsequently be ratified by the states to become effective.
hahajk 3y ago
I didn't see the parent say there was no precedent. But anyways, I like to hope that the US is better than China. If US citizens are abused while in China, I would be appalled to see Chinese citizens abused in the US as retribution.
- pokepim 3y ago
  [dead]
- ericmay 3y ago
  I think it would be a poor argument to liken the US banning Tik Tok to US (or other) citizens being abused in China with supposed retaliatory measures. We don’t need to overly moralize this and somehow find the US on a pedestal with impossible to reach and shifting standards of behavior that are only applicable to the US when it’s convenient for various bad actors and despotic regimes (Putin, Hamas, CCP, Iran, North Korea). America can be “better” than China without having to accept disadvantages. Likewise China could allow American social media companies to show that it is sincere in being interested in free and fair business. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be regulations but there’s simply no good argument to allow a Chinese social media company to operate in the US without reciprocal activity and nothing, nothing is lost by banning Tik Tok.
  - chrischen 3y ago
    Actually a free market is one of the main points of America. It’s not a moral argument of its superiority but a practical argument that a free market should result in the best outcome for all. I still believe in this, and if you look at America’s policies of sanctioning countries like Russia, blocking a business from operating in a country is actually a detriment to that country because they lose access to the benefit that that company provides. Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party. I don’t fundamentally believe it’s about fair playing ground or advantages/disadvantages for equivalent US companies in China. The current consensus is really about national security, and having China be able to access data on US people. If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way. Furthermore if it did become about fair playing ground for domestic companies then I think it fundamentally misunderstands the free market economic model. The free market would benefit domestic companies. It would strengthen domestic companies to have competition.
holmesworcester 3y ago
> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China. And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power. "Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)." We can say that Google and Facebook are "banned" or "censored" in China even though China would surely be happy to unban them if they sold their operations in China to a Chinese business. So it is consistent and fair to say that this bill "bans" or "censors" TikTok.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  Why is that improbable? Study your history. Merck was nationalized during WWI (that's why there's two mercks).
- jibe 3y ago
  The bill doesn’t block access to TikTok, it blocks US companies from doing business with TikTok. So it isn’t exactly a ban, or censorship. If TikTok wants to give up the revenue, they can continue to send propaganda to the US, and kids can continue to watch and make videos. China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Telling a business it's free to do something if there's no profit involved is like telling a man he's free to drink whiskey if he can jump over the moon.
    - mgiampapa 3y ago
      Here comes Elon with another hold my beer moment. Thank god he already wasted billions on Twitter.
      - Slava_Propanei 3y ago
        [dead]
alcoholic_byte 3y ago
I think, also with respect to the comments to this comment, we need to appreciate the minute nature of this scenario and statement. Journalists and your everyone else enjoys free speech, it must not be curtailed, neither must it be fostered. While companies as a disembodied judicial entity cannot have speech in the same sense as people of flesh and blood, they can, simply based on their properties, act as an amplifier or muffler. This requires at least some level of care which cannot be guaranteed if the business is run by a company headquartered in an unfriendly foreign nation which does not allow free speech at all and only allows businesses to conduct international business that is sanctioned.