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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat.

China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government.

Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those requirements, so don't operate there.

If the US wants to ban TikTok it should do the same thing here: make privacy and transparency rules that all social media companies that want to operate in the US must follow.

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> China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government.

Those rules, however, are official state secrets, and western companies who wish to operate in China must infer what they are themselves lest they get kicked out. China works on the standard that "there are rules that you must break, we won't tell you what they are, so be very very very careful." Not transparent at all (incidentally, China rejects rule of law as a western imperialist concept).

No one has succeeded in doing that, despite a number of attempts by companies that have operated in the country for decades. Microsoft was the most recent to give up by stripping the social features from LinkedIn in china a few years ago.

The laws on paper might be entirely fair, but what those laws say doesn't matter.

> We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat. China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government. Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those requirements, so don't operate there.

Wow. Talk about being disingenuous. “oh you can vote - you just have to take a literacy test first and show us 5 different types of ID we’re sure you don’t have - it’s just the law”.

“It’s just the rules” - what else could it be? Censorship isn’t this mystical thing the government does - it’s implemented with rules. Sounds like “go back to your country” at company scale.

Transparency law is never going to happen because US companies don’t want to follow such things.

There’s also forced tech transfer

Imagine the CCP following rules set by an adversary.

US: Listen CCP, you can't use your tech companies to deploy a massive surveillance system on American soil as you do in China.

CCP: OK!

Which US social media company respects privacy and has transparency rules?

Great. Let’s copy and paste China’s rules on western social media apps and apply them to Chinese owned social media apps in the US.

I wonder how many people in the US will use TikTok if the rules require government censorship and data sharing.

That's not what they meant and probably you know that, it's more like coming up with a standard set of rules that applies for all the apps and TikTok can either choose to obey them or exit the US market. Exactly like how American companies exited China. What the government perceives as a threat for apps from other nations must also apply to home grown apps. It's not like US based apps haven't been unethical, or didn't cause a crisis.

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