[krageon]

Whataboutism: the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.

This is not what happened here - here, the issue was explained with an analagous, well-known issue. That issue was not being raised, it was used in an illustrative way.

[haswell]

I agree that it isn’t quite whataboutism, but the end result seems about the same: instead of evaluating the TikTok issue for what it is, we’re now trying to imagine how what TikTok is doing is somehow equivalent to what other social networks have done. I question the value of returning to this analogy over and over.

The problem I have with this line of thinking is that clearly the context is not the same, and there is a meaningful difference between these actions taken by a geopolitical adversary and these actions taken by SV growth hacker culture.

Both issues need to be addressed, but the analogy stretches thin once you add more context, making it a not very informative line of inquiry, IMO.

[krageon]

> I question the value of returning to this analogy over and over.

It highlights a sickness that every social network has, and explains the title of the article well using real-world examples that folks are likely to understand. I see what you're getting at with getting too deep into all the nuance a subject has, but the nuance in this case just isn't very thick: "social media" makes it's profit by using you as a resource, which means spying. If you use anything in that space, it will spy on you. And it is all for the same reasons.

That said, it doesn't have to be repeatedly discussed. That's fair! But this article is high up and generating comments, so I feel other folks don't agree with you :)

> there is a meaningful difference between these actions taken by a geopolitical adversary and these actions taken by SV growth hacker culture.

Both countries are about equally likely to throw me in prison or harm me in some way. SV also exists to funnel data into the spy complex of the US (just as TikTok probably does for China). For someone outside of the US (and even inside...) the threat levels are the same.