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A comment on Judge temporarily blocks U.S. ban on TikTok downloads from U.S. app stores. Parent comment

Re:Judge temporarily blocks U.S. ban on TikTok downloads fro... by yorwba on Monday September 28, 2020 @05:13AM (#24614617)
As someone who has actually talked about the Tiananmen Square protests on WeChat and occasionally corrects misconceptions about how difficult that is, I don't think banning the app will help in any way, since the ban will just reduce the volume of such messages even more.

The status quo is that you only need some minor skill at language games to talk about forbidden topics without using any keywords that trigger censorship. With a ban in place, at least one of the participants additionally has to circumvent their country's firewall to reach the other side. Censoring censored media even more is not a good way to fight censorship.

I'm also not sure why you think "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP?" is talking about TikTok, since you can absolutely do that there https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmen

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Re:Judge temporarily blocks U.S. ban on TikTok downloads fro... by raxxorrax on Monday September 28, 2020 @08:20AM (#24615811)
Generally I would agree that it is a bad step to ban the app. It can still normalize censorship and if it becomes a main market player, you might loose the ability to talk about it and other apps might follow just because of the success.

Ideally people would stop using it by choice. Perhaps too much to ask, but I know enough people that wouldn't use it precisely because of these issues.

Agreed that it is easy to play language games, but maybe your intention is to draw attention of a larger crowd that would be completely oblivious to it.

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Re:Judge temporarily blocks U.S. ban on TikTok downloads fro... by causality0 on Monday September 28, 2020 @04:53PM (#24621101)
since the ban will just reduce the volume of such messages even more.

Trying to "win the hearts and minds" of the Chinese people is a lost cause. Either they agree with the CCP or they've adapted to its restrictions. All we can do is try to keep that ideology from spreading beyond their borders.

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