None of that matters though. The point is this: TikTok is owned by ByteDance. By definition, ByteDance is owned by the CCP. The CCP currently has concentration camps and is starting to act fairly imperialistic and bellicose. They clearly believe that their method of governance is superior to Democracy and they have ambitions to become the worlds superpower. The point is that they could use this to spy at any point in time if they wanted to even if they aren’t at this very second. The CCP simply cannot be trusted and never should have been in the first place. It is the exact same CCP that led to the death of millions of innocent Chinese during the cultural revolution. They still have portraits proudly displayed of Mao Zedong FFS.
Context: All internet companies in China operate under China's Cyber Security Law [0]. Among its consequences: "Companies could be asked to provide source code, encryption, or other crucial information for review by the authorities".
(Tangent: TIL Apple's operation of iCloud in China is by a government-sponsored data company named Guizhou-Cloud Big Data [1] as a result of this law.)
The US just has secret laws and courts to compel boards to do what they say or otherwise straight sends its goons to illegally hack their own global companies seemingly oblivious to why rule of law even exists.
I'd very much like to see this "definition" applied equally. Would you say Atlassian is controlled by the Australian government for the purposes of spying?
Is the CEO of Atlassian required to join a specific political party in order to remain CEO? Because that’s how it works in China. The 2 are not comparable.
There's this radical concept called the burden of proof that's been around in debate since antiquity.
Do you have any proof that Zhang Yiming has been forced to become a CCP member or lose his job? Hell I'll even make this easier for you: any evidence whatsoever that he's actually a member of the CCP?
That aside you honestly think Mike Cannon-Brookes would hold some moral highground and throw away his billions if all it costed was some lipservice and a $50 signup fee to be a party member? He managed to complain a few times after being forced into becoming a 5eyes spying vassal but besides that didn't do a single thing to stop it.
Its a fake dilemma you've created here, Chief executives do far worse things all the time than kowtow to their respective governments and when push comes to shove they all back down because it's worth it.
“ByteDance's CEO Zhang Yiming did what he had to do to protect himself and his company, releasing a letter of apology that signaled loyalty to Xi Jinping's hard-line agenda.” [0]
Mark Zuckerberg criticized the US Government's handling of Covid[1]. Do you believe ByteDance's CEO Zhang Yiming would do the same or anything similar?
Funny because the whistleblower Witness K might disagree with you there (No name because his trials are conducted in secret and he's had his passport removed to prevent him testifying at the Hague upon their request)
The establishment of "Chinanet", such as Alibaba and Tencent, do pledge allegiance to (and are owned in part by) the party in name and action, in return they benefit from the protection and favorable policy it ensues.
I personally don't like ByteDance mainly due to its product philosophy of reducing users to mindless eyeballs (it's a general indifference to social consequences in China tho ), but can't
help but clarify that ByteDance isn't like those.
Having billion-dollar app killed by the party without recourse is just not a remote possibility for the Chinanet establishment, but it is a reality for ByteDance. This is not to say it's impervious to CCP influence, but the dynamics is more nuanced. Old comment:
>The CCP high officials don't really care about anyone but their own relatives and cronies, while your assumption is mostly right as in the cases like Alibaba and Tencent, ByteDance isn't exactly like them, it has a kind of autonomy and internationalization those companies wouldn't dare to dream of. ByteDance isn't as beholden to the party as those two since it's a startup capitalized on the app economy, it's growth is organic, didn't rely on government policies and protection.
>In fact ByteDance already has blockbuster app Neihan Duanzi killed by Chinese authorities overngiht.
> it's a general indifference to social consequences in China tho
Interesting parallel to learned helplessness. [1] (Note: not making a value judgement, just using the psychological terminology)
If (a) you are a company that exists in a state where the government can and does intervene at any time for purposes of social engineering, then (b) you would expect, over time, to develop a culture that deprioritizes considering social consequences, as (c) it's not something that's reliably in your control.
