Technology

selective enforcement of the law is a real issue. One of the reasons Donald Trump will likely never go to jail is the failure to prosecute nixon, reagan (iran contra, iran hostage crisis meddling), and Bush/Cheney(wmd fiasco)

The argument here is more along the lines of, "you can't make a law that defines something as murder only when I do it."

Legally it is a very good argument. A law targeting a single company in name or effect is literally unconstitutional. It's called a "Bill of Attainder".

The counter argument is indicting Facebook because they never stopped selling information directly to the CCP.

Google and Microsoft would be scrambling to pay off every single person associated with that before it ever hit the first courtroom floor.

GDPR is a start, but we need to actually ban it, not just annoy people until they click Accept at the 20th popup of that tantalising offer to share your details with 1473 trusted data partners.

ohhh data collection taxation, I like it. You would think it would be a no-brainer but look at marijuana taxation and the continued resistance to rake in all that public funding. Would make most of the controversy around AI disappear if they tax it's collection.

While i dislike tiktok as much as the next one, please do temu first. Temu might actually be the downfall of our planet that is already falling down the stairs pretty hard.

Technically, the second partof that bill bans sending user data to China for all companies, so it's foreseeabke that they get fined into the dirt if nothing else.

I hope the Facebook multi-billion dollar fines act as precedent.

No, they love those, since that data goes to the US government instead of to the CCP

That's not a silly argument if your argument is about national security. For the exact same reason, China blocks almost all western apps. It gives a potential route for whatever nation is considered hostile to influence your population, and TikTok has actually activated this influence at least once directly. They tried to activate their users to protest congress from passing laws restricting them.

Basically, they have the ability to influence users, and they also have the will to do so as they've already shown. In what world eould they not be a national security threat? It's also really hard for me to accept this argument from a Chinese company when China has the great firewall to "protect" it'd citizens from outside influence.

You can argue that it is not to benefit the citizens and rather just the state, which is fair. You can't reasonably argue that the state has nothing to fear.

The argument isn't that they're "evil", it's that they could be used as tools by strategic rivals.

Tiktok is probably used 10 times as much though (users x time on the app) and Temu isn't spreading messages in quite the same way. Comparing apples and gerbils, whataboutism, etc.

You don't even need the word Chinese

Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.

Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don't really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn't be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.

Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.

TilTok likely got my car stolen (Hyundai vulnerability trended on TikTok)

A Chinese-owned fast fashion hazwaste app

AliExpress clone but you can only use it after installing their app on your phone.