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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Thats not really why they are worried about TikTok, it comes back to the issue of the CCP and and that China defacto owns TikTok which means that information can be harvested. This is G5 controversy all over. The brainwashing part is just noise. The real concern is real given Chinas history.

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I mean FB has a lot of information about users, have you seen how you are tagged in the ads ? Any private person can target any subgroup and we know that FB transferred this data to different companies in the past, the probability that some government somewhere that wanted the FB data does not have it yet (maybe a bit outdated) is Zero.

Let's assume you block all applications that are suspected of relations with CCP (no proof, no trial) this won't stop CCP just buying this data from shady american (or foreign) companies so it would be smart to fix the root of the problem(data collection and brainwashing)

When tiktok removes Hong Kong related protests videos this is bigger than the ccp having a facebook group or buying advertising profiles.

If they took those down, that would certainly be a problem, yes: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/%E5%85%89%E5%BE%A9%E9%A6%99%E6%B8...

That's not the point.

In the US we have rule of law, we have rights. There is no rule of law in china only rule of the party. FB and Twitter er scrutinized, this would never happen in China.

That's the very very very big difference here.

Yeah, but like the CCP don't really care about TikTok/ByteDance.

Or at least they didn't, until this happened.

They would care about Tencent or Alibaba, but ByteDance isn't big or important enough for the party to care.

Oh they care. A lot. They care about anything that gives them access to western data so that's just wrong. They care quite a lot about TikTok as it provides a potential backdoor (given that the CCP defacto owns bytedance)

That's the problem.

The sources I'm familiar with (mostly the FT) claim otherwise.

See for example: https://www.ft.com/content/0c42dc7c-b927-477a-90b7-a202bbe4b...

Or also this: https://www.ft.com/content/61988d2d-4c95-4a35-8273-d6980af04...

That article is mostly an opinion piece not really about the nuts and bolts of US intelligence concerns.

I love FT and I subscribe to the paper but I see more anti-trump sentiment than an actual argument there.

Like, when a President who disagrees publicly with his own intelligence agencies claims that something is the result of intelligence, I am very sceptical.

I'm very sceptical of US intelligence justifications in general (and have been since 2003) but even more so under the current administration.

"I love FT and I subscribe to the paper but I see more anti-trump sentiment than an actual argument there. "

I really don't see any anti-Trump sentiment there, can you clarify what you mean?

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