Close to half of American adults favor TikTok ban, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

Yes. I say that as a gay person, too; if China wants to enforce their policy, the US should demand they do it in the ugliest way possible. Their anachronistic decisions will become a lot more obvious if they're forced to pick one side in the game of public perception.

Most movie studios literally cut a different movie for Chinese audiences to downplay the surface level faux "look we care about gay people, give us money" they do for western audiences.

Nearby, Target literally pulled LBGTQ merchandise because some people hate the mere existence of LGBTQ people, and Bud light lost 10% of their damn value for throwing a token ad at someone who is Trans.

But I am just guessing.

China may also have an official public statement that they do not use PEDs, while wink wink nod nod anything to gain attention and glory for CCP on the international stage is worth the sacrifice.

These games we play are strange indeed.

And that’s even with some of the most disagreeable speech (active threats etc) still banned. Like we’re not even absolute free speech and it still sucks just how easy it is to ride the line with vague threats, knowing mistruths (Fox News etc), and other “valid” speech. It’s better to take stricter approaches like Germany etc and have the lines drawn a bit broader and have nazis banned entirely etc.

The “discourse banishes bad ideas” thing is a wishful fairy tale. Adversarial actors will parasitize your openness and use it to spread their message, and rebutting it only spreads the “debate” and gives it legitimacy. It’s better to stamp that shit out and force it out of mainstream channels and into separate “racist services” like gab, truth social, voat, etc.

It is what divides us from china but it’s also what’s tearing down our political system from the inside, because propaganda still works regardless of what you think about it. It’s marketing for ideology, nobody thinks marketing works either but companies aren’t spending billions of dollars for nothing. And the open western dialogue and interchange of information makes the propaganda more effective and propagate quicker.

An open mind is like a fortress with its gates undefended. There are some things you shouldn’t be open to even rebutting because they are simply so far out of the window of acceptability. We don’t debate people’s right to exist, for example.

The Party had been quite worried about how much bullshit and useless information can be conveyed through short-form video, and wanted to be sure that if kids were going to be addicted to it, they might as well learn something useful.

But we won't, because they're American, and that is the only important distinction to those calling for a ban on TikTok.

"Sometimes kids are complete idiots"... so definitely ban their social network but keep yours full of phony influencers and extreme politics - because the adults are never complete idiots...

Also, and perhaps more relevantly here, American lawmakers are accountable to and American voters are thereby subject to Meta's owners in the way they are not to TikTok’s.

In "the Twitter Files" we learned that American social media companies actually manipulate public opinion on sensitive political topics (censoring content based on hypothetical "Russian involvement"). And they haven't been held to account.

Meanwhile, there is no actual evidence of TikTok doing this in the West. I'm sure Chinese Douyin complies with government censorship for their domestic product, but there is no evidence that the American-managed product has done this. If it is happening and we just haven't found the evidence, the effect isn't there: Americans hate China more than ever.

I understand you wish to believe the opposite, because it would make us feel fuzzy inside about how great America is and evil the chicoms are, but there simply isn't evidence to support your comment.

The problem is that one man's political bias is another man's truth.

No, they are accountable in the same way. You pass laws that restrict corporate behaviour, and then you fine/ban applications that don't follow them.

What you don't do is write a 'TikTok sucks so it's banned' law, while permitting the same problematic behavior from other vendors.

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The major problem with TikTok[1] is that it disrupts an American oligopoly on public mindshare, and the US is afraid of it for the same reason that CCP is afraid of Facebook, or the CCCP[2] was afraid of jazz music and Hollywood.

[1] The other major problem with TikTok is that Facebook and Twitter and another major tech company are scared of it, and instead of competing, are very interested in lobbying until it goes away.

[2] The USSR.

If lawmakers were accountable to voters, voters would on occasion get what they want.

There's endless reasons you might want to stop other people from reading the things they want to read, and none of them matter, because, it is not your business what other people read.

(At least, to to my layman's understanding. IANAL.)

A TikTok ban that doesn't violate trade fairness would have to be based on some criterion other than nationality, e.g. by banning vertical video or something.

Either way, the issue at hand is whether or not US citizens/residents should be allowed to see certain things that come out of China, not whether or not we can and should be able to spread our ideals to China.

You don’t understand, it’s different (c).

Why not? Take that “green” politics for example that lead Germany to close a lot of atomic plants and, now, basically, at mercy of US gas (which production surged 80%, if I’m not mistaken)

And then US subsidies to move production to US so that some VW plant is cheaper in US than in Germany

But not allowing their own citizens to access content produced in that problematic country smacks of Soviet-style cold war isolation. Or, hell, the Chinese government's block on any outside news or media it doesn't agree with.

Strategically, if the US (and others) want to remain free, democratic societies, doing things like banning TikTok is a step in the wrong direction.

It's _extremely_ common for people with NSA or similar experience to have very senior positions at US tech companies, and there's a reason for that. It's nothing formal, it's more that having friendly people on both sides of the fence is mutually beneficial for the government and for those companies.