Comment by tertiary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tertiary | Hacker News Reader

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The whole ban is so gross. It's clearly politically targeted to deplatform Trump critics all while firing people up about China.

For those that aren't familiar. TikTok is pretty ubiquitous in the under 21 crowd while being practically unused by older people. It's sort of like when young people fled to Twitter and Instagram to get away from their parents on Facebook. It's basically the next Twitter for that age group.

TikTok (the community, not the company) is also quite critical of Trump. For instance, the buying up of rally tickets a few months ago so he would show up to an empty political event was organized on TikTok and we know that it pissed Trump off [1].

That level of age and political specificity in their audience makes it easy to target them for their ideas.

This type of laser focused ban on specific conpanies (rather than, say, disallowing data to be stored in China or banning Chinese owned companies from operating) reveals the nakedly political motivation behind this action. "China is bad" is just the excuse here. It's really about banning a popular meetingplace for a political demographic opposed to Trump.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...

While i dont think the threat from the CCP is something that can be reasonably boiled down to nothing more than made up Trump antics as you seem to imply, you do raise a relatively good point about targeting specific companies as opposed to an all out ban on Chinese tech companies in the US.

Its not that there isnt something to it but i would agree that his handling of the situation is poor and ineffective. For instance, rather than risking thier intel on TikTok specifically, they could try spreading awareness about the Belt and Road Initiative for instance which went from 60 something pledged countries in 2018 to ~138 pledged cpuntries in 2019. Simple, immediate, effective. No need for divisive identity politics.

> "China is bad" is just the excuse here.

Wait. "China is bad" is not necessarily an excuse, it might be an end in itself. Populism needs enemies and threats to find and maintain support. By demonizing China (as it did previously with immigrants, BLM protesters, Iran, etc.) Trump effectively injects fear in the political discourse and creates the need for a savior with a strong attitude. Which is himself, of course.

Readers of HN are heavily leaning to the left and naturally very far from Trump's voters demographic, reflecting California's and the US's tech workers predominant political sympathies; but I see that the fear and distrust of China has taken solid roots and I wouldn't be too surprised if some of them ended up voting republican, driven by the fear that a democratic president could be less resolute against China. Such is the power of creating enemies.

HN readers are not so friendly to pro-China comments or even those thread that tells the reality in China that they don’t want to believe

HN readers lean left? Most of us shut up about politics while on a tech site. Maybe people that lean left like to shout about it everywhere they go...

Also a possible trigger: Sarah Cooper lip syncing him on TikTok and getting possibly "higher ratings" than he.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Cooper

See: "Satirical videos"

The major impact exactly as he promoted light in the lungs and disinfectants in the body as the treatment:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/14/trump-lip-sy...

For him it's all about his ratings. The reality show continues.

Ha, really? I missed that. Thanks for pointing it out.

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