It's generally not wise to let your geopolitical rival have extensive influence over your populace, which is why CCP doesn't let American companies like Meta operate in China.
Yes, but then we also need to realise that pretty much the whole world outside of China is 'controlled' by American tech companies (both hardware and software/apps)
So if the US think it is not OK to have something like Tiktok owned by a Chinese company the rest of the world might wonder if it is OK for them to have everything owned by American companies...
All of those military bases are there in partnership with and at the invitation of the host country. The US doesn't just slap down a base in Poland and say "deal with it."
Regarding 1990, nonetheless, prolonged U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War became highly controversial though, fueling anti-American sentiment.
Uh yeah the government? I'm not sure if you expect the US to go out and poll everyone in the whole country first or what you're trying to imply, but governments usually coordinate with governments.
> See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
War is war, it sucks but it's been a part of human history for all of human history. That said, those wars are over. If Iraq no longer wanted US bases in their territory, they could ask the US to leave.
I think in 2020, Iraq's parliament did vote to expel foreign troops, yet the U.S. military presence continues albeit in a limited capacity.
You are right, governments usually coordinate with governments, but my point is that the consent of the government doesn't always align with the will of the people, particularly in cases where public opinion is suppressed or ignored.
There's also the signaling and red meat factor for politicians. Easy headline to be "tough on china", requires less explanation than pacific trade deals.
Absent any of these conversations is, in my experience, any notion of what exactly China aims to achieve with TikTok that is so sinister? I'm not even arguing, I wouldn't doubt China has plans or another that involve America, specifically that wouldn't be too great for America, I'm just struggling to connect TikTok to any of them, and any discussion seems to take it as granted that the shifty Chinese government is up to something with it.
So it's several things. Bear with me because finding news reports that I remember is difficult now because search results are flooded with stuff about the ban so I can't find what I'm looking for.
One concern is a general one that the Chinese government is directing the recommendation algorithms to act as propaganda. So subtly shifting user's opinions in favor of things that suit it and away from things that don't.
Another is that it is using TikTok to surveil journalists, emigres, and other persons of interest who are using TikTok. My understanding is there are credible reports of journalists being targeted by the Chinese government, where they used TikTok to find their personal details, location, etc.
There's also been increasing reports of the Chinese government operating detention centers in the US and other countries, where they bring kidnapped Chinese nationals. Basically arresting nationals on foreign soil. In some of these cases at least TikTok has been implicated as the method of locating them etc.
Discussion of this has all been out there over the years, but the way it's been covered has admittedly been weird. Maybe this is yet another sign of a fractured media landscape, but I think some of it has to do with the US not doing a great job of publicizing some things, possibly because it involves intelligence services.
I'm generally very in favor of unfettered freedom of speech, but have mixed feelings about this case. I guess I still side on that, and am skeptical about a ban, but this is getting into different territory and also don't feel strongly about it. I think the effects of foreign (and domestic) propaganda in social networks are very real, and although I generally think censorship is a very bad idea, I'm not sure I can blame a country for wanting an app banned if there's solid information that another country is using it in this way; it seems to be in this gray area of espionage versus free speech which is kind of an unusual territory to be in. Also, I'm fully aware that the US probably does similar things, but two wrongs don't really make a right to me, and if China produced solid evidence of the US doing something similar I wouldn't blame them for banning something either on similar grounds.
To me this all just maybe speaks to the need for a shift to open decentralized social network platforms. I realize that's easier said than done, but there's so many examples in the last few years of problems with control of centralized platforms (by private, government, or private-government combinations) leading to huge problems, either in reality or in appearance (which can sometimes be almost as equally concerning).
So literally all the same things the US does, but because China's doing it, now it's wrong. Got it.
I am being glib but I do want it understood that I appreciate the nuance and documentation you put the work into to show. It's just that, literally every one of these I already know about the United States doing so the outrage on it's part feels incredibly, hilariously hypocritical.
If you identify, contemplate, and sometimes activate an attack vector against rivals, how could you possibly be dumb enough to leave yourself exposed to the same attack?
Also, note that China has blocked this attack vector from the US.
So how colossally dumb would it be for the US to not reciprocally block this attack vector from China?
If these things are truly happening -- especially the alleged arrests on US soil -- then that should be really easy to demonstrate to the American people. That the government hasn't bothered to prove the allegations is telling.
Of course, if the allegations were proven, the people would demand more action than merely banning a video app. Action which would have an huge negative impact the economy and would be unpopular among the powerful. So maybe that's why they haven't bothered?
