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Comment by 13years | Hacker News Reader

The premise is China is spying on US citizens. I suppose we don't want competition when it comes to invasion of privacy.

Therefore, we ban it so only US companies can spy on US citizens.

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I'm curious what people think about tiktok' plans. They vowed to move data into us soil and have external audits. It came across as actual good faith compromises from my perspective.

They can feed their users propaganda no matter where the data lives, I don't think the data is the goal, I think the eyeballs are.

I think they would still send all the data back to China just discreetly. Even with external audits it would be trivial to do so.

It doesn't matter. The US gains nothing by letting Tiktok operate in the US.

The premise is not that, it’s that the Chinese government can influence the content that the US population is exposed to. For fucks sake, US politicians are campaigning on a platform that the CCP can manipulate.

So if we ban the TikTok app and everyone just moves to the TikTok web page, what are we going to do? Ban the web page too?

If we do ban the web page, on what grounds? If we claim that the web page collects too much data and is a national security threat, then doesn't that same argument apply to all of the millions of web pages out there?

Or do we just skip all pretense and start strengthening the national firewall?

I don’t know. I’m not advocating for a ban, just arguing against all the moronic “but what about US social media” and “it’s because the US government can’t spy on TikTok users” takes.

The US government and US companies are different appendages of billionaires: one is a fictional personhood while the other is a collective public administration that has more lobbyists than administrators, but both service the same masters.

Even if true, this is strictly better.

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