@w7voa This seems to come about a year and a half too late. Better late than never!

@evangreer Evan, I applaud your dedication to internet privacy. But stating that blocking Bytedance’s (BD) app and blocking the Wikipedia Foundation’s platform are equivalent actions is, frankly, absurd. A garden snake and a cobra might both be snakes, but their characteristics are very different. BD and the Wikipedia Foundation are both digital product providers, but their characteristics are also very different. Google might be closer to BD in privacy concerns… still not equal.

@evangreer Congress should totally act to 1. Protect the privacy of US citizens and 2. Hold accountable the corporations who hold onto our data, but fail to protect it from unauthorized release. We can agree on that, I think. I don’t agree with calling businesses and universities removing access to a CCP influence and intelligence collection algorithm with censoring free speech. It might be ineffective and promote the Streisand effect, but it’s not equal to CCP censorship.

This false equivalency by @evangreer disparaging privacy advocates is actively harmful. There have been multiple opportunities for Bytedance to provide transparency of how data from western countries is used by the CCP. They have failed to do so. They have failed to provide data protection for users from the CCP. There are clear issues with protecting marginalized portions of society from the CCP, and clear national security issues at play.