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Comment by slowhadoken | Hacker News Reader

Seems bold considering China’s firewall and all the US social media and chat apps it’s banned.

Might be a good political argument but not a legal one.

The legal argument is much more clear though. The US can impose embargo via executive order.

Keep in mind Australia dropped Huawei over security concerns for their national broadband network back in 2012. China is a totalitarian regime that suppresses speech and is reeducating an entire ethnic group, possibly even forcing them into factory jobs.

If you read the article, they are also contesting the fact the order was rushed and bans ByteDance from retaining US lawyers once the ban is in effect, which is a violation of due process.

So the legal argument from ByteDance actually has merit in that respect, regardless of the political debate.

> bans ByteDance from retaining US lawyers once the ban is in effect, which is a violation of due process

To counter the parent’s comment, this sounds like something a totalitarian state would do

Are you implying the USA is a totalitarian state now?

If orders like this are not overturned by the judicial system, then yes, it would be. But this order (or at least the lawyer-banning aspect) will be overturned because the US is not a totalitarian state.

Correct. It shows that Trump is subject to the law but the CCP does whatever it pleases. China blocks whatever it likes because it has no such legal standards.

Yes, the entire state apparatus bows to the whims of one man, which is almost definitionally a totalitarian state. We’re lucky, at the moment, that the totalitarian in charge has few concrete ideas and lacks the attention span to see through even those few.

Thank you. I can’t believe not everyone is seeing this.

Saudi Arabia is also a totalitarian regime. It suppresses speech, executes citizens prejudicially and extrajudicially even outside their own borders, arrests and charges women's rights activists of treason, dozens of executions by beheading of non-violent drug offenders per year, human rights activists are arrested and imprisoned without trial, and so on.

Maybe we should just stop doing business with Saudi Arabia too, is that your point? No more Saudi Arabia oil for the U.S. or even all of the western world? In fact they're still treated as a U.S. ally.

I wish I could upvote this 1000 times

Yes, we absolutely should stop doing any business with both Saudi Arabia and China, both of which are brutal murderous totalitarian regimes.

Failing that, however, considering the two options for global social networks are precisely limited to

a) there are no global social networks b) there are global social networks but only ones that are directly controlled by the CCP

I'm pretty alright with a).

No but we need their oil and alliance. It benefits us so that is ok—oops, I’ve said too much.

What do you suggest doing though? It would seem that giving them lots of money and arms isn’t a good way of dealing with them either.

oh we totally should. The US has historically extracted resources from regimes who play nice. When they stop playing nice or might want something a little better, the US goes all Iraq/Iran/Libya on them.

The foreign aid of high income countries (US, EU, etc.) is always used to prop up autocratic governments for resource extractions. It's how high income states enforce autocratic policies outside their borders, in order to keep their citizens happy with cheap oil and cheap plastic crap.

"There are exceptions to that power that lawyers for TikTok will likely underscore in their litigation. For instance, the authority cannot be used to regulate or prohibit either "personal communication" or sharing of film and other forms of media, which TikTok can argue is the primary use of its app."

It’s both.

China didn't ban Google or Facebbook. China has laws that required Google and Facebook to keep their servers within Chinese borders and they chose to not follow those rules, hence preventing them from operating in China. Whereas Tiktok has complied with all the laws in US thus far but still banned because of baseless national security concerns. And that's the issue here.

That's not what Wikipedia says (which is not to say your statement is false or wrong):

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Facebook#China

> In China, Facebook was blocked following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots because Xinjiang independence activists were using Facebook as part of their communications network, and Facebook denied giving the information of the activists.[12] Some Chinese users also believed that Facebook would not succeed in China after Google China's problems.[13] Renren (formerly Xiaonei) has many features similar to Facebook, and complies with PRC Government regulations regarding content filtering.

> As of 20 August 2013, there have been reports of Facebook being partially unblocked in China.[14] However, according to the "Blocked in China" website, Facebook is still blocked as of December 7, 2019.[15] Facebook is not blocked in the autonomous zones of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the province of Taiwan. Facebook is currently working on a censorship project for China, where a third party would be allowed to regulate on Facebook and control popular stories that come around. This would be a huge attempt on Facebook to get back into China.[16]

I’m Chinese but you wouldn’t preface my actions with “consider China’s firewall.”

That depends on whether you're controlled by the Chinese state. If you are, someone might well say this. The root question is whether TT/BD is/are controlled by the state. Given the size of the company and the CCP drive to control "large" (a flexible concept - which intensified after Xi Jinping came to power - it is not unreasonable to assume the state has significant influence.

You can say that about anything under the jurisdiction of Chinese law. It's not like they have a choice. US companies are also "controlled" by the state in the same manner we are accusing these companies because the Chinese government can compel them to release their data to them in the same way national security letters can be used, and in the same way NSA data harvesting is being used.

The difference right now between China and the US is that everybody knows China is monitoring everyone—even Chinese citizens.

I mean, everyone knows the US is monitoring everyone, except Americans seem to have some mental clutch where they keep denying the fact.

"China does it too" is not as strong argument as it sounds.

it is stronger when the reciprocal action is levied towards China. it isn't whataboutism it's tit for tat and it's as old as diplomacy.

It's how reciprocity in international trade works.

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