Cool, now let's ban Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and every single social media platform that does the same exact thing as TikTok. I have never used TikTok, but this is fucking bullshit. Facebook literally ruined elections and lives around the world.
Technically true of any country: only China is allowed to influence CCP elections, only Russia is allowed to fix Russian elections, only the US is allowed to ruin US elections...
They still try to influence each other's ones, but they aren't openly "allowed" to...
Lets drop this whole "lesser of two evils" thing. It doesn't work in our two party system and it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments. Fascism is fascism. America loves having a boogeyman.
The united states is fascist as fuck. All our tax dollars are funneled into the war machine to ruin lives all around the world to help make a few dick heads rich. We fund far right monsters in order to overthrow democracies and peaceful governments that don't want to fuck with America's banks. Civil liberties are thrown out week after week. The wage gap is a fucking joke. Nobody can afford shit. Homelessness is on the rise. Schools are underfunded. Police are militarized against the citizens. Protesting is becoming illegal basically everywhere. We allow corporations to run slave operations all over the global south in order to placate and distract consumers from their shitty existences.
It is only getting worse. And the big reason they want to get rid of tiktok is because ordinary people are successfully sharing their firsthand experiences with fascist america. Its got nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with control. Young people are mad and organizing on the only platform that doesn't have a US backdoor.
I like how you pretend people weren't sharing their experiences and politics on the million other forms of social media that exist before TikTok. As if everyone was in the dark ages. I've seen all the ugly things happening in the US and I don't use chinese spyware.
China is not just a "boogie man", it's literally a technofascist state that tightly controls all information coming into, out of and circulating within its country. It disappears a million Uyghurs into hundreds of concentration camps and its own population is literally the only one on earth that doesn't realize its happened. The brutalization of peaceful Hong Kong protestors was broadcast around the world and yet mainland chinese still think it was some violent uprising. People there don't even know the truth about Tinanmen or Tibet.
But somehow that's all a gap in your knowledge of the world...hmmm, weird must just be a coincidence that the dude who gets all his info from TikTok doesn't understand that China has the most developed censorship and social engineering apparatus on the planet...surely they suddenly give all that up when operating TikTok in the west.
I accidentally deleted my last response when trying to put in an edit but it doesn't really matter. You are arguing in bad faith and it is clear you don't want reason. So I will leave you with this:
Fascism can exist in more than one place. I am aware that the US got its current citizen control playbook from the CCP. I am not defending china. But if all it takes for them to threaten our national security is to let people know the proper truth about america, then I ought to let them do it anyways. The primary difference between tiktok and the other SoMe platforms is largely that american billionaires and israeli special interest groups have no influence there. So important matters that affect the working class (anyone whos not rich) are less likely to be controlled and manipulated. Therefore, it is more likely for regular people to get real information/news straight from the source/people. It's not that difficult to understand.
What you learned in highschool ain't shit. Read more. US robber barons basically funded the third reich. Our oligarchs love that shit. There is a whole swathe of history they keep out of the textbooks.
Your denial and downplay of fascism is exactly what allows it to fester in the states. Don't be part of the fucking problem.
Lets drop this whole “lesser of two evils” thing [...] it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments.
I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.
I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole "lesser of two evils" thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.
When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no "greater evil," you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).
Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism -- after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.
Oh, whoops, you thought I was defending the US. Not what I said, but it's the only way you can deflect from what the Chinese government is.
China being economically destitute for the last century thanks to terrible CCP domestic policies doesn't somehow change the fact that they represent an even darker path forward for humanity than the US. It's not really a point that can be argued. China has hundreds of concentration camps, forced mass relocation of Tibetans and other minorities to place them in dormitories they literally can't leave except during work hours, a national information firewall to control everything their populace sees.
Like, Xi Xinping had fucking execution vans in his lead up to power. Your brain would have to be scrubbed bloody to think China and the US represent the same thing.
The history speaks for itself. China is less of a threat to other countries in the world than the USA is. Your idea that they're some international boogeyman that's going to take over the entire world and doom humanity is just you repeating "China bad and scary" State Department propaganda.
Even with China's human rights record being what it is, they don't export war across the entire world.
Why would the American government ban companies based under their own jurisdiction? They can make use of all those other companies just like the Chinese government can make use of TikTok.