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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

The whole reason this is even happening is because they've been caught pushing political content that is blatantly either pro-China or meant to stir shit up in the American population. The irony with your comment is that TikTok's masters in China already have the same power that SOPA was supposed to grant the US government. In other words the USA is trying to strip the CCP of that power.

They could've played ball and not pushed politics and we'd have left them alone to make their money but instead they tried to bite the hand that feeds.

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> The irony with your comment is that TikTok's masters in China already have the same power that SOPA was supposed to grant the US government

Yes, the power of democracy. People spoke up and prevented a harmful law from being passed - why is TikTok exercising that right, in the same way as Google and Facebook, a problem? It sounds like you want the US to become like the CCP instead of vice versa.

Because TikTok is owned by one of our adversaries. They’ve been accused of pushing propaganda and they just accidentally proved how effective they can be at causing political change in the US.

Exactly what their opponents were afraid they had the power to do.

It looks REALLY bad. In this case it wasn’t anything sinister and they were open about it but tactically it was probably a massive mistake.

Also why didn’t they just tell everyone in the US? Why did only certain users get the message? Because of where they lived? Because they were voting age? They also proved they have an ability to target specific people for political action based on some (unknown) criteria.

That also looks horrible and plays right into their opponents hands.

> Exactly what their opponents were afraid they had the power to do.

They notified their users that their elected representatives were fast tracking a bill targeted at the service they were using. Negotiated in secret because those representatives knew it would be enormously unpopular with their constituents.

No, the whole reason this is happening is it distracts us from more serious issues such as Chinese labor practices. If politicians can "take China seriously" by banning TikTok they don't need to talk about barring import of products made using forced labor, say.

Didn't they already do that with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021? Or are you referring to other regions of CCP-occupied China?

It looks like that has blocked about $100M in goods shipped from Xinjiang since inception -- about 1/3 of shipments from that region and less than 1% total imports from China in that period. I'm not sure that token amount counts as taking it seriously.

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