Oh, you could probably make some effective arguments that they're using it to influence American thought in a way that's designed to diminish the US as a world power through internal strife.
Literally every government has people who go on social media or provide press reports. Only when Israel is involved do you start talking about it like it’s a conspiracy. Please reflect on that for a while.
Meanwhile Iran and Russia have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of the pro-Palestinian crowd doing the same in violation of Wikipedia’s terms of use.
Literally every organized group has people who go on social media. Only when Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims do the same thing as Israel do you consider it biased and wrong. Please reflect on why you think that.
Meanwhile, Israel and the US have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of Israeli hasbara and US willingness to ban sites in support of that hasbara.
"No you" is not really a good argument here. Israel does not have an organized campaign to modify wikipedia, like what the pro-Palestine crowd does. And scale matters: there are 15 million Jews globally, 2 billion Muslims, 1.4 billion Chinese, 90 million Iranians. This is not a level playing field; manpower matters in swaying public opinion. And factually - Israel is an American-aligned democracy and has substantially more freedoms than China, Iran, Russia, and the Muslim world, and is not working to destroy all of those places the way that those places are working to destroy the west and all US influence. It's just "Jews control the media" using the cover word of Israel instead. Obviously untrue - if it were, then social media and wikipedia would be dominated by pro-Israel narratives, rather than the other way around, which is what is actually reality.
Banning a propaganda tool used by China, Russia, and Iran, which is also used to collect our data, is not hasbara. It's just wise behavior to stop your enemies from disrupting your population. Anyway, hasbara means "explanation". Use of this as condemnation is basically somewhere between "foreign word bad" and "Jews bad".
Yes it is a good argument here. Yes they do have state level organizations and intelligence agencies being used to push propaganda and silence criticism across all forms of media.
Yes scale matters, the scale of resources used to push Israeli, US, and western propaganda dwarves that of China, Russia, or Iran. It’s laughable you use total population numbers here, as if every Muslim person is a dedicated jihadist working to bring down the west.
Anyway, not going any further down this pointless hole of arguing whether I hate Jews or not cause I don’t support the mass murder of children.
What about the groups linked in the wikipedia article: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices and the United Nations Special Rapporteur ?
Those seem less biased sources than The Jerusalem Post
The source here isn't the JP, it's wikipedia. Wikipedia investigated and banned the editors. JP is just the reporter. You can find other news sites with the same news, or Wikipedia itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
Those human rights groups, unfortunately, have a long history of bias and foreign influence. The closer they are to the UN, the more political they are. Literally half of the UN's resolutions pertain to Israel - while 99.999% of war deaths, famine, modern slavery, etc, happen without Israel being involved. The UN was led by a literal Nazi in the 70s - Kurt Waldheim - and the last few UN Secretary Generals have said that there is a serious bias against Israel there (obvious from the obsession).
No, it really isn't. 45k dead, half militants, is really quite good a good ratio for warfare.
Many repeating this absurd claim deny what happened on 10/7, deny the decades of Arab attacks on Jews prior to 48, and the 1300 years of genocide, rape, and displacement of Jews by the Muslim empires prior to that.
I don't believe that many of those repeating it really believe it either. If you thought this was genocide - on the scale of the horrors of the Holocaust, with 6 million Jews and 12 million total dead - and all you did was bitch on the internet, I'd be ashamed to know you.
This is war, this is how it goes. And Hamas and the 2 billion Muslims that hate Jews - along with Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments sowing dissent - have clear control over the narrative on TikTok.
I wonder what you know about Genocide better than experts in Holocaust studies and other genocides themselves.
William Schabas, author of the 741-page textbook, "Genocide in International Law" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
John Quigley, author of the 300-page book, "The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
@martinshawx, author of the books "What is Genocide?" and "War and Genocide" - says it's a genocide.
@dirkmoses, author of the 600-page book, "The Problems of Genocide" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
Raz Segal, author of "Genocide in the Carpathians" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
Amos Goldberg, author of books on Holocaust, says it's a genocide in Gaza
@bartov_omer, author of several books on Holocaust and genocide, says it's a genocide in Gaza.
But why to listen to the experts in law and genocide studies? Why to bother to read the extensive human rights reports?
Listen to @piersmorgan instead; he has a gut feeling.
Yeah, war is how "I was just following orders" German troops justified killing 12m+ in concentration camps. Goebbels said, "The Jews are responsible for the war. The treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They have deserved it all." Don't be like Goebbels.
> the 2 billion Muslims that hate Jews
Yeah, well: I know a handful Muslims who married Jews.
