It's not the app, it's the audience and regulations.
Chinese companies can spend a zillion dollars to promote an app willy nilly as a strategic interest.
And then ban competitors on home turf.
So the CIA could make 'USATikTok' and spend $2B promoting downloads in China, but it would be banned anyhow.
Zoom is an American company with operations in China.
The US's 'propaganda arm' is Hollywood. The US does not have the hyper specific and organised legions of propaganda/influencers that China has, nothing close to that. Surely there are some operational capabilities; the US Gov. has close ties with major press outlets and can place stories, and surely has influence in foreign media outlets, and uses major American corporations as cover, but nothing remotely on the scale and purpose of what China is up to.
It would be better to just ban Chinese apps related to social media. It's fair because it's tit-for-tat, but also because there are legit influence concerns.
We can sick to trading plastic toys and alarm clocks.
Edit: I should add what I assumed most people knew, and that is TikTok is a propaganda channel. Matthew Tye, an American ex-pat based in China has an interesting set of videos where he deconstructs a lot of the narrative being pursued on TikTok [1]. It's funny and scary.
You folks do realise that in every nation, Media is a protected industry? Just like finance and telecoms?
It's practiced everywhere, especially China.
Why do you think there is no 'CNN China?' or 'Disney China - Digital Entertainment China?' Or that China only allows X number of Hollywood films every year of course, subject to censorship? [1]
Or that Canada has rules over media ownership and content [2]
What do you think would happen if China tried to buy the 5 largest American Banks or Telecoms? Or visa versa?
TikTok is a media company, it should be treated as such.
If China wants to buy/promote a media company in the US, partly as a means to advocate CCP propaganda, then it can be subject to controls.
And FYI the conversation is moot from a trade perspective, since China wouldn't allow any such thing remotely to happen over there, there's simply no reason to allow it here.
And of course Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat etc. etc. are all banned in China, why on earth the US allows Chinese social media companies in America? Purely from a trade perspective makes utterly no sense.
The US should fairly and simply enact China's own media policies for foreign apps tit-for-tat: straight up bans, censorship, rules on ownership, make it impossible for them to compete. That would be fair.
When China wants to allow Snapchat unfettered access to China, then possibly TikTok can have unfettered access to the US.
Completely disagree: censorship is bad by itself, even censorship against an entity which engages in censorship itself.
> The US should fairly and simply enact China's own media policies for foreign apps tit-for-tat: straight up bans, censorship, rules on ownership, make it impossible for them to compete. That would be fair.
Sorry, but "retaliation" is not a good justification for censorship.
First - you're confusing 'censorship' with issues of competitive concern. Protecting industries, is not about 'censorship' it's about controlling systems.
Take some time to grasp why 100% of nations protect their financial systems at a very minimum - and usually communications and media.
If a nation left its financial system, comms and media 'open' - it would be very quickly taken over by competitive or totalitarian forces.
For example, any South American country that left those systems open would be almost entirely under the control of the US, Soviets/Russians or China.
Second - it's incredibly naive. Everything is 'censored' on some level - and I mean everything, for a variety of reasons.
Violence and Terrorism. Are we going to allow people to start putting "Kill All the Blacks/Whites/Chinamen" on Twitter, or FB, or on their own websites? And have their little meetings on how to coordinate this? Seems like we're going to have to censor that.
And what about the Jihadis in ISIS showing beheadings, asking young Muslims to "Come on over and you can behead infidels as well!". Because in where I live, 11 young men were nabbed by the Feds trying to get on a plane to go to Syria to do just that.
Have you spent time in Germany? Do you know that Mein Kampf is still effectively banned there? Do you know why? And how sensitive that subject is, and for good reason?
More subtly - we have foreign propaganda and political influence.
China is spending very heavily to convince the world that they have no responsibility towards the spread of COVID. We know factually, that it seems very clear there was at least some degree of coverup in the early stages and that they failed to inform the WHO of important issues, and have lied and not been transparent in their reporting. They jailed and condemned medical staff trying to pull the alarm.
But 'facts don't matter' if they can simply confuse people otherwise and it's not that hard at all - they can completely erase the truth. With the right controls, China can absolutely convince large swaths of the world for example, that 'Coronavirus originated in the USA, and was brought to China by the CIA' - which is absurd, but it's a pretty easy truth to preach if there's no 'censorship'.
Would you be willing to allow China to completely misinform most of the world as to the reality of Coronavirus? Because that's what they want to do.
More poignantly, interference in elections. Thankfully, Google is a fairly ethnical entity, because they could, if they wanted to, shift the outcome of elections in a lot of places. Russia has a program specifically designed to influence America, to try to manipulate outcomes that meet their strategic objectives. RT is a direct attempt at this, it was created by Russian intelligences services, specifically for the purpose of controlling what people believe, and towards promoting Putin's objectives. It's not a 'news agency' it's literally a propaganda arm in the most pure sense of that term.
Media, just like financial services, is power - and that power, were it up for grabs, would be enable certain forces to basically do anything they want.
This is not a new idea, it's as old as time, and the game has been going on for thousands of years.
So the solution could look something like this:
1) China should be banned from selling any products or services in the US that are likewise banned in China. That's actually pretty basic fair trade.
2) Because China censors products of its own companies and uses them as propaganda Channels, any Chinese media company will have to demonstrate quite clearly how they are free from political influence both in terms of political censorship, and especially from promoting political narratives. Some degree of control is fine (nobody is concerned that TikTok is taking down hate speech), but whatever they are doing has to be publicly defined and transparent.
