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Comment by kelipso | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty obvious the tiktok ban was due to the Israel-Palestine conflict and thus is about restricting US users. It literally got passed in the same bill as Israel funding too.

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I actually hadn't heard this theory until I read it on Wikipedia about an hour before your reply. I don't think the "same bill as Israel funding" is enough to make this obvious without other context, though: after all, that same bill includes military funding for Taiwan and Ukraine, too, and combining them was largely a parliamentary tactic to make it harder for legislators to oppose portions of the combined bill, not an acknowledgement that they all dealt with exactly the same subject.

(You might still be right, I just don't think it's "pretty obvious".)

Same bill as Israel funding is not my argument, it's just something to note. If you dig into this, you will find lots of public statements or comments made by ADL and related organizations about tiktok's influence on gen z opinions of the conflict, since tiktok doesn't ban pro palestine content or videos of civilian killings by IDF like all of the other big social networks do. Couple of weeks later, the ban is introduced and few weeks later the bill is passed. This is as pretty obvious as it can possibly be.

No. The Tiktok ban is because the PRC is using it to track US (and other country's') citizens. This is fundamentally no different than what Facebook has been doing for years, but China doesn't have a free market, so every piece of data is available to the PRC intelligence.

This should not be a surprise, but you folks are idiots who think only The Big Bad United States are (somehow) the only ones interested in spying.

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