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Comment by snehk | Hacker News Reader

They ban them because the companies don't want to follow the same rules Chinese companies have to follow. It's exactly what I'm asking for. Have one set of rules and apply them to everyone. Ban data harvesting completely. Ban it for Facebook, Google and everyone else and then kick out TikTok because they don't follow the rules.

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One of the first, most important rules Chinese companies have to follow in order to access this Chinese market is "be a Chinese company". I'm not exaggerating here, and if I remember rightly this is even an actual official, stated rule controlling who can offer information services like TikTok in China (rather then one of the many unstated rules their government also uses to screw with Western companies) and includes restrictions on non-Chinese even buying shares in those companies.

There was a rule when foreign companies have to partner with a local one. This rule was recently relaxed; for example there was some Tesla factory a while ago that had 100% foreign ownership.

In the Tesla case the Chinese government astroturfed a scandal as soon as the cars were available for sale, and people who had bought Teslas were being singled out for harrassment by police. So it's a very interesting case of rules being relaxed...

Are you talking about banning Teslas for government use or on government ground? That's not a scandal at all, that's just taking security precautions. These precautions may or may not be right, but nothing about these precautions were about kicking Tesla out of the country, nor banning Tesla use under the general public. In complete contrast to how Huawei was handled in the west.

No, I was talking about the incidents discussed in this article:

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/09/teslas-struggle-in-chin...

First the PRC government made an exception for Tesla:

> To entice Tesla to China, the Chinese government agreed to let Tesla become the first non-Chinese auto company with a solely owned subsidiary in China.

Once Tesla was established in China, there was a faked scandal to discredit the company, supported by state media:

> In April, a Chinese Tesla owner’s video claiming “Tesla brakes fail” went viral in China and was viewed more than 200 million times. It is essential to know that sometimes the Chinese government pushes for or encourages such online outcries to achieve its political goals.

While the story was pushed by Xinhua, it turned out the actual brake failure was faked:

> https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/owner-fabricating-china-bra...

Around the same time, Chinese police were preferentially pulling over Teslas:

https://electrek.co/2021/04/23/tesla-owners-stopped-going-on...

I probably ought to have mentioned this in my original comment - China allowed companies to set up certain kinds of Chinese operations, such as manufacturing, by partnering with a local company and setting up a joint operation but they're a lot more restrictive about online information services. Operating those really is limited to wholely Chinese-owned and Chinese-operated companies as I understand it, joint partnerships with foreign companies are not permitted to run them. This includes things like the Chinese versions of AWS and iCloud, which are entirely operated by existing Chinese companies.

This isn't true. Foreign websites get arbitrary banned in China despite following all their local rules. Even if they aren't banned, a lot of times they're artificially throttled. My best guess is that they'd rather keep the money circulated in China.

Example with apple: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_the_iTunes_Sto...

I'm really sick of this argument "companies don't want to follow the same rule in China". No they are not the same rules and it's not "don't want" but "can't". Take Yahoo for example, the formal CEO Jerry Yang lost his job as Yahoo China followed these "rules" back then to give email information of some dissent to Chinese government.

In China, when the government asks a company to do something, the company has no choice. When was the last time you heard US companies follow arbitrary ask of US government?

They ban them because they won’t censor factual information and won’t promote disinformation.

See how Chinese censorship applies to mRNA vaccine conspiracy theories. A person that debunked them was banned from wechat.

Do you see western governments doing this?

no, in the west we see companies banning content, not the govt. pot, kettle.

What social media company in the US bans positive coverage of mRNA vaccines?

In the US algorithms ban content, often by mistake. In China a political official or someone working for the government reviews the content personally. Big difference.

Twitter bans negative coverage

Algorithms are designed and tweaked by people who have biases and can be threatened by government officials or influenced by the media they consume which itself is majorly influenced by government organizations, lobbyist organizations, and corporate sponsors.

Also, who’s to judge that these poor algorithmic decisions are “mistakes” when only the companies are privy to the mechanics of the algorithm?

Again, they don't ban them. You're talking about a completely different thing. The Chinese rules (whatever they may be) apply to all companies. Your example even mentioned WeChat, a Chinese company. You would need to find an example where a US company is forced to do things that a company from China doesn't have to.

My argument is about having the same rules for everyone. The argument about data collection and privacy is a good one. It's just completely dishonest and hypocritical and doesn't serve the end user any purpose if it doesn't apply to everyone and it just clearly doesn't.

> They ban them because they won’t censor factual information and won’t promote disinformation.

Different censorship, different disinformation - but we have that in the west as well. The EU is several steps ahead in this race thanks to their Digital Services Act (making it criminal to spread some information, and threatening service providers with million-Euro-fines if they don't delete quickly enough [as in: within hours]), but the US has its very own 'Disinformation Governance Board' located with DHS, which is in all but name a Ministry of Truth. You are supposed to use the Internet to earn money and consume and spend, not to question the narrative.

There are no good countries. All nation-states suck. Some are better at marketing their alleged superiority to their less-intelligent (and thanks to controlling the education system: kept less-intelligent) population through "patriotism", though.

>See how Chinese censorship applies to mRNA vaccine conspiracy theories. A person that debunked them was banned from wechat.

Do you happen to have a decent source for that since it seems rather weird given China's gov stance on covid.

China’s stance on Covid is that America is responsible. I’ll update with the wechat source when I find it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...

I haven't seen that happen in China either. How do you know it actually happened and wasn't some other rumour spread (since there's a plethora of disinformation both for and against the Chinese government)?

To be clear, I'm not in favour of the Chinese regime but your particular point does still require a citation.

Because what I claimed is so outrageous?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...

I’ll find the wechat story when I’m more awake. ADV china covered it though.

> Because what I claimed is so outrageous?

No, because what you claimed requires substantiation. Please lets be calm about our discussion here.

> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...

> I’ll find the wechat story when I’m more awake. ADV china covered it though.

Thank you :)

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