Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.
Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.
It is happening on our local platforms here. Meta, based in the US, is systematically censoring Palestinian content that would otherwise be available here in Canada.
Details:
* https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
* https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
For a very recent example, one of the few remaining prominent Palestinian journalists, with a following of over 1M on Meta, was banned today:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/11/7/al-jaze...
The majority of Canadians share the majority of Americans' view of China.
Well, this is Canada we are talking about. All of the countries in OP's list are foreign.
Its not about who has the data, although that is important. Its not about subversion of a population by a foreign state, although that is important too.
The crux of the issue is reciprocity.
China does not let any CAN or US companies into China markets, without first demanding local factories, forcing local production, requiring equity control and even IP. And if you dont share it, bohoo they will steal it anyway. And, there's no recourse.
The chinese govt has abused free trade for so long. Its time to demand fairness.
They dont give us access into their markets? OK! We close our markets to their corporations.
Its as simple as that. The golden rule.
I think it has been so long since the Pax-Americana West has dealt with an overtly hostile major power that we’ve collectively lost the concept that there can be real enemies with goals that run explicitly counter to our own.
That said these sorts of issues were way down the list in these elections and people have to compromise on some issues and vote on the aggregate. I do think that it's pretty clear the Republicans were and are a lot more understanding and publicly supportive of Israel vs. the Democrats. They didn't try to do a "both sides here" but clearly communicated who they consider to be the aggressor and who they consider to be defending themselves. That doesn't mean that every single republican voter feels that way but a lot of them do.
The US also supported and brokered quite a few peace initiatives in the middle east. It's not fair to say it only acts to support wars.
This is provably false. The Green Party explicitly ran on support for Palestine and voters in parts of Michigan voted for the party in decently large numbers to split the Democrat vote.
Not enough voters saw the issue as big enough to switch their votes on a national scale but that’s not a failure of lack of choice, the people spoke with their votes that they don’t care about Israel and Palestine nearly as much as other issues.
Chinese social media is pretty vibrant with the exception that you can’t agitate for the fall of the government.
Or Pooh Bear.
Or South Park entirely after one episode of joking about China influencing Disney about Pooh Bear.
Or failures of the central government.
There are a lot of things banned online in China; this is so not true.
As a citizen of a country, as much as I would love to believe in free exchange of information, it's better to limit what enemies are able to broadcast directly to our phones. that's a commons with a lot of tragedies in it.
However, that said, I do agree with your broader point. I'm suspicious of Tik Tok and the Chinese government's intentions and I think banning it was a good move.
If you're going to cry foul, maybe you shouldn't block the other party in the first place.
Many of the Tiktok generation live in a world where reading for 3 minutes is a heavy effort they are unwilling to do. All information is supposed to be presented in short entertaining video clips.
In China online time for the youth has been strictly regulated years ago. But harming other nations is only in their interest.
Actually, there is a lot more. About 30% people (of USA) use TT, ~60% under 30. You guess it, they don't to look only at dance videos. Social media had become a huge source of information for a big chunk of the population.
On TT, and on most social media (SM), what you watch is mainly determined by the recommendation algorithm. This algo can hide subjects the SM can't put ad on but also subjects the they don't like and boost the one they do (shadow ban). That how you politicize SM. That about, the first thing Musk did with Twitter (after firing people).
When it's a state controlled SM, it's more like foreign interference. There is a lot of books about that. It's documented, not a secret of something. Uyghurs for example, have been a subject of ban on TikTok, shadowing it heavily.
The essence is, by denying agency of your country’s users, you deny the whole set of ideas it bases on. If that’s a natural vulnerability of the ideology, addressing it by banning media is a patch over a bleeding wound.
Canadian teens will simply learn about VPN, like they always do in other countries which ban internet resources. Not a single one of them will leave tiktok.
The threat is that it silently engages in manipulation, rather than something like RT or New York Times where the bias is well known ahead of time.
Tiktok's Canada-based offices must have been up to some other form of skulduggery for them to have been shuttered while leaving Canadian use of the platform completely status quo.
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Not foreign, but we already have that problem with Sinclair and local TV affiliate stations.
Our local billionaires goals are not in the same category.
Describing them as an enemy might be too far, but you certainly wouldn’t describe China as a friend.
The biggest foreign meddler and spy in Canada is the southern neighbor.
We know for a fact through leaks that US has put all Canadians under mass surveillance both in communication and movement (like the wifi hacking at airports leaked by Snowden) since more than a decade, or the 2023 Pentagon leaks that were quickly scolded as "but they were trying to find Russian activity in Canada", and don't forget the AT&T whistleblower which also exposed mass surveillance on Canadians by US intelligence.
And yet..nobody cares..even though we know for a fact it happens, we don't care let alone call the US an enemy.
So, what is the difference? The media and politicians calling 24/7 China your enemy (something nobody would've done before 2018/2017), but ignoring or pretending that the real spy of all spies which hacks and spies on all of its allies, even the personal phone of the German chancellor is cool.
I find those double standards not only mind blowing, but dangerous.
We're letting the White House to dictate globally who can play by the rules and who is an exception.
We're not "at war" but that doesn't mean much.
If there is a major nation on this planet that has never done anything bad to mine in its history I can think of is China.
I can remember American, British, French troops raping and humiliating that country, I can't remember a single time the opposite happened.
While China does not always play fair and there's plenty of despicable things they do I don't like, I just don't see them as my enemy and see no valid reason to do so.
When the Elkann family (which owns majority stake in Stellantis, Juventus, Ferrari and many others) got pissed off by the largest newspaper in Italy reporting on them (despite their businesses impacting the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Italians) they simply bought the newspaper and the major critical voice of them disappeared.
But since Bytedance doesn't dance at NSA's tune, different rules apply.
I've always been terrified to think about how much of my data is out there, but I don't understand enough about how it can be used, and the potential risks.