Comment by monero-xmr
2 months ago
If the government can’t ban a business entity then doesn’t that say something about control? We have an app controlled by a communist dictatorship. They can keep the app running by selling it, but they won’t.
What’s perplexing to me is leftists love how companies in America can be forced to sell and broken if they are declared monopolies. But if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers suddenly forcing a sale is wrong? It makes me feel even more certain that HN is astroturfed by Chinese bots because who cares
> if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers
I suspect that people pattern-match this declaration to McCarthyism.
Additionally, the US has been invoking national security for a series of extremely dubious moves recently as well -- e.g. Biden's latest decision to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon on shaky grounds of national security, and his administration's recent policy to introduce export limits on GPUs to all countries except 18 (most US allies, NATO or otherwise, are now unjustly being restricted in how many GPUs they can import). Coupled with the incoming Trump administration's threats of trade war and expansionist designs on Greenland, people -- especially non-Americans, also in countries that have historically been friends of the US -- are very quickly running out of goodwill for the US, and in light of these events naturally the TikTok ban is seen as just another draconian attempt by the US to practise (economic) imperialism.
McCarthyism wasn't a very credible threat. There are reams of evidence that CCP is trying to destroy democracy and attacking all of our critical infrastructure (electronic especially) looking for weak points. There is nothing imagined about it like there was with McCarthyism
Overall I agree with you. I was merely speculating on why there is so much pushback against the TikTok ban -- that people (erroneously) pattern-match this decision to McCarthyism.
Your last statement is a pretty silly generalization, and I don't think you need to bring in left/right extremes into this. For a lot of folks this is more about precedent on being able to ban anything the current establishment disagrees with, which has its own merits, even if you want to say that it's strictly being done because China controls it, which is not 100% of the reason why.
I despise communism myself, as my country went through 45 years of it. I agree with TikTok being forced to sell, and I'd like to see all social media sites offer more transparency mechanisms to NGOs and government agencies to show how their algorithms really work to have some watchdog be able to check if what we're seeing is heavily manipulated, especially during election years.