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hedorayesterday at 4:48 PM1 replyview on HN

Those are answers to a different question.

The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).

So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.

Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:

> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?


Replies

insane_dreameryesterday at 5:25 PM

> won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases

that's not the issue; the issue is control of the network

> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

No. In the US government's view, its responsibility is to counter potential foreign threats -- and not just foreign, but adversarial (this wouldn't be an issue for a social network controlled by the UK or Japan, for example) -- which would include a highly pervasive social network controlled by a foreign government that is the US' largest adversary.

As for whether social media companies in general are good or bad for American society, that's a completely separate question. (I tend to think they do more harm then good, but it's still a separate question.)