They're right to be angry at their government: freedom of communication is a human right they've had taken away from them. I'd be angry too if a US president made it illegal for me to read HN. I'd be very mad if TikTok pundits were making influential videos advocating HN be shut down—so I can't imagine writing HN comments arguing the reverse, that's the symmetry principle that underpins civics, <i>equality</i>. The right of a TikTok viewer to watch content I dislike is equal to my right to read HN—their anger is the same as my anger.<p>In the Indian context, their TikTok ban is adjacent to a wide variety of internet censorship targeting the incumbent government's political detractors. It's gone to the extent of even regional internet shutdowns. I can't help but thinking this all functions as a slippery slope: the more people tolerate temporary emergency measures, the more they become permanent, and pervasive—like India today. Censorship is an attractively abusable power.<p>It's a cautionary tale from more angles than the WSJ article considers.
I dont understand. If China does not allow foreign internet companies to operate on its soil, why should India or US or any western country allow chinese internet companies to operate within their jurisdiction ?
TikTok bans in India and US are very different.<p>India did it as a kneejerk response to the Doklam border incident of 2020. When you don't intend a full scale war,the other recourse is to hurt China economically. I distinctly remember the wave that followed of boycotting Chinese goods as much as possible. TikTok is the outcome of that.<p>While it doesn't do much politically, the ban was to hurt Bytedance. When 80-100 million people go dark on a certain social media platform, those numbers don't look good. When Bytedance wants MAU stats to leverage against the next expansion loans or merger (possibly), this could hurt them. Or simply revenue from ads. With the US it is pure political influence on the sly which the government is afraid of. Indians are tough audience to sway that way from my experience.
The great lesson of Prohibition was that minorities trying to boss around a majority are always a dodgy play.<p>Minorities wielding power, like teens exploring sexuality, excel at not learning such lessons.<p>The correct answer to a perceived threat such as TikTok is to provide a superior TikTok.
The <i>'but then we're as bad as ..'</i> argument will be presented, and maybe a reference to the Paradox of Tolerance (aka the Popper Paradox).<p>I read a nice(r) interpretation of the paradox a while ago - loosely the claim was made that it's not an ethical standard that you (your nation state, etc) have to apply to yourself in order to maintain a moral high-ground, but works better once you think of it as a social contract.<p>That is, if someone / another nation state is not willing to follow the same basic rule, then they don't get the benefit of it.
Few Americans have considered the rationality of the GFWC without the context of authoritarianism.<p>China blocks the internet because 50 years ago <i>the vast majority of the country was illiterate and subsistence farming.</i> You don't wake up one day equipped to critically think about statements that sound good but aren't true. You don't wake up understanding the tragedy of the commons. You don't suddenly have a historical understanding of how your country came to be and the values it was founded upon. You don't wake up having thought about the golden rule or "equality" and matched that to various situations in the zeitgeist. You don't wake up having fully contemplated that others might treat you the same way you treat them. These things come from major investments in public education.<p>Americans have huge amounts of privilege they aren't even aware they have. We grew up with public education, and don't understand what it means to not have public education, or have a poor literacy rate.<p>It might surprise many to know that while china does have great power over the GFW they choose not to enforce it for many of their educated and more well off citizens, which is why you can use VPN services to get pretty unfiltered internet within China.<p>The US is facing a crisis where half the population doesn't understand that in November they are going to vote to lose the right to have a meaningful vote, and so many people here haven't fully contemplated not taking that very very real possibility seriously. "Hoping" that Americans will arrive at the right conclusion is a poor strategy to continue living in a "liberal democracy." Living in a liberal democracy requires more than hope.<p>We are in the "if you can keep it stage" of "a republic if, you can keep it."<p>Letting a hostile genocidal foreign power have direct access to our countries most vulnerable and impressionable people, our children, is not good policy, <i>especially</i> when that foreign power has gone to great effort to make sure that what they are doing to us, is not done to them.
People are wasting time on stupid content... Why don't you see it's killing American society? Algos are made to make Wests stupid. Like drugs.