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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

That's not super relevant to this case, because TikTok itself is banned in China; Chinese users have to use Douyin, which runs the same platform but doesn't share content with TikTok.

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> (...) because TikTok itself is banned in China; Chinese users have to use Douyin

Seems to me that it's not banned at all, they just release a region-specific version for a specific market.

It's banned in the relevant sense, that users of TikTok aren't getting any kind of network effect from the Chinese userbase.

Regionalizing a service is not the same as banning. It's not dependent on "the relevant sense", it's just plain outright wrong. By your measuring stick Netflix and Amazon Video and even YouTube would be banned because they split their service into separate markets, with some content not available somewhere else. At most you could argue censorship, but that's about it.

Heck, region-encoded DVDs weren't a form of ban, don't you agree?

Tiktok is the same exact service with region-specific restrictions, primarily motivated to comply with local jurisdictions. That's it.

Those bans have to do with IP rights. Regionalising of social media is effective censorship, since it's not that there are localized versions, it's that accessing outside versions and people, information and ideas in them is banned. If there was mere regionalising, they would be able to access the non localized version too, if they wished.

Then Netflix is banned in the relevant sense in my country since I cannot get the same experience an American does. Look, shit on tiktok all you want, hell I installed both tik-tok and wechat and I uninstalled them within 1 day when I noticed how Orwellian they were. I only ask to some westerners commenters to not be disingenuous, because Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and virtually any other big American company has given carte blanche to the NSA to get on their data. Also spare me the tired " this is whataboutism" argument.

According to this site, it’s actually banned in China: https://www.saporedicina.com/english/access-tiktok-china/

I’m guessing that the international tiktok hosts content that wouldn’t be allowed on China, and the CCP isn’t interested in having the workload of censoring the rest of the world’s content.

International users can still feed censorship classification systems, like with WeChat: https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/

It is still owned by the same company.

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