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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

It’s bad because China has different interests than the US. Imagine if a war breaks out in Taiwan and they send targeted propaganda to members of the US military.

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US-made missiles are blowing stuff up inside Russia because Russia invaded a treaty partner who gave up their nukes in exchange for a security alliance with the US. And yet Russian apps are in our app stores. Nobody needs to imagine.

> yet Russian apps are in our app stores

Major social media apps? Chinese apps are still in our app stores, just not TikTok (as of Sunday).

It took me less than 15 seconds to find that VK, which is a major social media app in Russia, is in the Google Play store.

Compared to Tiktok with ~100 million American users, VK is essentially irrelevant and not even worth wasting court time about.

The only Russian app I'm aware of is Telegram. What other Russian apps might people be unwittingly running?

I would argue that Telegram is a much, much larger security threat to the average individual American than Tiktok. Except they comply with government search warrants and don't enable E2E encryption by default so they are useful to the American National Security Establishment and get to stay.

No servers in Russia. Given Pavel's prior history it seems unlikely that he would cooperate with Russian government. Plenty of other criticism of telegram is warranted but it's probably not a tool of the Russian government.

Edit: related https://hate.tg/

And yet Russian apps are in our app stores.

There are no Russian apps that collect extensive data on hundreds of millions of Americans. (And if I'm wrong about that, the US should absolutely force divestiture of those apps or ban them).

>a treaty partner who gave up their nukes in exchange for a security alliance with the US

If it wasn't ratified by the senate then we didn't enter into a treaty, I really don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but everyone has different interests from everyone else. That's not a sufficient reason.

You are free to have that our opinion but our elected government disagrees with you. It’s not the job of the court to adjust laws based on personal preference of HN commenters.

Yes but there are Reagan's interests and Hitler's interests. You have no choice but to pick the lesser evil.

Sorry, While I understand that there are degrees of interest misalignment, I'm not sure what Hitler's interests refers to in this context. Hitler is deceased so it's unlikely his interests are relevant in a discussion about TikTok.

Wouldn't banning the collection of this confidential data provide a better solution? Meta could still turnaround and sell this information to Chinese companies.

> Meta could still turnaround and sell this information to Chinese companies

Let them collect and ban this. Difference between Meta and TikTok is you can prosecute the former’s top leadership.

> Let them collect and ban this.

As if this would get banned.

That's funny. How big of a check did Zuck just write to the Trump inauguration?

My preference would be a law that bans some specific activity (i.e. the collection of some set of data that should remain "private"). From there it would be straightforward to establish when an application (like TikTok or Instagram) was collecting this data and they could be prosecuted or their application banned at that point.

This banning of TikTok because of "national security" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Might the next application banned on these ground be domestic? It's unsettling, in my opinion, to see this precedent set.

> China has different interests than the US

Define the US here. Is it the government, the people, the business interests of the private sector?

Each one of those has different interests, often competing ones.

In any functional nation the people's interests should prevail, and it seems to me that any information capable of swaying the public's opinion is informing them that their interests are being harmed in favor of other ones.

Your question is irrelevant because none of the parties you've listed have interests that are aligned with the CCP, assuming you're referring to the people as a whole. Obviously there are specific individuals whose interests are aligned with China's government but laws in a democracy aren't meant to make everyone happy, they're meant to meet the interests of the majority of people

| meet the interests of the majority of people

I wonder how do you know "the interests of the majority of people" is to ban Tiktok...

That's not what I said, I said that the interests of the majority do not align with the interests of the Chinese government. That seems self evident to me but YMMV

Don't you know, China is the new enemy of the US. That's what the elites in the US have decided and that is enough to be considered as the will of the people.

> none of the parties you've listed have interests that are aligned with the CCP

The interest of the people is to have a peaceful coexistence and cooperation with China, while the interest of the military-industrial complex is to keep the tension high at all times so that more and more money is spent on armaments.

Who do you think the US government will favor in the end?

Who has more power to determine the result of the next elections, considering that to run a presidential campaign you need more than a billion dollars?

No citizen gains from war except the few that sell weapons and want to exploit other countries.

Crazy take, More likely the US or it's allies goes to war and they try to play up sympathy with the target.

Nobody wants China to take Taiwan, that's not something its possible to convince people of

Im not so confident about that. Attenuating isolationist policy in the face of Taiwan is the easiest, but I can see anti-ROC propaganda in the mix.

> Nobody wants China to take Taiwan, that's not something its possible to convince people of

It's not about convincing them to want it but rather about sowing doubt and confusion at the critical moment.

David French's NYT column last week starts with what one might call a "just-plausible-enough" scenario: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/opinion/tiktok-supreme-co... (gift link, yw).

thanks for the gift link :)

Then China would just fall back to bombarding them with propaganda on one of the other large social media platforms that are prone to both known and unknown influence.

They would be within their rights to do that. But then they would have to compete with other participants in the discussion. On TikTok they can ensure there is no such competition.

The magnitude of the attack is not comparable. One thing is being a bad actor in a network owned by someone else where you can get monitored, caught and banned. Versus owning the network completely and amplifying messages with ease at scale. The effort needed and effectiveness of the attack is extremely different.

Domestic based social media platforms can be pressured to comply with demands such as the DOJ's investigation into Russia's 2016 disinformation campaign on Facebook. Likewise social media platforms based in a foreign adversary would be pressured to comply with demands of that foreign adversary.

Aka because we're the "good" guys

In preventing a country from being invaded, yes, we are.

This is a common criticism in these kinds of discussions, but no, protecting oneself from foreign influence and threats does not require a moral high-ground, just as locking your front door doesn't.

For some reason I can't reply to "luddit3" below you. But he should check a list of countries that started the most wars and invasions in the last 150 years and which one tops it easily.

> countries that started the most wars and invasions in the last 150 years and which one tops it easily

What is the list? Does WWII count as one war, or do we could belligerents individually?

There is no good, just bad and kill-it-with-fire kind of evil. You choose bad you get a bad life. You choose the other you get literally hell. One government harvests and sells the organs of its healthy population[0][1][2] and the other makes some people feel sad.

Ironically, the "good" guys here allow you to talk shit on the internet about them while the "bad" guys would catch and harvest my organs someday for writing this comment.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_... [1] https://chinatribunal.com/ [2] https://theowp.org/reports/china-is-forcibly-harvesting-orga...

The USA has more prisoners than China and far more per capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...

And funnily enough, just had a state try to pass a law making prisoners get to "choose" to donate organs for a reduced sentence https://apnews.com/article/organ-donation-massachusetts-stat...

But point is, no love for the CCP but this sort of jingoistic take sucks. China is not "literally hell"

Self-interest doesn't require moral justification.

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