If this policy was applied across the board there would be a lot less complaining, but this is obviously targeting a company because they pissed off the president.
The united states is in no way making this a universal policy, and is clearly just doing favoritism.
It's either unregulated social networks are a threat to free and fair elections or they are not.
If you have the former position, which seems to be embraced by the majority of HN users, you can't accept to have Tik Tok, a chinese controlled social network, taking over everyone under 30 in the US.
How would this not be a major threat? As opposed to bot farms on FB/Twitter controlled by foreign actors?
Facebook and Twitter are both owned by someone, but the primary driver of what content you see is your social graph, not their magical algorithms. (though this is decreasing with both)
With TikTok, the primary determinant of what you see in your feed is what they choose to show you - and it could be from anyone in the world, with any degree of separation from you.
I think we all know that geopolitical adversaries interfere on USA domestic politics mainly using USA owned social network, in particular Facebook and Twitter.
Yep, what so sad is things have become so transparently partisan. If it were Telegram or Yandex interfering on behalf of Putin, there would be endless hours of call outs about the abuse and need for sanctions, but because it’s China (who have economic sway on a lot of corps and pols), it’s unfashionable to call them out and castigate them (by most media and pols).
> it’s unfashionable to call them out and castigate them
This is an exaggeration. Anti-China sentiment has been surprisingly uncontroversial and bipartisan. It’s actually one of the only things the American left/right can agree on right now.
Really the problem is reducing countries, China or America, to a single entity with a single will as if this was the middle ages and each was being run by a monarch.
The problem is that China has done some specific extremely bad things - Uighurs, Hong Kong; as well as some normal things (competing against US companies) and some things that may be normal but are opaque (how many social networks are beholden to US intelligence services? how many apps snoop the clipboard?). Conflating them all into "China bad" makes it harder to make specific demands that can be widely supported.
Putting kids in cages isn't as bad as the Uighurs? Separating families at the border isn't similar? C'mon... we are just as shitty in the US as other countries any more.
I don't think that's particularly obvious. Lots of people raised serious concerns about TikTok, and lots of organizations banned it, long before the President started leaning in.
The united states is in no way making this a universal policy, and is clearly just doing favoritism.