India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

Chinese immigrant in US here:

I don't think it's a stretch to state the risk of tiktok being mass propaganda machine, from India's perspective.

Additionally, I don't take this as a particular politically charged statement against China, as quite a few replies stated. The reason is that China and India are on a very delicate geopolitical environment. The history is long and ambiguous. The current rivalry is subtle and dangerous. You just cannot give any chance in this situation. After all, China do not have any foreign social network services anyway. There is no reason to gift the opponent an potential upper hand.

The Pandora's box was formally opened in the Arab spring already. It was a well intended start, followed with an ugly development and messy prospect left for generations to suffer and struggle.

Now the whole idea of social networking services as an actual helper of connecting people with different cultural background roughly reduces to nil. That really was a buffer.

Lastly, I don't think it makes sense for any sovereign government to force their country's corporation to serve them directly.

That would immediately destroy any chance of those organizations to expand beyond their home country. Someone might argue Chinese firms are OK to that because they had a big market already. That's a totally unreasonable imagination on Chinese business men's brain structure. I never encountered any such Chinese business man who believe loyalty to CCP is higher than their profit. Other argument is that Chinese law can coerce, but all the laws are saying the company ought to corporate when necessary for the security of the country. I cannot imagine any sane political personnel can convince anyone else that offensive propaganda in peace time is necessary for national security. At least I did not see any such behavior or even minor behavior with hint of such reasoning from past history.

TikTok apps add a vector for arbitrary code download and execution. What "algorithm" you get would seem to depend on what they'd like to run on your device that day.

There is empirical evidence from the multiple natural experiments that happened on subreddits at the start of Reddit.

I personally had to come up with arguments to justifiably censor people to stop the sub I became a part of, from becoming more of a chess pool.

I was a card carrying member of the market place of ideas/ free speech camp till 12-13 years ago, at which point it was clearer to me that giving free speech to certain groups was the same as allowing prions to proliferate in the food chain.

Which is why stronger moderation was required to reverse the descent into madness - it worked.

The people who were hateful bigots were ejected and made their own forums, where they promised never to ban dissenting voices.

Sure enough, they too started banning voices because

1) they weren’t there for free speech in the first place, just for indoctrination.

2) free speech meant that They became petri dishes for even more extreme material and eventually had to be banned or risk getting the entire forum/subreddit removed.

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I’d love alternate interpretations for it, if possible, but the experience from these multiple natural experiments show that letting malicious Machiavellian actors on your platform will result in the abuse of normal users and the tolerance of the system.

So it's a difference in degree, not kind. My point stands. I'm far more concerned about an organization that has imprisoned thousands with essentially zero consequences than one that hired some paramilitaries and got in significant legal trouble for it.

China is a shithole fascist country of oppression and slavery, not a race. That you associate a nation state directly with a race, is frankly racist. Maybe you should be canceled, Björn.