I agree with you that “free market” standpoints aren’t very good places to criticize this decision from – except to point out the hypocrisy of the right-wing, which I do think the original comment was trying to do – but it has to be said that nobody is obligated to criticize both China and the U.S. equally in order to not be a hypocrite.

One simple example of why would be that most if not all users here have absolutely no say at all as to what China does. There aren’t a lot of Chinese citizenry here. But there are a lot of Americans. It so follows that it makes sense to criticize the U.S. more, because many people on Beehaw can actually do something about it, especially in aggregate.

It doesn’t help to criticize China much either, anyway. China’s bad, yes; we know. Even among honest-to-god capital-C Communist circles, China is controversial. Posts about it tend to do three things: 1) Create a sort of misery/anger circle-jerk, 2) arbitrarily and unnecessarily signal to others that you aren’t a tankie, when nobody should really need to clarify that in most scenarios, and 3) further U.S. propaganda interests by taking people’s time and attention away from issues they’re more likely to be able to do something about.

I’m obviously not in favor of forgetting what China’s done, either, but there’s a happy middle-ground I think a lot of Western-centric sites sail right past, and I don’t think any of it is helpful.

Some American or other company should just hurry up and make TokTik and rake in the bucks.

Google’s already been trying with Youtube Shorts. Let’s not encourage them.