Chinese government didn't allow people in China to use US services (Google, Twitter, FB) and instead invested and marketed Chinese "clones" of these businesses (Tencent, Weibo, Baidu).

Now that the Chinese owned TikTok is such a desirable app to use in the USA, the US government is blocking it in a similar fashion.

To be honest it's all quite petty.

I wouldn't call it petty; these platforms control access to information and there's a huge ideological (figurative) battle between the US and China.

Access to information is a euphemistic way of putting it. Another way of putting it would be control over the delivery of information...

It's all getting very Orwellian.

Wouldn't this embolden other countries to ban US made apps or tech unless they 'sell' a stake to their local companies? EU for example.

Where have you heard the US government is blocking the app? The gigantic security issues have been because the US government doesn't block apps like this.

It can forbid government workers from using it on government-provided devices. This is sensible due to the capabilities for arbitrary code execution and the full permissions to the device the app requires of the user. Amazon has done that with their employees as well. But the US government doesn't have a Great Firewall. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't ban or block it.

Edit: Apologies. I mistook the unlikelihood of anything like this being effective as reason enough for no one (let alone the President) to make statements like this. I stand corrected.

One other minor correction is that Amazon walked back on banning TikTok explicitly on their company devices.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/10/21320196/amazon-employees...

It was a huge story yesterday that Trump has said he’s going to ban it.

And while it’s not clear exactly how they’d ban it, it certainly isn’t impossible. They could tell major telcos to block IP ranges. Or tell Apple and Google to pull the app. Everyone involved could just say no to the government but it’s not all that clear that they would.

Considering the government strong armed Google into not interacting with Huawei, and considering many other governments have done IP bans / app store removal pressure, I find it a bit funny that the original reply was saying "who said the government will block TikTok?", as if that wasn't news directly from the President's mouth

I don't read Twitter... I especially don't read the President's tweets.

Fair point, however it was blasted all over CNBC and etc, maybe I need to read the news less and my programming reference manuals more as a better use of my time

I placed an edit with an apology in my original comment.

Sigh. We're living in an Onion story.

Do you read TFA? Because this info was in the first sentence.

Ha. President Trump tweets a lot of stuff that fails to take reality into account.

Personally, I hold anything said on Twitter to be at the same level of informational trust as something said in general chat in an on-line game.

The President may think he's playing a MMORPG, but I can thankfully shut the chat window.