TikTok: Is this a national security scare or is something else going on?

It's not until everyone learns to stop rewarding these kind of grift platforms for offering nothing business-opportunity-wise or growth-wise that this world of online exploitation will change. If TikTok goes away, something else will replace it, pedaling fear out of protecting TikTok (which barely does anything good for anyone but itself is a waste of time, and so is uploading content to TikTok.

- China is certainly intensely ambitious, and has provably engaged in economic espionage for decades (as has the West, but perhaps with considerably more subtlety).

- Chinese business leaders know that to disobey the government is to risk their personal security. So if the government were to ask ByteDance to do something, it very much would be done.

- The Western political elites desperately need an enemy to distract from the fact that their economic model is failing millions of their citizens. It wasn't China that stole the jobs. It was McKinsey that advised the board to send them there.

- one of the brightest spots in the US is technology. You think Zuckerberg and Musk dont have senators on speedial? They do not need a competitor eating their lunch. Unlike Insta and whatsapp, facebook cant buy their way out of their failure to innovate. They need to make tiktok go away asap. What could be easier than riding the anti china sentiment, which is happily bipartisan?

To be clear, I do not approve of many of the Chinese government's policies. But to whip TikTok when the Valley is strip mining your personal data every day seems pretty unfair.

I haven't had as strong a feeling that a war is on its way with China, but the same uptick of anti Chinese sentiment appeared a few years ago starting with the Huawei ban and has been growing since. And you've got top US generals and financiers saying a war is looking more likely than not within the next five years. So yeah, I'd say it's a combination of both a genuine security concern and a priming of the populace to get them ready for any potential conflict coming down the road.

I'm not saying that there wasn't any anti Russian and Chinese sentiment expressed occasionally before, but I just have this instinctual feeling that these were the dates where it upticked and solidified into something else, a pattern or a 'narrative' if you will. If there's any web scraper geniuses out there it'd be interesting to know if the data supports the hypothesis. It would be Winter 2016/2017 for Russia and probably 2018/2019 for China. But considering this is when it became consciously noticeable, it may have began a good while earlier.

And, yes, I think the Chinese government gives Byte Dance a huge amount of money to ensure they have some level of say in how this all plays out. Why wouldn't you? It's cleaner, easier and probably cheaper than (say) funding a rebel group somewhere. Probably less likely to bite you in the arse, too.

Having said that I also don’t care if we ban an app from a non free / less than friendly country that doesn’t allow similar apps from the us to operate in their country….

So yeah I get some of the weirdness but I have no problem with the actions proposed either.

Not content to fix it the right way which involves actually limiting their power, government is trying to do it the socialist/totalitarian way. Written so broadly, and so loosely that anything the higher ups decide to do won't violate the law (even if it violates their own authority granted to them by the constitution).

There's a good book by USMC University on Political Warfare which goes into depth about how these campaigns often work out.