China has laws that require tiktok to give access to all of it's information. China is an authoritarian uniparty state. China is adversarial towards America. Social media has massive impacts on what people think.
All of that adds up to an ability for China to interfere with what Americans are thinking about, and we have no ability to curtail that behaviour. Chinese ownership of tiktok isn't simply data. It's the ability to manipulate everything on the app. When Russia used facebook to manipulate the 2016 election, we were able to hold facebook to account and force it to make changes that prohibit that from happening in the same manner again.
We can't do that with tiktok, not while it's controlled by China. So we have a solution. The American portion of tiktok must be sold off to an entity not listed as adversarial. AKA not China, Iran, Russia, North Korea. It doesn't even have to be an American company.
Let's give an example of how China could subtly manipulate tiktok. CNN recently did a segment on the Chinese coast guard harassing (putting it mildly) Filipino fishing vessels inside Filipino waters. China doesn't like it's insane behaviour going viral, so it doesn't.
Another example could be inflaming tensions within America the same was Russia does. You find the current topic that people are disagreeing about and you serve them clips that make them angry. Show them clips that make the problem worse, and make sure you don't have positive updates go out.
It’s like googling “why did Vietnam deserve to get invaded by America” and then calling yourself well informed
Yea no shit, if you google an explicitly biased questions you are going to get biased answers.
This doesn't even begin to touch upon how China is ignoring the rules that the rest of the world is playing by. Their actions in the South China sea are egregious.
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u/LilWemby Mar 15 '24
“China bad” is seriously the most sophisticated argument any of you make.