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Comment on I'm OOTL: Why is TikTok being banned?

You’re conflating privacy and espionage. The reason basically every country in the world has laws about foreign ownership of media and telecommunications infrastructure is not because of privacy concerns – it’s because of the potential for espionage. That fanciful law with no chance of passing in the US (even if it should!) would reduce but not eliminate the problem. It’s illegal for China to operate weird little secret police stations in foreign countries to threaten, intimidate, and control the Chinese diaspora, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing it. Having them control powerful monitoring and tracking tools doesn’t make it harder. They are very capable of surreptitiously doing shit they shouldn’t.

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theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
No I’m not conflating anything, you’re just moving the goalpost…

People can still do murder even though its illegal and most murders go unsolved, so we shouldn’t have laws making murder illegal

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- breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  No, you’re conflating privacy and espionage.
  
  I’m not moving the goal posts. The order for China to divest is about espionage. The ban stemming from their refusal to divest is about espionage. Your privacy law doesn’t solve this problem because it’s not a privacy problem, it’s an espionage problem.
  
  To take your murder example, it’s like saying ‘I don’t see why everyone’s so worked up about China coming here and shooting people. People get shot here every day and the army doesn’t get involved!’ Despite sharing some details, domestic gun violence and war are different. You’re focusing on the trees and missing the forest.
  
  🙂 perfect is the enemy of good
  
  I’m not opposed to your proposed law. I’d support the hell out of it. It would solve other important problems, even if it wouldn’t solve this one. But saying that a country can’t do anything about espionage unless they pass that law is unrealistic.
  
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  - theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    But saying that a country can’t do anything about espionage unless they pass that law is unrealistic.
    
    Who said that?
    
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    breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    I think banning individual social media services is not the solution. The solution is to create meaningful laws that hold any company, Chinese or American, accountable for data privacy and misinformation/election interference violations.
    
    You, in a nutshell. You’re saying that they shouldn’t address specific threats. Why not both?
    
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