this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Man people really set up the strawmen here. Congress has literally said it’s about foreign influence, not about protecting children. It has absolutely nothing to do with kids. It has to do with China influencing the citizens of the United States to do things that are beneficial to China, against the interests of the US government.
It’s not a ban, if China gives up control of the app to a United States entity then there’s no problem. It has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children.
Which is also a lie. The likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google are just as beholden to foreign governments such as the fascist regimes of India, Israel, Myanmar and others. They pay the people in Congress a lot more in legal bribes, though, so they can basically get away with anything.
Imagine the uproar if China demanded that Google stopped being a US military contractor..
What the whole thing is about is empty symbolic rhetoric and xenophobia in an election year and oppressive measures to go with it.
Google was blocked in China in 2014 for refusing to censor search results. Now search results are censored and must go through their Hong Kong subsiduary. The last part is what the US Government is asking for TikTok to do right?
China already bans and censors loads of apps and websites already so I don't think looking at what they do in this instance is a good idea.
China did that. We criticized them for it. Now we're turning around and doing it. "We should get to do it because insert dictator here does it" isn't a great argument.