By taking a more active hand in private-social interactions, it would seem the CCP ironically makes those same companies care less about it proactively, and simply follow the letter of the law.
By Which definition you're referring to? Now ByteDance is desperately trying to find a way out of this. It shows CCP is not intended to save their ass like how they try to save Huawei. Because it's just a company without government background.
> They clearly believe that their method of governance is superior to Democracy and they have ambitions to become the world's superpower.
It is the Western World who believe Democracy is superior to any others without contexts.
Democracy is good of course on paper, however, it's usually used as a cause to target flawed developing countries and leaving them to burn in hell. The West got rid of Gaddafi, leaving Lybia people suffering even more. Assad was facing a similar situation, I believe if he died the situation in Syria would be much worse. They just want to judge, and don't give a shit about that they cause much more damages.
A quote from Lee Quan Yew from the interview with Charlie Rose[0]: "I think to make sure that they feel they're accepted at the top table." China was THE superpower for a very, very long time (For example, in terms of GDP, and here's a video on the historical comparison [1]). The situation is more like, China has its own system and it's not possible to largely change or its people would greatly suffer (as always according to Chinese history, or just like Eastern Europe), and they're not quite accepted because the system is radically different.
> They still have portraits proudly displayed of Mao Zedong FFS.
State media has already started to criticize Mao for years. They didn't do it at scale because it would piss-off most middle-aged or old people, and it's pointless. It's very likely they will do this after these generations have died. It's basically like when people talk about Washington they rarely talk about how he treats slaves.
You know Apartheid South Africa freed Nelson Mandela?
Indoctrination North Korea would kill for, never mind China: George Washington "freed slaves".
Aside from owning (more than 300) human slaves, George Washington "yanked" the teeth from their heads for his own personal use[0], and he doesn't get enough credit for not doing that any more after he died either.
You are thinking of this from the point of view of a morally sound individual in the modern world.
It is always difficult to simply destroy your wealth after death. It would have been easier for him to Will all his slaves to whomever inherited the rest of his estate, or to simply sell them all before his death and give that money to causes he believed in (like setting up a university under his name).
No one at his time was going to criticize him. Heck other slave owners probably considered him too tender hearted for doing, what was in their minds the equivalent of releasing your prize horses into the wild to “run free” after you died.
Unfortunately, no. I was just commenting on CCP owning Tiktok.
Which means if it is still operated by ByteDance they will continuously remove contents they don't like.
But to be frank, there are much more companies are vulnerable to similar issues like Blizzard. Although they're not obligated to ban accounts that against China's interest, they do it anyway because they don't want to lose market.
That's what people don't understand about TikTok and how the CCP works. Data gathered aren't the main issue, this app should not be analysed the same way as Facebook. The CCP will use it like they use anything else, as a tool to promote their own view.
Wait a minute... what happened to "we are against the CCP, not the Chinese people" and "the Chinese people and the CCP are separate"?
There is no concrete evidence of spying. Tiktok is a private company. Yes one or more people in Tiktok may have ties with CCP members. But doesn't banning the whole of Tiktok, without concrete evidence, based merely on some level of association with CCP (and the level of association isn't even clear or proven at this point), then how can people still claim "the Chinese people and the CCP are separate"?
It seems more like we're moving more and more towards "anything and everybody from China equals CCP and the whole of China is evil".
No but there's evidence of CCP propaganda already, just try to make a video about Taiwan, Hong-Kong or the insecurity issues within China and notice your account being banned.
And before anyone tells me "it's the same as Facebook", I can go right now on Facebook and find as much anti-american or anti-Trump content as you want.
> But doesn't banning the whole of Tiktok, without concrete evidence, based merely on some level of association with CCP (and the level of association isn't even clear at this point)
The level of association is pretty clear, unless you have no knowledge on how large companies operates in China.
> It seems more like we're moving more and more towards "anything and everybody from China equals CCP and the whole of China is evil".
No, I'm only against the CCP, maybe one day the Chinese people will have the government they deserve.
