this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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China is actively demanding that all Chinese companies excise American hardware and software from their technology stacks. They know that they can’t divorce a US tech company headquartered in the US from the US intelligence agencies, so it is the next best option. This is colloquially known in China as “Delete A” or “Delete America”. Who is being xenophobic again?
Ok, China is a bad example, except as what not to do.
As you pointed out yourself, this bill is Congress acting like the oppressive Chinese government rather than the liberal democracy the US likes to pretend to be.
Preventing an oppressive government from exerting undue influence on another sovereign nation’s citizenry is an oppressive act itself?
Dude. Tiktok is a social media platform that happens to be owned by a company with Chinese government connections.
It's not a nefarious conspiracy to control Americans. That would be Facebook and the Republican party platform
Agreed on the Republican party bit.
If Facebook could be considered a nefarious conspiracy (or at least subservient to the powers engaging in said conspiracy), why is it unbelievable that TikTok could also be?
Because Facebook has been PROVEN to knowingly allow widespread coordinated election tampering (Cambridge Analytica, for example) and steering users towards far right pages and groups,
Tiktok is only SUSPECTED based on association with China and furthermore has a much smaller user base and therefore less impact if they DO run election influence campaigns like Facebook does.
The US could, if there was the political will, hold Facebook accountable for this because Meta is an American company. The US would not be able to hold a non-American company accountable in the same way. I do not see a conflict between wanting Meta held accountable for allowing things like Cambridge Analytica to occur and not minding the US taking proactive action on TikTok.
So which is it?
Is the US unable to hold Tiktok accountable or is it/should it be allowed to dictate the ownership of Tiktok?
I'd argue it's neither. The US is perfectly within their rights to enforce US laws within the US, including towards companies not based in the US. That's literally what being a sovereign nation means.
As for forcing the change of ownership of a company that hasn't been found guilty of anything but SUSPICION based on ASSOCIATION, that's some banana republic demagoguery nonsense designed to make right wing voters think that politicians up for re-election are "tough on China" and centrists think they're "standing up for democracy".
It's not "proactive", it's oppressive and unjustified.
I was wrong, TikTok has a US subsidiary, so accountability can been enforced. I was under the mistaken impression they didn’t, so operating on the assumption that any accountability action would be functionally unenforceable.
The difference being that this is about protecting sensitive data like trade secrets, in a complex ecosystem that is impossible to fully oversee. Many western governments have banned Huawei from 5g network components for the same reason and that is solid reasoning.
But with TikTok it is a very different story. Nobody needs to use it. People are using it voluntarily. In regards to steering people to bad content through its algorithm, it is no different from Facebook or Instagram. The argument @[email protected] made is valid.
It is not about preventing foreign or private influence that his harmful to the citizens. It is about controling that influence.
No, it is about preventing foreign influence on citizens. The fact that some level of control (or more accurately accountability) can be exerted by the US government on companies like Meta is true but unrelated. If ByteDance was a company in the EU we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
So what you're saying is that 'murica is no better than China
Nope that’s not what i’m saying, try again.
It never was.