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China already uses the same logic to ban American apps. People still try to do business with China, including other American businesses. And people will also co

China already uses the same logic to ban American apps. People still try to do business with China, including other American businesses. And people will also continue to do business with America, including other Chinese businesses

aprilthird2021 2y ago
And China is a terrible, autocratic nation which abuses people daily and uses slave labor from NK and Uighurs to produce goods for almost 0 cost. Why do we want to be like that? To prove to everyone that that works?
- Veraticus 2y ago
  If you believe that is so, why is it incumbent on us to accept China's businesses worldwide? Shouldn't we be banning them more to protest slave labor and concentration camps? No country has a right to do business anywhere and everywhere. I feel like people are really grasping at straws to squeeze this argument under some kind of "freedom of speech" or "freedom of action" umbrella, but those concepts have only ever applied to humans, not nations.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    I actually am fine with banning all Chinese businesses. Our ruling classes would dislike that. They ONLY want to ban Chinese businesses when they fear they might not have sole and total control over what Americans see and what "influences" them, and I hate that. It's that authoritarian impulse in rulers to keep people like docile sheep they can extract money out of and silence, that I hate.
- derefr 2y ago
  If you already acknowledge that China (the CCP really; the average Chinese citizen is not complicit) is doing "evil" things — then do you not also acknowledge that one of the "evil" things the CCP does, is to suborn/coerce private Chinese individuals and companies into temporarily acting as foreign propaganda arms for CCP messaging? Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population? (Compare/contrast: the Canadian government's inquiry[1] into suspected foreign-state-led tampering of Canadian elections as executed through social-media marketing and psy-ops. Same question: why would any government knowingly permit this, if they had the tools to block it?) [1] https://apnews.com/article/public-inquiry-canada-foreign-interference-china-a630eef29379e8c93a5a52caa3ddd059 https://apnews.com/article/public-inquiry-canada-foreign-int... China is a dystopia, because the CCP combines internal propaganda against the West, with strong filters on Internet, news media, etc., such that it's very difficult (and often illegal) to "be informed" — i.e. to get any idea of what Western thought about China actually is, without the tainted lens of the CCP viewpoint. It's not just that you can't access "US propaganda mouthpieces" in China; you can't access any foreign media reporting about the US in China. Banning one foreign propaganda mouthpiece does not create a dystopia; and in fact, depending on what that propaganda vehicle is stating, can make your own state less dystopian. For the US to become "like China" in how it is manipulating the views of its citizens, it would have to be banning not only all Chinese-owned media (which it is not doing), but also banning any reporting on China from any neutral-third-party country — such that the only way to hear about China would be through US news media that the US government could suborn. Which is... not happening. Also, for the comparison to be valid, the US ban on Tiktok would have to be somehow analogous to China's ban on US news media. Which it's not, because Tiktok is not Chinese news media. (You could say that Douyin is Chinese news media of a sort — insofar as you might call Twitter "American news media." But Tiktok is not Douyin; no Douyin content is accessible on Tiktok.) Tiktok does not give Americans access to a bunch of Chinese-sourced information about China that the US government would want to suppress. Tiktok just does the same thing Instagram or Snapchat does — give Westerners a place to share their short-form content — but with the CCP being able to step in at any point and inject psy-ops or "tune the algorithm" toward their ends, because of their ultimate control over the platform. Rather than thinking of Tiktok as "Chinese news media", I think a more apt way to think about it, is as one of those scam apps that you find on app stores, that has stolen the (decompiled or FOSS) code from a popular app; injected a backdoor into it; and reuploaded it. Tiktok is the higher-effort version of this — it hasn't stolen anything, but instead independently implemented a (basically fungible) competitor to the other apps in its space. But, from the CCP's perspective, it's to the same end: like scam apps, Tiktok redirects Western civilian engagement and attention from apps that the CCP can't touch, into an app that the CCP is able to "nudge" at will.
  - nemothekid 2y ago
    This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong. It's completely bizarre that anyone would use the treatment of the Uyghurs as the beacon of immorality for the chinese, while the US currently bombs more muslims with the efficiency that the CCP could ever dream of. If the China is evil for suppressing all social media for the purpose of spreading propoganda, what do you call what the US is doing with TikTok. Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? With your standard, couldn't the US also be considered a dystopia? I view banning of TikTok as dangerous, especially considering the political climate. Is my "freedom of choice" really freedom if my only choices are thouse controlled US hegemonic powers? If it was instead China that ruled world, and Douyin, WeChat and Weibo were used world wide, would it seem that China is the "free" society, and that America in banning TikTok was the autocratic one? You could even imagine them using Trump as "proof" of dysfunction in our system.
    - derefr 2y ago
      > This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong. No? I think you're engaging in very black-and-white thinking yourself. The spectrum from "utopia" to "dystopia" is very wide. I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side. A country is an effective dystopia, to the degree that, among other things, its citizens are: • manipulated by the state into not realizing the bad things the state does (both locally and on the world stage); • manipulated by the state into developing a negatively-biased view of countries that oppose that country in conflicts (usually involving many entirely-false beliefs about those countries), where countries neutral to those conflicts would not support those views; • and controlled + influenced by the state into not visiting other countries where they could "learn the truth." China does all three of these things, in the strongest and most active sense. News companies are state-owned or coerced. Citizen journalists are arrested. Individuals sharing things they shouldn't are arrested. People have low social credit scores and can't leave the country by default, and have to earn their way out by presenting as brainwashed. Etc. The US, meanwhile, does some of these things, but in much weaker senses: • the US very well probably manipulates its own mainstream media; but it does nothing to prevent access to foreign news sources (where, again, Tiktok is not a foreign news source — you can't learn anything about China on Tiktok. But you can still read CCP-mouthpiece Chinese MSM outlets like https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ just fine.) • the