abc-xyz

> In fact, Apple has provided a freely accessible API to its podcast directory that anyone can use without asking Apple’s permission.

Have you tried using it? I haven’t myself but your comment made me google it quickly, and as far as I can tell, then it’s extremely limited (e.g. you can’t fetch a list of all podcasts, or newly updated podcasts, etc).

Does that mean western organizations will finally stop censoring western people living in western countries? Will they finally stop banning people for voicing support for democracy in Hong Kong? Or for condemning concentration camps in Xinjiang? Will they finally stop ruining their products in their attempt to be granted access to the Chinese market? Will western employees finally be able to ‘like’ a tweet thanking their company for listing Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan on their website without being fired?

> ByteDance has had a party committee since 2017 and is headed by CCP secretary and company editor-in-chief Zhang Fuping (張輔評), reported Human Rights Watch. Members of the committee hold regular gatherings at which they study speeches by Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) and "pledge to follow the party in technological innovation."

> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027

It’s no secret that the EU want to achieve technological sovereignty.

It seems like it would be a good thing if you didn’t have these billion-user social networks, operated by foreign entities that are likely to use them to spread propaganda, censorship, election interference, etc.

I might be misunderstanding the author but when I go to flight booking websites (such as google flights) then I have to select start + end destination + date(s). I usually only get back 10-20 results in total, but even if they did return more then I fail to see the complexity. Maybe there is another way to book flights that I’m not familiar with?

Nevertheless, it was an interesting article, would’ve been nice if it also revealed the pricing of these services.

The most dystopian place in the world (VICE reporters undercover: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ).

These boycotts have limited impact, or rather, their impact can be explained away by blaming other factors (see Blizzard, Disney, etc). This makes it a lot easier for companies to engage in this political marketing (lgbtq+/blm/etc). The reason they’re afraid to voice support for democracy in Hong Kong or human rights in a China, is not because they fear the Chinese people will individually boycott them, but rather that the CCP will block their access to the entire market.

Are you against executive orders in general or just this one?

Because surely one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, operated by the enemy, with access to troves of personal user data that can be used for election interference, blackmail, propaganda, etc. is a national security threat.

And yes, other social media platforms, including Facebook, pose national security threats as well, but it’s up to the elected officials to decide how significant the threat is, and when/if it’s necessary to take action. With regard to TikTok and WeChat, I’d say it’s long overdue, and I personally hope the list will be expanded to include all software and hardware operated by Chinese companies.

There’s to my knowledge only been an increased anti-China sentiment, which is understandable since they’ve become the nazis of our century.

I don’t support anyone getting beaten up no matter what crimes they’ve committed, but I do support isolating China from the rest of the world until we see a positive regime change.

The racism towards Asians in general is overblown. I highly doubt that Malaysians, Koreans, etc. abroad have seen an increase in physical assaults compared to white/black people. If there has been for Chinese people then it’s also important to consider that they in democratic countries went out to have anti-democracy protests (and the Chinese were often very aggressive during these anti-democracy protests).

But we should also strive not to cherry-pick what kind of discrimination to report just because a specific country is good at crying racism. The discrimination against Asians (as people tend to assume any Asian they see is from China) was heavily reported and condemned by the press. Meanwhile discrimination against other groups of people (which has been far worse for e.g. foreigners staying in China) has been largely ignored in comparison.

Also, if governments had done their job and prevented all travel to/from China (as well as all countries that refused to implement similar restrictions) in the beginning, then we likely wouldn’t be dealing with a pandemic right now, and people wouldn’t have been discriminated against (more than usual that is). I’d say in the beginning (not anymore) it was also justified to be wary of anyone believed to be Chinese since there was a high chance that they recently been to China or had close contact with someone who had been (since Chinese tend to stay together when abroad).

We (un)fortunately haven’t invented time travel.

Meanwhile in a China, foreigners (white/black people) are being kicked out of their homes and forced to sleep on the street, restaurants (including a McDonald’s) are refusing to serve foreign customers, foreigners are refused entry to malls, foreigners are unable to access important government-issued apps, etc. Asians aren’t the only ones affected.

It’s worth pointing out that it was dangerous for him to highlight the bad parts of China while he was still living there. In one of his videos he mentioned that during his time in China he had recorded a lot of footage but he was understandably afraid to publish it (I believe he partly addresses it in this video unless my memory is failing me: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbHxeOQA1Mc).

I personally like this video a lot: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ImmRjT74i-c. It talks a bit about why the rest of the world had no masks or other medical equipment when the Wuhan Virus spread outside of China.

There’s also another foreigner who was semi-famous in China that’s now making funny videos about China (e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=s8PYZQd3Dvo).

But if war is inevitable then better it occur sooner rather than later (as the CCP are becoming evermore powerful and aggressive). Imagine how much death could’ve been prevented if the world had stood up to Hitler earlier.

Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, India, the millions of people suffering from severe drought as a result of Chinese Mekong River dams (Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam), the South China Sea conflicts, the Wuhan Virus, etc.

