Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada

Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X. What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices. The Chinese can buy all of the information they want on Americans and Canadians from ad brokers, who will happily sell them everything they need to track individuals' locations.

Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.

It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

That can be a threat, but a billionaire American or South African with similar power and motivation is also a threat.

A billionaire American lives in America and generally benefits if America benefits. A foreign country is not aligned to America’s interests and may be outright hostile to them.

This right here is incredibly stupid. One of the stupidest takes and a rampid and dangerous misconception among mostly young men I see as of late. Elon avoids taxes not because he likes this country, but because he benefits from it. Anything that maximizes his personal wealth could very well be hostile to the well being of the country. You should see how he treated his own children. Incredibly naive. Many rich men end up giving back to the communities that made them (Gates and others for instance). Elon, a child of parents that cashed in on apartheid, is certainly an exception.