[Thread] Let's talk about why the Tik Tok status quo doesn't make sense for America.

There are 3 issues (2 longstanding problems + 1 more recent issue which has emerged to the forefront): https://twitter.com/rabois/status/1289696133971763200

(1) Trade reciprocity: Most US content platforms are banned in China, including Facebook, Twitter, Github, Google, Youtube, Reddit, Netflix.

(1) Granting China's content platforms unfettered access to US market at a time when they've banned nearly every US platform is a cognitive dissonance that's hard to reconcile. Enforcing a reasonable degree of "trade reciprocity" should not seem unreasonable.

(2) Cybersecurity & natnl security: We keep experiencing these in the form of alleged “accidents”, “hacks” or “glitches,” but the bottom line is that under Chinese laws, any organization & individual in China is legally obligated to comply & assist the CN gov with intel requests.

(2) The recent National Security Law also has implications on censorship & content application with extraterritorial applications.

(3) UN defines genocide as an "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." There are serious political implications w formally acknowledging a genocide is taking place but there r bigger implications with sweeping genocide under the rug

(3) Tik Tok's parent company, ByteDance, has allegedly assisted the CCP w identifying Uighur women of child-bearing age for the purpose of arresting those women & sending to the camps where they underwent forced sterilization. This is genocide & the US should have no part in it.

Option 1- Divestment: Divesting sounds good, but because of Chinese laws, divesting from China is always inherently a two part process in order to be meaningful: a company has to (1) divest from the Chinese parent company AND (2) divest from the CCP's jurisdictional control.

In other words, even Tik Tok is now owned by Microsoft, it would need to move its engineering *out of China* in order for its platform to be divested from the CCP’s jurisdictional control. Otherwise, it will face similar quandary as Zoom & will be subject to CCP's intel requests

Option 2- Suspension: Main downside is inconveniencing US Tik Tok users. To be clear, POTUS (regardless of who is Prez) does have exec authority to enact a suspension under the IEEPA-- this is no different than precedent on other sanctions. India did this & the sky didn't fall.

For additional insights on this, @benthompson has done some fantastic analysis.
https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1289568113915125761?s=21 https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1289568113915125761