Comment by ranger_danger 4 hours ago
if youtube was being banned instead for the same reason (pretend it was owned by ByteDance), would you feel the same way? what about any other website/platform that you like?
what if this was YOUR business getting banned?
I’m not advocating that we abandon democracy. To use your argument the other way around, why should we treat china as a democracy as it doesn’t pretend to be one? They don’t allow our businesses to operate on an equal footing there, so why afford them easy access to our markets?
In the case of any foreign ownership of mass media, it is trivial to weaponize that platform to wage asymmetric war against a political adversary by driving division in between the population through lies, half truths, and selected context. That’s why the US has laws to ban foreign ownership of broadcast media outlets.
What’s interesting about this argument is that the playing field is highly asymmetric between the us and china. China explicitly firewalls out large amounts of the internet from its population. If you want to do business via an e-commerce in china, you cannot do so without explicit permission, license and partial Chinese equity share - for example https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp...
On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?