I can tell you one kind of content that can get someone banned from Facebook: pro-China content. Even if someone genuinely believes that being pro-China is right, and that that person is not a bot.
> The level of association is pretty clear, unless you have no knowledge on how large companies operates in China.
> No, I'm only against the CCP, maybe one day the Chinese people will have the government they deserve.
This looks like a huge contradiction to me. "Private companies in China have to follow Chinese law, so private Chinese companies are associated with CCP, so we should ban private Chinese companies, but I'm only against CCP".
Imagine someone disagreeing with PRISM, and making the same statement as above, but substituting "CCP" with "American government".
I dont have any friends who are pro china on Facebook so I cant prove/disprove but I see plenty of pro china content on hacker news. None of it is being actively scrubbed by the US Government. This is the big difference between operating in China vs United States.
> I can tell you one kind of content that can get someone banned from Facebook: pro-China content. Even if someone genuinely believes that being pro-China is right, and that that person is not a bot.
I don't see how you came to that conclusion. CGTN is still there on Facebook for example. They weren't even kicked out despite blatantly faking their subscribers count (yeah it's that obvious).
> This looks like a huge contradiction to me. "Private companies in China have to follow Chinese law, so private Chinese companies are associated with CCP, so we should ban private Chinese companies, but I'm only against CCP".
In China, if you did not know, there is no rule of law, the CCP is the law. Any large companies needs to have a CCP representative. There is no independent large company in China, that's not a thing yet.
> Imagine someone disagreeing with PRISM, and making the same statement as above, but substituting "CCP" with "American government".
The problem isn't just the data, it's the propaganda and the reach of the CCP.
Tiktok is blocked in China and can only be accessed using VPN. Of course there are still people who do that, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to identify them and verify their nationality. So you'll have to remain unconvinced.
Edit: Actually, if you could find that kind of video on another platform, it would be possible to upload it on TikTok and see what happens.
> No but there's evidence of CCP propaganda already, just try to make a video about Taiwan, Hong-Kong or the insecurity issues within China and notice your account being banned.
China's National Security Law makes it a legal requirement on citizens that:
> Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work known to the public.
At that point, the CCP doesn't differentiate between "the Chinese people" and the CCP. They legally all have to do what they are told by the CCP for spying or whatever else. "Non-democratic" can sound a bit abstract, but...
You fear CCP propaganda. All right. But it seems that in your zeal to deny CCP propaganda, you seem to forget that all media is propaganda. All this western media attention towards how CCP is evil and how Tiktok can be used to spy or influence us, no matter whether they are right, are also designed as distractions from domestic issues.
Let's say we should ban Tiktok. Everybody's data is still being spied on by the CIA, and gathered by PRISM.
Go one step further. Ban Tiktok and Facebook, Twitter, etc.
This is an incredibly bad faith argument. What are you saying? Because everything is propaganda, either everything should be allowed or everything should be banned?
What happens within the borders of a country is different, even if it is spying and suppression of human rights and what not.
The destiny of a country should be in the hands of it's people. Be it good, bad or worse. But if you allow propaganda from another country to enter into your media, all is lost. Why? Because you lose faith in everything. How is one sure the revolution in a country is pure bred from that country? How is one sure the change one sought is because of the needs of the people of that country?
It's an incredibly dangerous situation. Even if your own govt. spies on you, stopping the propaganda of a foreign country takes precedence at all costs, if necessary, even by war.
> Because everything is propaganda, either everything should be allowed or everything should be banned?
How are either of those things worse than let's ban this propaganda but allow that propaganda? Is propaganda only bad if you happen to 'disagree' with it (ie not be as extensively indoctrinated by it)?
> Because you lose faith in everything.
Including, according to your argument, propaganda from who you think (because of propaganda) are on your side.
Propaganda from what is supposed to be your own side is actually, if anything, more repugnant and indefensible than 'enemy' propaganda.
