Comment by cromka
2 months ago
Yet when Europeans feel the same way about American manipulative social media and the US sees it as targeting its tech industry, you don’t see a bias? Are you OK with EU banning Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, too, because it goes against its own citizens rights and safety? Or, following your logic, should we demand they are sold to European owners?
Why do you think it’s YOU who decides to be the gatekeeper on all that data and no one else?
You see the double standards here? The hypocrisy?
You can demand whatever you desire from your government. It's your country.
Can you expand and on this? Do you think EU should force every successful US company to divest their EU branches. I do not know where I stand on this but you seem to have a clear idea on this..
I think the point is that it's not hypocritical to support the TikTok ban, since they don't care and/or can't influence what the EU does with respect to American social media.
I think the EU should do whatever the EU wants to do and accept the consequences of their actions. As an American, I might have opinions but no say in EU's matters. Europe has plenty of very smart people to figure out what's best for them.
I say this because I feel the reply to my top post was unnecessarily aggressive. I have friends in Europe and respect their independence. I don't know why an opinion on a purely US matter brought anger from an EU resident.
My best guess is the feeling I sometimes have that Europeans believe Americans keep scheming to subjugate them, when in fact Americans hardly ever think about Europe. Also, when Americans do think about Europe, it's in a positive way as Europeans share many of our values.
The big corporations, with government support, that does try to profit from Europe are the same that do it to American citizens in the US, so we're kind of in the same fight against them.
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I feel that Europe has exactly that very right, as I support our right to exorcise control of the CCP from TikTok and/or shut it down. I completely understand why they would.
As a European, I am 100% ok with EU banning Facebook and other large advertisement funded platforms.
When GDPR was created there was a huge wave of people arguing that Facebook and other similar platforms would withdraw from EU. That did not happen, but if it had it would have been perfectly fine. Instead most American companies decided to create EU specific version of their platforms in order to comply with GDPR.
The next wave of privacy protecting regulations will likely recreate similar reactions. Those companies that want to stay in EU will comply, and those who don't will withdraw and give space to new ones. The trend of moving to national platforms/cloud providers has already started and been going on fairly strong in my country, especially from government organization and defense adjacent companies.