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I get the feeling the Trump Administration’s lawyers are going to fumble the full ban lawsuit in November allowing Bytedance to retain control of TikTok. If this were an actual national security issue then you’d think they’d come up with more compelling reasons to remove it from the App Store.

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There's a valid concern but the administration's approach is heavy-handed and impractical. They seem intent on simply stealing a successful company from China and letting american companies earn the rewards and maybe get a kickback in the process. They should use either their national security powers or, better yet, an act of Congress to ban the specific objectionable activities and let the markets sort themselves out.

> stealing a successful company from China

Only its US operations.

I'm sure it's not a coincidence that one of the biggest western social media apps - Instagram - launched a direct clone of tiktok. So far IG reels are dead but if TikTok gets banned there's an undeniable benefit for IG, right?

It very likely isn't a coincidence as the main manager of Instagram has been lobbying for the ban of TikTok.

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