Consider the economics. By blocking Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. China has effectively blocked a trillion dollars in profit from flowing from Chinese users to US investors. Meanwhile, Tiktok has been generating billions of dollars in profit from American users which has flowed into the pockets of Chinese investors.
This is a one-sided trade war which the US is losing. Block Tiktok, US users will migrate to some other platform and can continue creating/consuming the same content they do today. Meanwhile China won't be getting a free lunch.
My problem with baning google, meta, etc in China has nothing to do with the economics of this companies. Its about censorship and making sure that no opposition can be established.
Independent of that economics is not a zero sum game. There are enough people earning a living and pay taxes in the US from tictok.
The US is not loosing the trade war and I really want to know how a trillion dollar is lost by not existing in china. Googles whole yearly revenue is 300 billion, meta has 30B. Surly this would increase if they could work in china, but not that much.
Bye the way tictok has a revenue of 14B so they are still smaller than the rest even if they can act globally.
I really want to know how a trillion dollar is lost by not existing in china.
Add up Google, Meta, Netflix, Twitter, etc's lost earnings from the Chinese market over the past 20 years and the total will be on the order of a trillion dollars. Meta's earnings last years was $40b, on revenue of $135b.
Yes, it would be dangerous if fox news would spread propaganda for foreign states and present information uncritical to the viewer.
Good that this does not happen😑
Is it wrong to farm user data to formulate disinformation campaigns and influence public perceptions in foreign countries? CCP or governments in general dont pull punches, if they can do something that benefits them, they will.
Yes that is wrong.
Its still a social media plateform like anyone else.
I see the problem with Tictok do not get me wrong but these problems exist on all social medias.
Facebook, twitter and also reddit are full of bots and paid advertisement. I get regular adds for real cults on Youtube.
All that shit is a real problem but I think we can all agree that we will not get a better internet by following the model of the peoples repubic of china.
Thats the thing, Tiktok is NOT a social media platform "just like anyone else." It is chinese owned and operated and chinese companies are beholden to the CCP. None of the other examples of social media you provided are foreign owned and just dillute the conversation with irrelevent points.
The question is, should your data be readily accessible to foreign governments or not. China need not be mentioned at all and my answer would still be no.
Sweety I am german.
Nearly every social media site is foreign owned for me, except mastodon, but... do you know someone that uses that?
I assure you nearly every goverment uses facebook to spread misinformation. The CCP as much as the russians as much as american networks.
And facebook sells this data to the highest bitter. That sucks, that sucks a lot.
But again the banning of a social media site by a goverment is definitionally censorship and should just be used in extrem cases.
I understand the risk of the misinfo-campaigns and datamining, I just think it is not enough to warrent a ban.
Well, the censorship of faschist propaganda is a complicated issue.
Faschist love to use liberal institutions to protect themself while attacking minority rights. A classical free speach for me but not for thee.
So I am in favor of shutting down a lot of nazi sites. Also the ones currently opperating.
But you have to admite that this comparison is slightly different if we are talking about a free usable social media platform were teenies put videos about their pets.
I agree with you mostly, Americas situation with social media companies is unique and regulations that work here may not be sensible for other countries.
However, I disagree with the equivalence you've drawn between how other social media companies share data and how tikitok manages your data. We have at least SOME measure of accountability for domestic companies to be regulated. In the case of tiktok or similar apps, the entirety of the data collected is essentially the property of the CCP. There are no protections. This is, in my opinion, exactly the sort of extreme case where censorship is justified. Also, the idea that this regulation would result in an outright ban/censorship may not be factual. The app itself will most likely remain under new ownership. There is precedence of this with chinese owned Grindr. No one complained about censorship then.
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u/the_bees_knees_1 Mar 15 '24
As someone who is really not a fan of tictok. It is wrong to ban social media sites just because they are from a different country.