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.

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

It is happening on our local platforms here. Meta, based in the US, is systematically censoring Palestinian content that would otherwise be available here in Canada.

Details:

* https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

* https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

For a very recent example, one of the few remaining prominent Palestinian journalists, with a following of over 1M on Meta, was banned today:

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/11/7/al-jaze...

While one is certainly entitled to disagree with Meta's moderation policies, I feel like this muddies the issue.

Specifically what happened in Canada is:

* A national security review found Tiktok's operations in Canada to be a risk to national security

* Tiktok's operations in Canada are being closed down but Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok

* This type of review is pretty opaque by nature so more details are probably unavailable at this stage

If Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok I'm not sure there is a speech/censorship issue here. Maybe Tiktok Canada was harboring spies or something, or maybe this is a roundabout way to push Tiktok out of the country later, but I don't think we have any solid public info.