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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.

Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.

6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".

This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.

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Why just TikTok? Are American corporations immune from coveting thy neighbor's possessions?

For the same reason Grindr was forced to sell to a non-Chinese parent, the risks of putting some apps / information in the hands of strategic competitors is too high. If a domestic company tried to blackmail people with their sexual history, they face domestic legal accountability. China does not.

Jurisprudentially? Yes.

Why is "The Chinese Communist Part is more dangerous than Meta sharholders" such a hard thing to grasp?

Because Facebook destabilized our nation in 8 years far more than any claims of modern CCP wrongdoings to the US.

Now imagine what would have happened if Facebook was owned by Russia.

Why should it be? What does ByteDance want that isn't also valuable to Facebook?

Facebook is a company owned by public shareholders.

ByteDance is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.

What facebook and ByteDance want at their core are very different things.

The destabilization of the United States and the end of it's status as the worlds richest and most powerful country?

Is it more dangerous? Facebook has done more harm to the average American than the Chinese Communist Party has.

More dangerous to the US government? Yes, that's true.

What in the tinfoil hat of god…

> This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.

Because people are writing Orwell fanfiction?

Do you have any evidence at all or just fear, uncertainty, and doubt?

That's an interesting hypothetical, I have another one.

Imagine you're a country with natural resources. Private industries want those resources. Suddenly the US media is flooded with fabricated or exaggerated stories about the country written by NGOs and Think Tanks. Suddenly, out of nowhere a coup happens in the country with the stated intention of "liberalization" and "democratic reforms". The country goes through shock therapy and structural adjustments as it takes on mountains of IMF loans to enter the world markets-- it has to sell off control of all its national resources and industries to American companies. The life expectancy plummets.

Oh wait this isn't a hypothetical this is just actual US foreign policy.

South Korea seems to have done fine.

I cannot tell if this comment was made seriously or as a satire of unhinged conspiracy theories.

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