(We have had numerous reports about this now over the past years that foreign investors and companies operating in China are actually competing with the Chinese state there.) If you don't agree, let's take out China in this argument and phrase it differently: Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there? (I mean we had Nazi parties in the US around that time, BUT from today's perspective we would agree that such a scenario(the media-outlets) is a clear cut case with the US-government prohibiting it.) What was better in the 1930's was that the newspaper industry was in the business for the news. They were a news-company. These days hedge-funds and for profits(not necessarily bad but it takes a turn when it is unadulterated greed by all means necessary( The Atlantic wrote a nice piece about this where Money swoops in buys a newspaper and runs it into the ground and that regularly and at scale, just cannot find the article)). So our position is a bit dire and we have Television and an industry that strives to captivate/capitalize all the attention it can get for a few pennies to deal with these days. The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death). Pair that with the New Silk Road initiative and the Dollar-Imperialism the Chinese government tries to run in the Pan-Pacific region and the picture becomes less welcoming. Don't get me wrong, there is enough blame to go around for everybody, but I rather have it come from a non fascist entity. That being said, I can go into Washington and demonstrate peacefully(!) against Biden or Trump and I can ask questions about the past. Try doing that in Bejing with respect to Xi or Tienamen Square.(So while we can blame both sides there is still more to one argument than the other, so much for whataboutism) Considering that 'Grandpa' Xi enforced a personal cult around him starting with children's school books(not unlike Putin) and with what goes on with the Uyghur population in China's north, the attempts to strong arm Taiwan , the alignment of China with Russia, the broken promise made to Hong Kong and other items, I have to say that China is fascist and the CCP communist in name only. The concept of Lebensraum is firmly on the agenda of global and, if you are unfortunate enough, also local politics again. China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions.(China is less commercially insulated than Russia it appears. Propably one of the reasons China's is a bit softer trying to incorporate time.) From an economic perspective I totally get that no company wants to have their business taken away, but I doubt Bytedance is just a company. This is just a change in ownership, nothing out of the ordinary. The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership. That framing, in the light of what I just wrote, becomes highly suspect. Almost vicious, bordering on the willingness to divide and incite. (Which reminds me: Totalitarian regimes like to be part of the regular government bodies but they also like to set up their own counterpart so that they, after having stopped the working of those other bodies (or if they are ousted), still have a viable alternative.) That is why I welcome this, why I think it is high time, why I hope to see more of these actions globally,
spaceman_2020 3y ago
To be fair, China never claimed to be the bastion of free market capitalism. America did. Still does. And now it’s banning and regulating superior products off the market.
- number_man 3y ago
  > America did. Still does. Where and when did America claim that?
  - zrn900 3y ago
    When it was forcing every country to privatize everything they had in the last 40 years...
- roamerz 3y ago
  It’s banning it because of national security concerns and has nothing to do with capitalism. Honestly though this administration doesn’t seem to take national security very seriously so this will probably fall to the wayside and be enforced with the same vigor as our border security laws - so yeah nothing for them to worry about.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Somehow, it becomes a security threat when the product is superior than local offerings The Biden admin has also been looking to halt BYD sales in the US, citing security threats [0]. BYD’s cars are often cheaper than Teslas and very well reviewed 0: https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/24087919/biden-tariff-chinese-ev-byd-battery-detroit https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/24087919/biden-tariff-c...
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  To be even more fair, America never claimed that free speech and free markets are wrong. China did. Still does. And now it's begging and suing to keep those freedoms.
- xorbax 3y ago
dbbk 3y ago
TikTok in the US is not run by the Chinese parent directly, it's run by a US-based company called TikTok U.S. Data Security
zrn900 3y ago
> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China Every company that complies with the local laws can open any kind of company in China and they do. The US has to do the same per WTO law as long as Tiktok obeys the US law. And it does. Hence the made up 'national security' horsesh*t to justify the ban - otherwise it would run afoul of WTO rules.