In an ideal world, the rest of the world would join Trump in isolating China through bans and tariffs.

Would be great if it was possible to filter based on the clothes origin. I believe this could appeal to many users, for instance, r/AvoidChineseProducts (https://old.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/) has been growing a lot lately.

I of course understand that it would be difficult and time consuming to collect this information, however, India recently forced companies, including Amazon, to display country of origin, so might be able to scrape the information from their sites.

Key point is ByteDance as a whole (I haven’t been able to find anything to indicate that TikTok itself is profitable), which happens to be a privately held company. ByteDance’s CEO have also gone on record saying they had a “weak” implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would “further deepen cooperation” with the Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.

It does because these Uyghurs are subjected to hard labor where they’re producing goods for Nike, Gap, H&M, Amazon, Puma, etc. It’s a lot harder to look past these things when you know they’re happening (similarly to how it’s hard for football fans to look past the slave labor used for the World Cup in Qatar). The fact that their treatment feels equivalent to the holocaust makes it even worse.

It also adds great frustration/anger when western companies fight for human rights in USA while they stay silent on China’s human rights issues (and even censor western citizens voicing support for them).

When are these countries going to start boycotting China? USA under Trump is quite frankly the only western country that has taken meaningful action to stand up to China.

USA also benefits from the fact that it’s a democracy (admittedly a very flawed one, especially compared to e.g. the Scandinavian countries), so if they elect a madman then other countries only have to endure 4-8 years (and his/her power is significantly restricted compared to Xi Jinping and other dictators).

Name one western country that have elected an anti-China government and say why you think their opinion/action towards China had any influence on them willing the election.

I’m guessing you can’t, because quite frankly, USA is the only western country that have done something meaningful to stand up to China. If Trump gets re-elected then I’ll agree that his anti-China stance and actions won him a significant amount of votes (enough to be deciding factor in him beating Biden), but unless that happens then you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone that a western government rose to power as a result of their anti-China stance.

I would say it proves my point. Most people couldn’t care less about what happens outside their borders unless the country responsible also do things that impact their life. No on gives a damn when North Korea starve its citizens to death, subject them to hard labor and execute them left and right. But the western world care a lot when they imprison/torture a western citizen.

Similarly, no one cares about China kidnaping girls from neighboring countries to force them into marriage/prostitution in China. But people care a lot when China force gaming companies to censor their games and ban western citizens playing western games in a western country because they write “Free Hong Kong” in the chat.

I’m afraid you’re mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter. There are also many western countries that don’t have a problem with police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people who still took the streets to show solidarity with the African-American people.

It’s also ridiculous to believe other western countries don’t have the guts to protest the US considering the largest protests in recent years (in western countries) have involved USA (primarily BLM and Trump) rather than China.

Twitter was thinking: “a free video sharing app is crazy expensive.. we’re burning all our capital on an app that will be near impossible to profit from.”

TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.

TikTok is as far as I know not profitable. There’s a limit how much investor money you can burn on an app that isn’t making money. But I would say it’s safe to assume the CCP will gladly burn billions to ensure they have a social media platform that’s used worldwide.

You could easily make the case that Facebook is copying Twitter (Vine), an American tech company that TikTok copied.

But let’s be real, there’s nothing impressive or innovative about making an Instagram clone with short video clips rather than pictures. All this talk about its magic algorithm is ridiculous. What would be impressive is if they were profitable, which they as far as I know are not. Their scalability is also overrated since other companies are doing all the heavy lifting, and they’re spending hundreds of millions on attracting users to their free video sharing app.

Already happened many times. A recent example is the BLM protests that took place all over the world. There has also been a lot of protests against Trump, including the famous baby balloon that was seen during his UK visit.

Plenty of people are protesting against business with Saudi Arabia. The reason you see so much anti-China sentiment is likely a result of China having managed to become a part of the lives of people in western countries.

Oil states play a huge role in the lives of people who follow football due to UAE/Qatar having ownership of large clubs, similarly, there have been a lot of protests with regard to the 2022 FIFA World Cup which will take place in Qatar.

Another example is the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi.

You can use GitHub since it’s one of the few platforms (if not the only) that won’t be blocked in China and Microsoft is very unlikely to censor your repository.

WeChat and other social media will of course shadowban messages containing a link to your repo (assuming it become popular enough to be noticed) but you can find creative ways to bypass the blacklisting (e.g. share link in a picture, with spaces in the link, forking the repo and sharing the forked one, etc.)

I think it’s perfectly normal in companies to share news and whatnot in various group chats. We often share news related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the virus, BLM, Trump, etc. We don’t all share the same political views, but we’re all adults.

Zoom is of course still a national security threat.

A lot of things are considered national security risks despite lacking what you might consider proof of wrongdoing.

It’s quite frankly baffling that people can’t see why one of the most popular social media platforms wouldn’t be considered a national security risk, especially after what we saw during the last presidential election.