Comment by glenstein
11 hours ago
>I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.
Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.
Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.
Do you have links to the Human Rights Watch reporting that you reference?
Here's one from October of last year:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/09/japan-chinese-authoritie...
And here's their overall 2025 page on China which details, among other things, harassment of critics based out of Italy, detention of U.S. based artist, and even harrassment of protestors in San Fransisco.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/china
I think their suppression of criticism on Uighur forced labor has also encompassed harassment of extended support networks people from the region as well, but that's just off the top of my head and not necessarily on that page.
Not a link to the Human Rights Watch report; however, at oral argument this was stated by the US government (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2024/24-656 @ 1:58:32):
Elizabeth B. Prelogar: And the one final point on this is that ByteDance was not a trusted partner here. It wasn't a company that the United States could simply expect to comply with any requirements in good faith.
And there was actual factual evidence to show that even during a period of time when the company was representing that it had walled off the U.S. data and it was protected, there was a well-publicized incident where ByteDance and China surveilled U.S. journalists using their location data --this is the protected U.S. data --in order to try to figure out who was leaking information from the company to those journalists.