To save itself, TikTok in 2022 offered the U.S. government an extraordinary deal. The video app, owned by a Chinese company, said it would let federal officials pick its U.S. operation’s board of directors, would give the government veto power over each new hire and would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department to monitor its source code, according to a copy of the company’s proposal. It even offered to give federal officials a kill switch that would shut the app down
Facebook was blocked following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots because protestors with the East Turkestan independence movement were using Facebook as part of their communications network to organize attacks across the city. China has been banning this and other western social media for years. China bans so many western products and content, this is not a tit for tat or they would have done it years ago. The great firewall is insanely authoritarian. Too many Americans greatly underestimate the threat from China.
Apologies, I misspoke. Yes, western social media has been banned since forever and China requires local majority stake for joint ventures.
What I was getting at is that in March China announced they are moving from Microsoft, Intel and AMD for government PCs. I imagine US is quite angry to be losing so many backdoor vectors. US and China are trading big blows now with 100% tariffs on EVs and TT ban.