U.S. looking at banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok

It is absolutely foolish for any country other than China to allow TikTok within their borders.<p>You might fairly ask whether or not it is equally foolish for non-US countries to use US services. I think that is also a reasonable question, and deserves reflection.

What would it mean to &quot;ban&quot; an app? Would they force Apple and Google not to distribute it? Would they set up a national firewall?

All this will do is validate that banning each other&#x27;s social media apps is a legitimate thing to do, all you need is sufficient justification.<p>The usual reason for tit-for-tat trade restrictions is to punish the original restrictions and try to coerce the other side back to a free trade position. That can&#x27;t happen in this case, the CCP will never allow foreign social media in China, so it would end up with a permanent mutual ban.<p>Either we believe that freedom of communication is a paramount principle that should be protected, or we don&#x27;t and we think it&#x27;s ok to interfere with it for &#x27;national interest&#x27; reasons. Our national interest reasons might differ from theirs, but we&#x27;d still be validating that banning social media is an acceptable step to take depending on the circumstances. I realise this poses a problem because letting Chinese social media into our markets creates risks but if they operate in our markets they have to follow our laws and our standards. Playing the game their way by their rules is a losing strategy. We need to get a lot more creative on this.

This is such cancer. I didn&#x27;t expect that trade wars and centralized app stores would lead to this, but here we are.<p>Think back to 1999-- could you imagine if China had made Napster, the USA would block your access to download and use it? We would all just laugh at how easy it would be to get around it

Well China has banned FB Twitter, Google etc. a decade ago

This is more of the protectionism&#x2F;mercantilism&#x2F;nationalism stuff. Sure, there&#x27;s a B-story for it but it&#x27;s all seated in revanchist nationalism and a tropish &quot;suspicious foreigners&quot; framing.<p>If someone made a villainous fu manchu character people would rightly protest it as intolerable. Yet when we actually instrument official government policy based on the same sentiments that the character is based on nobody even reaches for the pearls to clutch.<p>Once again, fiction and symbols are somehow more important to the political imagination than material reality.

This sounds like a protectionist move from the United States, than anything else.<p>TikTok appears to be the first China technology media company, that can actually make a dent in the universe.<p>It wasn’t WeChat from Tencent. Nor anything from Alibaba; I don’t think they’re in the media space. Nor search from Baidu. Nor Sina Weibo for tweets.<p>I can’t think of any other Chinese media company, that can actually make an impact, on the world, just yet.<p>Perhaps the USA government is trying to kill this fledgling company, while it’s still small. It still hasn’t reached the prevalence of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter yet.<p>The funny thing is, for a while, TikTok was trying to discourage political content. Just stick to fun dance moves. They tried to tell their users to keep that vile political stuff to Twitter and Facebook; and then, they got criticized for censorship. LOL.

The CCP bans so many apps, websites and other western technology, so this seems like a reasonable action just on that alone.<p>And given how bad TikTok is with user data (mostly minors too), I don&#x27;t see how banning it would be a bad thing.<p>There will be American or western clones within days that replace it.

This would be a good moment for the EU to reassess it&#x27;s dependency on American apps like Whatsapp.<p>If even the US starts openly blocking apps because they think it would be better for a local competitor to fill this part of the market it should be a wakeup call for the EU.

Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games ... shall we ban Fortnite as well then and make all the kids play Minecraft since it is wholly owned by a US company ???.

If you view digital contents as industrial goods, the internet today which allows apps, services to flow around the world without much burden (e.g. tariff, import control) is already a miracle. It&#x27;s no surprise of countries to start building &quot;customs&quot; on the internet and that may become a trend considering the deglobalization happening these years.

Did anyone analyze the traffic sent out by this app and found something not-nice?

Are super-platforms such as FAANG and BATH(Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei) Army, Navy, Air Forces, &amp; Marines proxies on the digital layer?<p>It certainly seems like the world is bifurcating between FAANG and BATH for that reason.

How would this be implemented?<p>Delisting from AppStore? Or ask ISP to ban tiktok domains? Or both?

How much money is an American teenager or user, making from TikTok?<p>Is TikTok doing revenue sharing with the content creator?<p>If so, then this ban is just going to smack these American end users in the face.

I like Chinese tiktok &quot;for you&quot; recommendation than YouTube&#x27;s recommended. Tiktoks reco is like yeah I will watch that, most of the time I am like thanks. Keep recommending like this. Youtube is like, algorithm thinks it has figured me but it&#x27;s sort of showing me the same old videos like it&#x27;s new. I will throw my data to China.

So it is not ok for a foreign app the spy on its user but it&#x27;s perfectly ok for Google and co to do so? Anyone remember what Uber did with their app and tracking users? What about the king of tracking, facebook?

Even a stopped clock&#x27;s right at least once a day.

Trump administration banning an app that has allowed for worldwide social mobilization against him? No way.

Zoom, WeChat too

You can hear the 8 minute Pompeo interview here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foxnews.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;mike-pompeo-tik-tok-china-communist-social-media-spying-fox-ingraham" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foxnews.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;mike-pompeo-tik-tok-china-comm...</a><p>Covering a wide range of topics. Mostly it sounded like Pompeo getting ready for the upcoming election.

Will US abolish all other Chinese digital presence including Alibaba etc?

Welcome to dictatorship. Government will now start to ban all kinds of apps they don&#x27;t want.

So this is how it&#x27;s going to happen - with every country banning each other&#x27;s social media apps, we will enter into a future of digital borders, limited speech, and broken international relations. All in the name of making sure people don&#x27;t dare think some wrongthink.

I wish EU would done some with WeChat<p>nobody cares really about TikTok, it&#x27;s childish thing, but amount of data WeChat harvest is ridiculous and it honestly stops Chinese abroad from integrating with locals, if they keep communicating again just with Chinese within WeChat. if they were forced to use proper international apps with E2E encryption they could discuss whatever they want without sacrifing privacy<p>I see it here, you have local Chinese living in EU still talking in WeChat groups under control of Chinese government which knows every word they talk