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Comment by picafrost | Hacker News Reader

It’s always uncomfortable when realpolitik clashes with the values we aspire to have.

What is freedom, anyway? Surely it can’t include allowing a foreign adversary access to a knob to twist on an important demographic of society. A foreign adversary who is actively compromising the network infrastructure of that society [1] but definitely wouldn’t touch infrastructure around an app owned by a Chinese company.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. One person's portal to a better world is a state's vehicle to shaping it in the state's interests.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/united-states-china-hacking-espio...

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that's a slippery slope. The Russian government is also justifying all of its censorship with foreign interference (this line of argument works with the Russian public, just to note), take care!

I'm less certain that it's a slippery slope than it is a fine line. The government does not appear to have a problem with the speech occurring on TikTok. It is not trying to apply censorship or forcing the app to close down. It tried to force it to be sold away from its Chinese ownership. It tried to mitigate the possibility that a foreign adversary can use the app as a tool for its own interests. Had TikTok divested itself instead of shutting itself down the dancing would have continued on.

the state as such consists of many entities, all these entities are not all pulling into the same direction.

divesting was never a real option, why would you spawn a US-based competitor - and it would cut you off from all the global content? just never a real good option

> this line of argument works with the Russian public, just to note

To a degree... I'd say western sanctions targeting the population as a whole were at least as effective in supporting the autocracy.

Hard to tell if the sanctions are targeted at the population or at the military industrial complex of Russia. I am not an expert in these matters.

When you can't use your credit card abroad or be paid for your work from there I thinks it's pretty clear.

Indeed. It's the road to open government censorship. There is no grey area when it comes to freedom of speech.

Everything's a slippery slope.

we are not at war with China. i did not vote to be at war with China. i am an adult and should be trusted by our elites to be able to read whatever i want.

the entire ethos of our country is antithetical to this notion of well-educated, affluent urbanites deciding what information diet is ‘correct’ for the dirty masses to consume.

> What is freedom, anyway?

It's a question of freedom for whom and freedom from what.

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