Everyone makes noise about this but what is the solution? War with china? Cut off trade and sanction China? They explicitly designed their country to avert such arm twisting.
My solution: Form a treaty between as many countries as possible where an explicit agreement is made to wind down trade with China within 10 years and establish relief and subsidy funds in form of low interest loans,tariff relief and preferential treatments for non-aligned nations. To seal off the deal a 50 year sanction on all trade with China after the 10 year period (reviewed for re-approval every 10 years). Immediate economic relief and laws that encourage trade with non-aligned nations for businesses in western-aligned nations. It will cost an insane amount but certainly cheaper than a war. Oh and for dessert, short term retaliation by China can be met with oil sanctions (in form of replacing China's demand with subsisized buy out of oil supply) and potential blockade of sea trade routes (fairly easy to crush their navy far away from friendly waters -- only a last resort).
I am not saying my idea is perfect or even good but it is an idea. Our privilege of living in the wesr means being able to throw around ideas for solutions like this and popularize them with law makers so they can be confident it won't cost them their next election. But I fear China has already aquired extensive compromisng material in western nations' governments and corporations which will make democractic approaches hard.
Now is the time to stop wars and economic depressions -- when we can plan on solutions.
The Uyighur were picked on because of their small voice. China is perfecting their approach with them and HK so they can be effective against more valued targets such as Taiwan and further.
Is anyone really surprised? This had to happen. And it won't stop happening.
1. Develop platform targeting the youth
2. Gain huge market share
3. Censor and curate to influence young minds worldwide
Many of us this saw this coming long ago. Unfortunately, no legislation appears to exist anywhere in the world which could possibly stop such social media companies which are controlled by foreign agencies with agendas from being launched in their countries in the first place.
China has a TERRIBLE track record of censoring information, of not respecting user privacy, and of KILLING people for speaking out.
Letting infrastructure, apps, operating systems or social networks controlled by them (eg. Android forks, WeChat, TikTok) into your countries is a terrible idea.
4chan/diy was banned in my country for a long time "voluntarily" by telcos. There's plenty of garbage human beings on that site most certainly yes, but there's just as many on talkback radio late at night who advocate incredibly horrible things too, really horrible things, I worked in an industry documenting them.
Some people in society seem to get a free pass and others who are the mass media badguy of the day don't. To pretend it doesn't come down to advertising dollars is disingenuous.
>Unfortunately, no legislation appears to exist anywhere in the world...
I think you'll find a couple of countries, including China and Russia, have very effective methods to prevent foreign influence on their own citizens, all while they run very effective campaigns against the naive internet citizens of Western countries.
Last weekend, I heard, on an NPR "Weekend Update" news blurb, a newsreader refer to the "Tiananmen crackdown", and "clashes between police and demonstrators", in the same sentence.
A crackdown is when police start arresting people for things they hadn't been. Mowing people down in the street with machine guns, wholesale, is called a "massacre".
A clash is when two armed parties battle. When police beat unarmed people with clubs, and blast them with firearms, that isn't a clash, it is an attack. "Clash" blames the demonstrators for being attacked.
Tiktok has no choice. NPR has a choice, and abandons it.
I can't imagine that bodes well for Tik Tok in terms of long term consequences. Perhaps Tik Tok has been shown that this issue is out of its control - either by the CCP or US actions. At any rate, I think congress will take action against the company.
I’m skeptical the user was banned for this reason.
There were stories of users being banned for LGBT content, but I see tons of it on TikTok. Turns out the real situation was TikTok following local laws and only videos in Turkey were removed.
Edit: There must be more to this story [1] because the video is still up [2]
So what's new in the world? Social networks are very likely a passing fad, that people grow out of as they get older and have developed more 'Internet Sense'.
Today it's China in the spotlight, yesterday it was Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA.
I've always been familiar with Uighur, probably because:
> “Uighur,” with an “i,” has appeared for centuries in writings by Western scholars, and many Western media and experts on the region still prefer this spelling.
However, apparently native speakers prefer the other spelling:
> But members of this mostly Muslim ethnic group overwhelmingly prefer the spelling “Uyghur,” which they say more closely approximates the proper orthography and pronunciation in their native language, “Uyƣur."
The use of the latter spelling in the West seems to be a more recent shift to accommodate this.
That's a good point, I've always seen Uighur but who knows. The Chinese story has not gained a network effect yet, not enough people know about it to make it a profitable target for media companies. Occasionally you'll see a story on it, but until more people understand china headlines won't drive clicks.
I'm holding judgment until further evidence that this is not another accusation equivalent to Iraq's WMD or Syria's chemical weapons in this trade war with China.
My solution: Form a treaty between as many countries as possible where an explicit agreement is made to wind down trade with China within 10 years and establish relief and subsidy funds in form of low interest loans,tariff relief and preferential treatments for non-aligned nations. To seal off the deal a 50 year sanction on all trade with China after the 10 year period (reviewed for re-approval every 10 years). Immediate economic relief and laws that encourage trade with non-aligned nations for businesses in western-aligned nations. It will cost an insane amount but certainly cheaper than a war. Oh and for dessert, short term retaliation by China can be met with oil sanctions (in form of replacing China's demand with subsisized buy out of oil supply) and potential blockade of sea trade routes (fairly easy to crush their navy far away from friendly waters -- only a last resort).
I am not saying my idea is perfect or even good but it is an idea. Our privilege of living in the wesr means being able to throw around ideas for solutions like this and popularize them with law makers so they can be confident it won't cost them their next election. But I fear China has already aquired extensive compromisng material in western nations' governments and corporations which will make democractic approaches hard.
Now is the time to stop wars and economic depressions -- when we can plan on solutions.
The Uyighur were picked on because of their small voice. China is perfecting their approach with them and HK so they can be effective against more valued targets such as Taiwan and further.