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Comment by Eumenes | Hacker News Reader

At first, I was all for banning Tiktok, but I'm come around - no social media giant has the users or general public in mind, whether their HQ is in the US or China. Big tech in the US is just upset they didn't come up with Tiktok first and in turn, the intelligence agencies are upset they can't snoop as much as they'd like. This turns off politicians because they're 1) tight with big tech 2) support the federal intelligence apparatus like ravenous dogs 3) its easy to join the anti China bandwagon ... if anything, popular internet connected services being ran from other countries actually acts as a nice buffer from domestic foolery.

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>Big tech in the US is just upset they didn't come up with Tiktok first

They did come up with it first, it was called Vine. I would even go as far as calling TikTok a Vine clone.

It was more focused on lip syncing, from their purchase of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly

Tik tok is only a vine clone if Reddit is a Twitter clone. They operate completely differently and had very different starting points.

Comparing Reddit to Twitter is bad. But saying TikTok is a vine Clone like Reddit is a Digg clone is a pretty good analogy though.

Tik tok and vine have and had nothing of substance alike.

Vine was pretty limited and never really evolved much beyond its earliest implementation. TikTok has powerful editing, remixing, and a very good recommendation engine that Vine never had.

Strong agree here. I wish there were significant & substantive items in the reporting that motivated the desire behind the ban (in a manner that differs significantly from what US social giants definitely already do), but it's too abstract and the motivations easily reduce to exactly what you say.

I think if we admit that social media has any power or influence then we have to also admit that it can have negative ones.

To me, the defining difference between US company influence in the US is that they also have to live in whatever country they create for us (via their propaganda). Other countries companies don't, and in fact if they aren't our allies would actually be incentivized to do more harm than our own companies (assuming their influence is equal).

It seems to me that allyship is a meaningful pivot for these decisions, moreso than other concerns.

I couldn't care less if tiktok was banned in some way, but the proposed bill that incriminates us for using VPN to access it is absolute garbage.

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