> Even if your own govt. spies on you, stopping the propaganda of a foreign country takes precedence at all costs, if necessary, even by war.
So when your own country, while not spying on you, spreads propaganda in another country, you think it's totally understandable if that other country starts a war over it?
> So when your own country, while not spying on you, spreads propaganda in another country, you think it's totally understandable if that other country starts a war over it?
Yes. In today's world where mis-information and propaganda can topple governments and wreak havoc in societies, it's imperative that a destructive act of propaganda be seen akin to an actual act of war.
American social media app's dominate my country. Google 99% market share. Facebook/Instagram 95% market share in social. 5eyes/PRISM (they're not gonna forgive snowden, he ruined their reputation) monitors my country (not part of the anglospehere) and I never consented.
Am I supposed to tell my government to block American apps so that I can compete with American apps or on "national security" grounds? Because this is the trend American's will see. And if Zuck is reading this, you're shooting your own foot. What do you think is gonna happen? You're pitting the government against TikTok because your company cannot compete fairly. You think you'll win like this? Your Facebook/Instagram will get banned in future by other democratic countries in future because of the precedent you're going to be setting.
Let China do it's thing. It may very well turn out that their way of governance is better. Losers stick to old ways, if it turns out it's the superior system, they'll clearly be better.
But for a system to be proven takes decades/centuries. As long as China does not force it's system, it's fine in my eyes.
>Am I supposed to tell my government to block American apps so that I can compete with American apps or on "national security" grounds?
The primary motive is to curb propaganda. If all the countries in the world blocked data collection, businesses all over would stop data collection.
>You're pitting the government against TikTok because your company cannot compete fairly
Perhaps. But if the new competing app also collects data, the govt. ought to shut it down. Ultimately, I want data collection to stop.
>It may very well turn out that their way of governance is better
Governance is different from protecting basic human rights. An authoritarian government is a danger to the whole world. You can see that already happening with Turkey.
It is actually a very interesting example to set that Microsoft is buying English speaking TikTok regions. I wonder how many other unions or countries are considering forcing Facebook, Google, etc to sell their local operations to a local company?
Ask a Chinese citizen to publicly speak out and push back against the CCP and see if they are (rightly) afraid to do so. Ask an American to publicly speak out and push back against the US government, and you'd get laughed at since basically 99% of Americans do that daily.
I don't 100% agree. Actually we do criticise CCP alot and it's as proliferate and popular as a cultural phenomenon itself (especially the older generation since people in power back then were even worse). It's true no one would raise up a giant placard on the street 'publically' but that's just culture difference. If you must think it's a sign of repression then I can't convince you.
I don't want to represent anyone but I personally think the fear is a bit over exaggerated. Ordinary people in general don't have such fear. You really have to get the attention of the very top and pissing people off big time. It's mostly having nothing to do with democratic movements. See example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Lijun_incident. And people in general enjoying discussing these issues and will understand all the subtext.
What would happen to people who started to publicly protest for the firing of everyone involved in the suppression of Dr. Li Wenliang's warning about COVID and his police detention and orders to stay quiet? Would it be possible to agitate for change, or would the movement's leaders be arrested and/or have their lives ruined?
There were 8 main doctors involved at the initial mess up. Eventually they are all publicly restored but the case of Li Wenliang led to a storm of internet protest (which I believe is the only thing covered in mainstream media). Some couldn't be taken seriously since it morphed into a meme (translation and circulation of the banned text into music sheet, mose code etc). But the truth is the ideological definition has been so fixed that it becomes sort of reverse psychology when people hear about protesting on the street, agitate for change they would feel appalled. In reality small protests did happen everywhere against injustice (just not in name of democracy). But of course these are just my opinions.
My point was there was no accountability for actively suppressing warnings about what has been the one of the largest pandemics in modern history. If Chinese citizens demanded those responsible be held accountable, what would happen to them? Ignored? Warned by the police to apologize and stay quiet? Arrested?
