A bill stating that TikTok must divest or sell TikTok or stop operating in the US has passed.
Commenter KT Chong pointed out the stakes for China and the US
This ban is NOT just about protecting America from China. TikTok has global reach OUTSIDE the US. TikTok is a most popular app in over a hundred countries in the world — including in the Global South where China’s influences are steadily rising while US is facing increasing hostility due to the US complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in West Bank. Once the US gets its hands on TikTok, the US government will definitely use it to spread anti-China and pro-US propaganda. That is the true purpose of forcing Chinese to sell TikTok to the US, so that that US can seize/steal a most popular media tool and then use its global influences against China. I would rather TikTok just gives up its US market (i.e., banned in the US) than to hand over its global influence to the US government.
By laws, the Chinese government can block the forced sale as ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) has to follow Chinese laws. The CCP should absolutely NOT approve the sales. This is not just business. This is but a battle in the bigger war between the US and China over global influences and the new media. TikTok should NOT be handed over to the US and then be used as tool to expand US influence in the global market. I would rather TikTok just give up on the US market rather than to hand over TikTok influences on all those overseas markets to the US. I hope China is smart enough to realize what is at stake here.
This seems reasonable to me. It would be like China saying “the US must sell or divest Apple because Apple does business in China.”
I will point out that TikTok has been notorious or famous, depending on your view, for contradicting US propaganda on many issues, most recently on Palestine. The videos are often savage, and make politicians look like fools in a way that is much easier to do in video than with writing or audio only, and they are seen by millions. “A Modest Proposal” is famous because it’s so hard to be so savage and because there was no audio recording and transmission during the Irish Potato Famine.
Another issue is that America wants to force the sale of a successful internet/social media company: the most successful in recent years, and the first to make video work on social media.
If you can’t innovate: steal.
If the US was truly just concerned about damage to users, it could simply set up rules the US subsidiary has to follow, in the same way that China has specific rules for US internet companies that apply in China, but not elsewhere.
As for the fears of all user info being turned over to the Chinese government, that’s laughable, not because it might not happen but because governments mass gobbling such data happens all the time, and because some hacker group will inevitably crack every social media company and just sell data to everyone.
Anyway, China should definitely tell the US they don’t get to force a sale of a Chinese company. While they’re too polite to do so, it really should be accompanied with the metaphorical middle finger.
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