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Because it deals with an actual enemy pumping propaganda into your country's citizen's ears. It's a legitimate threat to national security. And no, not just the US does this. (I assume you mean free countries, not dictatorship like China, Russia or North Korea that ban everything they don't like).

Europe banned Russian propaganda outlet RT a couple of years ago, on security grounds. It's just that US prefers the soft-soft approach. Don't ban them, let them "divest". No. It doesn't work. It should be banned end of story. I guarantee a genuine competitor from the US or an allied country would make an alternative quite soon. Would be so addictive and equally brain rotting? Probably not, so people who enjoyed it before would complain. Fine, let them go join Douyin or other Chinese platform and see for themselves how "freedom of speech"looks like in China.

As for anyone who might come and say "they're not doing anything wrong". They are and you're naive for not seeing it. Every company in China is an arm of the state. As an example see how Bytedance released an ebook reader in the US with an AI assistant that tells you things like "nothing happened in 1989 on Tiananmen square", there is no genocide in Xinjiang, it is inappropriate to question and critique the Chinese communist party, China never attacked anyone,ever but it's perfectly fine to criticise every other single country on earth and it is ready to give you a litany of misdeeds any other country on earth ever did. Except China. Do you think a company like that owning what's essentially a monopoly on news for the young people is good? No it is not, and any sane politician would ban it long time ago. The fact Trump did this move worries me for his other decisions in future .

Fox News, Twitter and Meta are far worse influences on American society than TikTok.

And every big US platform is just a big siphon for the NSA when it comes to non U.S. persons.

The stupidity and hypocrisy of this ban and unban is hilarious.

It's the tech policy analog of the Iraq War (on the level of stupidity, loss of standing, inevitable consequences etc).

Not saying this ban is equivalent to a decision that killed 1M+ people, lead to ISIS, and created the migrant crisis and more

> The stupidity and hypocrisy of this ban and unban is hilarious.

Your adversary does not care about morals, but will leverage yours in his favour.

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All media has propaganda. But if you objectively look at what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and then look at RT's coverage of the war, you must be pretty brainwashed to trust RT any more than American media.

There are plenty of corruption and issues in EU, some of which RT may have covered legitimately, but at least we're not intentionally massacring civilians and sending our poor and minorities to die as cannon fodder in an useless invasion. There's a reason why all European neighbours of Russia have or want to join NATO, and that is its imperialistic and aggressive policies.

You should come visit us in Finland or maybe our neighbour Estonia and really see what ordinary people have to say about Russia. Real people, who actually live next to them.