In case of Li Wenliang and the initial COVID 19 mess up, some level of accountability did happen. The court ruled in favor of Li Wenliang, said the police's treatment was not right, and the police apologized. Also, the Wuhan city officials who handled the initial COVID 19 case were fired.
Generally nothing happens to people who complain, unless they instigate mass protests or are deemed a threat to the state. As for whether govt officials listen to them: they do, although not always. Depends on the case.
In China, one negative remark about the government may get you a visit from the police and a stern talking-to. A history of such remarks may get you interrogated or fined. For extreme violators you may not be allowed on social media at all, and you may lose your job.
In America, one politically incorrect mark may get you not allowed on social media at all, right from the start. It may also lead to your immediate termination from your job, if your single remark attracts any attention whatsoever online. You may be de-platformed. You may be sued. Your bank may decide to close your account. And the people are angry. They want to punish thought criminals. If you think the Bad Thoughts, you deserve everything you have coming to you.
In China, the government is remote, people are generally happy with the job it's doing, and no one wants to criticize it. So the rule of "don't criticize the government" is not a burdensome one, and (aside from a few vocal minorities at the fringes of society) people don't care.
Yet in America, the smorgasbord of people and thoughts you are not permitted to criticize are around you 24/7. They are pushed continually in the media you consume (for "representation"), promoted as heroes and "brave", and if you disagree with any of this, at all, you had better hold your tongue about it.
One of these countries deeply and heavily oppresses its populace, with continual threats of job loss, social ostracization, and suspicion about whom around you might be an informant, a political extremist or opportunist who will report your Bad Thoughts on the nearest social media platform and seek your immediate and total ruination.
The other country does no such thing, and the idea that you would have to live in a state of perpetually policing your thoughts to not get fired or ostracized seems bizarre and paranoid when you relate it to its people.
I'll let you guess which country is which.
Source: 30 years in the U.S., 10 years in China. Frequent travel between the two, and tons of exposure to many people in both.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. As much as I find the federal agents' behavior of be despicable, they're not what the parent post is talking about. I have yet seen someone dragged out of their homes for making a snaky tweet against trump, or speaking out against him in major media outlets.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over how Federal agents, in uniform, making lawful arrests, where suspects were Mirandized, interviewed, and then released, somehow becomes black-bagging simply because they didn’t put a decal on their vehicle.
> This should not be happening in the United States. A person cannot be constitutionally arrested without charge, without being read his rights, and without the arresting officials identifying whom they work for and into whose custody the arrestee is being taken or where he is being taken.
This is at least partly false. First, you need to be Mirandized before being interviewed. You do not need to be Mirandized at the moment you are being arrested.
“The Miranda warning (from the U.S. Supreme Court's Miranda v. Arizona decision), requires that officers let you know of certain facts after your arrest, before questioning you.”
Second, you can be arrested with reasonable suspicion even if no charges are ultimately brought;
“In the U.S. and its territories, FBI special agents may make arrests for any federal offense committed in their presence or when they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed, or is committing, a felony violation of U.S. laws”
Third, you can be legally arrested by plainclothes officers that identify themselves as police. In some jurisdictions you can even be arrested by another citizen.
> This is at least partly false. First, you need to be Mirandized before being interviewed. You do not need to be Mirandized at the moment you are being arrested.
> because they didn’t put a decal on their vehicle.
Dude do you really see no problem with this?
My biggest issue is how do I know if they're actual law enforcement agencies or some thugs? If I were in the situation, I would not know to resist the arrest or to comply because I do not know if they're kidnappers or law enforcers.
I do not have much of a problem if I know they're actual law enforcers. But I can easily see this slipping into worse things like gangs pretending to be law enforcement and kidnapping people.
> The American equivalent would be BLM protests. We all know how the feds are kidnapping citizens without warrant.
I mentioned this happening two weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23874084), while living in America. I think it's a legitimate cause for concern. However I did not fear that I'd be sent to a concentration camp for mentioning it. The situation has not [yet?] deteriorated so far as to be comparable with the CCP's China.
