The US is 'looking at' banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps | Hacker News Reader

The US is 'looking at' banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps

cnn.com

36 pointsgdeglin12 comments

I’m unsure how they can do this without falling afoul of things like the first amendment? Short of having an import ban maybe?

But how would that apply to the app stores? They have non-US customers wanting non US sanctioned businesses?

Obviously they could terminate individual corps them if they broke criminal laws, but the reality is that almost anything that tiktok’s surveillance has done has been done by the US social networks at this point as well.

Has Apple investigated them for the clipboard thing? Or did that turn out to be a hoax?

Turned out to be something that is common to many other apps.

This is nothing but anti-chinese hysteria.

Maybe OP or other users are hopping aboard a hysteria train, but as a presumably Stallmanist community we should be heavily concerned about the closed source data siphoning software of our geographic and ideological rivals.

China is just as right to be concerned about our companies being NSA backdoors as we are worried about TikTok.

Is this legal?

Given its history, one should not assume the current administration will decide not to do something just because it's illegal or outside their traditional scope of power.

That said, I (not a lawyer) think it depends on how they do it. If they can compel Apple and Google to remove TikTok from the app stores (which I think they could with help from Congress), that would likely be enough to kill TikTok in the US.

"I will make it legal." -- Senator Palpatine

Sorry, in all seriousness though, I'm sure there's a legal pathway for any action the gov't wishes to take here [1].

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713

About time

Anti-Chinese hysteria plain and simple. After all, it’s not like China has not banned or restricted American social media apps.

This must be done in the interest of national security.

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