The Trump administration announced today that it plans to ban TikTok and WeChat from use in the United States. My Shanghai friend Tina is appalled. When I mentioned that it would be nice if China ended its ban on Facebook and Twitter, her response was that her VPN works just fine. Good point. Looks like I will be renewing my VPN licenses for the indefinite future.
The main stream media is not seeing the big picture when it repeats the Trump administration’s rationale for banning these Chinese social media platforms, that they are a “security risk” and that there is no way to enforce data mining / sharing prohibitions (so called “privacy restrictions”) against the companies that own TikTok and WeChat (Bytedance and Tencent respectively). As if…
The big picture is that China is denying the U.S. owned social media platforms free access to the Chinese market. If Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Breitbart and the New York Times (just to name a few) were no longer blocked in China then I suspect that the U.S. would drop its ban on Tik Tok and WeChat. China would of course have to promise to respect users’ privacy and not mine user data for security purposes. Just as the U.S. government does…
WeChat does a better job of facilitating translation between Chinese and English texts than does Instant Messaging. Still, I have to reckon that everything I say to my Chinese friends is going straight into the Chinese “file” on me. Maybe that’s why every time I visit China I am offered dumplings. I tend to go on and on about dumplings.