alt Hacker NewsThat would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.
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No. The relationship between the US government and large US companies is nothing at all like the relationship between the Chinese government and large Chinese companies; the latter exist at the will of the CCP, and if you step out of line you will be shut down. Recently Jack Ma, who would be like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos in the US, got slapped down big time -- with significant repercussions for his companies -- recently because he made a comment critical of the government -- and what he said wasn't even bad (so probably it was some other reason that they came after him, but come after him they did).
To fix your analogy, it would be like EU passing a law that Facebook in the EU would have to be divested so they are not owned by Facebook in the US
This is completely incorrect. Divestment in this context means the selling of an asset by an organization. You cannot "divest" in this sense from a government. That's nonsensical.
The equivalent in Facebook (Meta) terms would be China requiring Facebook, if it wished to continue operations in China, to sell the Chinese Facebook product to a Chinese or other, as to be defined by China, non-American entity. In some sense this is already the case.
Not really. There is no analogous concept in the US of the CCP's relationship with large companies.
1) TikTok was already theoretically a US company, but the strings were being pulled by the parent org in China.
2) US and China regulatory burdens and rule of law aren't equivalent, and I'm not going to grant that equivalency.
Vaguely like that.
Ostensibly, the US government honors the 1st and 4th amendments, and only restricts speech on the platform in rare instances where that speech is likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action, and only issues warrants for private data which are of limited scope for evidence where the government has probable cause that a crime has occurred.
The accusation is that the CCP and Bytedance have a much more intimate relationship than that, censoring (or compelling) speech and producing data for mere political favors. Whether or not this is true of Facebook's relationship with US political entities is up for debate.