Comment by Al-Khwarizmi

Any country has the right to this kind of ban, that's what national sovereignty is all about.

A different issue is whether doing it is the right decision or not.

And another issue is the hypocrisy. When China did it, the unanimous opinion from the US (both the official stance and what one could hear/read from regular people, e.g. HN comments) was that such bans were authoritarian and evidence that there was no freedom of speech in China. But now suddenly it's a perfectly fine and even obvious/necessary thing to do...

Being neither from China nor from the US, this paints the US (who have benefitted a lot from riding the moral high horse of free market, etc. for decades) in a quite bad light.

Should the EU ban US social networks for pure economic reasons (so we roll our own instead of providing our data and money to US companies, which would almost surely be good for our economy)? The argument for not doing it used to be that freedom should be above domestic interests, one embraces the free market even if some aspects of it are harmful because overall it's a win. But the US is showing it doesn't really believe in that principle, and probably never has.