A political system requires stability to survive, both internally and externally. Internal propaganda(to spread certain cultural norms and beliefs) is a stabilizing act, while external propaganda is (potentially) destabilizing. In this context, it makes sense why one would be allowed and the other wouldn't.
Are you implying that there's no difference between a democracy in bad shape and a 1-party dictatorship with decades of mass murder and genocide under their belt? You would let them spread their propaganda freely "because Facebook"?
Just a bit more context.
ByteDance is backed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group [0]
The majority of investors and high-stake owners of Bytedance are non-Chinese.
Yeah, but please save your fud shoes for the time when they will actually start doing what you're afraid of via tiktok. Or at least for when it will become unclear and better encrypted. Before that it's up to everyone to use or not to use private companies' apps who never killed millions of people and are just doing a regular business. (I'm not a US citizen and apolitical if that matters)
Okay, but if I were an American civilian TikTok user, why should I care?
If you're saying we shouldn't support China financially, I agree, but TikTok doesn't even scratch the surface on the ways in which Americans give money to Chinese companies. Banning TikTok might be the start of a larger set of sanctions against China, but that would have massive economic implications for the US, which aren't likely to be popular. I doubt this will happen. So banning TikTok as an economic sanction is a pretty meaningless gesture.
If you're saying we should be worried about TikTok collecting data on us: again, I agree, but I think we should be more concerned about American companies and government agencies collecting information on us. Every time I know of an American civilian has been arrested, shot by law enforcement, canceled, etc., it has been due to actions of Americans. Has even a single action been taken by the CCP against an American civilian?
Privacy is a fundamental human right, and it's unacceptable for the CCP, the US government, or US companies to violate that right. But if we're trying to protect ourselves, it makes sense to protect against the entities that are actually attacking us, and for US civilians, that's not the CCP. I don't see a strong argument for banning TikTok here that doesn't also apply to Facebook, Instagram, Google, or any of the various other corporations that collect data on you and then sell it to whoever will pay for it.
EDIT: I'm sure the person who downvoted this post in the time it took for the page to refresh after posting it read the whole thing. /s
Compare to the 1979, 1984, 1995, and 1996 sanctions against Iran, each of which banned investment and trade with Iran in entire economic sectors. Such bans would be politically impossible for the US to direct toward china, since we are dependent on China for certain products--we literally don't have the production capacity to meet our own needs.
Well perhaps if you try criticising the CCP and the Chinese ambassador to the UK through this bizzare interview of the footage such as this [0] and repost it on TikTok and it goes viral, you might see yourself banned immediately.
Being able to influence geopolitics and orchestrate a pro-CCP feed to target demographics is a long, subtle plan that spans decades and TikTok is just the current instrument that the CCP has in their arsenal, and it's very likely early into that plan.
It's a little naive to think that there would be a red herring found with a packet inspection, though the author deserves credit for settling doubts.
You can post anything you like about Trump on FB/Twitter and you won't have federal police erase you 2 days later. The threshold for that in China is comparing it's current president to a cartoon character.
If its association with China is the only problem, then that means you'll have no problems with Bytedance selling Tiktok to a US company, and putting US employees in charge, right?
> .. understand what data does TikTok regularly send back to its servers. I decrypted the content of the requests and analysed it. As far as we can see, in its current state, TikTok doesn’t have a suspicious behavior and is not exfiltrating unusual data. Getting data about the user device is quite common in the mobile world and we would obtain similar results with Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and others.
Thanks for excellent technical analysis! I personally enjoyed reading your article. However, to my knowledge, no decision maker is interested to learn the technical details. Don't we know already this tiktok is just in the US-China cross fire?
Our American friends are interested to teach our Chinese friends lessons by hitting hard on their public business faces. Never mind not talking about thousands of real state investments by Chinese people in US cities. Never mind, not talking about CCP atrocities on the Xinjiang people going way back at least 15 years (since when I am following).
