What do you mean "even India" has banned it? India is notorious for its censorship and is rated near the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index. Being in that company is absolutely not something the US should aspire to.

That's not the point. It's in the interest of a country to not let it's data be sucked by a foreign government. And India took the bold but right decision early on.

I think the better framing is that ByteDance refused to comply with US regulations and spin off TikTok.

If the EU decided WhatsApp should be spun off from Meta (for any number of legitimate reasons) to continue operating there, we wouldn’t claim that the EU banned the app.

I wouldn’t mind my data being siphoned off to China. It’s not even clear that if China had all of our data then it would meaningfully change world events.

Freedom means freedom from censorship. I can’t think of an equivalent event that’s happened in my lifetime in the US. "India did it too" isn’t exactly a strong rallying cry.

That said, we’ll live. Hopefully our blind trust that there were security concerns ends up being worth something.

Arguably China has won the day with the massive migration to RedNote.

> massive migration

You're in a bubble if you think there is a massive migration happening to an unlocalized app .

Not at all. There are hundreds of thousands of US users. Most of the content I see is localized and tailored for English. There’s even an auto translate feature. They’re very welcoming and nice, and encourage us to post. Most of them are just showing their houses and what it’s like to live in China.

It was a pleasant surprise. That said, I’m not too interested in endless house tours, so I’m going to see what kind of content there is when things settle down. That’s still a migration though, at least for me.

It's meant as a joke of sorts, not a migration. From the NYT:

"Sure, there are the people calling themselves “TikTok refugees” and joining Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, as a half-joking protest of the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok on national security grounds. (The joke part is: OK, Congress, you want to stop us from using a sketchy Chinese social media app? We’ll download an even sketchier Chinese social media app and use that instead.)"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/technology/what-if-no-one...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/arts/tiktok-red-note-chin...

What is impressive to me as a software developer is that the RedNote engineering team added a Translate item to the system, at scale, within a matter of days. It works flawlessly.

You have data?

This baffles me a lot as TikTok and RedNote have very distinct market niches except for their Chinese origin. I assume if someone were interested in a flavor of social media like RedNote they would have been on it already.

Is there a really strong market demand for whatever social platform as long as it's owned by a Chinese company?

I feel the same concerns for which US bans tiktok are valid for EU and fb/meta/x/twitter/google.

How do we know they're not siphoning our EU data to the US, or controlling what the algorithm shows us to influence politics?

Was it? What was the real concern? And can you prove it?

Yes, it has been a security threat for years. It's a shame it took this long. In case you missed some of the myriad stories, here's just a few. Sure seems like the onus is on TikTok to prove they aren't being evil at this point, because all the evidence so far isn't implying anything good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31920756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28199588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33280176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21076459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33302591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098132

Thank you for collecting these.