Because China has strict censorship laws, so should the US?

There is no honour in (economic) war. You don't win by holding the moral high ground.

Sucks for us Westerners to see our Internet firewalled, but that's what happens when you're in a war, whatever its nature. Everybody pays for it.

This is not an effective war strategy though. The same influence American politicians swear the Chinese government has over Tiktok can easily be obtained through any number of social media companies.

Moral high ground and fairness is the best strategy here. If it's illegal for all companies to capture this information, it makes enforcement easier and prevents foreign adversaries from merely infiltrating other companies.

There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.

> This is not an effective war strategy though

I disagree. The most effective war strategy is playing dirtier than your opponent. Like, I don't know, throwing the two only atomic bombs ever unleashed on city centres.

I'm not saying that I approve it. I'm just saying that war is not an honourable endeavour. The one that goes further than the other ever dared tends to be the winner.

> There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.

Indeed. The only way to stop that is through draconian laws, so you can jail these people for "high treason", like I imagine China already does.

China also has strict economic requirements for foreign companies too. Foreign companies of specific “strategic industries” are prohibited from operating independently in China and must open up as a joint venture with Chinese domestic companies and have party members on their board.

We shouldn't adopt 'general censorship' positions, but if China censors US media, then the US should center Chinese media.

I believe in reciprocity. If someone treating you poorly, there's no reason you need to keep allowing them to walk over you.

In what sense is TikTok "Chinese media" when the majority of the creators (consumed in the US) are in the West?

Bytedance is a Chinese company that is required by law to take direction from the CCP. The CCP may find it useful to promote/suppress particular content regardless of the geographic location of the creator.

If we're using China as a role model for our information hygiene, then I think it's fair to say that the free speech experiment that some liberal democracies have practiced over the past few centuries has ran its course, and can be considered a failure.

Pack it up, folks, as it turns out, there are some things that are too dangerous to let the public hear.

I think you need to study WW2 a little bit more. The Office of Censorship opening up letters to destroy pro-Nazi sentiment, and the Office of War Information buying up Disney Cartoons to show Donald Duck / Popeye / etc. as a Navy Sailor and encourage us to buy War Bonds through very overt propaganda.

Free Speech comes and goes in the USA. We tend to lean towards the freer-side of things, but if we need to, we clamp down on it to meet our other goals.

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WW2 is hardly an outlier either. WW1 had Espionage Act of 1917, Civil War didn't even have a law, Censorship and seizure of printing presses was just so common. Pre-Civil War, the Postmaster General of slave states commonly censored pamphlets from abolitionists. I mean, the "Alien and Sedition Acts" were passed within a year or two of the Bill of Rights, allowing the President to arrest various members of the press in the 1780s. Etc. etc. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of the USA as a country.

Book burnings and other such events were also widespread in the USA throughout our history... and even have legal precedent like the Comstock laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws

IMO, we've gone too far into the free-speech side of becoming absolutely idiots about the subject in recent years and all of us can benefit from researching the actual history of the USA.

Free Speech, both opening up, and restricting it, has its uses. And if you're a student of history, you'll be able to feel the ebbs and flows of this subject throughout time.

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Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.

> Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.

How about the Red Scare or Huckleberry Finn? Problem with censorship as a tool is that it will be abused. What makes you so sure that the party censoring AP African American studies won't be back in power next?

There's plenty of evils available to the US Government today. As some people like to point out, a government is an entity that has monopolized violence, which is an arrangement that's largely to the benefit of society (at least, in the cases where it is used correctly).

Execution, jailings, regulations, etc. etc. Plenty of ways for the government to be abused. Its inevitable that we give the government power to do what is necessary in society, whatever it is. Censorship is just one more power that the US Government has toyed with from time to time over the centuries.

To prevent abuse, we need to elect the right people to be our leaders, and the ones who wield that power.