It's not support for humanity, it's not about sudden urge for national security, it's about politics and populism.
If it were just in the US-China crossfire, I'd expect to see a lot more voices speaking out in defense of it. The decisionmakers themselves aren't tremendously technical people, but technical people seem convinced there's a real problem here.
It's important to say that BURP only deals with http like requests ( http/https websockets ) and the app can be sending/receiving data via other protocols, the same way you can't see whatsapp messages via burp [0]
I think America not allowing any Chinese product is not tenable and is a rejection of free markets. We must have a way of making them safe, providing penalties for violations of people's safety, and oversite provided by independent corporate entities
Markets are never fully free - ask any US company that has tried to sell to the Chinese market. What we are seeing here is the first truly global Chinese app. The US is grappling with the fact that China makes it very difficult for American companies to access the China market, but the US generally does not do the same for foreign countries. However, maintaining that approach puts US companies in a distinct disadvantage.
> ask any US company that has tried to sell to the Chinese market
Like Boeing, Microsoft, GM, Apple, KFC, McDonalds, Proctor and Gamble GE, Nike, Coca-Cola? They all make billions annually and have dominant marketshare. American companies are everywhere.
Facebook and Google are the only two banned that I know of and it's because they didn't want to follow local regulations.
>I think America not allowing any Chinese product is not tenable and is a rejection of free markets.
Free markets are a two way street, if one party refuses to participate then why is it not okay for the other party to block them? China refuses to participate by blocking American companies from competing in many Chinese markets and requiring Chine ownership of most companies that are in China. So there already isn't a free market, the US is simply acknowledging that fact and acting accordingly.
American brands are way more prevalent in China than Chinese brands are in US though. 15% of Apple's revenue is from China. 17̀% of Boeing's revenue is from there. China only has a few big brands and it seems like America is quick to ban them for different reasons.
It would not surprise me if China retaliated and blocked american companies from selling in China.
That is not really relevant though. The point is that
while its true that there are some american companies who are not allowed to operate in China, there are many more that are allowed to operate and have a large amounts of revenue from there. Conversely there are very few Chinese companies operating in US, and the successful ones like huawei and bytedance are being shut down by government intervention.
China could easily make the claim that Boeing have strong connections to the US government and using them is a threat to national security.
Most are, Boeing I believe opened an assembly plant in China a couple years back. Even for the ones assembled in America the components may be built in other nations by subcontractors.
What a bizarre viewpoint. So America should sell off these brands to the highest bidder and focus on companies that only produce and sell in the US? You are totally fine with letting China buy coke and kfc? Both have huge market penetration in China.
This makes no sense.
"Brands Smands" indeed, good luck getting consumers to buy PatriotSoda instead.
It makes no sense that you believe you know my opinion on what America and/or American companies should do when I didn't give my opinion on what American and/or American companies should do. The viewpoint you've ascribed to me seems bizarre to me; I don't recognize it.
Should we sink to their level though? I'm not sure tit for tat fighting is going to fix anything, it just drags us all down. I'm not saying I have a solution, but I feel there's got to be a better one than the direction we're going.
Isn't Bytedance selling Tiktok to Microsoft the solution? As far as concrete worries are concerned, doesn't that solve everything? But I'm not seeing anybody paying any attention to that.
Clearly apps ecosystem badly needs end-to-end encryption which is exclusively installed and applied by each enduser party not by server side which is easily circumvented by powers to be ... also to obfuscate who endusers are we also need a tor router like ecosystem ... until these layers become available everyone is simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of mass surveillance
TikTok is a company, and has many competitors, there would not be any issue for anyone to develop a tiktok copycat. Why should it be banned under a free market? Plenty of silicon valley leadership have their political allegiance. Why would that be a problem for the users?
I would be shocked to see solid proof that tiktok is substantially more intrusive than snapchat or instagram. Data collection should be limited at the OS level anyway.
