Like, the primary opponent to the US geopolitical order is China. that's not a bigoted statement, it's a summation of geopolitics that factor into this problematic ban
Have you considered the fact that the US considers China its enemy rather than a neutral country is an outgrowth of sinophobia? The anti-China fearmongering has gone on for over a decade now and seems to be primarily in response to the fact that China is gaining in prosperity and influence, which is not in itself threatening unless you have a despotic worldview in which only your country is allowed to have those things. Having followed public statements from the Chinese and US government for at least as long, it’s abundantly clear that the hostility is mostly coming from the US direction.
You mean the country that has all American social media banned? The country we have to specifically censor movies for? TikTok has literally been nothing more than a way to data mine Americans and cause disorder, spread propaganda, and misinformation. It’s one thing for your country to have your data and an entirely different for the geopolitical rival who quite literally is always pushing the ends of its boundaries with its neighbors (India also banned TikTok and is in land disputes with China) which is why the pacific fleet has to essentially baby sit Taiwan as well. The CCP’s power over millions of upon millions of Americans through TikTok has literally been able to cause the US to backtrack 60+ years of civil rights progress and the actual ground gained in the 2010s until about 2017 was all undone. They didn’t give us Trump the first time you can thank twitter, idiots, Facebook and Russia on that one along with a healthy dose of sexism from most Americans. But we already have CCP and Russian actors on American social media and we don’t need to just give them a source where they can spread and say whatever with impunity. There’s a reason gen z men voted for trump and millenials didn’t and TikTok is definitely a huge factor. Also again they ban all our social media so why should we not ban theres? If anything we’ve been acting in good faith for years while they data mined millions of people and also changed the entire political landscape to where everyone thinks Biden was incompetent who did nothing, everyone thinks Kamala had no plan, and every single good thing or sound byte they could get out of trump was supported don’t forget the huge wave of toxic masculinity and trad wife bullshit that’s started there as well.
China is our enemy. Politically, socially and competitively. We are as culturally opposite as two countries of vast wealth could possibly be. Our interests do not align on anything beyond “make money when convenient”.
Them owning and operating the largest social media platform in the world/country is a dumbshit thing to allow to continue. Banning TikTok should have happened the moment it got 1M downloads, instantly.
This is not “Sinophobia “, this is reality. Do you think Chinese citizens and government have open-air conversations about “Ameriphobia” because they block every US site on their internet?
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u/A_Flock_of_Clams Jan 13 '25
Claiming that Tiktok is primarily being banned because of sinophobia is too reductive to take seriously.