https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1880846050145296460
Do you have any idea how totalitarian and hypocritical you sound @RushDoshi?
You initiated the closure of an app used by 170 million of your fellow Americans, probably the single biggest act of censorship ever, with a extortionary "proposition" that no American company would have taken in a million years: "sell yourself to us or we ban you" (imagine China telling this to Tesla or Microsoft?). And you now have the audacity to write that if TikTok shuts down "it's on them"? At the very least have the courage of owning your own actions instead of blaming the victim of your state coercion...
Courage and dignity is 100% on TikTok's side here. If they were to yield to this shakedown, the precedent this would set is that success in the US market comes with a mandatory exit clause - either sell to American interests or be legislated out of existence. TikTok isn't just defending itself here but broader principles that you and your colleagues ironically used to champion when it served American interests: the notion that companies should be able to compete fairly in international markets without facing politically-motivated forced sales, and that the rules of commerce shouldn't be rewritten whenever they become inconvenient for an individual country's interests.
The hypocrisy of now using state coercion to force outcomes that the US spent decades condemning in other countries is staggering. Anyone who actually cares about fair competition, and preventing a new era of digital colonialism where the US annexes foreign tech companies when they become successful can only stand unequivocally behind TikTok in this fight.
Even more ironically, it's becoming more and more painfully obvious that this is resulting in the mother of all Streisand effects, as evidenced by the mass exodus of users to Xiaohongshu/REDnote and the skyrocketing subscription rates to online Mandarin classes. Instead of reducing Chinese influence, which is the stated aim of the initiative, you're handing China its greatest soft power win ever. So it doesn't even make sense from the standpoint of the US's interests.
I suppose there's a certain poetic justice in watching your attempts at digital control collapse so spectacularly. The real lesson isn't about TikTok - it's about the limits of narrative manipulation. When you overplay your hand this dramatically, to the point of banning an app used by half the country, reality has a way of snapping back with equal force. But by all means, keep telling yourself that "it's on them."
