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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Is all that folks "Why is Europe like that" from US? In that case, remember that TikTok is going to be banned because it is destroying US social networks business. On the contrary, this is an official order after the proof of copyright infringement, and targets the specific devices that are attached by people here in Italy on their TVs to stoke content (pezzotto).

It's not single people that go watch some streaming, it's a criminal organization that resells copyrighted content like footbool, F1, ... and make the customers pay (less than Sky of course). This is stealing.

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Banning TikTok from the U.S. is really just banning them engaging in financial transactions in the U.S. Asking Google or whoever to poison DNS in a country is a whole different technical ball of wax. The two are not comparable. One difference is that ByteDance won't attempt to engage in financial transactions in the U.S. because doing so would create a diplomatic crisis and anyways it's not easy for a company of that size and with that much business to evade sanctions like that. While the pirate will and can just due to their small size and their ability to set up new bank accounts, which is why countries try to block pirates in the network rather than in the financial system, but blocking them in the network is pretty difficult, and blocking them in DNS -DNSSEC be damned- is basically the easiest way.

The US ban banned app stores from providing their free applications, which is just as much as a technical choke point as DNS and nothing to do with financial transactions.

That sounds much better than DMCA takedowns for sure. But many of us are against the current copyright regime itself. The ridiculously long duration of copyright ensures that nothing culturally relevant goes to the public domain. For things that are relevant, the weaponization of copyright laws takes away our ability to own what we bought and paid for. There's even a common saying that "if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."

> TikTok is going to be banned because it is destroying US social networks business

Didn't Europe ban Russia Today and other Russian state sponsored media?

Those never were real media though and they didn't even pretend anymore.

Officially it was banned as a part of the economic sanctions but being a part of their war machine would have been enough of a reason by itself.

And what do you think tik tok is? It's a similar service exerting propaganda on the populace at china's algorithmic control.

For now the Russian media and Twitter have worse influence on democracy than Tiktok ever did.

You're not thinking like a politician - you're thinking like the point is to maintain democracy etc. Russia Today will never tell people there's a genocide in Gaza, while TikTok does tell them that, so the latter is much more dangerous to politicians.

I don't know why politicians have this weird attitude towards Gaza, but they do.

Also, the propaganda on Russia Today supports strong governments, so your job as a politician will be safe even if they swing the next election. The propaganda on TikTok does not.

> Russia Today will never tell people there's a genocide in Gaza, while TikTok does tell them that

Well if RT was banned for other instances of disinformation, then Tiktok should absolutely be banned for this one.

That isn't disinformation though? The disinformation in that case is the one being pushed by Western politicians.

The propaganda on RT is of a completely different nature than the propaganda on TikTok.

Those can be next. It's one baby step at a time.

It's copyright infringement. That's the only correct word to use. (Stealing is a wrong word because it implies physical scarcity)

What does it matter what nonsense we in the US do? The Italian law is well-made and justly-carried out, or it isn't. Personally, I am happy to condemn my own government for its many failures.

The TikTok ban is about Chinese Communist Party brainwashing our teenagers, spreading propaganda, and stealing Americans' personal data. It was never about protoecting facebook or twitter.

TikTok is a legitimate national security concern.

How? It might expedite intel gathering and psychological warfare to an extent but let's not pretend China doesn't have agents inside of all of the "friendly" platforms already.

Because China can control what gets recommended to TikTok viewers and actively brainwash them. Even if it does not work on all people that's enough to be a security concern.

In the EU, I'd rank it a lower national security threat than Twitter or Facebook, by far.

And seeing what's going on in the US now, I'd maybe have the same analysis for the US.

But it is a threat and all of those threats should be dealt with .

All threats aren't equal. I'm more afraid of Twitter and Facebook, where there's tons of official government presence.

China doesn't consider EU it's primary advesary/competitor either though. They have a lot more incentive to use it against the USA.

So is Facebook and Instagram.

We’re only talking about banning the foreign one.

Also, by that logic, all publishing is potentially a “national security concern”.

Banning /foreign/ influence and propaganda? Why would a country want to do that I wonder?

We should bring back RT while we're at it then eh?

You give me your take on, quote, Trump banning voice of America, unquote?

That Facebook/whatsapp/instagram arent ‘foreign’ is an illusion. They are controlled by the same entity, the capitalist elite.

Yes. Human rights to free expression don’t end at the border, and are not contingent on citizenship.

If you only believe in human rights for passport holders, you don’t believe in human rights.

Furthermore, if you think your enemies having the right to publish whatever they like is a national security threat, you don’t believe in the nation or its founding principles as outlined in the US constitution.

State censorship is much more of a national security threat than foreign propaganda.

I think a lot of people don't consider the implications of foreign powers acting against their nation, not a corporation in that country but the actual government using it's vast resources to undermine other countries.

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