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Plenty of good answers have already been put forward. But in case you're asking in good faith, here are the two main ones:

1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)

I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.

2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.

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pjc50 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation?

Yandex got fragmented into EU bits and Russian bits. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/russia-yandex-...

The head of VK is subject to sanctions https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22951307/us-sanctions-rus... (but it appears that Americans are still free to use VK if they want to?)

> (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)

American-backed forces are fighting the Russian army itself in Ukraine. Implied in all of that is a desire to not have US forces fight them directly in Poland.

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bryanlarsen 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.

China benefits greatly from the rules based order that America spends considerable effort to maintain and uphold. They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer, but they're better off with than without and recognize that.

OTOH, Russia does not. They prefer chaos.

China is definitely the stronger threat. But Russia is a greater immediate threat because they're only interested in tearing things down. It's easier to tear things down than to build them up, especially if you don't care about the consequences.

	▲	insane_dreamer 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> But Russia is a greater immediate threat I disagree; and it's the dismissal for the past 13-14 years of China as an immediate threat which is what has in part allowed China to become such a large longer-term threat. > They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer I would put it differently: China wants its own global hegemony instead of the U.S.' -- and that's understandable (everyone wants to rule the world). But if the U.S. doesn't want that to happen then it has to take steps to counter it.

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e_i_pi_2 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with point #1, but then this ban should also include the US controlled sites - having the main office in the US doesn't mean the data is any more secure, or that the products do less harm socially.

For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it

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insane_dreamer 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Re #2 -- while there is a tit-for-tat element here, forcing a sale of TikTok or removing it from the App stores, is still worlds apart from the type of censoring of information that the Chinese government engages in. So it's not a case of "we want to do the same thing". If you've lived in China (I have) you'll know what I'm talking about.

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e_i_pi_2 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Good clarification - I'm not saying we're adopting all the same policies, but it is a step in that direction, and I think we need to have a clear line saying we never do anything close to that. Similar to the "first they came" poem, this could be used to justify further expansion of this power, and that poem does start with "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist"

	▲	insane_dreamer 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed that there's always a risk that something like this sets a precedent for abuse of power to control information by the US government. And we know that the US gov is not beyond spying on its citizens (Snowden, NSA). However, there are still fairly robust safeguards in place in the US by virtual of the political structure, to make this much less likely to happen. Those same safeguards make it unlikely that while Trump and Elon would almost certainly exercise the degree of control that Xi has if they could, they are prevented from the worst by the structure in place. The problem in China is that there weren't strong safeguards to prevent a totalitarian control (CCP is supposed to be democratic within itself in that leaders are elected, though it's all restricted to party members, of course), and when Xi came into power he was able, within a few years, to sweep aside all opposition, primarily through "anti-corruption campaigns". So he now has a degree of control and power that would be a wet dream for Trump. (And you should see the level of adulation in the newspapers there.) Now in the US we have a separate problem, and that is we have a system where unelected people like Elon and Zuckerberg, Murdoch, etc., exercise a tremendous amount of influence over the population through their policies and who are pursuing a marriage between authoritarian politics and big business (by the way, there's a term for this, it's called "fascism"). That is a serious problem -- but it's separate from the TikTok issue and shouldn't be used to discount the dangers of the CCP having control over a highly popular social network in the US.

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hedora 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Those are answers to a different question.

The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).

So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.

Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:

> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

	▲	insane_dreamer 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases that's not the issue; the issue is control of the network > Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic? No. In the US government's view, its responsibility is to counter potential foreign threats -- and not just foreign, but adversarial (this wouldn't be an issue for a social network controlled by the UK or Japan, for example) -- which would include a highly pervasive social network controlled by a foreign government that is the US' largest adversary. As for whether social media companies in general are good or bad for American society, that's a completely separate question. (I tend to think they do more harm then good, but it's still a separate question.)

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walls 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on.

So now the US should just do everything China does? What happened to American ideals protecting themselves? If free speech really works, it shouldn't matter that TikTok exists.

	▲	8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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est 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial

That's the exact reason why Communist China setup the firewall in the first place. Good luck.

	▲	insane_dreamer 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The two are vastly different. The GFW doesn't just block websites/networks/content that is controlled by adversarial foreign governments, but all websites/networks/content which the CCP is unable to censor. The GFW is about controlling the flow of information to its citizens from __any__ party not under the CCP's control.