US suppresses virally-disseminated citizen journalism in the sense of telling social-media services to blacklist keywords in their recommendation algorithms; but they aren't arresting the people who post those things. There is no risk in the US to spreading samizdat — in fact, there is no concept in the US of samizdat, because there is no news or fact that will get you arrested by sharing it. Anyone who wants can join a group chat (even one hosted on a US-based service!) about these topics, and spread info there without a problem. People can put up posters or even run billboards calling for people to join these meetings, and the government won't go around tearing them down. (This is what your much-underappreciated right to "freedom of assembly" gets you!) • Random US citizens have no trouble visiting other countries — even the countries the US doesn't like. You can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right this moment if you like. A US citizen can also legally visit Russia, despite the global sanctions (though you'll have to fly to a neighbouring country and come in via land.) In neither case will this get you in trouble with the US government. It won't even disrupt an application for security clearance. (Also, if you're curious, I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Here in Canada, we have things like hate-speech laws. We believe that there is such a right as "freedom of speech", but that it can come into opposition of other rights — such as the right to one's own safety. Or the right to a fair election.) > Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially when the past performance is in peacetime, and the future results are in wartime. Which is to say: IMHO the CCP has not yet done any kind of real manipulation through Tiktok. In fact, they've likely encouraged ByteDance to be perfect little boy-scouts and build up as much social trust among Gen Z and Gen Alpha as possible. (Whereas Facebook et al likely were told by the US government to suppress certain sentiments.) The thing the US government fears — the thing any US citizen should fear — isn't any already ongoing manipulation on Tiktok. The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent. And anyone who believes that a war between the US and China is inevitable, wants to get that sleeper agent out of the room before they wake up.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Why do we want to be like that? We don’t. TikTok.com will continue to be freely accessible. That’s not true for Facebook in China.
deleted 2y ago
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hnfong 2y ago
First Google result for "China foreign direct investment" (no quotes) for me: "Foreign direct investment in China falls to 30-year low" https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Foreign-direct-investment-in-China-falls-to-30-year-low https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Foreign-direct-investment-in... I won't comment on whether prioritizing national security over being business friendly is right, I'm just saying there are consequences in China's case, and I believe there will be some consequences for the US as well.
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
China don't "ban apps unless company sells it" "non-adversary", implying that China is your enemy, this doesn't make sense lol, pure propaganda at this point China tells ahead of time what the company is allowed or not allowed to do, then grant access if they comply TikTok comply with the US law, otherwise it would have already been banned The US is spreading some FUD to push some other laws and to prevent China from being leader in the US, they did the same with EU companies in the past, most notably French ones Guess who is working on "we don't have WeeChat in the west, let's copy WeeChat for our everything app" Yeah, you guessed right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aDPHpPGxD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aDPHpPGxD0
- Veraticus 2y ago
  Uh, China has banned numerous US-based apps because they violate its censorship policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... That includes Twitter/X, so not sure what your YouTube video has to do with anything.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
    Read again, specially this line: "China tells ahead of time what the company is allowed or not allowed to do, then grant access if they comply" Are you implying that US companies should be above foreign local laws?
    - Veraticus 2y ago
      I did read that line: the result of a company not complying is them being banned. Those apps are not accessible anywhere in China. If you agree that companies should not be above the laws of the country they operate in, doesn't the same apply to ByteDance?
      - WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
        You ask a question that's already answered in my post, what is your goal? "TikTok comply with the US law, otherwise it would have already been banned"
smgit 2y ago
India banned TikTok a while back but their trade with China just keeps growing - https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/chinas-share-in-indias-industrial-goods-imports-jump-to-30-from-21-in-last-15-years-gtri/109679285 https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/c... TikTok ban is more about the Attention Wars. Politicians in Democracies world over have walked into a trap by falling in love with Social Media. How do you get noticed, in the absurd reality created by social media, where everyone is given a mic hooked up to the same sound system? No one can win in this game. Its an arms race to nowhere. Instead of recognizing that and creating a coordination mechanism for who gets the mic, politicians are currently doing two things - 1. Buying more Ads (just check the ever growing ad spends by political parties world over) - this basically means Democracy is for sale to the largest ad buyers 2. Arm twisting the platforms
ETHisso2017 2y ago
Factually incorrect. China didn't ban US apps, it required US apps to obey local Chinese censorship laws. Some apps (like LinkedIn) stayed in compliance and stayed, while others left China.
- Veraticus 2y ago
  What a weird stance to take! What happens if apps refuse to self-censor or obey Chinese censorship laws? They are banned. So indeed, China does ban US apps. Twitter/X did not just leave China; it is blocked in mainland China and no one can access it.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    While US apps are slightly harmed by losing access to a market, it's really the freedom of Chinese citizens that is impacted by China banning apps. The US banning TikTok will harm ByteDance's bottom line but it also sets a precedent that the US government can dictate what you install on your phone. Why are people advocating for this like it's some kind of victory for freedom?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Why are people advocating for this like it's some kind of victory for freedom? We’re not. It’s a victory for national security. It’s a collective curtailment on freedom, similar to how we’ve agreed Americans are not free to finance terrorism.
  - ETHisso2017 2y ago
    That's not a weird stance at all. Twitter/X is blocked in China because it refuses to comply with Chinese law on censorship. China's law criminalizes behavior on censorship, which adheres to what modern notions of legal jurisprudence. The US law criminalizes origin and ownership, which violates a legal principle on bills of attainder.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

