
We Should Worry About How China Uses Apps Like TikTok - panarky
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/02/opinion/will-china-export-its-illiberal-innovation.html
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49531
Not to get too "whatabouty" here, but it always feels a bit less poignant to
call China out for the same things the United States, and massive private US
corporations, are doing. Censorship, collection of private data, public data,
biometrics, DNA, monitoring and incarcerating ethnic minorities. At least in
China they have public healthcare.

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rrggrr
Unhelpful comparison without acknowledgement of the serious shortcomings and
corruption in Chinese healthcare; and the free debate in the US concerning
privacy. The gap is too large to "what about".

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49531
Free debate doesn't do much when the people in power have no motivation to
change, and when even small wins (like net neutrality) are so easily undone. I
really don't think the gap is as large as you might think.

The US is a bit more liberal in its allowances of public discourse than China
but at the end of the day US media mostly serves to maintain the status quo;
you're not going to make any real lasting change via freedom of speech alone.

Also look at actual movements within the US which have made an impact on
people's lives and see how the US state has cracked down on them, the Black
Panthers are a good example of this.

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peisistratos
It's hard for me to read this in a US newspaper and square it with the real
world. It bemoans race riots and military police in Xinjiang - in China. From
the context of the Baltimore race riots three years ago I cast my mind to
Xinjiang Muslim radicals _within_ China - right next to the Afghans who
American troops and military police patrol 18 years and counting, on the other
side of the world. Radicals in Afghanistan who the US had originally armed in
the 1970s and 1980s to overthrow the then secular Afghan government
incidentally.

Then from Facebook Google and most of the surveillance San Francisco
establishment, in lockstep with government PRISM, we look East to see the
Chinese doing the same?

Africans in the US, native Americans at the Standing Rock reservation being
water cannoned, are no better off than those in Xinjiang. More African men in
the US are in the prison system than college.

The demonization of China by Americans for what Americans are doing, with less
reason, is silly.

It is like the hypocrisy of telling Venezuelan military to revolt and cheering
street protests in Venezuela, then going back to hearings about Russian
interference in the US or condemnations of yellow vest protests. Macron
praises the destructive protests in Caracas and condemns yellow vests in Paris
in the same press conference.

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panarky
_> no better off than those in Xinjiang._

This is false equivalence.

While treatment of many groups is disgraceful in the US, the level of
surveillance, social control and repression is nowhere near what happens in
China.

China has locked up millions Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in re-education
camps.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-
education_camps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps)

Yes, America's wars are shameful.

Guantánamo Bay, the FISA "court" and domestic concentration camps for asylum
seekers are contemptible.

But these things are not on the same scale as what China is doing.

The fact that we can have this conversation without censorship or fear of
arrest is evidence that the US and China are far from equivalent.

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cafxx
We should worry about all such apps, regardless of provenance... As a non-US
citizen, I don't really see the difference between e.g. a China-based app and
an US-based app.

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kinkrtyavimoodh
As a non-US citizen I would trust US apps, especially those by companies like
Google or Apple, any day over Chinese apps.

~~~
chappi42
Me too, the consequences are less severe. (For now).

~~~
cafxx
For example? Can you give some concrete examples of consequences for _you_ in
the two cases?

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Mr_Shiba
NYT's China hit article of the day

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quotz
Of course we should

