Comment by mullingitover
4 days ago
The US censorship of Chinese social media apps on these grounds sure makes it look like China was completely justified in doing it first.
4 days ago
The US censorship of Chinese social media apps on these grounds sure makes it look like China was completely justified in doing it first.
???
Isn't it the reverse? China has censored/banned many US apps and websites for a long time, surely turnabout is fair play?
Hell, TikTok itself is already banned in China, irony of ironies.
China didn’t ban U.S. apps. it maintains a policy that sets a high bar for foreign operators, such as requiring domestic servers, domestic partners legally responsible for operations, content access and moderation to meet local standards, etc.
U.S. apps and websites simply choose not to operate there due to these requirements.
The U.S. has been complaining about this for years, advocating for a free internet without censorship in the Chinese market. But now that Chinese apps have access to American data, we’ve begun implementing the same measures.
I can get to the main Xinhua news website -- the Chinese one, not some US-specific page -- easily enough as an American. You definitely can't do the equivalent from within China, you can't get to Voice of America, or the New York Times, or similar sites.
That's the difference. It's not about operating as a business within the country, it's about banning access to even the foreign version of the site or app.
China commonly bans Western websites and apps, even ones that have never operated or attempted to operate as businesses within China. The US doing the same is relatively rare, situations like this TikTok ban are very uncommon.
> content access and moderation to meet local standards
what a nice way to say forcing a backdoor to identify, spy on, and oppress citizens.
but yeah I guess oppression of people is a "high bar" for foreign operators to meet.
backdoors are wrong here and are wrong there.
1 reply →
Ah, more misinformation from the PRC defense squad, right on time!
> China didn’t ban U.S. apps.
Yes, it did.
It's not just that the websites and apps don't operate as normal businesses within China, but you can't even reach the foreign versions from within China without using a VPN. That's what makes them truly banned.
There are plenty of Chinese websites who do not operate as businesses within the US, but Americans can still freely access the sites if they want to, thus they're not banned.
Please, read this and educate yourself about China's firewall: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
Could you elaborate on that? I have no clue how the US banning TikTok for granting the CCP the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Americans somehow justifies the decade plus of the GFW, blocking Western social media, rampant censorship, etc.
I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning software because of the risks of the software/data collection posing risks to the political stability of each nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is justification.
Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Chinese/Americans".
Data sovereignty — the idea that every country should protect and prevent its citizens’ data from foreign entities.
We never discussed this seriously before because we held a monopoly on it. For decades, other countries provided us with a direct feed of their data. Only recently have they begun to grasp the ramifications of that.
China never bought into that narrative. They have consistently upheld their data sovereignty policy, requiring foreign entities to host servers within their borders to operate, and that looks like the direction the rest of the world is heading.
I wish for an open world where data & communication flows freely, but it's unclear who can be trusted to wield that power.
The US government has never provided any direct evidence of their claims of CCP puppet-mastery, the whole thing is generally some combination of "Trust me bro" and "Well obviously China's government is gonna control a Chinese company."
Meanwhile China's reasoning for blocking US companies has been eerily similar arguments the entire time. Hard to prove them wrong when we have the major aristocrats of US tech companies completely prostrating themselves at Mar-a-Lago, offering bribes (er, sorry, the going term is "funding inauguration parties") to the incoming administration in broad daylight, staffing themselves with party officials, etc.
Arguably both are right, and it's a shame because the general working class people of both nations have more in common with each other than they do with their ruling classes. I think the thing that terrifies those in authority the most is the idea that the citizenry might realize this if there's enough communication.
The difference being American citizens used to have the final say while the Chinese never did.
Congratulations, you turned the U.S into an authoritarian clone of China.