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Comment by throwaway122378 | Hacker News Reader

China should allow non-Chinese social media companies from operating in mainland China or else international governments should ban Chinese social media companies from operating in their borders.

This is absurd. China is surveilling the world with their apps now.

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I'm starting to think that this kind of idea is dangerous.

Chinese apps are left unchecked as long as they are loyal to the regime, but international companies would be held accountable back home for their actions in China, in an inevitable race to the bottom, this is competitive disadvantage and outsiders are doomed to fail.

As long as these social media companies follow Chinese law, they will be allowed.

You got yourself confused because of the US centric view. The real problem here is US literally took the entire market for global scale online services. Companies like Google don't even pay much corporate tax in countries like Australia. Why should other countries further damage their economies to anger their No.1 trading partner China to defend such US monopoly?

All non-Chinese social media companies have to do is comply with Chinese censorship laws. Nothing ever stopped these companies from operating there except the filtering requirements was onerous (read: expensive). China brought in mass human moderation way before it was deemed necessary on non-Chinese social media. The primary reason FB, twitter was banned is they refused to filter calls for ethnic violence post 2009 terrorist attacks in China. Western platforms finally recognized that was necessary in the last few years.

The real problem is the disparity in allowable speech on between ecosystems means China can conduct official diplomatic influence campaigns on western social media platforms. Where as embassies in China frequently get censored trying to conduct influence operations. Really that's China exploiting an asymmetric western vulnerability, not much to do but fight fire with fire at the cost of western values.

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