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.
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.
They absolutely can if they adhere to the law. LinkedIn and GitHub are thriving in China. Google and Facebook voluntarily pulled out.
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.
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.
It doesn't bear thinking about!
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.