aprilthird2021 2y ago

And China is a terrible, autocratic nation which abuses people daily and uses slave labor from NK and Uighurs to produce goods for almost 0 cost. Why do we want to be like that? To prove to everyone that that works?

Veraticus 2y ago
If you believe that is so, why is it incumbent on us to accept China's businesses worldwide? Shouldn't we be banning them more to protest slave labor and concentration camps? No country has a right to do business anywhere and everywhere. I feel like people are really grasping at straws to squeeze this argument under some kind of "freedom of speech" or "freedom of action" umbrella, but those concepts have only ever applied to humans, not nations.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I actually am fine with banning all Chinese businesses. Our ruling classes would dislike that. They ONLY want to ban Chinese businesses when they fear they might not have sole and total control over what Americans see and what "influences" them, and I hate that. It's that authoritarian impulse in rulers to keep people like docile sheep they can extract money out of and silence, that I hate.
derefr 2y ago
If you already acknowledge that China (the CCP really; the average Chinese citizen is not complicit) is doing "evil" things — then do you not also acknowledge that one of the "evil" things the CCP does, is to suborn/coerce private Chinese individuals and companies into temporarily acting as foreign propaganda arms for CCP messaging? Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population? (Compare/contrast: the Canadian government's inquiry[1] into suspected foreign-state-led tampering of Canadian elections as executed through social-media marketing and psy-ops. Same question: why would any government knowingly permit this, if they had the tools to block it?) [1] https://apnews.com/article/public-inquiry-canada-foreign-interference-china-a630eef29379e8c93a5a52caa3ddd059 https://apnews.com/article/public-inquiry-canada-foreign-int... China is a dystopia, because the CCP combines internal propaganda against the West, with strong filters on Internet, news media, etc., such that it's very difficult (and often illegal) to "be informed" — i.e. to get any idea of what Western thought about China actually is, without the tainted lens of the CCP viewpoint. It's not just that you can't access "US propaganda mouthpieces" in China; you can't access any foreign media reporting about the US in China. Banning one foreign propaganda mouthpiece does not create a dystopia; and in fact, depending on what that propaganda vehicle is stating, can make your own state less dystopian. For the US to become "like China" in how it is manipulating the views of its citizens, it would have to be banning not only all Chinese-owned media (which it is not doing), but also banning any reporting on China from any neutral-third-party country — such that the only way to hear about China would be through US news media that the US government could suborn. Which is... not happening. Also, for the comparison to be valid, the US ban on Tiktok would have to be somehow analogous to China's ban on US news media. Which it's not, because Tiktok is not Chinese news media. (You could say that Douyin is Chinese news media of a sort — insofar as you might call Twitter "American news media." But Tiktok is not Douyin; no Douyin content is accessible on Tiktok.) Tiktok does not give Americans access to a bunch of Chinese-sourced information about China that the US government would want to suppress. Tiktok just does the same thing Instagram or Snapchat does — give Westerners a place to share their short-form content — but with the CCP being able to step in at any point and inject psy-ops or "tune the algorithm" toward their ends, because of their ultimate control over the platform. Rather than thinking of Tiktok as "Chinese news media", I think a more apt way to think about it, is as one of those scam apps that you find on app stores, that has stolen the (decompiled or FOSS) code from a popular app; injected a backdoor into it; and reuploaded it. Tiktok is the higher-effort version of this — it hasn't stolen anything, but instead independently implemented a (basically fungible) competitor to the other apps in its space. But, from the CCP's perspective, it's to the same end: like scam apps, Tiktok redirects Western civilian engagement and attention from apps that the CCP can't touch, into an app that the CCP is able to "nudge" at will.
- nemothekid 2y ago