> and all you did was bitch on the internet, I'd be ashamed to know you
Unfortunately, popular opinion - at least of the far left - has always been united against Israel. In fact, many of those authors called it a genocide before this war. You can find plenty of such accusations on Twitter from prior to 10/10, when Israel started responding to the attack. You have many groups blaming Israel for all sorts of absurd things - like the fires in California. I wish I was joking. If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you listened to these groups.
It is an extension of populist antisemitism. I encourage you to think about this on your own: why is Israel condemned for 45k deaths in a war they didn't start, where half of the killed are militants, where Israel is literally providing aid to their enemy, while the Houthis, responsible for 300k dead in the past decade, including many children via starvation, who have brought back slavery in Yemen, are lauded for attacking western shipping and have fanboys of one of their murderous pirates? Where is the criticism for Muslims planning terror attacks against the west, and against individual Jews globally? Why do leftists love the idea of jihad and intifada, but not a nation defending itself?
Meanwhile, most "genocide" decriers seem to have ignored the tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones launched at Israeli civilians from Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. They ignore the videos of Gazans chearing in the streets and spitting on corpses. The open calls for exterminating the Jews from the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ, Iran, and more. There is one side calling for the extermination of the other and taking actions to make it so - the Muslims trying to destroy Israel and calling for and taking actions to kill Jews globally.
> In fact, many of those authors called it a genocide before this war.
That's because Ralph Lemkin, who coined the term "Genocide" in the wake of the Shoah, identified 10 stages, and mass extinction event is the final stage. He posited that once mass extinction commences it almost impossible to stop without incurring a significant cost to whoever wants to stop it (and so, he implored powers-that-be recognize it before the event & not after): https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
> If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you listened to these groups.
I know. And it is totally absurd like you say. Racists (antisemites in this case) will never make any sense. Historians specializing in genocide / Holocaust, on the other hand, are experts in their fields.
> Where is the criticism for Muslims planning terror attacks against the west, and against individual Jews globally?
You are joking? ALL Muslims are vilified by many in almost every Western country and in countries where Muslims are a significant minority (like India). Like antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism is every which where.
> the Muslims trying to destroy Israel
Unsure why you blame ALL 2b Muslims. I mean, you're no different than those antisemites who blame the Jewish people for all of world's problems. As a test, replace "Muslims" with "Jews" in your sentences and see if they read antisemitic to you.
Besides, Pakistan, a Muslim country, has 300+ nuclear warheads and Inter-continental ballistic missiles capability; and if ALL Muslims without exception, like you say, are rabidly hell-bent on destroying Israel, what are the Pakistanis waiting for? Please, snap out of this Islamophobic hysteria.
I mean, I'm not on TikTok at all and Israel is committing a genocide. China didn't tell me that, the Israeli's killing Palestinians en masse told me that. Because that's what the word "genocide" means.
It seems to be if the US Government wants not to be associated with a genocide-committing country they should just... do that. TikTok might have the largest share of the pro-Palestine mood as it were, but like... it's on all the platforms. Because again... they're committing a genocide, and filming it.
I would argue that even though you're not on tiktok, you are being influenced by the narrative that China is pushing. There are numerous genocides happening in the world today. Sudan. China (try talking about THAT one on TikTok...). Why aren't those being treated with equal concern? Because China knows that only the Isreal/Gaza one is a wedge in America, so they push that to sow discord.
> Why aren't those being treated with equal concern?
I mean I can't speak to other people's experience, but as an American, I'm uniquely pissed off with the Israeli one because my tax dollars are paying for it, and because the White House could stop it at a time of their choosing, as they've done before.
What makes this a genocide and not every other war where far more people, including more civilians, died? And at higher ratios of the dead? You can find hundreds of videos of Israel targeting militants, Hamas using schools and hospitals as bases, and more.
Nearly a million died in the Iraq war. In a single battle, Mosul, almost as many were killed as in Gaza, including similar ratios of militants and civilians. In Ukraine, far more have been killed, both combatants and civilians - and Russia clearly targets civilians there, and they started the war (while Hamas started the Gaza war). In Syria, half a million died, mostly civilians. Ditto the Lebanese civil war. Ditto the Yemen-Houthi war.
This feels so obvious to explain that I can't help but feel like it's condescending, but a conflict is not a genocide, irrespective of it's death toll. If you looked up the definition:
> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Which is just 100% what Israel is attempting to do to Palestine, and they're not exactly being coy about it.
