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Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada

(www.cbc.ca)
747 points empressplay | 1 comments | 06 Nov 24 23:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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not2b ◴[07 Nov 24 00:01 UTC] No.42071538[source]▶
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.

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1. juliuskiesian ◴[09 Nov 24 21:48 UTC] No.42097112[source]▶
If the west is serious about its "universal values", that would the approach to take. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Yes, China banned Facebook, X etc for national security reasons, too. The Chinese government wants Chinese data to stay in China, and all of these social media platform would have to comply with Chinese law, including some requirements regarding censorship. Now it becomes more and more obvious that the west is not that different from China, the country it keeps bitching about on a daily basis. Censorship has been there for a long time, and now you have outright banning of a social network because it has roots in China.

You can accept one of these two things but not both:

A. National security is above freedom of speech B. Freedom of speech is a fundamental value of an open society and should in no scenario be given up

If you accept A, you have to be honest and admit that the banning of Facebook etc in China is completely justified. If you accept B, you have to just let TikTok operate normally as any other social network.