Amazing that Congress will see bipartisan action on this issue before any of the other much more important issues.
It absolutely destroys criticisms of China banning Facebook, etc.
1. https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-ru...
You mean around 10-20% of the open internet? [1][2] That is what you graciously summarize as "Facebook, etc."?
No, it does not destroy criticisms of that. China is #172 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index [3]. It was #179 two years ago. Just because the US "bans" [sic!] one app (that, by the way, is also blocked in China [4]), that does not make them equal.
To give you an idea of how bad it is: I went through the Pudong Airport two years ago. I had to scan my passport and my face to connect to the WiFi. After I did, I couldn't call my mother, because literally every communication channel I could think of was blocked. I couldn't even connect to a VPN. I might as well have been on a mountain in the middle of nothing.
[1] https://en.greatfire.org/analyzer
[2] https://cyber.harvard.edu/filtering/china/
[4] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-douyin-byteda...
basically china's entire tech industry was built on the back of creating an artificially constrained market where foreign competitors with superior products were not allowed to compete. that is, everything that wasn't built off outright theft of American tech. that could have been hundreds of billions of dollars of increased market cap and returns to the investing public, hundreds of billions that china effectively stole.
The US does plenty of sketchy shit, but it has nothing on the surveillance state imposed by the CCP, nor is it empowered to suppress information in the same manner.
The CCP’s censorship is so heavy handed that others have tried to weaponize it, as discussed recently here:
Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions [2].
———
[1] - https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-ca...
The US also spread COVID antivax information.
So yes, the US government has done a lot that has hurt other people, it has also done a lot that has helped other people. I think we choose whether we want to believe people care about us or don't. I choose to believe they do.
Also, the “yellow” in “yellow journalism” != the slur “yellow” as in “yellow peril.”
And finally, your conclusion - “[Americans] are ready to accept anything to stop the ‘bad guys’” - would still be a parochial ignorance, as well as ironically biased, even were it not so shakily premised.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others were operating in China, but when China imposed more and more censorship requirements on all social media platforms in China regardless of whether or not they were domestic or foreign and required all of them to turn over user details to the government many chose not to comply, and then China blocked them.
If a US social media platform were willing to implement China's censorship and disclosure requirements for its Chinese operations would they be able to go back? As far as I know we don't know because none of them have tried.
Note that TikTok as we know it is itself not available in China. The original app that became TikTok is in China, but when they wanted to expand to the rest of the world they split it into two companies and the apps diverged. Both companies are owned by ByteDance.
That's probably the approach a US social media company would need to take to try to get back into China.
LinkedIn tried really hard to stay in, it simply is not sustainable.
there is a US-sized subset of China that is close to an even footing with the US, yes
Freedom means freedom from censorship. I can’t think of an equivalent event that’s happened in my lifetime in the US. "India did it too" isn’t exactly a strong rallying cry.
That said, we’ll live. Hopefully our blind trust that there were security concerns ends up being worth something.
You're in a bubble if you think there is a massive migration happening to an unlocalized app .
It was a pleasant surprise. That said, I’m not too interested in endless house tours, so I’m going to see what kind of content there is when things settle down. That’s still a migration though, at least for me.
"Sure, there are the people calling themselves “TikTok refugees” and joining Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, as a half-joking protest of the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok on national security grounds. (The joke part is: OK, Congress, you want to stop us from using a sketchy Chinese social media app? We’ll download an even sketchier Chinese social media app and use that instead.)"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/technology/what-if-no-one...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/arts/tiktok-red-note-chin...
Is there a really strong market demand for whatever social platform as long as it's owned by a Chinese company?
How do we know they're not siphoning our EU data to the US, or controlling what the algorithm shows us to influence politics?
If the EU decided WhatsApp should be spun off from Meta (for any number of legitimate reasons) to continue operating there, we wouldn’t claim that the EU banned the app.
Do you think that’s going to be good for you?
(Kidding aside, your point is very valid)
What is that criticisms about? US and EU should ban that too.