141–150 of 445 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the biggest concern is still Chinese ownership of US customer data. Not just the addictive features within the app.
I'm not any more comfortable with Facebook owning that data than the Chinese government. We've already seen the harm that comes from that.
I see this as being inevitable. TikTok and ByteDance are secretly mocking us and ignoring our laws. They keep claiming that the transfer of Americans data to the U.S. is "in progress" and I believe the whole thing is an insider company joke. In the meantime they simply keep pilfering and abusing our data. What's worse, unscrupulous advertisers are actually taking disadvantage of their illegal behavior to advertise to…
Why not regulate how the data is used or stored, like the EU does, but ban? I'm really hoping this doesn't become a reality because if it does, we will end up with partitioned internet and stagnation. People often forget that the US companies are foreign entity for most of the worlds population and with the WikiLeaks revelations we know for a fact that the US government has access to the data of American tech compani…
US Tech firms products are largely banned in China, closing off a market of 1bn+ - why should Chinese firms have unfettered access to the US?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine this kind of dialogue "Hey, you like jobs right? They get you elected and all. Well if you ban tiktok we'll make some jobs, watcha think?"
Huh? How does banning tiktok make jobs? Are you assuming a US based company will spring up with a clone? You really believe that? Isn't it much more likely Meta will use it's power to gobble up any upstart to avoid the competition?
I don’t remember exactly when Congress seemed to figure out they could spell things by making backronyms of bill names, but boy I wish they’d stop. How about “Anti-TikTok Act of 2022”.
But yeah, the bill names get really goofy sometimes.
The best argument is reciprocity. China is largely a closed market to US companies. This is intentional policy by the CCP. the CCP dangles the 1B+ market to extract concessions from Western companies that I don't like (eg making movies more palatable to the CCP even released elsewhere). More importantly, Western companies will never "win" in China. It's Lucy and the football. The CCP will guarantee that doesn't happen.
Trade is predicated to open and equal access to each other's markets. Obviously the reality isn't quite that but that's the starting principle: reciprocity. China is clearly not reciprocating the access Chinese companies have in the West and that's a good a reason as any to ban things like Tiktok. It's also justifiable.
There's also the issue that Chinese companies are tools of the state without any adequate separation or rule of law to stop that in a way that just isn't true for US companies. But that's a lesser issue than the recipricoal trade issue.
I wish they'd do this via a slightly different criterion, which IMO would be more fair: ban foreign companies from operating in the US whenever American companies in the same field can't operate in the same way in the foreign company's home country (so TikTok would end up banned here since Twitter, etc. is banned there).
This blows up global trade. Different countries value different industries for different reasons. The French aren't going to sell wine like Americans, and Americans don't care enough about the difference to get into a fight over it.
"TikTok is digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans, collecting troves of their data, and censoring their news." Is the conclusion that all forms of digital fentanyl should be banned or just Chinese ones? Because the reality is there's nothing too exceptional about TikTok's underlying algorithms. Will lawmakers be willing enact legislation against companies marketing similar "digital fentanyl" but that are America…