Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

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> Twitter is a popular information-sharing social platform, and there are Chinese actors on it, but this argument isn't extended to suggest that it be banned, either. But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist? I don't get it.

Is it that hard to understand? Twitter and Facebook will at least try to make a genuine effort to root out and ban "coordinated inauthentic activity" by the Chinese government (and if they don't they could probably be compelled to do so): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/23/facebook-.... A Chinese-owned TikTok won't: either it won't do it at all, or it will make a fake/bad-faith effort.

Similarly, Twitter and Facebook may gather a lot of non-public user data, but there's pretty much no chance that any of that data will be willingly handed over to Chinese intelligence.

It should be noted that Chinese intelligence is not exclusively after top secret government data: they're also interested in many kinds of mundane information that you might be surprised by that can be leveraged to get it: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-china-t....

Banning/setting up a firewall makes us no different than the CCP!

Personally I think all the effort and resources spent policing social media platforms is a complete waste and malinvestment. This looks like an overreach of government power.

> Banning/setting up a firewall makes us no different than the CCP! [1]

That's pretty clearly not the case. Context matters. For instance: if I shot someone in self defense, and you shot someone to murder them, we're not "no different" because we both performed the action of shooting a gun at someone. In that case, like this one, the context motivating the action is more important than the action itself in determining its meaning.

> Personally I think all the effort and resources spent policing social media platforms is a complete waste and malinvestment. This looks like an overreach of government power.

Some people say the same thing about having any military at all.

[1] Italicizing something like that is a common quote style, but I'm assuming you're italicizing your own statement for emphasis because that isn't anything like what I said.

@localhost’s link has an answer to that:

> Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do? Well yes, we know that is what they would do, because the Chinese government has blocked U.S. social networks for years. Wars, though, are fought not because we lust for battle, but because we pray for peace. If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours, it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.

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