  This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong. It's completely bizarre that anyone would use the treatment of the Uyghurs as the beacon of immorality for the chinese, while the US currently bombs more muslims with the efficiency that the CCP could ever dream of. If the China is evil for suppressing all social media for the purpose of spreading propoganda, what do you call what the US is doing with TikTok. Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? With your standard, couldn't the US also be considered a dystopia? I view banning of TikTok as dangerous, especially considering the political climate. Is my "freedom of choice" really freedom if my only choices are thouse controlled US hegemonic powers? If it was instead China that ruled world, and Douyin, WeChat and Weibo were used world wide, would it seem that China is the "free" society, and that America in banning TikTok was the autocratic one? You could even imagine them using Trump as "proof" of dysfunction in our system.
  - derefr 2y ago
    > This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong. No? I think you're engaging in very black-and-white thinking yourself. The spectrum from "utopia" to "dystopia" is very wide. I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side. A country is an effective dystopia, to the degree that, among other things, its citizens are: • manipulated by the state into not realizing the bad things the state does (both locally and on the world stage); • manipulated by the state into developing a negatively-biased view of countries that oppose that country in conflicts (usually involving many entirely-false beliefs about those countries), where countries neutral to those conflicts would not support those views; • and controlled + influenced by the state into not visiting other countries where they could "learn the truth." China does all three of these things, in the strongest and most active sense. News companies are state-owned or coerced. Citizen journalists are arrested. Individuals sharing things they shouldn't are arrested. People have low social credit scores and can't leave the country by default, and have to earn their way out by presenting as brainwashed. Etc. The US, meanwhile, does some of these things, but in much weaker senses: • the US very well probably manipulates its own mainstream media; but it does nothing to prevent access to foreign news sources (where, again, Tiktok is not a foreign news source — you can't learn anything about China on Tiktok. But you can still read CCP-mouthpiece Chinese MSM outlets like https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ just fine.) • the US suppresses virally-disseminated citizen journalism in the sense of telling social-media services to blacklist keywords in their recommendation algorithms; but they aren't arresting the people who post those things. There is no risk in the US to spreading samizdat — in fact, there is no concept in the US of samizdat, because there is no news or fact that will get you arrested by sharing it. Anyone who wants can join a group chat (even one hosted on a US-based service!) about these topics, and spread info there without a problem. People can put up posters or even run billboards calling for people to join these meetings, and the government won't go around tearing them down. (This is what your much-underappreciated right to "freedom of assembly" gets you!) • Random US citizens have no trouble visiting other countries — even the countries the US doesn't like. You can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right this moment if you like. A US citizen can also legally visit Russia, despite the global sanctions (though you'll have to fly to a neighbouring country and come in via land.) In neither case will this get you in trouble with the US government. It won't even disrupt an application for security clearance. (Also, if you're curious, I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Here in Canada, we have things like hate-speech laws. We believe that there is such a right as "freedom of speech", but that it can come into opposition of other rights — such as the right to one's own safety. Or the right to a fair election.) > Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially when the past performance is in peacetime, and the future results are in wartime. Which is to say: IMHO the CCP has not yet done any kind of real manipulation through Tiktok. In fact, they've likely encouraged ByteDance to be perfect little boy-scouts and build up as much social trust among Gen Z and Gen Alpha as possible. (Whereas Facebook et al likely were told by the US government to suppress certain sentiments.) The thing the US government fears — the thing any US citizen should fear — isn't any already ongoing manipulation on Tiktok. The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent. And anyone who believes that a war between the US and China is inevitable, wants to get that sleeper agent out of the room before they wake up.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Why do we want to be like that? We don’t. TikTok.com will continue to be freely accessible. That’s not true for Facebook in China.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hnfong 2y ago

