Turns out that US law (and custom) says the US can't do that particular kind of "tit for tat". I wasn't aware that China had a veto over the US Constitution.
Is it? Congress has the authority to regulate international trade. If TikTok was shipping books into the USA no one would be arguing whether it would be constitutional to ban them or not. The constitution hasn't been updated for the internet and smartphones but they absolutely can be governed the same way, as courts have ruled over and over again.
> Is it? Congress has the authority to regulate international trade.
Not as a pretext for speech regulation. And the right to free speech in the US is understood to include the right to listen.
> If TikTok was shipping books into the USA no one would be arguing whether it would be constitutional to ban them or not.
I'd like to think nobody would be arguing, because that would be clearly unconstitutional. But in fact people probably would try to claim it was somehow acceptable. They'd be wrong.
They might get away with a ban on all books from a given country, if they could show it was really, truly intended to affect only the physical process of printing and the market for that service. The instant it's even peripherally intended to affect the content, it's unconstitutional. And the TikTok thing is about content and who controls content.
You could buy obvious Russian propaganda in the US in the middle of the Cold War.
> The constitution hasn't been updated for the internet and smartphones but they absolutely can be governed the same way, as courts have ruled over and over again.
Great. Since banning book imports would be blatantly unconstitutional, so is this bullshit.
That's making a false analogy and is a logical fallacy trying to compare the two. Finding ways to level international trade to ensure fair trading and equal access to markets is definitely within the government's purview to do and within the national interests of our country.
One rule that I would like to see implemented to equalize trade is to not allow foreign citizens or corporations to be able to purchase real estate in this country or become majority shareholders in any corporation if the country of their citizenship or incorporation does not allow the same reciprocity. It is foolish to allow this kind of imbalanced ownership to happen.
You're statement is true, would should not do the same thing in terms of discrimination, but the two situations are a bit different. Your talking about culture, while this deals more with a outside government's influence on our populace.
For me, think the ACLU makes a valid argument, that this could set a bad precedent. But, the Chinese government already has a system to at least partially monitor and influence what some businesses do (requiring corporations to have role for the CCP in their charters). https://www.csis.org/analysis/new-challenge-communist-corpor.... It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that the CCP uses tik-tok to influence the US populace (think Russia and its use of social media during the 2016 election of Trump).