Your assertion is obviously not true. This is why they target militants and post the videos and explanations on the internet. You can find hundreds or thousands of such videos. It’s why they send texts hours before bombing. It’s why they do roof knocks. It’s why they provide safe passage and humanitarian zones. It’s why they drop leaflets. It’s why they still provide electricity, water, and food to Gaza. I read a report about how they asked a Palestinian to alert his neighbors via a phone call and waited for him to tell everyone to get out. These are steps no other nation takes, and it is easy to find experts confirming that. It’s why there are only 45k dead instead of 2 million.
If Israel wanted to maximize casualties, there would not be a Palestinian alive today. What would be their incentive to stop? The far left claims it’s a genocide as it is. What would actually killing them all be, then? Double genocide? You have used the worst term you can to describe something very far from the worst Israel could do.
And then of course, is the obvious contradiction that they just agreed to a ceasefire for their hostages. Just like they did in November 2023. And how they agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon despite all the cries of them trying to seize the land. Israel wants to be left alone to live; the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab nations) want to kill all the Israelis and destroy Israel. The rest of the world wants these positions to meet in the middle, so there we are in the middle ground: perpetual war. Go look at the Hamas and Hezbollah founding charters, or the Houthi flag, or everything Iran says.
"You can't be mad at them for killing a lot of Palestinians when they've shown incredible restraint in not killing all of them" is a hell of an argument, I'll give you that. Still genocide though. There's no victim-count aspect to this definition, they are attacking Palestinians, living in Palestine, because they are Palestinian, and they want to settle those areas with Israeli's. We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain percentage of the population to then be able to declare it a genocide.
And, like even if I take this:
> I read a report about how they asked a Palestinian to alert his neighbors via a phone call and waited for him to tell everyone to get out.
at 100% face value, that some militants were in some building and the IDF was about to reduce it to ashes... so they called the guy next door, and asked him to evacuate the building? Which is presumably... full of militants? Cuz that's like the whole thing, that's the whole fuckin point?
You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose?
> the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab nations) want to kill all the Israelis and destroy Israel.
I mean they can want that as hard as they want, but Israel has the military and political backing of the West. They're untouchable, as has been demonstrated by them being surrounded by enemies essentially since the state was partitioned off from the others during it's founding, and it's still there.
No, this is not why. They are attacking because Gaza invaded Israel on 10/7, killing over 1200, injuring 5000, and kidnapping over 200. Notice how Arab / Palestinian citizens of Israel are not being killed.
> We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain percentage of the population to then be able to declare it a genocide.
I think this is a fundamental flaw of the genocide conventions. With this interpretation, you could call a single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying a people (in which case, isn’t even murder of an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a genocide?). Obviously, this is absurd, and nobody is on TikTok raging about Hamas’ attempted genocide of Israel.
> You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose?
Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
> With this interpretation, you could call a single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying a people
I mean, if you killed someone who for whatever odd reason played a critical role in the maintenance of a culture, with the stated goal being the extinction of that culture, then yes that's an act of genocide. The fact that the event itself is a bit strange doesn't change what it is.
The systematized way that Canada's residential schools literally beat their native tongue out of the native children they were put in charge of was also an act of genocide. It isn't an error in the interpretation, it's what the word is.
> (in which case, isn’t even murder of an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a genocide?)
Yes, but they're not the ones aggressing. No one is saying Israel's neighbors are innocent, but Israel is currently, actively engaged in an ethnic cleansing. The fact that those they're cleansing wouldn't do the same back to them given the chance both doesn't make that okay and is irrelevant.
> Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
Well then they fucked up about 47,000 times by official numbers.
You do know this war started with a massive assault by Hamas, PIJ, PFLP, and other Palestinian groups, right? They attacked Israel, targeting civilians in a brutal assault, starting this war. If you start a war, you are the aggressor, even if you lose.
Social disruption. That's plainly clear given that Douyin is prevented from having the destructive content that proliferates on TikTok. Keep your competition mired in anti-inellectualism for a generation and it accelerates the rot.
It's taken for granted that the shifty [any] government is up to something because they always are, 100% of the time. Why would you expect the evil overlords to not be up to something with the big evil brainwashing program that has access to almost everyone on earth?
Seriously, given all the crazy shit that's been uncovered in the last 20 years — PRISM, Five Eyes, Cambridge Analytica — why would an influence campaign run over one of the world's biggest social networks controlled by the actual, real life authoritarian Big Brother state be the one scenario that crosses the line from plausible to fantasy for you?
I don't necessarily buy the argument that we should play the same game as a communist dictatorship in the name of fairness. If we eat our own dogfood then we ought to conclude that suppression of speech in fact marks a critical weakness of their system. Why not take the free real estate, then, and leave our system's open nature unmolested?
Turnabout is fair play.