Comment on TikTok confirms it offered US government a 'kill switch'
onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 months ago
It never was about “security”. They’re just afraid that China has a successful product in their country. Competition isn’t something they enjoy.
xcjs@programming.dev 5 months ago
I agree with this, especially because this hasn’t pushed any discussion forward about federal level consumer privacy laws in the United States.
tardigrada@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Competition aka market economy only works if every player respects the same rules. It’s obvious that this isn’t the case here. TikTok -the ‘Western’ version of ByteDance’s product- isn’t allowed even in China as you will know. So why does TikTok complain if it gets banned in the West, while it seems fine to be banned in China? Isn’t that a double standard?
Also, if we’re talking about competition, then this doesn’t work in a centrally planned economy like China’s. The competition argument coming from a Chinese perspective isn’t valid, as it is the Chinese government itself which rejects exactly this very competition for itself.
xcjs@programming.dev 5 months ago
I would buy this argument if the US had any effective consumer privacy laws in the first place and Byte Dance were flagrantly ignoring them.
The issue of course is that the US doesn’t want to cripple their own social media companies by passing laws that everyone has to follow in the first place.