[pictureofabear]

Countries outside the US are free to ban US-owned platforms, and many countries do. It's not hypocrisy.

One of the CCP's goal is to destabilize the Western Liberal order. This is, of course, bad for the West. It's not unreasonable to take actions to prevent this.

[Spivak]

I really don't think the west needs any help destabilizing itself. I wouldn't really worry even if we fuck ourselves politically, as long as the US military continues to playing in an entire other league and the ever-present threat of either side escalating to nuclear weapons out of desperation there's not a whole lot of realistic risk.

[yucky]

Which leads us to the very uncomfortable fact, we want to ban TikTok for the same reason they ban the likes of Facebook, Google etc - because governments (including ours) uses it for citizen data-mining and mass crowd control.

We know how dangerous TikTok is in their hands because we know how valuable Facebook, Google etc is in ours.

[_8j50]

Except for the crucial fact that unlike China US law protects US companies from state interference.

The EU for example fines US tech companies left and right and enforced EU data privacy law and US companies pay up or comply. The dispute with China and US tech companies was never about privacy but about censorship (censoring what the state tells you to), there is no such dispute between tiktok and the US gov.

[yucky]

The NSA has proven repeatedly for decades that those laws are worth zero, they do not apply to the NSA. Edward Snowden proved that. All US tech companies give up their data on users willingly or unwillingly.

[_8j50]

You're not wrong and if that is good enough to ban US companies in China then so be it, it is their right as is the US and tiktok. Are you expecting the US to allow tiktok to save face or something?

[yucky]

No I just hate the hypocrisy, that's all. I would much prefer the US Government just come right out and say we use social media to monitor our citizens and we don't want China to have access to that same data. Pretending like it's unique to them is silly and makes me not respect them.

[_8j50]

You can make that false claim and make a liar out of your own self but the facts are it doesn't even matter if the US spies on its own people or not, it won't change the fact that americans don't want China to also have critical data that can be used against them as a country.

We really need a term for silly people that jealous-hate the US lol

[8note]

The question is whether what you care about is the order's power or the order's values

If you care more about the values, it makes no sense to drop the values to retain the power

[barrysteve]

If you don't have the power to protect the values, what difference does it make?