For some reason the ‘independents’ are happy with banning Tiktok because of “Chinese espionage” and “cybersecurity”.

If we were really worried about Chinese spying, we wouldn’t have invited and subsidized thousands of Chinese spies in industry and academia and military research for the last 40 fucking years.

If we were really worried about cybersecurity, we wouldn’t hire China to build all of our electronic shit, and we wouldn’t let China DESIGN our electronic shit.

If we were really worried about “addictive social media”, we’d ban all of it, starting with our own.

This is just old-fashioned monopolistic competition among brands. Facebook and Twitter and Apple are part of Deepstate, so they can mobilize Deepstate’s “security” apparatus to squash a competitor that does the job better.

In the bigger picture, banning the media of hostile nations is just dumb. In the 30s and 40s we encouraged Americans to listen to Berlin and Tokyo and Moscow on shortwave. We were confident that our system was superior, and in the ’30s and ’40s our system WAS superior. After Deepstate rose from the grave in 1946, we gradually narrowed down the available channels and switched back to a hard-wired system where banning an entire nation or company or belief is physically possible and easy.