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Comment by 86J8oyZv | Hacker News Reader

Given the arrests in Portland, does that mean every country should ban American products?

Most countries arrest people who are breaking windows, setting things on fire, engaging in riots after being told to disperse and illegally carrying weapons. All of the people who were arrested were charged and then released (pending bail, recognizance, etc per Washington law).

You may feel those actions are just, but being just does not make them legal.

It’s Oregon, not Washington. And my understanding is that plenty of people have been arrested then released without being charged.

Flip the script and it’s TikTok just complying with what you see as unjust laws, but they are laws of the CCP nonetheless.

Which is why we're banning them using the tool for that situation (a foreign company who is acting in a way unaligned to the interests of US citizens) and not arresting them.

We are under no duty to allow the CCP to act within our borders.

If we ban any company that complies with laws we don't like, taken to the extreme doesn't that lead to every country banning companies from every other country that doesn't have laws that map exactly to their own?

Do you really think banning CCP backed companies from hoovering up the personal data of Americans en masse is an extreme?

Every country enforces their laws. If a US company violated gdpr, I would expect them to be fined and banned from the EU.

This isn't talking about banning a specific company for violating local laws. This is talking about banning all companies from a specific country because that country has laws the US doesn't agree with. Should Europe ban all American companies because the US doesn't have GDPR? Or flip it around, which US law did Tiktok violate?

Then why are we singling our TikTok? Why not ban any Chinese company from operating within our borders?

TikTok hasn't been singled out. The US has pretty much done the same for all Chinese communication tech that operates in the US: Huawei, ZTE, WeChat.

Yes, the issue with TikTok has never been TikTok itself, and has always been the government institutions that have overwhelming control over their governance. China shouldn't be violating the human rights of their own people, and they definitely shouldn't be exporting the oppression of those rights to the rest of the world.

Yep.

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