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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I'm not opposed. Granted my basis would be that China effectively bans such social media apps from the outside ... I'm ok with doing the same for them.

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I should hope we hold ourselves to a higher bar than China. This would effectively set the precedent that the US Congress can choose winners and losers in the market and even force a sale of a foreign company to an American company. That's the type of action taken by Russia and China that is rightfully condemned.

I'd prefer if we focused on why the app is dangerous and maybe pass some comprehensive privacy or anti-monopoly legislation that removes the danger rather than playing whack-a-mole with whatever company has attracted the most attention at the time.

> should hope we hold ourselves to a higher bar than China

We do. TikTok.com won't be blocked here the way Facebook and Google are in China.

If TikTok tells users "our app is being banned, so just use the website instead", I predict America will move towards a national firewall.

Let's see, it will be interesting to look back on these comments in a decade.

> If TikTok tells users "our app is being banned, so just use the website instead", I predict America will move towards a national firewall

Sure, yes, it can always get worse. The point is it isn't, and we're nowhere close to false comparisons with the CCP.

The forced sale of Grindr already demonstrated this precedent

As I recall Grindr was sold to a Chinese company without going through a legally required review process. That's a bit different than a Chinese company providing their own service in the US.

No my reasoning would simply be applying the same rules that China applies to US companies for social media.

Good for the goose…

> This would effectively set the precedent that the US Congress can choose winners and losers in the market

No it wouldn't, as that precedent is already set. And, not only do they choose winners, but individual members of Congress freely profit off those choices.

The US is a weird ass country cause everything has been privatized. The banks, insurance, energy, water, food, health, telcos, the railways etc etc

Very few countries across the world do that. Govts usually own a chunk of the largest firms in strategic sectors and have seats on the board. Look at Boeing/Airbus ownership and the outcomes. Its just easier to influence large corps when you own them. If you don't own them then Boeing is the latest example in a long line up of large corps, showing everyone how they skirt whatever law and regulation the govt passes.

Just because some other country suppresses what content their citizens see doesn't mean we should too.

I think it's pretty clear that the establishment doesn't like the content on tiktok and that's a large reason for the ban.

My basis is simply a tit for tat trade situation. Roughly the same situation for Chinese social media companies as they would apply to American in China.

Content is really unrelated.

I think from a trade perspective that makes a lot more sense.

The part that's hard for me to ignore is the fairly overt statements from reps that they don't like the content: https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1782920301052911713

It's possible for something to be providing valuable news and perspective and also be controlled/manipulated by an adversary. Sorta like a broken clock being right twice a day.

Yeah I don't think those reps would like much of the internet if they ventured outside wherever they usually go. But they're also your typical bombastic / silly statements where they're throwing anything at public that sticks.

This is not about suppressing content. ByteDance will be able to sell the company and even profit from it.

They wont be able to, because their main product, the AI model and algorithms, are trained on Chinese citizen data, thus marking it as non-exportable. This is already well known, which is why the bill states to divest instead of outright ban just to play pedantry. Tiktok has announced that they will take it up to the courts and leave the US in the meantime.

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