The fact that India would consider TikTok a threat but not Meta leads me to believe that it wasn't done on a purely espionage basis. The threat of TikTok, today, it still theoretical, while Facebook has done measurable harm to India's neighbors.
Unlike China, US is not an adversary of India and US didn't kill Indian soldiers just two years back. So it makes sense they would go after Tiktok.
The harm is just not espionage, it is also manipulation of sentiment by propoganda.
Also, I am not really sure with all the equivalence to Meta in this thread. Sure, Meta has things to be criticized about but if one thinks West has threat from Meta on the same level as Tiktok, that seems delusional.
My problem with this “analysis” is it stems from xenophobia rather than the actual problem with these social networks.
The idea that we must “act now” with TikTok when Meta has been a worse actor is just anti-Chinese; we are pretending that Meta wont just bend over to the CCP as well if given the chance - we already have several of our companies self-censoring on issues that might anger the CCP.
Banning TikTok won’t fix the underlying problem and if your concern is China collecting data on US citizens you should understand there are very little controls in place, today, to prevent that from happening with any foreign actor. I don’t think China would have to pull teeth to exfiltrate data from any of the other social networks.
>Also, I am not really sure with all the equivalence to Meta in this thread.
Which company is implicated in a genocide in India neighboring states? Again is your concern actually about people or is it just “China scary”.
> Unlike China, US is not an adversary of India and US didn't kill Indian soldiers just two years back. So it makes sense they would go after Tiktok.
China is a very real threat to India right now. Why wouldn't they ban TikTok?
Anti- the ruthless mafioso that rule China with an iron fist, all too ready to harvest organs from its citizens for the benefit of the Party members and their friends.
Most any individual Chinese is probably just another joe trying to feed and love his family.
The Chinese government is a threat to Western Democracy, freedom, and human rights.
There was an allegation earlier this month, with what appears to be strong evidence to support it, that engineers in China have access to data from U.S. users: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...
Even if you ignore how suspicious that is, once the data is in China you have to assume it's made available to the government, since that's the official policy as far as I am aware.