First Google result for "China foreign direct investment" (no quotes) for me: "Foreign direct investment in China falls to 30-year low" https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Foreign-direct-investment-in-China-falls-to-30-year-low https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Foreign-direct-investment-in... I won't comment on whether prioritizing national security over being business friendly is right, I'm just saying there are consequences in China's case, and I believe there will be some consequences for the US as well.

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

China don't "ban apps unless company sells it" "non-adversary", implying that China is your enemy, this doesn't make sense lol, pure propaganda at this point China tells ahead of time what the company is allowed or not allowed to do, then grant access if they comply TikTok comply with the US law, otherwise it would have already been banned The US is spreading some FUD to push some other laws and to prevent China from being leader in the US, they did the same with EU companies in the past, most notably French ones Guess who is working on "we don't have WeeChat in the west, let's copy WeeChat for our everything app" Yeah, you guessed right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aDPHpPGxD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aDPHpPGxD0

Veraticus 2y ago
Uh, China has banned numerous US-based apps because they violate its censorship policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... That includes Twitter/X, so not sure what your YouTube video has to do with anything.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
  Read again, specially this line: "China tells ahead of time what the company is allowed or not allowed to do, then grant access if they comply" Are you implying that US companies should be above foreign local laws?
  - Veraticus 2y ago
    I did read that line: the result of a company not complying is them being banned. Those apps are not accessible anywhere in China. If you agree that companies should not be above the laws of the country they operate in, doesn't the same apply to ByteDance?
    - WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
      You ask a question that's already answered in my post, what is your goal? "TikTok comply with the US law, otherwise it would have already been banned"

smgit 2y ago

India banned TikTok a while back but their trade with China just keeps growing - https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/chinas-share-in-indias-industrial-goods-imports-jump-to-30-from-21-in-last-15-years-gtri/109679285 https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/c... TikTok ban is more about the Attention Wars. Politicians in Democracies world over have walked into a trap by falling in love with Social Media. How do you get noticed, in the absurd reality created by social media, where everyone is given a mic hooked up to the same sound system? No one can win in this game. Its an arms race to nowhere. Instead of recognizing that and creating a coordination mechanism for who gets the mic, politicians are currently doing two things - 1. Buying more Ads (just check the ever growing ad spends by political parties world over) - this basically means Democracy is for sale to the largest ad buyers 2. Arm twisting the platforms

ETHisso2017 2y ago

Factually incorrect. China didn't ban US apps, it required US apps to obey local Chinese censorship laws. Some apps (like LinkedIn) stayed in compliance and stayed, while others left China.

Veraticus 2y ago
What a weird stance to take! What happens if apps refuse to self-censor or obey Chinese censorship laws? They are banned. So indeed, China does ban US apps. Twitter/X did not just leave China; it is blocked in mainland China and no one can access it.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  While US apps are slightly harmed by losing access to a market, it's really the freedom of Chinese citizens that is impacted by China banning apps. The US banning TikTok will harm ByteDance's bottom line but it also sets a precedent that the US government can dictate what you install on your phone. Why are people advocating for this like it's some kind of victory for freedom?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Why are people advocating for this like it's some kind of victory for freedom? We’re not. It’s a victory for national security. It’s a collective curtailment on freedom, similar to how we’ve agreed Americans are not free to finance terrorism.
- ETHisso2017 2y ago
  That's not a weird stance at all. Twitter/X is blocked in China because it refuses to comply with Chinese law on censorship. China's law criminalizes behavior on censorship, which adheres to what modern notions of legal jurisprudence. The US law criminalizes origin and ownership, which violates a legal principle on bills of attainder.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]