codedokode 3y ago

> You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen Because freedom of speech doesn't work in practice?

gpt5 3y ago
Because freedom of speech is less protected (in practice) for foreign entities.
didjxhxhsvc 3y ago
Maybe you can expand on what you’re trying to say because freedom of speech is protected afaik.
sillypuddy 3y ago
If the ban was based on the context of the speech it would violate the constitution, but ownership of corporations is fair game to regulate. It's not uncommon for countries to have foreign ownership restrictions on other industries like banking, utilities, railroads, etc.
- chrischen 3y ago
  The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black. If the US has precedent, and this action follows that precedent, then our bitching and whining about Google and Facebook in China previously makes us look really contradictory. We’ll end up validating Chinese policies all these years if we claim this action has precedent. If it doesn’t have precedent, then it’s even worse. It becomes a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them (or their practices).”
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black. You could say the same thing about China complaining about this. Actually, that's what people would think of first when you mentioned "the teapot calling the kettle back". Frankly, I think people in China are surprised we kept our internet open for so long. Anyways, yes, American is now admitting that they will play by the same rules as China, rather than giving them a pass.
    - chrischen 3y ago
      What does it matter what China does? If they don’t want our stuff then that’s their choice. I mean, we voluntarily use an economic blockade as a weapon against North Korea, Iran, and Russia, and it is not to their benefits. My whole second point about joining them is saying that it shouldn’t matter what China does or says. They are hypocrites so we can be too???
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I mean, if you think like that, then it doesn't really matter at all. Americans aren't so bound to concept of Chinese face that they actually even care about this. Since we don't get face hurt, accusations of hypocrisy are pretty pointless anyways.
        chrischen 3y ago
        Saving face is not just about saving face. There's also your credibility at stake. There's only so many times you can invade a country under false pretenses before the international community, or even your own constituency, starts siding with the opposition. I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles. At which point we don't need thinkers, just people doing what they can to get what they can all the time. No need to argue or make points. Just fight it out and save some time.
        3y ago
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  >If the ban was based on the context of the speech it would violate the constitution It still wouldn't violate the Constitution. Rights are reserved for citizens. It's perfectly legal to tell TikTok what they can or can't say. That's not what Congress has done, but it would be legal.
jrockway 3y ago
There can only be a finite number of broadcasters because of how radio works, so it makes sense to regulate. (A little bit of sense, not a lot.) There should be no restrictions on who owns a website. There can be an unlimited number of websites, and every website's "reception range" is the entire planet. Today's rulemaking pushes us one step closer to a Great Firewall. If ByteDance moves operations entirely to China, what measures will the government enact to prevent people in the US from using it? (It will probably be strong-arming app stores, but that will fail because they can just make it a web app. So the only option will be to have two Internets, one with everything except TikTok, and one with everything.) It will be interesting if this extends to other apps. Will it be unamerican to play Genshin Impact?
- qmarchi 3y ago
  In this particular case, the law targets financial interactions with the company in question. So it wouldn't actually ban the company from serving on the internet, but no US company can knowingly facilitate their services on their servers. Ex, ByteDance couldn't go to AWS and ask for capacity, nor could they go to Hurricane Electric and ask for Peering.
throwawayq3423 3y ago
No because a US person can be called in to answer questions in a court of law or before congress. If the owner is Chinese living in London, where would you even begin ?
- heffer 3y ago
  There is always the option to detain them in Canada and maybe, possibly extradite them to the US (or not).
  - throwawayq3423 3y ago
    That was for breaking sanctions law, but you supported my point. It's difficult.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
Because freedoms apply to US citizens. It works just fine.
- takeda 3y ago
  That's exactly it. Freedom of speech is my right to be able to bitch about Biden or Trump without having to worry that I'll die in prison. Freedom of speech is not a right of foreign entities sending me memes about them to manipulate who I will vote for in the election. There's a law where foreign entities can't own TV or Radio in US. This might be controversial, but IMO it should be updated to also include social media as this is source where people get news from.
- Gormo 3y ago
  Well, no, that's not quite right. Even though we nominalize the concept of 'freedoms' as something that we have (making it possible to conceptualize there being people who don't have them), the actual legal framework in place operationalizes these freedoms as restrictions on the exercise of political power, without qualification. In other words "freedom of speech" means that Congress doesn't have the power to pass laws that suppress speech itself, regardless of where it comes from. It's not that the first amendment applies to some people (and certainly not that it doesn't apply to others), but that it applies to Congress and limits what laws they can pass without qualification.
  - trimethylpurine 3y ago
    Your interpretation might have been right before. But now you're looking at a vast majority bipartisan vote that makes something inarguably clear; China doesn't have those rights as of the most recent interpretation. That's now true, regardless of previous interpretations.
    - Gormo 3y ago
      That's not the way it works. Bipartisan votes in Congress don't alter the constitution, or expand Congress's own power under the constitution, unless the vote is for a constitutional amendment, which must subsequently be ratified by the states to become effective.

hahajk 3y ago

I didn't see the parent say there was no precedent. But anyways, I like to hope that the US is better than China. If US citizens are abused while in China, I would be appalled to see Chinese citizens abused in the US as retribution.

pokepim 3y ago
[dead]
ericmay 3y ago
I think it would be a poor argument to liken the US banning Tik Tok to US (or other) citizens being abused in China with supposed retaliatory measures. We don’t need to overly moralize this and somehow find the US on a pedestal with impossible to reach and shifting standards of behavior that are only applicable to the US when it’s convenient for various bad actors and despotic regimes (Putin, Hamas, CCP, Iran, North Korea). America can be “better” than China without having to accept disadvantages. Likewise China could allow American social media companies to show that it is sincere in being interested in free and fair business. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be regulations but there’s simply no good argument to allow a Chinese social media company to operate in the US without reciprocal activity and nothing, nothing is lost by banning Tik Tok.
- chrischen 3y ago
  Actually a free market is one of the main points of America. It’s not a moral argument of its superiority but a practical argument that a free market should result in the best outcome for all. I still believe in this, and if you look at America’s policies of sanctioning countries like Russia, blocking a business from operating in a country is actually a detriment to that country because they lose access to the benefit that that company provides. Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party. I don’t fundamentally believe it’s about fair playing ground or advantages/disadvantages for equivalent US companies in China. The current consensus is really about national security, and having China be able to access data on US people. If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way. Furthermore if it did become about fair playing ground for domestic companies then I think it fundamentally misunderstands the free market economic model. The free market would benefit domestic companies. It would strengthen domestic companies to have competition.

holmesworcester 3y ago

> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China. And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power. "Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)." We can say that Google and Facebook are "banned" or "censored" in China even though China would surely be happy to unban them if they sold their operations in China to a Chinese business. So it is consistent and fair to say that this bill "bans" or "censors" TikTok.

