Another way to look at it is the fact that China does not let American social media in its market. Why should America give China access to it's markets when that's not reciprocated?
No, we shouldn't. Be we also shouldn't be schmucks that give market access that isn't reciprocated. Most free trade agreements work on reciprocity. We agree not to put tariffs on country X's cars because they agree not to put tariffs on ours. A ban is essentially an infinite tariff. If that's how a foreign country is going to treat American companies, why not respond in kind?
Because it goes against one of our purported values. I'd hope that this action had some inherent merit (I'm not claiming it doesn't), and it's not just retaliation.
Are we protecting America's trade interests with this bill? I don't think so...
What purported value is it going against? Allowing market access to countries that don't reciprocate is not one of our values. Nor is it one of China's. Or most countries, for that matter. When other countries erect tariffs, we usually respond on kind. And when we raise tariffs other countries - including close friends like Canada - they respond with their own tariffs against American imports too.
You've got it backwards: reciprocal trade agreements are the norm not just in US politics but across the world.
We're banning the company not the ability to express. They can upload the exact same videos to YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and who knows how many alternatives.
Americans have more than one value at a time. Americans also claim to value fairness, and they conduct trade with all kinds of people. If some of those people fail to conduct trade fairly, Americans do not need to oblige those failures.
> all 160 million US TikTok users install a PWA of TikTok and everything is fine
I’m not saying the bill is performative. The app-store and hosting ban will be effective. The point is nothing will be censored. Distribution will have been curtailed.
TikTok is Douyin with a different coat of paint. They're near identical apps run by the same company, ByteDance. It's not banned in China, it just has a different name.
Sure, by virtue of China's stricter regulation of social media. But for all intents and purposes, Douyin is TikTok in China. Or rather TikTok is Douyin in the rest of the world outside of China.
Douyin is TikTok in China. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that TikTok is the export version of Douyin.
Reasons for having two apps are rife with speculation. One is that censorship in Douyin is more prevalent than on the export version (that one is pretty obvious). There's also speculation that the export version of Douyin has an algorithm tuned to be more addictive.
But let's be clear, by ByteDance's own statements the two apps have shared management and technology.
That's false, American social media simply refused to follow Chinese law. (I believe facebook specifically refused to remove accounts belonging to ETIM/TIP, an organisation recognised by the UN, EU and at the time the USA as a terrorist group)
Zuckerberg tried damn hard to get his crap into China, he even asked the Chinese president Xi in person to name his unborn baby. He became quite "unfriendly" to China/CCP after all those efforts got him nothing in return.
Incorrect, Facebook is flat out banned in China no matter whether they comply with CCP censorship. I'm very interested in sources to substantiate the claim that Facebook is refusing to ban groups that even the US designates as terrorists.
One, this article was published years after Facebook was blocked in China so it can't be the cause of the block. Also, China daily is a propaganda outlet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily
It's literally run by the "Central Propaganda Department".