You're focusing too much on the what and not the why. Banning all foreign business in certain market segments to protect your domestic industry is fine (because it's all countries) Banning Chinese businesses because we're imposing trade restrictions with China is fine (because it affects everyone). Hell banning specific companies because they don't comply with local laws is fine too (because it's the same rules for everyone).
Fuck this one particular subsidiary majority owned by a Chinese company rubs me the wrong way because China doesn't do this to us. As a general rule US companies can operate in China and US companies are allowed to own stake in Chinese companies.
To me this is an escalation of the fair-weather, "I don't like you, you don't like me but we can still be professionals when it comes to mutually beneficial trade" attitude we've had.
The easiest way to understand this issue is to ask yourself why American social media companies can’t operate in China with the same level of operational freedom that Tik Tok can in the United States. Once you have those answers you will understand why it needs to be banned from the perspective of the United States.
Facebook didn’t start to become globally popular until around this time. In 2006/2007 when I joined you still needed a .edu or in my case a .mil email address to access it. Basically as soon as it started becoming popular in China it was banned.
The organized protests[1] were just a convenient excuse. Race riots have occurred in many countries and you can link those back to various social media platforms which were used to organize protests.
[1] The protests as you describe them… there is a lot to unpack here and it’s not a good enough excuse to ban American social media companies. But if you think it is, then the US also gets to arbitrarily ban foreign social media companies.
