As an American who has more power over me, powerful people in China or powerful people in America?

Who is more likely to give my data to my government to adverse affect?

Who is more likely to lobby my government to adverse affect?

What reasons would a foreign government want information about foreign citizens of its adversary?

At the end of the day you are the outgroup when it comes to the CCP and it'd be best to remember that.

If you are an American, the intelligence community already treats you like you are the outgroup.

Which is another problem entirely but it's whataboutism. It says nothing about the CCPs motivations.

>Who is more likely to lobby my government to adverse affect?

Dude, the concern is that allowing TikTok is quite literally allowing the CCP to indirectly lobby. It's how this whole thing got started in earnest.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-cal...

The geopolitical utility of the app is to give the CCP more power to manipulate and hurt you. They want to get closer to the level of power that domestic US powers-that-be have. I'm blown away that this seems to lost on so many people commenting here

Maybe my interests and those of the general American public are more in line with the "CCP" than Israel regarding international affairs.

Putting CCP in quotes is silly. It is not a conspiracy theory that the CCP exerts an extreme level of control over ByteDance.

Your interests are probably not aligned with the CCP. The American public's certainly aren't. The Chinese government wants to achieve a hegemony and export their economy and culture by undermining the US wherever they can. We don't fit into that in a way that won't result in a markedly worse life for us.

TikTok would boost content about how Israelis making target practice out of Palestinian children is great and needs to happen more often if it made the US look bad. That you can't see that, or can't separate that instance from other possibilities, is exactly why TikTok is under scrutiny.

It's in quotes because the actual English initialism is CPC.

Using "CCP" shows your ideological bias.

You say that like CPC doesn't carry an ideological implication of its own. To the average person, the distinction between calling it the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of China is so miniscule that they're not going to seriously engage with you if you earnestly try and take that angle. Go ahead and nitpick over how people refer to the party at your ideology's expense. I sure as shit won't stop you.

It shows that you make no effort to get non-US media and don't have informed opinions.

I make plenty of effort to stay informed, I just don't make any effort to argue inconsequential shit to signal that I'm "more informed". At some point in this conversation, you just quit addressing anything other than what you believe to be the most accurate initialism for the Party like anybody cares. You're either deflecting or are arguing silly points for the love of the game. If you genuinely believe what you're implying you do, you're actively repelling people from your ideology.

It's endlessly amusing that people are willing to speak positively of an authoritarian state, not even for a paycheck which one might not forgive but at least understand, but merely for their daily dose of brainrot[0] videos.

[0] In the dictionary sense of the word: https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the...

As of yesterday, powerful people in China had a lot of power over you. As of today, they have a lot less. That's a good thing.

What is the point of App Store rules if your privacy continues to be at risk. Oh yes, every single app must declare if it uses name, or email, or address, or camera, but all of them are exempt except TikTok? If you want to make the App Stores more stringent, sure, go for it.

The issue is ability to manipulate people. However, should not the NSA monitor how the algo is working, and be empowered to cut off TikTok if for example you start seeing a million videos saying "Taiwan, the eastern province of China". I am sure we will still have control, we just need to be smart enough to "tap" into what content is being fed.

What are China going to do to with my data that US companies haven't already done?

Help China's military.

It has nothing to do with your data. That whole thing is a red herring.

The risk with TikTok is that it presents media entirely algorithmically, and that algorithm is controllable by the Chinese government and is opaque to everyone else.

Data collection is a worry of the previous decade, the recommendation algorithm is the battle ground, the US has decided that it much prefers having Meta push its white supremacist and gender wars drivel non stop than what was being shown in TikTok (Israeli atrocities)

While we are at it we should show the Hamas atrocities while we are at it. Would not be complete, without someone of the fake heart pull videos that Hamas traditionally put on as well.

Just no.

First of all China has PIPL now: https://personalinformationprotectionlaw.com/

Second of all, China actually enforces it's laws against it's largest and most valuable companies: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/china-regul...

US has/does neither - especially for the last ~20 years.

I'm curious about your third assertion--I am definitely not a fan of the US government's current laissez-faire approach to regulation, but I was able to find a few examples of the US levying larger fines:

British Petroleum (total settlement was 20b, but the Clean Water Act penalty was only 5.5b): https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-and-five-gulf-states-reach...

Wells Fargo: has had so many scandals, some of which were over 3b: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-bill...

In the article you linked, it mentions that this fine was 2.75b, or, 4% of Alibaba's 2019 revenue. I'm not knowledgeable enough in finance to state this as fact, but it looks like BP had a total revenue of 222B in 2015 [1]. 5.5b/222b = 2.47%. The total settlement would be 20b/222b = 9.01%

Now, obviously there are many examples of companies being fined paltry amounts for massive violations in the US, and I'm not sure how to reconcile 5.5b for destroying an entire ocean ecosystem vs roughly the same fine for anti-trust violations. But I don't think it's true that the US never enforces its laws against large and valuable companies. Do you know of any good sources that compare the history of corporate fines in China vs the US in more detail?

[1] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

Yes retribution against Jack Ma is most certainly evidence that China is better. If you have a better example that this retribution case I am all ears. Comical you pick the first and single case that is directly tied to the Jack Ma incident.

As demonstrated by this ban, we're objectively worse now.

The true threat to our democracy is a foreign power. It's just not China.

What's your objective metric? The number of American websites and apps blocked in China is not one, not two, but in the thousands. Pro TikTok propaganda has convinced people too young to remember all American news/social media getting banned in China that America is the real censor here. There are multiple entities competing to "red pill" you on the reality of whatever. America is definitely the lesser evil in this comparison and it's not even close.

Civil rights aren't a zero-sum game. America must lead by example by not silencing 170 million people because of some "intelligence" that's likely less reputable than Saddam having WMDs or the Marty Rimm report.

Yes banning TikTok is a threat to democracy.

Unironically it is

Just because you say it does not make it so. Oh the irony.

How so? The law was passed by democratically elected representatives in the US government.

AIPAC (foreign lobby) money.

They also profited heavily from picking favorites. Senator Cotton mysteriously increased his net wealth by 2 million in the past year.

This is silly. Yes, there is a lot of money in American politics. No, that does not mean that any particular lobbying entity, even the AIPAC believe it or not!, controls what happens.

This isn't a battle of moneyed interests vs. penniless altruists. There is plenty of money on TikTok's side here.

If you find yourself buying into a simplistic narrative about a single organization buying the exact law they want, you've been had. It's never that simple.

In this case, it is this simple.

AIPAC wanted this.

They threaten congressmen who buck them with being primaried. They reward compliance with money. This is not behavior we see routinely from other special interests.

No, it isn't. It's obvious to anyone without their head in their ass that the current setup with the Chinese government having control of a media platform that is dominant in the US and presents content to people based on an inscrutable algorithm.

It has nothing to do with the AIPAC besides that they happened to support the "well duh" position on this.

I get that "it's the jews" is the preferred cope of people on TikTok who don't want to think about this too much, but it really has nothing to do with this. This all started years before the middle eastern omnicause du jour.