Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aaronstotle | Hacker News Reader

Domestic governments shouldn't let hostile foreign governments the ability to exert soft power over 1/2 of their population. Hence why China banned all USA based tech companies from operating there.

View on HN

As a Chinese grown up within the Great Firewall, now I began to really feel all the hypocrisy around the matter of "freedom of Internet". It seems the block of Facebook and Twitter in China is surely justified at the very begining, for the same "national security" grounds. China have exactly the same amount of reason to believe the US is stealing data or propelling propaganda by social network.

It seems there are indeed things that can override citizen's free choice even in the "lighthouse of democracy and freedom", and CCP didn't make a mistake for building the firewall. My need to use Shadowsocks to use Google instead of Baidu or some other crap was simply a collateral damage.

Of course, the Chinese censorship is way more intensive, but this act makes a dangerous precedent.

TikTok is also blocked by the GFW in China, so this puts the USA on par with blocking it also. Weirdly enough, Douyin isn’t banned, specifically, so you should still be able to use it in the states.

Tiktok is not blocked, bytedance chose not to list its app on Chinese appstores and blocks +86 phone registration.

tiktok.com links were available in China.

So if you use the American app store to install TikTok, it works just fine, even for the falun dafa content? Interesting. I've heard that tiktok.com is actually blocked by the GFW, so even if you have the app, you still can't view content without a VPN, but I guess I can check for sure in a few months.

Obviously the USA doesn't have a GFW, so they can't actually block tiktok, just ban it from the app store and prevent business from resolving in the US around it (e.g. paying content creators).

And this is why most countries should ban Facebook, Twitter and US social media.

The opinion is mostly not about control over recommendation algorithms; it goes out of its way to say that the data collection is dispositive. Check out Gorsuch's concurrence for some flavor of how much more complicated this would be with respect to the recommender.

The funny thing is that when China did that, it was unanimously condemned in the Western world as an authoritarian move, and often use as an example of why China was a dictatorship with no freedom of speech, etc. But now it's actually the normal thing to do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com