[dvduval]

I have been studying Chinese for 7 years. Many of my Chinese friends live in Los Angeles and WeChat is central in their life... Getting a job, taking orders, doing all kinds of business, paying for things. They don't know the phone numbers of their friends. Many don't speak English or their English is not very good. If it is completely cut off they will still find ways to communicate but arguably it will be more likely to create new ways for scammers to take advantage of people. I think it is possible to ban WeclChat, but there needs to be a well thought out plan.

[neither_color]

They can do what all expats in China already need to do to access facebook, google, gmail, instagram, twitter, whatsapp, etc: use a vpn.

[seanmcdirmid]

Just to be clear, the USA doesn’t have the infrastructure or legal framework in place to actually block internet traffic. The best they can do is remove DNS entries.

[belated4]

Must feel good to say China's getting what they deserve but it's the ordinary people who are suffering the most. The ban is a victory to no one, and just shows the US is the copycat this time around.

[dang]

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ed25519FUUU]

Their usage of wechat is more likely a liability than a benefit. It gives a foreign adversary visibility into their activities in US. How can they become activist or work for change if their government is monitoring everything they say?

Do the Hong Kong protest crackdown not scare anyone else?

Now they have an excuse. It won’t look suspicious if they communicate to each other on channels that can’t be monitored by their oppressive government.

[newen]

Why are you assuming an average Chinese citizen would want to be an activist or work for change? Most likely they have positive views of their government just like the average American citizen.

[valuearb]

Your arguments is the NSA should monitor them, just as it does us?

[Causality1]

Those are valid concerns. I also think the opposite side of that coin is worth considering. That is to say, should we allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil or should we minimize total damage by cutting it off now instead of later?

As for me, I believe allowing WeChat to become anything like the structural institution it is in China in any part of the US would be a mistake. Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.

[pizza]

You really need to explain your point more thoroughly.

- "allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil" - does this mean have more users?

- "minimize total damage" - it would be good if you articulated the damage being done

- "Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese" - according to Julian Assange, https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

[eeZah7Ux]

> Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.

Imagine that! Imagine if some US agency had a global dragnet surveillance network!

[londons_explore]

For a long time, USPS was directly controlled by government, yet was also one of the only ways for people to communicate long distance. Government could easily have made laws like "we will read all your mail", or "we won't deliver mail to political enemies".

Yet that didn't happen. Why are things turning out differently in the internet age?