No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and claim how you're not free, you don't support free market and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.

Any country is free to do this.

TikTok is literally banned in China (along with YouTube, Facebook, Insta, etc, etc).

Is it banned or is it just not available due to the owners already having an app that does the same thing (douyin)?

Yes, it's region banned (not just by IP so VPNs don't even really work well). You'll get a 404, if you try connecting, and your packet rate won't support video through a VPN. Note that it's also banned in HK and India and parts of Europe so it's not really anything new to ban it when you're talking about almost half the world's population.

Couldn't people just say "but Instagram" is just TikTok? Is it really the "same thing" just, because the same people have control, if the algos, servers, content, moderation/censorship, and promotion are different? Like BlueSky, Twitter, and TruthCentral are all the same thing? Or if we want the "same company" company Allo and Hangouts? I mean everyone loved Allo, right, you can have that one.

The US didn’t “ban” anything. If the EU required Meta to divest I imagine they would do that rather than shut down and lose billions.

You think US Meta would relinquish tech to EU Meta? You think they're better then TikTok?

Yeah, we're not buying that story anymore.

US tech companies sell themselves to European tech companies all the time, Meta would definitely sell.

TikTok's main user base is the USA. If TikTok sells their US app, they can't support themselves on the rest of the world. TikTok isn't even the leader in China.

US Meta can definitely support itself at it's current size without EU Meta.

Are there any numbers for that? I highly doubt tiktok is doomed to fail just because is banning it.

It's still way more popular than any Meta or US app for that matter, is right now.

The company scaled to support the world’s largest economy.

Remove that. Recognize they can’t compete in #2 (China).

Then how can you justify their current scale?

What do you mean by more popular than any meta or us app? WhatsApp has 2b monthly active users, where as TikTok has little more than 1b.

More important than user count is user economic purchasing power.

Hum... Brazil already demanded explanations about the new Meta moderation rules. I remember reading the same about the UK, but I'm not sure.

This ban only applies to foreign adversaries (e.g. China, Iran, and Russia).

Which the United States clearly is trying to become with Mexico, Canada and Denmark, UK and Germany. so far.

Musk making threats against the UK government has gone down badly: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/uk-counter-ext...

Musk, is a representative of Trump's government, right?

A senior member of Trump's government is trying to mess with our political system - how is this not catastrophic for diplomatic relations, coming on top of the threats to our NATO allies?

1. CEOs meeting the President is not evidence of govt. control.

2. Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella .

>Europe is an ally

Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory something that ended that situation.

Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.

Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most hostile things. We should be taking the threats of invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to, for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was expected.

> Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella

That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.

Most European countries will basically make no deals or anything for 4 years just like we did last time.

There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies

You know this was happening before elon bought Twitter, right? Secretly?

Members of congress were texting and emailing with execs from Twitter and Facebook to request post suppression. During an election.

The US is not an enemy to the EU, while China is a clear enemy to the US.

The difference is quite easy to easy to spot.

I mean under Trump the US becomes less and less of an ally, and more an opportunistic bully.