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> but the same arguments also apply to Instagram/Twitter/Whatever.

No, they do not. These are US products, not the foreign communist party psyops project.

You use these words like they are axiomatically evil.

Like, "it's a foreign project"... so is my Nintendo. Are you afraid or worried about foreign things? A lot of the world does a lot of things better than the U.S.

"It's a communist party project"... first of all, plenty of great communist projects out there, and the Chinese communist party is really only a very very narrow slice of communism so your brush is absolutely over broad. But second, so what? What do you own that didn't pass through China in some capacity?

"It's a psyop"... it's an app with funny videos on it. I think you need to set that tinfoil hat down and pause a bit. Does it have a different cultural root used to moderate it? Sure! Are they making moderation decisions I would make? No. Does that make it psyop? Of course not. Don't be absurd.

There’s some serious false equivalence here.

Is Xbox prevented from competing with Nintendo in Japan, under similar conditions as Nintendo competes with Xbox in USA?

Are there representatives of the Japanese government sitting within Nintendos offices overlooking what Nintendo is doing? Is that government run by a single party?

China doesn’t allow US social media apps, mostly because they want extreme control over the content on their side of the firewall. But probably also because they know that US intelligence services could force the US social media companies to give them access to information or make changes to their code.

So it’s utter madness and ridiculous naive to allow Chinese companies unfettered access to the US market when we know that the parent company is forced to be under direct supervision of the communist party of China, and we know that the party and the PLA along with its intelligence services are essentially one and the same entity.

At the very least this gives Chinese companies undue advantage in the US market. It’s much easier for them to leverage the code they’re written in both the Chinese and the US market, making them more efficient and thus letting them undercut US companies over time.

I can’t believe how naive nearly all of the comments defending TikTok are.

(Sure the “psyop” part of the other comment is a bit much, but I took it as hyperbole and I think most readers would)

You say I'm naive, I say you've been had by jingoistic propaganda. You are more concerned about a foreign boogeyman, I'm more concerned about the one that's governing me.

The US government has shown, time and time again, what it will do with power once it uses it.

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