throwawaymaths 3y ago
Why is that improbable? Study your history. Merck was nationalized during WWI (that's why there's two mercks).
jibe 3y ago
The bill doesn’t block access to TikTok, it blocks US companies from doing business with TikTok. So it isn’t exactly a ban, or censorship. If TikTok wants to give up the revenue, they can continue to send propaganda to the US, and kids can continue to watch and make videos. China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Telling a business it's free to do something if there's no profit involved is like telling a man he's free to drink whiskey if he can jump over the moon.
  - mgiampapa 3y ago
    Here comes Elon with another hold my beer moment. Thank god he already wasted billions on Twitter.
    - Slava_Propanei 3y ago
      [dead]

alcoholic_byte 3y ago

I think, also with respect to the comments to this comment, we need to appreciate the minute nature of this scenario and statement. Journalists and your everyone else enjoys free speech, it must not be curtailed, neither must it be fostered. While companies as a disembodied judicial entity cannot have speech in the same sense as people of flesh and blood, they can, simply based on their properties, act as an amplifier or muffler. This requires at least some level of care which cannot be guaranteed if the business is run by a company headquartered in an unfriendly foreign nation which does not allow free speech at all and only allows businesses to conduct international business that is sanctioned.(We have had numerous reports about this now over the past years that foreign investors and companies operating in China are actually competing with the Chinese state there.) If you don't agree, let's take out China in this argument and phrase it differently: Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there? (I mean we had Nazi parties in the US around that time, BUT from today's perspective we would agree that such a scenario(the media-outlets) is a clear cut case with the US-government prohibiting it.) What was better in the 1930's was that the newspaper industry was in the business for the news. They were a news-company. These days hedge-funds and for profits(not necessarily bad but it takes a turn when it is unadulterated greed by all means necessary( The Atlantic wrote a nice piece about this where Money swoops in buys a newspaper and runs it into the ground and that regularly and at scale, just cannot find the article)). So our position is a bit dire and we have Television and an industry that strives to captivate/capitalize all the attention it can get for a few pennies to deal with these days. The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death). Pair that with the New Silk Road initiative and the Dollar-Imperialism the Chinese government tries to run in the Pan-Pacific region and the picture becomes less welcoming. Don't get me wrong, there is enough blame to go around for everybody, but I rather have it come from a non fascist entity. That being said, I can go into Washington and demonstrate peacefully(!) against Biden or Trump and I can ask questions about the past. Try doing that in Bejing with respect to Xi or Tienamen Square.(So while we can blame both sides there is still more to one argument than the other, so much for whataboutism) Considering that 'Grandpa' Xi enforced a personal cult around him starting with children's school books(not unlike Putin) and with what goes on with the Uyghur population in China's north, the attempts to strong arm Taiwan , the alignment of China with Russia, the broken promise made to Hong Kong and other items, I have to say that China is fascist and the CCP communist in name only. The concept of Lebensraum is firmly on the agenda of global and, if you are unfortunate enough, also local politics again. China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions.(China is less commercially insulated than Russia it appears. Propably one of the reasons China's is a bit softer trying to incorporate time.) From an economic perspective I totally get that no company wants to have their business taken away, but I doubt Bytedance is just a company. This is just a change in ownership, nothing out of the ordinary. The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership. That framing, in the light of what I just wrote, becomes highly suspect. Almost vicious, bordering on the willingness to divide and incite. (Which reminds me: Totalitarian regimes like to be part of the regular government bodies but they also like to set up their own counterpart so that they, after having stopped the working of those other bodies (or if they are ousted), still have a viable alternative.) That is why I welcome this, why I think it is high time, why I hope to see more of these actions globally,

spaceman_2020 3y ago

To be fair, China never claimed to be the bastion of free market capitalism. America did. Still does. And now it’s banning and regulating superior products off the market.

number_man 3y ago
> America did. Still does. Where and when did America claim that?
- zrn900 3y ago
  When it was forcing every country to privatize everything they had in the last 40 years...
roamerz 3y ago
It’s banning it because of national security concerns and has nothing to do with capitalism. Honestly though this administration doesn’t seem to take national security very seriously so this will probably fall to the wayside and be enforced with the same vigor as our border security laws - so yeah nothing for them to worry about.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Somehow, it becomes a security threat when the product is superior than local offerings The Biden admin has also been looking to halt BYD sales in the US, citing security threats [0]. BYD’s cars are often cheaper than Teslas and very well reviewed 0: https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/24087919/biden-tariff-chinese-ev-byd-battery-detroit https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/24087919/biden-tariff-c...
trimethylpurine 3y ago
To be even more fair, America never claimed that free speech and free markets are wrong. China did. Still does. And now it's begging and suing to keep those freedoms.
xorbax 3y ago

dbbk 3y ago

TikTok in the US is not run by the Chinese parent directly, it's run by a US-based company called TikTok U.S. Data Security

zrn900 3y ago

> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China Every company that complies with the local laws can open any kind of company in China and they do. The US has to do the same per WTO law as long as Tiktok obeys the US law. And it does. Hence the made up 'national security' horsesh*t to justify the ban - otherwise it would run afoul of WTO rules.